Laksa

According to this webpage, the wolfberry has some amazing powers: What are your favourite uses for this fruit and do you have it every day? Do you abstain from it when travelling?

Salmon was on special on the weekend, so I bought some fillets. The recipe inspiration is nobu the cookbook's "Chilean sea bass with Nobu's black bean sauce", but substituting salmon for sea bass. On closer examination, the recipe is really Cantonese-style steamed fish with a hot oil drizzle, with a Japanese twist, e.g. the use of sake. We didn't have sake, so substitued shaoxing and cognac. Mince some black beans with shaoxing wine into a paste and spread on the fish: Place the fish on a plate with some cognac and into a hot steamer for 10 minutes. Pour the liquid from the steamer onto a plate together with the fish. Heat olive and sesame oil until it smokes and drizzle on fish, garnish with chives: I wish I had strained the steamer liquid to make it clearer, but oh well... I felt the black bean sauce didn't match the flavour of salmon all that well, to echo what others here have written. I had to tweak the dish a little by adding some minced chillis and garlic to the sauce. That was an improvement, I felt. The cognac went surprisingly well with the salmon, however. In hindsight, I should've used more than I did.

All the talk of grass jelly got me hankering for some. So after work, I went to the local Thai grocery store to get a can. The Thai lady at the store insisted that I should have it with palm sugar instead of regular cane sugar: Dice up the jelly, melt the palm sugar and pour the jelly and syrup into a bowl with some ice cubes: The palm sugar gave it a real nice nutty flavour. Refreshing! And I think I already feel a difference in the bee-hind.

England: Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding? Steak and Kidney pie? Beef Wellington? And warm lager. China: Peking duck, and tea.

i dunno - i believe hte pulled tea came with the muslims from india. chai is made the same way. You're probably correct. That doesn't mean it can't be Malaysia's national drink, does it? I've never been to India, so I wonder if pulled tea is as common (pervasive?) there as it is in Malaysia. As for mushy peas, isn't that more English? Meat pie - yes.

I don't know, but according to this page on fresh water turtle shell, the shell is boiled for 1-2 hours, which I imagine would soften it somewhat. After that, you give Mr. Universe a really big mortar and pestle and set him to work!

Isn't that a common Italian antipasto? I've seen it on a few menus.

with great difficulty. :laugh:

I'd rather have too little salt than too much salt. I actually found my meal at OG to be on the salty side, for my taste. As for the salt fiends, what's wrong with making use of the salt shaker at the table?

Maybe she's been quoted out of context, but too little salt is bad?

You're right that it has a lot to do with expectations. I've been to OG once, and I went there with absolutely NO expectation at all of getting authentic Italian food. I went there because I've already tried Red Lobster, Ruby Tuesday, Outback Steakhouse, so what the heck? I ordered their t-bone steak (I think that's what they called it) - hardly something you would order at an Italian restaurant, and was pleasantly surprised. The steak was flavorfully seasoned, and cooked to the doneness I requested. The oven-roasted potato pieces that came with it were buttery, crisp on the outside and had a fluffly center. Very competently done. No complaints at all.

In foochow, we call agar agar "cai yien". No clue what the chinese characters are. I love bun dai woon. It's been so long since I've had it. Is that available in the United States? I thought ban dai woon tasted a little like wheatgrass juice at some point but I was never able to compare the two - had them at two different places and time.

Barramundi?

Australia: Serious version: Roast leg of lamb and Penfold's Grange Bush version: Kangaroo steak with damper bread and Victoria Bitter Facetious version: Vegemite sandwich and egg-flip Big M (egg flavoured milk)

I genuinely like to hear foreign words pronounced in the way a native speaker would say them. Now, I'm no Italian nor do I speak Italian but when Mario says those Italian terms, I tend to believe he's saying them the way he would if he were speaking with other Italian speakers, with the true intonations or pitch of a native speaker. I don't think it's pretentious to do that. I would find it more disconcerting if I knew he were deliberately "dumbing down" the pronunciation to suit the ear of English speakers.

That's what I was thinking as well. So my post was really partly in jest. Perhaps every item or curry dish on the menu could be adjusted by the chef to different levels of spiciness?

Singapore!? Yeah, after they stole those dishes from Malaysia!! The national "dessert" of Malaysia could well be "Ais Kacang" (lots of posts here on eG about that). If I'm pressed to name a national drink, I'd probably say Milo. Edited to add: Hmm... on second thoughts, I think "teh tarik" is really Malaysia's national drink. Description and picture of teh tarik.

In the foochow dialect, we don't say "xian cao", but "cao li". Funny how dialects have different names (from Mandarin) for the same things. So I have no clue what "li" stands for. My mum makes agar agar all the time as well. She often adds flavourings like milo, or condensed milk, or those "Sun valley" cordials. Barley is my favourite.

Did you happen to see if the menu makes good use of little chilli icons?

I drank lots of the stuff as a kid. I never remember the stuff as being bitter - not as the primary taste anyway. If I recall, it was pretty much tasteless, with a herbal aroma. My mum made grass jelly "tea" very often because she valued its cooling properties, given that the weather in Malaysia is always hot and humid. I think during that time, the grass jelly drink that is commonly available now was rare, so she bought grass jelly (just the jelly itself) that came in can, which she cut up into small cubes and mixed with water and sugar. I think she called it 仙草 (xian cao) in Mandarin but in foochow it sounded like "cao li". I'm gessing the first character is grass, but no clue what the second is. I could think of worse things to drink.

Well, it's not exactly Indian, but I love okra in curry fish head and chicken curries - the wet type with lots of coconut milk (more Malaysian than Indian, I think). Any soupy curry recipe will do, and add whole okras (minus the head) for the last 15 minutes or so of cooking. Okra stir fried with tom yum paste is a regular item on my kitchen table. The recipe is simplicity itself - stir fry bit-size pieces with garlic until soft, add enough tom yum paste to your liking/spice tolerance. For the more adventurous, substitue belacan for tom yum.

Probably getting a little of topic, but one of my favourite childhood treats is to eat "jambu air" (rose apple? water apple?) with dried sour plum powder 酸梅糖. Guava goes really well with the powder as well. I think the powder is essentially salt, sugar and ground dried sour plum. I am yet to try watermelon with this powder, but I think watermelon is sweet enough and flavourful enough not to require it.

Interesting. Why? Do you have an alternative short-form or do you always speak the entire word? YES ! YES! Speaking for myself, I REALLY DO prefer to pronounce the entire word, rather than truncate in what sounds to me like nursery-speak: Eat your veggies. Play nice with the doggy. Don't pull the kitty's tail. What does the ducky say? etc. : : I, personally, count it as part of the dumbing down of culture generally, but if people find "veggies" more interesting to eat than "vegetables" and they do eat a better diet, let them say on! (In MY home, spinach remains a vegetable). Interesting, but I personally don't see it that way. I see "veggie" or "veg" as just a convenient short form, like cauli for cauliflower, cuke for cucumber, or spuds for potatoes.

Not really. Morimoto specializes in Japanese cuisine, not Chinese. Logistically speaking, a Chinese restaurant is more likely to have the equipment and ingredients he needs, woks, big Chinese cleavers, etc. It would be really cool to have in Philly a King of Iron Chefs battle between Chen-san and Morimoto-san though. What wouldn't I give to be on that tasting panel... Duh - yeah. He's a chef that specializes in Chinese (even more specifically, Szechuan) cuisine. Chen Kinichi guest cheffing at a Japanese, French, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Cuban, Lativan, Polish or German restaurant, Argentinian Rodizio House, Belgian Frites stand or whatfreakingever doesn't really make sense, does it? Sort of what I was implying, no? Am I being too oblique? Well, I wasn't trying to contradict you. I was just adding something that I thought was worth mentioning to your reply to what spikemom said. Perhaps I'm dense, but I can't see if you implied anything by what you wrote. If you find what I wrote too obvious, please feel free to ignore it. There's no need to launch a sarcastic diatribe, is there?

If I have some cheese, olives and EVOO for drizzling or dipping, I prefer to eat them with the denser French baguette with its thicker crust. I can then tear off chunks of bread and break them into bite-size pieces with my hands. The smaller pieces of bread also make it easier to mop up oil. If I'm eating a sandwich, I much prefer to bite into the thinner crust of the Vietnamese baguette -- the thinner crust is less likely to tear a hole in the roof of your mouth!