Pan

gaf, if you have occasion to go back, try their coffee ice cream; it's really good. Or at least, I think so.

I wish I could! They look fabulous!

TP, I'm sure your daughters love(d) those biscuits!

This doesn't seem insurmountable to me. If I can take your list as a complete list of foods he's allergic to, that leaves ingredients such as: Rice, beans or noodles made from same Squashes Potatoes, sweet potatoes, other tubers (taro, etc.) Spices except pepper and perhaps chili Beets Cucumber, lettuce, spinach, cauliflower, artichoke, collards, cabbage, etc. All fruits except for bananas and pineapples Maple syrup, honey Perhaps yogurt (though considering the milk and cheese allergies, I wonder) Tofu All kinds of meat and seafood All nuts and seeds except peanuts and sesame seeds? Anyway, I think that Indian food may be in his future. Fish with mustard seeds. Potato and cauliflower curry. Chettinad Chicken with urad dal. And Chinese food: Sweet potatoes with ginger and scallions. Lion's head soup. Steamed fish with ginger, scallions, and soy sauce. And perhaps Iranian food, which often uses plums instead of tomatoes for acidity. Good luck to your brother! This is doable but does take some patience and imagination.

Interesting. I've never had tom yam soup that included any coconut milk. The places I go to, if you want coconut milk in your soup, you should get tom kha.

Or perhaps without the whipped cream, for those who are having meat meals?

I'm not sure it makes sense for Malaysians to go to the U.S. to eat Chinese food, but that's a topic for another thread, I guess.

How do they rank in the order of sweetness? Is it: lanas lenas nanas nenas ??? ← I have a hard time remembering. They looked a bit different, but the taste was pretty similar. I'm trying to remember if lanas was a little sweeter and less "sharp" (tajam) than nanas. It was a bit smaller, I think. Yeah, we probably need an anak Johor to resolve this. The pineapple I ate always was trucked (lorried?) in from Johor.

Fat Guy, I have a feeling you could say more about what Mr. Wolf does than he did in that interview. What do you know about how restaurant consultants work and what they do?

You may be right, project, but what about the possibility that someone might like reading about someone's experience just to learn what things were like for them? You don't have to be experiencing the story in an escapist manner to learn something about the way human beings live -- in this case, a cook, but a person could read a biographical story about an athlete, a scientist, a musician, a bank-robber, a priest, or a basket-weaver. Whether the reader learns anything about the human condition from a biographical story is more a function of how good the writing is than whether there's some practical bit of knowledge for them to apply to their own quest to be an athlete, a scientist, etc. Not everything has to be a method book or teach-yourself article. Furthermore, I think that oyster-shucking would be best dealt with elsewhere on the site, such as in a course on the safe preparation of shellfish or merely a step-by-step demonstration on the Cooking forum.

North Americans: Keep in mind that that sweet & sour pork with pineapples is made with fresh, not canned pineapples. Right, TP? I know of at least four varieties of pineapple that were and I believe still are grown in Malaysia. I don't know the Latin or English names, but in Malay (or at least East Coast Malay), they're nanas (the catchall name for "pineapple," also), nenas, lanas, and lenas. Sorry, couldn't resist.

But I think a really good tzimmes is better.

I would like to do it next winter, but if my sister has her wedding in France in the fall we will be going there instead... Then Malaysia would be two years from now. How is the travelling around the Christmas and New Years holidays? ← You won't be able to go to the East Coast then, because that's monsoon season and the roads may be impassible. West Coast should be OK; right, West Coast people?

You have a really good bullshit detector, Carrot Top. No disrespect intended to the rest of Mr. Wolf's remarks, but it certainly does come across as at least a bit sexist to be talking about the other testicle descending. Then again, given the default assumption that chefs are men, a successful woman chef probably has to, figuratively, have balls to make it in the world Mr. Wolf is part of. But in terms of his main points, I don't think I have a much better understanding of how to recognize the magic he speaks of now than I did before reading. I have a feeling that we may be talking about an intangible quality that's somewhat indefinable, much like Justice Powell's remarks about obscenity (he knew it when he saw it).

Candied yams can be good. Can you imagine them candied with jaggery? How about maple syrup? Though I have to say that in my family, we've always preferred our sweet potatoes roasted in the oven. I don't add a thing to them; I just eat 'em!

You might find it interesting to go to Kota Bharu, Kelantan before travelling to Thailand. Kota Bharu has some unique foods that are delicious -- or unique to me, anyway; it wouldn't surprise me if the Patani Malays also make excellent Ayam Percik (wood-roasted chicken with a spicy peanut sauce with lots of great herbs and greens in it) and so forth. But I also realize you're trying to cover a lot of ground in a limited amount of time.

It would still probably be best to inquire whether it would be OK to bring alcohol there. I'm glad to hear about yet another reason to visit Astoria.

Oh yeah? Then how about animal Gods and Godesses? Those have existed since ancient times, if not prehistory.

I'm getting lost in some of the terminology here, but the question I'll ask you is: What is ulam in the Philippines, again? In the Malaysian states of Kelantan and Terengganu, that's a bunch of fragrant leaves and such-like (wild or/and cultivated), usually raw, which are eaten with sambal belacan (shrimp paste plus hot pepper and such) or/and budu (fish sauce) or/and tempoyak (fermented durian paste). I think I can say categorically that there is never any meat or fish in Malaysian ulam, except inasmuch as the fish sauce is used, and you can of course eat some fish dish or something else along with your ulam, if you so choose.

Well, I'd find it pretty difficult to be a surgeon, too (not to mention, since I don't have fine enough dexterity, I'd kill people). Should that make me anti-surgery? Many people simply don't like the sight of blood. For that matter, a lot of people wouldn't want to be farmers, either. ← this is totally different. sometimes we are life dependant on surgery. ← That doesn't mean I have to perform the surgery or even be in the operating room while it's being performed. As a matter of fact, my presence in the operating room would be most unwelcome, as I'd simply get in the way. I don't need to smash cockroaches, either, and it's nasty when they go splat. But I do it. And while I've never slaughtered an animal, I have witnessed the process, hated it, and ate the meat anyway. So what does your objection really consist of? How about if we bring in nasty experiments on animals that are absolutely essential to cure human beings of horrible illnesses? I wouldn't want to be the experimenter. So should I reject all medicines made possible through such experimentation? It's one thing if you want to argue that it's cruel to kill animals and unjustifiable to kill them for human consumption because human beings can survive well as vegetarians, but it's quite another to claim that being squeamish about actually slaughtering the animals is itself an argument for "saving" the life of an animal. (Whether an animal bred for slaughter will be killed anyway is a topic for another thread, I suspect.)

Bill, I think I'm going to answer your question in a different way. My immediate family (parents, brother and I) have decided that we prefer chicken to turkey, so we usually have chicken for Thanksgiving. Actually, my brother usually doesn't make it in from the West Coast for Thanksgiving, so it's often just me and my parents. Or sometimes, I go to my godmother's, where she also tends to cook chicken. I think my father once or twice cooked Chettinad Chicken with urad dal (adapted from Madhur Jaffrey's recipe) for Thanksgiving, because all of us love the dish so much. I also believe I remember two cornish hens one time, and I think he also got poussins or some other kind of small birds (pheasants?) another time.

I had a quite acceptable meal at Coyote Taqueria in Old Town (a shrimp quesadilla, I think), just not good enough for me to have thought it worth specifically mentioning in its own thread. That other place next door (Old something or other, I think) was popular but the food tasted like nothing. The other place I went to in Old Town was a South American place that again was acceptable but not special. At least I was out of Hotel Circle, though. Thank goodness for my dinner at Indigo Grill and the lunch you took me to at Khyber Pass.

Kevin, have you tried getting skin-on pork from your local Chinese butcher?

Feel better, binkyboots!

I have every expectation that you'll have a wonderful time! If you haven't already, you need to check out some of the threads pinned at the top of this forum, such as: Eateries in Malaysia Restaurants and food stalls in Bangkok Hanoi, Ho Chi Min and other parts of Vietnam Eating in Cambodia There's no pinned thread on Laos, but do a search. If there's no suitable thread on Laos, start one! One quick comment: I think that you may want to stop in Ipoh, on the way from KL to Penang if not for longer. Have a look at this post with pictures from Ipoh.