I remember Shanghai red bean paste-filled pancakes being a staple on the sweets trolley at yum cha back in the day, but I have to admit that I haven’t really seen them around in recent years. The good news is that they’re actually pretty easy to make, and apart from red bean paste, all you…
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again… Harm Chim Peng (I’ve spelled the dish the way it’s pronounced in Cantonese; I don’t know of a standard spelling for it), is a type of savoury doughnut sold at street stalls back in Malaysia, and it comes in a number of different varieties – plain,…
I sometimes feel sorry for those not born into the culture trying to learn all the nuances of Chinese food. It’s hard enough trying to wrap your head around the topic, let alone recognise all the different iterations of specific dishes by different Chinese dialect groups. Radish cake is one such example; the Cantonese version…
A Wok Around Asia Recipe By Traders Hotel Kuala Lumpur When I got into this whole “food thing” back in the day, I had to learn how to make everything myself through trial and error, because hawkers in Malaysia were notoriously secretive about their craft. One of these recipes was for roti canai (roti prata…
On my most recent trip to Kuala Lumpur, I was reintroduced to a childhood favourite known in my hometown of Seremban simply as Hokkien Mee (Hokkien noodles). I bought it from a stall in Ampang run by Feh Loh (literally “Fat Guy” in Cantonese – that was what he called himself, I promise), asked for…
I first learned about cheesy noodles when a Malaysian friend posted about the long wait lines to eat at a Kuala Lumpur restaurant which specialised in cheesy freshwater prawn mee hoon/bee hoon (vermicelli). With a bit of digging, I found out that the Malaysian proprietor got his inspiration from some restaurant in Hong Kong that…
A Deepavali Favourite Using Natural Plant Extract Coconut candy is one of my favourite memories of Deepavali (aka Diwali, though not in Malaysia), the Indian Festival of Lights. During this public holiday, our Indian friends would hold “open houses” where they served up a culinary extravaganza to feed the friends from all ethnic backgrounds who…
This, folks, represents my culinary raison d’être – the world famous Seremban Beef Noodles, otherwise known (in Cantonese) as Ngau Lam Fun; one of countless childhood memories that finally lured me away from IT consultancy and into food full-time some 17 years ago. To expand on that a little, the reason I got into this “food…