Malaysian food

The food in Malaysia was fantastic. Lots of chinese style food as well as malaysian specialities. I love chinese food, and malaysian food is pretty good too!

Something I will remember for a long time is a pudding that we had after a very filling buffet dinner of Malaysian food, we were given a bowl, piled as high as would fit with food. It was mainly ice, with a kind of juice at the bottom that tasted vaguely of lychee and contained two jelly-like substances, one of which was little brown cubes and one was bluish stringy things. "Sprinkled" on top was a sauce that seemed to contain mainly sweetcorn and then some chopped nuts on top. Gradually the flavoured ice-stuff melted and we were left with a bowl of witches potion. If anyone knows what it's called, please let me know. It is apparently meant to cool you on a hot evening after a hot meal, and luckily it seemed that we weren't meant to finish it completely, because although I love trying new things, it was a strange taste and there was bloody loads!

Something more horrific in some ways was a large hall in Kota Kinabalu given over to restaurants serving fish where you can choose which animal to eat. Now, personally I don't have any problems with that, if the fish are kept in good conditions. After all, we should face up to what we eat and not try to trick ourselves that food didn't have a life first. However, the tiger prawns were kept in little plastic bottles where they could hardly move. Apparently they are dangerous and will attack the chef when they pick it out of the water, so they are forced to keep them like that. However, at that point, it is surely preferable to kill them straight away before they get to the restaurant and eat them when they are slightly less fresh. I left feeling distinctly uncomfortable and amazed by the scale of it - the hall was probably a square measuring 100m in each direction, with stacks of fish tanks all the way around the sides.

On the whole though, I love their diet of noodles or rice with varieties of stir-fried meat and veg with or without sauce. I could live with that!