#1 eat of 2008

Lisa recently blogged about her Top Eats of 2008. I'm not sure I can do a top five list, but I can certainly tell you my #1 eat of 2008 in ridiculous, gratuitous photographic detail, because I didn't the first time I mentioned it on here:

Second Wedding Banquet, at the Jade Palace, in Georgetown, Penang.


pick pick

The joy of a Chinese wedding is all in the eating.


tofu and vege soup

It is a fast affair, everyone serving from the middle using their chopsticks, except in the instances of soup.


fried not-chicken

Every dish has a meaning: red chicken stands for good life; the soup, for wealth.


fishy

Fish is for plenty.


wintermelon

Melon has something to do with taking the bitterness away or something, I can never remember.


mock prawn + scallops

We ate a full eight courses, every one of them strict vegetarian (or, as we call it in Australia, vegan).


mixed vegies

At a seafood restaurant.


longan




gratuitous link to wedding shenanigans in Australia here

evergreen, ee beng, and luk yea yan, penang

An Auntie took us to breakfast at Evergreen Vegetarian on Jalan Cantonment. It is a general buffet self-service style place, though it does also offer ala carte dishes and bao, and there was a whole wall of mooncakes available for purchase. I had some great noodles and a tasty potato thing, amongst other dishes. I also picked up a lotus bean mooncake for later nomming (it was nomlicious).

Ee Beng Vegetarian Restaurant is on Lebuh Dickens, and due to its location near Jalan Hutton I ate there twice recently. It's also a general buffet self-service setup, with two dozen or so dishes to choose from which you then take to the counter to be measured and paid for. The noodles were fantastic, and I missed out on what my mother described as a really fantastic mushroom and broccoli thing.

Auntie took us out to breakfast a second time, and being delightful she again took us to a vegetarian restaurant, Luk Yea Yan on Macalister. Breakfasts that are common in restaurants in Australia are tasty, hash browns and baked beans and wilted greens and things, but nothing beats soup and noodles for breakfast. It was such a delight to sit there, my hand curled around a soup spoon, chopsticks in my other hand, piling the noodles on my spoon and drinking the liquid. I had a fresh soy milk to compliment it, and when I'm in Penang, I'm not the only one drinking soy milk. My mum, my aunties, we all order soy milk, and it is fresh and so fantastic.



Evergreen Vegetarian
39A Cantonment Road
Georgetown

Ee Beng Vegetarian
20 Lebuh Dickens
Georgetown

Luk Lea Yan
148 Jalan Macalister
Georgetown

restoran wawasan mutiara, penang

After we established that we needed to stay an extra week in Georgetown, investigations began to find places to eat breakfast. The hotel breakfast is cool and all, but at 42RM is quite expensive. My parents stumbled across Restoran Wawasan Mutiara, an Indian restaurant opposite the Komtar carpark and beside Bazar Komtar. We ended up visiting it so many times that my parents gave a tip to our waiter on our last visit, so pleased were they.



I tried the vegetable biryani, which I got with dahl, cabbage and beans. They were just slightly spicy, with a really great flavour. The dosai masala was fantastic, I had one filled with onion and cabbage, and was scolded for not using my sugar appropriately (or at all).

One morning we finally made it there for breakfast, where I had roti pisang and dahl, and our waiter was shocked that I wasn't eating dosai, given it is often a breakfast food and I had ordered it several times previously for dinner. The roti pisang was amazing, and once I got used to the sensation of one bite banana, another bite spicy dahl, it was fantastic. I am eager to attempt roti pisang at home.



The dahl was usually room temperature, which was a bit disappointing, because dahl should be hot lah!

As always it was easy to order vegan, though that wasn't clear from the menu, I just ordered whatever I felt like and hoped for the best, which is often what I do when I'm in Malaysia.

The watermelon juice, incidentally, was pretty tasty. We'd order four glasses of it, and after taking our order the waiter would wander past the table to the kitchen, a whole watermelon in his hand.



Wawasan Mutiara
Lebuh Tek Soon
Georgetown

wandering around penang

I've been away from keyboard for the last two weeks because I had to take an unplanned run up to Penang. I spent a lot of time loitering around Prangin Mall as I was staying at the Traders Hotel on Jalan Magazine. There aren't any vegetarian restaurants in there, but that's okay, because my favourite kitchen implement is the wok, and the tasty dishes that come out of it, ie, mee goreng, char kuay teow, etc, are my favourites. And that's easy to veganise, though most times it helps to speak Hokkien, Cantonese or Malay, because sometimes you have to do a fair amount of alteration.





The other thing I love, is that saying "vegetarian" leads to "do you eat egg? what about garlic?" and oh, I wish restaurants in Perth could be more accepting of that.*





I know the photos all look a bit same-same, and terribly poor quality due to being taken using Toy Camera (an Ixus 55), but oh how I love these foods, and how I miss them when I am not in Malaysia.




*they are not saying 'vegetarians don't eat garlic,' they are checking that I am not Jain or have some other (religious) restrictions.

kek lok si vegetarian restaurant

After visiting Kwan Yin and the Kek Lok Si temple, we meandered underneath the temple to the Kek Lok Si Vegetarian Restaurant.

The food was excellent, and moderately priced, and the curry was tasty with a spicy aftertaste, but the staff spoke very little English and didn't take well to questions, so going there might be troublesome for some.

Kek Lok Si Vegetarian Restaurant
Kek Lok Si
Air Itam, Penang

lily's vegetarian kitchen

Lily's Vegetarian Kitchen, located about a 10 minute walk from the Gama builiding, is a two-floored fast food and a la carte restaurant. We accidentally ended up on the first floor, but the manager called our orders down and made us stay upstairs to eat, though we were scolded before we left.

The satay to share was excellent, made of soft mock meats, and the noodles we ordered - one laksa, one noodle soup - were delicious and flavoursome.

Including drinks, the meal rounded to about 20RM, about midprice for two of us for a lunch meal.

Lily's Vegetarian Kitchen
Noble House
98 Madras Lane
Georgetown, Penang

wedding banquet #2 (jade palace seafood restaurant)

My aunts arranged the second of our wedding banquets, as they had all been unable to attend the first in Australia. We arrived at Jade Palace to discover its full name is Jade Palace Seafood Restaurant. A hissed conversation ensued, a mix of Cantonese, Malay and English, before my aunt reassured us that all the vegetarian weddings were held there.

Seated by a wall of fishtanks filled with poor creatures doomed to eventually become someone's dinner, we were treated to the most delicious vegetarian Chinese food I have ever eaten. We had eight courses of food, most of which I only rarely eat in Australia, the courses as follows: entree/pick pick, tofu + vege soup, crispy fried mock chicken, fish, wintermelon in sauce, prawns and squid, mixed vegies, and sweet longan for dessert.



It continues to astound me how well some restaurants cater for vegetarianism, and how poorly others grasp it. In Penang we had an eight course vegetarian wedding feast, conforming to the traditions, catered entirely by a seafood restaurant; in a seafood restaurant in Australia, I would struggle to find a single dish on the menu that I could eat.

Jade Palace Seafood Restaurant
3F Choo Plaza
41 Abu Siti Lane
Georgetown, Penang

makanan; or, my longing for the pasar malam

Smell is such a powerful, evocative tool. Walking into my local Chinese grocery store reminds me of my childhood, the smell of spices and the rounded, heavy tones of Cantonese upon the air. The smell of stock, bubbling on the stove, reminds me of my mother, pounding blachan, spending hours chopping and spicing and stirring. Like my mother, I didn't really learn to cook until I left my parents' house: now it is my delight. There are styles of cooking that I struggle to replicate, dishes that I adore but never succeed in cooking. this latest trip has stirred such a passion in me, and my inability to cook Nonya and other local Malay styles is something that I intend to rectify.

My favourite way of eating in Penang is at the local makanan, or as my father likes to call them, mucking stalls. These sprawling, open air (though often covered, on account of the rain), tiny food stalls offer a range of food styles and drinks, the smell as you reach them is a delightful intermingling. The stalls will often only specialise in a handful of dishes, creating an interesting competition between the stalls. I love the noodle stalls the most: old Chinese ladies will select foodstuffs as you point at them, until the tiny basket is full and she will either throw it all into a wok, or put it in a bowl and cover it all with hot stock. It's fast and delicious, and the fast cooking is one of the more hygienic ways to prepare the food in the humid, stifling environment.

This visit we only had the opportunity to visit the makanan at the Batu Ferrenghi pasar malam, and alas, no photos, as the lights as always are dim and sketchy, and make for terrible photography.