YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE

At least that’s the way I felt after having ordered my second lunch at a Nasi Kandar restaurant.  I wanted to finish off my list of the top twenty hawker foods today.  This is the second time I’ve gone to this restaurant to eat a dish called Nasi Kandar. (The first time I was so taken by the eye appeal of the Tandoori Chicken that I ordered it, so that trip doesn't count insofar as going down my list of 20 hawker foods.  But today it will be Nasi Kandar.)

So, I go in and ask the waiter for Nasi Kandir.  Simple, right?  He led me to a counter that had about fifteen different food items and pointed to one.  He said ‘special of the day’.  Somewhat bewildered and for the lack of a better reply I said OK. 

The plate that arrived at my table contained a large portion of fragrant fried rice, a hard boiled egg, a chicken leg and a small bowl of yellow curry with a piece of boiled potato in it.  On the side of my plate were thin slices of cucumber and pineapple.  It was all very tasty, made more so by a glass of watermelon juice. 

I left confused about what Nasi Kandar really is.  A little knowledge is, if not a dangerous thing, certainly a misleading one.   A check on the web back in my hotel room showed that it can be a lot of things and that Nasi Kandar is not really one dish with specific foods.  It is generally a plate of rice over which a curry is poured, or, served on the side.  Chicken, beef, vegetables, etc. are added to the customer’s specifications.

So I ate Nasi Kandar and didn't realize it.

This evening I went to finish off my list.  The first dish was Mee Goreng which is a close relative of a pasta dish in the US.  Noodles just like spaghetti is topped with a spicy sauce.  Pieces of tofu, bean sprouts and potatoes round out the dish.  If I closed my eyes for a moment it’s like tasting spaghetti with a spicy sauce.  I would definitely order this again

 Here, the 'Mee Goreng chef" is starting the dish which you see finished above.

Next was Hokkien Chicken.  The chicken comes either roasted or steamed.  I got my steamed.  It was accompanied by a soup of soft noodles in a lightly flavored broth.  The only zing to the dish were two sauces that accompanied it.  Both were hot and spicy.  Frankly, this dish won’t be on my repeat list.

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Off it was to complete my 20^th item by having the most commonly known food to us all on the list – Satay, those tasty tidbits of meat on skewers marinated and cooked over charcoal.   You get it here with pork, chicken, or a couple other things I won’t mention.  Unfortunately the stall where I went to sells them only by ten pieces and it was too late and too much food for me.  So, satay will wait till tomorrow night.  

So, I settled on dessert.  You see Apom Balik below being cooked on a special griddle that has indentations in it.

An order constitutes four of these.  You have your choice of four fillings.  I chose banana in two two of them, and a mixture of palm sugar and coconut for the other two.

Below, you can see that delicious coconut-palm sugar mixture on the pancake.

These little rascals are barely three inches across.  They will be one of the staple desserts at Chez Greenbrier.  I got the five ingredients from the chef but he deigned not give me the proportions.  I think it will be easy to figure out.

On it was to my other dessert for the evening - Kuih Ketayap.

Take a look below at the yummy same filling of palm sugar and coconut inside the Kuih.

But, what am I going to do for lunch today?  Gee my 20 (frankly a few more than that because I've added four or five more dishes along the way) are done with the exception satay.

It was off to a new food destination since New Lane Hawkers area is only a night thing other than Sunday.  New Lane is where I have eaten many of those 20 dishes.

New World Food Court started out as a small amusement park that went bust.  What better thing to help it rise from the ashes than turn part of it into a food court under cover of a large high metal pavilion surrounded by restaurants and shops, all under the original amusement park roofing.

New World Food Court is an L shaped affair.  

A brief stroll around the L shaped area took me past 29 permanent stalls to choose food from. 

My first selection was Prawn Mee which was a bowl of spaghetti like noodles swimming in a fragrant spicy broth with small shrimps and a piece of boiled egg.  A dollop of spicy hot sauce had been put on top along with a few thin slices of pork.

My next stop at New World was for Koay Teow Th’ng.  You can get it in the form of a soup or stir fried.  I was on a soup roll having started with Prawn Mee.  Koay Teow in the ‘dry version’ has a stir fried noodle similar to those that we see in those little packages of instant ‘oriental soup’ in the US.  In the soup form it has a lot of long delightfully soft rice noodles which are a joy to eat once you get the hang of lifting a few high above the bowl with your chopsticks and letting them pool in your spoon as you lower them. 

Several fish balls, ground pork which has been formed into small pieces and cooked in the broth, and a topping of fried shallots round it out.  You dip the pork into a side dish of spicy chilies and soy sauce to give it a zing.  Here is a fish ball, which frankly doesn't have a fishy flavor.   

The Koay Teow chef was kind enough to pose for a picture

For me, I also think the more foods you consume that have been prepared in a broth means that they have been well cooked and the liquid also helps wash stray bacteria down the gullet and gets rid of them.  But just chalk that up to my superstitions and perhaps a mind-set that lets me eat at semi-sanitary hawker stalls and think I won’t get ‘Bali Belly’.  I’ll have to ask Bev if there is anything to that.