Tea For The Tillerman

To answer what might be an inevitable question, there's no tillerman in this post.

Our trip to Southeast Asia earlier this year had us in Singapore for a night, on to Cambodia for three nights, back to Singapore for another seven nights and then finishing in Malaysia for four nights. Cambodia was amazing. Singapore was amazing. Malaysia was...not amazing. There was nothing necessarily regrettable about our time in Malaysia. It just wasn't amazing. 

I don't know what we did wrong in Malaysia but the place didn't capture our imagination the way the other two countries did. Maybe it was our questionable choices to visit the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park and take a trip out to the coast to see (very, very few) fireflies at night. Maybe it was the fact that we found one of KL's marquee tourists attractions, the Batu Caves, to be mostly just smelly and hot. Or maybe we just didn't get anything out of taking the elevator up to the top of the Petronas Towers (once the tallest building in the world) because there's nothing else up there to look at. Whatever it was, we didn't love Malaysia. Maybe it was just Kuala Lumpur. Maybe we should have gone to Penang.

If there's any other evidence needed of how much we didn't love Malaysia, consider this: Cambodia got five blog posts; Singapore got five blog posts; Malaysia's getting one. Yes, there's one post shared between all three countries about food but as far as Malaysia-only posts, this is it. It's about tea. And it was the best thing we did by far in Malaysia. 

To be clear, this isn't like a token post to make me or the country of Malaysia feel good about the fact that we visited. Our time with tea in Malaysia was worth writing about. So here goes.

Boh tea plantation. Cameron Highlands, Malaysia.

I grew up on tea. I spent the first 11 years of my life in England and drank tea every day pretty much for as long as I can remember. Now, I'm sure there was a time when I was really young that my mom fed me something other than tea, but as far as I can remember in my childhood, there was tea on the breakfast table and for afternoon tea on weekends every time we had breakfast or tea. It's an essential part of growing up in England and likely always will be. I don't drink tea really today like ever but when I go back to England to visit I do. Every time I have any sort of sit down meal to start off the day. It must be some kind of innate behavior kicking in.

Of course, tea doesn't grow in England. The reason why English people drink tea is that they took over about half the world centuries ago and produced goods in all their territories to make life back at home in Britain that much better. That included tea, which was produced in massive quantities in places like India and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and Kenya and Uganda and yes, even Malaysia.

As of the beginning of this year, I had never visited a tea plantation anywhere in the world. Some of that has to do with the fact that I haven't really been that many places where tea is grown. Yes, I've been to Kenya and Uganda but I was a bit more focused on something other than tea in the week long safari we spent in each of hose two countries (although we did see tea plantations in Uganda). I've visited a coffee plantation (in Hawaii), but never tea. Time to change that. In Malaysia.

Some of the seemingly endless greenhouses that coat the Cameron Highlands.

There are no tea plantations in Kuala Lumpur. Or anywhere near there really. Apparently, something about the climate or the soil or the elevation or something isn't right there. KL is barely above sea level and it's hot pretty much all the time. Particularly in February. So we had to get out of town a bit to the north.

There's a spot in Malaysia called the Cameron Highlands which is perfect for growing almost anything that needs soil and water to grow. Tomatoes, long beans, greens, lettuce, spinach, eggplant, cucumbers, you name it. The elevation and climate are ideal. It's also (as the name suggests) high enough above sea level (say 5,000 feet or so) that the nights are cooler and misty and the land doesn't get baked by the mid-day (or late day or early morning) sun. It's also a pretty good spot to grow tea. There are at least two very large tea plantations there. 

The problem? It's nowhere near Kuala Lumpur. Want to drive out there? Google Maps says three hours to get there. Train? Five hours. If we wanted to go there (and we did), we'd need a ride. 

We found one on Viator. We picked what sounded like a jam packed 12 hour (!!!) day traveling to the Cameron Highlands, exploring various things up there (including a tea plantation) and then back again to KL. We paid to make the tour private and then hoped we'd be able to talk our guide into skipping most of the stuff and just focusing on the tea plantation part of the whole thing. It sort of mostly worked. Kind of. His wife tripped us up a bit.

So what was on the tour? Ready for this? A basket weaving demonstration. A waterfall. An aborigine village. A vegetable market. A strawberry farm. A butterfly farm. A honey bee farm. A cactus shop. Lunch. A visit to a tea plantation (Boh Tea, as it turned out) and a photo stop at a second tea plantation. We didn't figure we needed all that. I mean, why do we need to go to a vegetable farm? It's not like we are picking up some garlic and some long beans or something like that. Pass on the vegetable farm. Pass on the strawberry farm. Pass on the basket weaving.

We figured we'd just stick to the things we were really interested in and if we were able to squeeze a bit more time at the tea plantations, that was good for us. Plus maybe then we'd have a day that lasted less than 12 hours and could make it back to the hotel in time for afternoon happy hour in the executive lounge at the Kuala Lumpur Hilton. Free food and booze. Always with the mooching with these two.

Three hours to Cameron Highlands is no joke by the way. It was two hours on Malaysia's super-modern North-South Expressway followed by an hour's drive up and around twisty-turny roads to the beginning of Cameron Highlands. And our driver was no slouch. He was definitely driving at a good clip. There were times that the roads definitely tested his ability to keep his Toyota Innova on the road or at the very least between the lines. It would be at least 30 minutes after the three hour mark before we got to anywhere we could stop.

It is truly a different world in the Highlands, by the way. When you get out of the hot and sticky lowlands of tropical Malaysia and up a bit in the clouds, it's a totally different world, one which man has figured the best thing to do is cover it with greenhouses as far as the eye can see. I'm not convinced there was a single right angle used in the construction of a single one of these things. Those stick and plastic-built plant incubators covered the contours of the land and mimicked the surface of the Earth. A dip in the land meant a dip in the roof structure. 

And it is COLD. Not like freezing cold but I definitely regretted not bringing something with long sleeves with me. A 20 to 30 degree drop in temperature will do that to you.

The approach to Boh Tea's visitor center.

Somewhere between the butterfly farm and the cactus shop, we stopped at Boh Tea.

Malaysia is not a huge tea producer. China leads the world in tea production at 2.47 million metric tons per year. That number represents 40% of the world's total tea production. India is next. Then Kenya. Then Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka manages just a bit more than 10% of China's output at 349,000 metric tons per year. Malaysia isn't anywhere close in terms of volume produced. It isn't even in the top ten. How much in Malaysia? 10,000 metric tons per year. That's nothing. It doesn't look that way when you visit one of these plantations, though. I can't imagine these things in China.

A metric ton by the way is 1,000 kilograms, or 2,200 pounds. 2.47 million metric tons is a lot.

My first impression of our drive to the Boh Plantation was how incredibly beautiful these tea plant covered fields were. They are a gorgeous mix of dark and light green colors and the plants coat the Earth just the same way those greenhouses we passed on our way to the plantation do. Although instead of ugly white-ish plastic, it's verdant green. The plants create a cover for the ground, with tiny paths separating the plants for the pluckers to walk through. This is a strange analogy but the only thing I can liken the appearance to is a craquelin topping on top of a chou pastry bun. I know that's ultra obscure (yes, I do watch the British Baking Show religiously) but for me, that's exactly the look.

Every surface that can be covered with tea plants is covered with tea plants. There's no need to mess about with anything else. The walkway to the plantation visitor center is as narrow as it can reasonably be to accommodate the volume of incoming tourists. Either side of the path? Tea.

Tea plant. Up close and personal. 

It's funny what you don't know about how things that you consume are produced. We came face to face with that last year in Zanzibar when we stopped by a spice farm. We got the same kind of experience here in Malaysia. I mean, I had no idea how tea was produced. I could have guessed at the picking but after that...I don't know. Ignorant.

There are five basic steps after picking: withering, rolling, fermentation, drying and sorting. Do these five things in that order, and you end up with some tea. Withering takes about 20 hours to complete. Drying takes just 20 minutes. The object of the entire process is to get the moisture content of the tea down, down, down and concentrate the flavor so it's useful to make drinks for British people and whomever else out there loves a good cuppa. There's a display outside the 1934 factory on property that shows the various stages of leaf condition during the entire production process.

The factory, which was built about five years after the plantation was established, is still in use today. A tea plant, by the way, takes about that length of time to go from seedling to tea-producing vine.

The entire process of tea production, along with the history of Boh Tea and some ancient tea-rolling and drying equipment that replaced hand labor and time respectively, are on display for all to see in the visitor center. If you are a tea geek (and I'm not quite sure I'm completely in that category) this must be a dream come true. For someone like me just generally interested in food production, it was still pretty fascinating. I mean the lengths people used to go to just to dry some plant leaves so they could be shipped halfway around the world and steeped in hot water so people who couldn't have imagined the sight of the place where these little leaves came from could have a drink is just amazing to me.

And of course they had samples. They had to have samples, right? And I have to say...my eyes are opened.

After you get through all the history of Boh and the stats about worldwide production of tea and the process of the whole thing, there are four urns of tea (I was honestly going to use the term coffee urns but, well, you know...) each of which has a different flavor of sweetened tea. And get this...the tea is powdered. 

Now, look, I know that we can buy powdered iced tea drink here in the United States but I figured that was some kind of synthetic drink that wasn't really tea. Some sort of chemical concoction to approximate real iced tea drink. Apparently I was wrong.

Iced tea is disgusting by the way. It just is. It's one of those American things I can't get my head wrapped around.

This powdered tea stuff...incredible! They were serving this stuff in tiny cups and I must have had 12 of these things. I kept going back. I don't know what they made this stuff with, whether it was milk or water or some magic elixir but the taste was just mindblowingly good. And I'm not particularly a tea guy (except in Britain...) and no way am I a powdered tea guy. But this stuff. Just wow! The caramel and matcha flavors were just indescribably good.

I will say that we have purchased some U.S.-based version of what we had at Boh and I just can't make it the way they made it at the headquarters there in Malaysia. It was just transcendent. Maybe it was the being there. Being there often makes the difference, although if that's what this was, it was a pretty extreme example of being there making a difference.

Antique tea-rolling machine (top) and the good stuff (bottom). The matcha and caramel...I'm telling you.

This travel stuff is eye-opening sometimes. But ain't that most of the point of doing this?

So about that plan to spend more time at the tea plantation and get back early. I think it worked. We milked maybe an extra 15 to 20 minutes out of our time at Boh. We probably could have got a little bit longer stay but honestly, we were pretty much finished anyway. And yes, we did make it back for free happy hour at the hotel.

We also visited the vegetable farm. Or at least a market. I said we were skipping it. We didn't. 

Apparently, vegetables in the Cameron Highlands are significantly cheaper and presumeably better than veg available in the local supermarkets around Kuala Lumpur. And our driver had a list from his wife and (I think) an appointment at a specific stall. So we stopped. 

Far be it from me to get in the way of a hardworking Malaysian couple and a some groceries that can save them a ringgit or two. I'm not being facetious here. I am sure both of them work harder to make ends meet than we do or ever have and I don't want to stand in the way of any of that and I'm not stuck up enough to be so self centered to be upset about this. We try to tip well on these excursions for just that reason. We had two priorities for this day: (1) spend as much time as possible at a tea plantation and (2) get back for free happy hour. We got both. I appreciate our driver pushing the schedule and his car's ability to climb those hills. I think we ended up with a 10 hour day instead of a 12 hour day. That's a heck of a long time to spend driving two tourists around. I'm happy to stop for some veg. 

We did stop at a second tea plantation (Cameron Valley Tea) for a photo opportunity. More of that gorgeous tea-coated Malaysia landscape. That's what this whole day was about and it was completely worth it. I won't forget those landscapes. It's the craquelin. I don't know how else to convey the appearance.

Top to bottom: Boh's factory; the view from Boh's visitor center; Cameron Valley Tea plantation.

Dangerously Addictive

OK, so I'm going to do something here that's probably a little short-sighted, maybe a bit ignorant and possibly just altogether wrong. It's food post time and I'm going to just smush all the food we ate in Southeast Asia together into one post. That means just one post for Cambodia, Singapore and Malaysia combined. Is food in those countries all really the same? Honestly...no it is not. There is a great diversity and variety in what is eaten between those three nations. They are in no way the same. There's no excuse for me doing this post this way. 

Having said that (so here comes the excuse...), I do feel based on my whole two weeks over in that area of the planet, that there is enough overlap in some areas and I'm also not going to highlight much about Cambodia. So given the lack of focus on Cambodia, I feel (again...based on my whole all of two weeks there) that Singapore and Malaysia are close enough to one another to get away with this concept. Plus, I'm not writing three posts about food from one trip. Or two, even, because Cambodia certainly has an important, albeit small, part to play here. So here goes...my food post from the entirety of Southeast Asia that we visited in 2024.

And, yes, I'm drinking my beer with a straw in the photograph above. I'm wearing gloves and my hands are slippery. Not risking dropping beer.

So first of all, before I get to specific dishes or plates or whatever, let me say that my two favorite meals on this trip were in Malaysia and it's not even close. Overall (meaning not just for the food), I'd rank the three countries from top to bottom as Cambodia first, Singapore second and Malaysia a distant (and I do mean distant) third. But food-wise, the dishes I long for from this trip are two that I ate in Kuala Lumpur.

One of the two was a dish called nyonya laksa, a shrimp and tofu, spicy coconut milk noodle dish that just hit all the notes I want in a lunch dish (or any other sort of meal for that matter). We got it at the Old China Cafe in Chinatown in Kuala Lumpur and it was just awesome. I tried very hard on this trip to eat dishes that I really wasn't familiar with and nyonya laksa definitely checked that box. I really had very little idea what I was actually ordering. Maybe I got super lucky. If I did, it wasn't the only time I got that sort of lucky in Malaysia. 

I'll save the other dish that I loved for last. Let's get to what else I found on the other side of the planet.

Nasi Lemak

Let's start this post off in earnest with the greatest hits. If there were one or two classic, can't miss dishes that we HAD to have in Singapore and Malaysia, one was definitely something called nasi lemak (and the other is the next dish in this post). And if you didn't know it, nasi lemak is the national dish of Malaysia, not that labeling it as that explains the dish in any way.

Sometimes the best sorts of food are simple, simple, simple. Nasi lemak for sure is one of those. Rice cooked in coconut milk; cucumbers (or you might skip those things if you are not pro-cucumber); a dried anchovies and peanuts concoction called ikan bilis; and an egg of some sort (we ate this dish with both fried and halved hard-boiled eggs, although not at the same time) along with some sambal on the side pretty much forms the base of a typical nasi lemak plate.

Much like the ubiquitous rice and beans in Costa Rica, nasi lemak can make up any sort of meal, be it breakfast, lunch or dinner. Maybe it's eaten just plain for breakfast and maybe you add some chicken or a banana-leaf-wrapped otah (or spiced fish cake) for the later meals but nasi lemak is eligible for a place on the table at any Malaysian or Singaporean mealtime.

Best nasi lemak on our trip? In Singapore, but that's probably because we didn't eat it in Malaysia except at our hotel. There's something about this coconut rice. The toppings can for sure affect the quality of the dish, especially if you get a perfectly fried and juicy chicken wing on the side, but that coconut rice...whoever invented that stuff was onto something for sure. 

The picture above is from The Coconut Club in Singapore. It was definitely the best nasi lemak of the trip, although it would have been better with the chicken wing from Selera Rasa Nasi Lemak at the Adam Road Food Centre. Coconut Club's chicken was a touch dry.

Chili Crab

This was my food splurge in Southeast Asia. I knew a meal of chili crab was going to cost me a lot and I ignored it anyway. I also knew it was going to be super messy. Whatever. 

Chili crab is basically a cooked Singaporean mud crab doused in some kind of spicy tomato sauce. You get the entire animal chopped up into pieces, shell and all, and just pound away at this thing until it's all gone. It's some tough going at some points. Despite providing you with a hefty set of crab crackers to open that shell, there's some work here involved. I've eaten other meals of crabs in shells but I've never seen any shell as thick as these mud crabs. I'm estimating the thickness of the claws approached 1/16 of an inch. It's basically like cracking a thick piece of strong plastic. No easy task.

A whole lot of research about where to get some really excellent chili crab led me to Keng Eng Kee (or K.E.K. for short) Seafood. It's one of their specialties; they have been around since the 1970s; they are on their third generation of ownership; they are Anthony Bourdain-endorsed; and they are not in a super accessible area with tons of tourist foot traffic. Seemed like a good combination.

There's no doubt in my mind that this was a good choice. It was open-air. It was packed. There were plastic chairs. There was a time limit to the table. And we were looked at with some skepticism when we showed up and asked if we had a reservation. We did. Of course we did. And I swear someone somewhere started the clock as soon as we sat down.

We didn't use all our time. We can eat quickly. Even if it's a whole crab that requires cracking.

I think as a dining splurge, this was worth doing once. I've said it before and I'll say it again...I don't understand why crab costs so much (with the possible exception of Dungeness crab). This was a good meal and it was tasty (although sweet more than spicy) and it was completely authentically Singaporean. But at a $95 SG per kilo price (that's about $70 or so US), I feel I can get something better for less. 

My crab weighed about 0.9 kilograms. Do the math on the cost, if you are so inclined.

Hawker Markets

Some of our food experience on this trip required a lot of research and a lot of looking to find the best, the most traditional, the most Southeast Asian food we could find. Some...but not all. One thing that was obvious to us before we even booked our flights to Singapore and Malaysia and everywhere else we stopped was that our culinary experience in Singapore had to include a lot of eating at the country's various hawker markets.

Why hawker markets? Well, because it seems like every TV show we watched, every blog post we clicked on and every travel guide we read said we had to get to these places at mealtimes. Heck, Newton Food Centre is the first place that Nick Young and Rachel Chu go to get some food in Crazy Rich Asians after they get picked up at Changi Airport. Hawker markets are in vogue. Hawker markets are hip. We had to get to multiple, multiple hawker markets in Singapore. There was no question or no option really about this. This was going to be a project in and of itself.

Maybe I ought to take a step backwards here and explain what a hawker market is. Quite simply, it's an open air market with multiple stalls which usually feature one or two signature dishes and each stall only serves those particular dishes. Sounds simple, right? It's not. It's way, way deeper than that. I am sure there are people out there who would hail hawker markets as the keepers of traditional Singaporean (with all its Malaysian, Indian, Chinese, etc. influences) dishes. And those people wouldn't be wrong. Hawker markets are for sure preserving the area's culinary traditions. And they are doing it at insanely low prices, and that includes the stalls which have been Michelin listed or Michelin starred. Not kidding. Looking for cheap and amazing food in Singapore? Put some hawker markets on your list.

We did. Our itinerary for this trip had four hawker markets on it and we made it to all four. There are more. We just picked four that were closest to the other things we were looking to do while in Singapore.

Chicken rice from Maxwell Food Centre (top); Paneer Tikka from Tekka Centre (bottom).

We tried to mix it up at the hawker markets. 

We went with the internet's advice at the Maxwell Food Centre and Adam Road Food Centre and got the chicken rice and nasi lemak, respectively, which is supposed to be the top of the top dishes (although admittedly the internet seemed to be split on the best stall at Adam Road). We stood in a very long line at Maxwell that went very quickly on our first day in Singapore and we stood in a fairly short line at Adam Road that took about 45 minutes between the time we started queuing and when we got our food.

At the other two spots, we winged it and just picked what looked or sounded good. No advance research, just pick a spot and go with it. Usually the conventional wisdom was to go with the longest line on the supposition that people know where the good stuff is. We didn't do any of that. Standing in two lines was enough. 

In two of the four places, I picked something that I really was completely unfamiliar with. There were two things on my nasi lemak plate at Adam Road that I just ate without understanding what I was eating and I ordered a carrot cake at Newton Food Centre with really no clue what I'd be handed, although I was pretty sure it wasn't some brown cake with carrot shreds, walnut and cream cheese frosting. It wasn't. It was basically a white radish omelet with a side of spicy red sauce (picture below).

And I did figure out what one of the two mystery items on my nasi lemak plate was. It was the aforementioned spiced fish cake or otah. I still don't know what the other thing was. 

So was it good? Absolutely. Everything we ate at all four hawker markets was really good, quick and fresh and totally unlike anything we can get quickly at a restaurant or stall here at home. And it was all super, super cheap. The paneer tikka in the picture above cost me $4 SG, and that included the made to order garlic naan. I was lamenting that we didn't have enough cash in the nasi lemak line because I couldn't believe the thing that I was about to ordered cost $4. I thought the sign said $14.

Was food from a hawker market the best thing I ate on this trip? No it was not. But for the cost, it blew almost every other dish that we ate out of the water and it wasn't even close. I could easily eat three solid meals a day from hawker markets and expect to spend less than $15 US total for the whole day. And that's not, by the way, a bad strategy for staying well fed in Singapore I'm sure.

Sugar Cane Juice

One of the peculiar things about eating at the hawker markets is you can't get both your food and drinks at the same stalls. We found food at about 90% of the stalls and the other 10% were drinks only. And here's where I found one of my food quests for this vacation: sugar cane juice.

Order a cup of sugar cane juice and the stall owner will whip out a few stalks of bamboo-looking things (spoiler alert: it's sugar cane), split them in half and then feed them through a machine that squeezes all the juice from the sticks. The juice goes into a metal container just below the machine; the rest of the woody cane goes into the trash, although a little of the pulp ends up with the juice. The juice then gets run through a very fine mesh sieve (don't want to drink the pulp) and then poured over ice. Voila: sugar cane juice.

This was actually refreshing and not too sweet (I imagined it would be super sweet). I'd have this stuff on its own or as a dessert drink. I'm not sure it was the best accompaniment to my carrot cake but this was a successful quest. When else am I going to drink freshly pulped sugar cane?

Salted Egg Fish Skins

There are foods out there that are just so unusual and tantalizing (and not always in a "wow that sounds incredible!" way) that I just have to sample them when I travel. I don't mean like monkey's brains or some other sort of offal or something really disgusting like the chicken with cream clam sauce burger that we found in a 7-11 in Singapore. I mean something simpler. Something that just makes you wonder why would anyone ever make this and stick it in a bag on a food shelf somewhere. On this trip, that food was salted egg fish skins.

And yes, the chicken with cream clam sauce burger was real. Why? It's like someone just picked a bunch of ingredients and just put them together with no thought whatsoever as to whether it would be good.

So there's nothing mysterious about salted egg fish skins. They are what they sound like. They are pieces of fish skin dipped in salted duck egg yolks and cooked before being sealed into a bag and placed on a grocery store shelf. They are like potato chips. Only made with fish skins instead of potatoes.

Singaporeans apparently love these things. I do not, although I did eat the whole bag. They weren't objectionable or anything. Maybe it's a cultural thing or a practice makes perfect thing but I'm just not conditioned to crave fish skins as a snack. Glad I did this once. Probably not a repeat customer. It's not like the sugar cane juice.

Durian

OK...so it had to happen sooner or later that I'd finally sample durian while traveling. I wasn't going to. I swear. They have pieces of fresh durian very visible and very, very securely wrapped on market stalls in Singapore's Chinatown and I had no inclination to pick up a packet and try it. The airport got me here.

If you don't know what durian is, it's a fruit that grows in the tropics that some people describe as custardy and others (to be clear here...most others) describe as having the smell and flavor of rotting meat. Durians are banned on the Singapore MRT system because of the risk of their smell. Singapore's not alone in this kind of prohibition. We found the same sort of ban on the buses in Zanzibar last winter. I have really no desire to try a fruit that smells like rotting meat, but clearly people must like this stuff. I mean, they do seem to have a lot for sale in some spots.

Which brings us to the Kuala Lumpur airport with a little time to kill.

I'm sure if you've traveled to anywhere international you are familiar with the stores at the airport that sell chocolates or whatever it is that has some sort of connection to the country you are leaving. They had a couple of these stalls at the KL airport and among the various boxes of goodies, there was a display of durian filled dark chocolates. And there were samples.

Of all the durian experiences I could imagine, eating a tiny candy that is pretty much equal parts dark chocolate and durian was about the best-case scenario I could ever cook up. Plus it's free. There was something about this situation that I couldn't say no to. I picked up one of the individually-wrapped chocolates, opened the tiny little packet, smelled it and then popped it into my mouth and bit down.

I'll say this: it's a good thing they had a lot of other individually-wrapped candies hanging around the airport because I needed about five or six other types of chocolate samples to erase that memory. And quick. Rotting meat? I'm not sure about that but something not good was in my mouth. If this my reaction to about as little durian as you could ever have, I'm passing in the future. Including in airports.

Pandan

Believe it or not, most of what I've described that sat before us on tables or counters before it made its way to my mouth was familiar in some form. I knew about sugar cane juice and durian and even salted egg fish skins before leaving home. I had no idea that something called pandan even existed. We found out about it on our first day in Cambodia when we ordered some pandan sticky rice with mango. We love sticky rice with mango. Had to have this.

When our sticky rice arrived, it looked like the picture above. Rice? Check! Mango? Check!! Sauce made from something coconut-y? Check!!! What's the green stuff. Must be the pandan, right? Right!!!!

Pandan is basically Southeast Asia's version of vanilla. It's a bright green leaf used to flavor food. We found some when we were on a hike on Singapore's Pulau Ubin island looking for hornbills and other winged creatures. And it's just awesome. We stayed three nights in Cambodia. We ate pandan sticky rice four times in our stay at our hotel. We also found plenty of pandan treats in Malaysia and ate it pretty much every time we saw it. This was a revelation. And it's not strictly like vanilla. I'd describe it as a more herbaceous version of vanilla, for what that's worth.

More pandan treats? Yes, please!!!

So after all that eating, there's one more thing to talk about: the best meal of our trip (for me, at least). And this is going to sound a bit crazy.

When we got to Kuala Lumpur, it was before check-in time at the Hilton so we dropped our bags and asked the hotel staff if there was someplace close we could get something to eat. They gave us a couple of options, one of which was something called NU Sentral, which sounded like it was some sort of hawker market-type thing that had a number of options. The directions were easy enough and it didn't involve walking outside in the heat so we picked that.

It turned out that we were sent to a shopping mall food court and it appeared that the air conditioning in the building stopped at the perimeter of the food court. Oh well. We were there and hungry, let's just pick something and this will be a throwaway meal. After looking at all the stalls, I picked a place labeled Chili Pan Mee. I just wanted to try something I'd never heard of. After trying to order just simple chili pan mee (whatever that was...) and not being able to convince the dude at the register that I didn't also want the side of dumplings, I acquiesced and just paid for what he wanted me to get (it was less than $3.50 US).

Usually when I get a meal that might be notable while traveling, I take a picture before eating. I didn't here. I took a picture of the stall (below) just so I could remember the name of the dish.

I don't know what they put in that bowl but it was phenomenal. I know there was pork and anchovies and probably some fish sauce and spices but this meal was just amazing. It was so rich with flavor and had the best sort of spicy heat to it. The broth was fantastic. The side of dumplings was good too but that chili pan mee...I mean just wow! At a mall food court for less than $3.50!!!! What are we doing wrong in this world over here that I can't get this stuff at our local mall? I feel embarrassed a bit here. We went to world-renowned hawker markets in Singapore and at least one Michelin-starred restaurant on this trip and I love something from the mall food court. It was that good.

So that's it. That's my Southeast Asia food rundown. I will say that I've tried to find a reasonably good chili pan mee in New York since I got back and I do very much like the version that Pig and Khao makes (they also have amazing coconut rice) but it's not the mall food court in KL. It's just not.