food cravings...

Just now after my cell group finished just now, a page from the newspaper on a table in the room caught my eye, but not for its headline story or some scandalous pictures. Nope, rather, i saw the ad for the Rice Table Restaurant, complete with very appealing pics of all the various dishes that they have to offer, including daging rendang, tahu telor, berkedel, ayam goreng, and much much more... Made me want to go there to eat right there and then...

It didn't help that i hadn't eaten lunch yet...

Good thing i went home after that to see a pot of ayam buah keluak on the table. For those who dunno what it is, well, it's a peranakan dish that is basically a blackish stew of chicken, pork ribs and this ugly brownish mangrove nut the size of two or three chestnuts which contains a bitter, black flesh (the buah keluak)... The black flesh is scooped out of the hard brown shell, sometimes mixed with a little minced pork, then restuffed into the shell again before cooking. If you don't do that, you will be left with a rather unappetising dish that is extremely bitter to the point of revulsion. From what i observe from when my mother makes it, the preparation takes fairly long. Furthermore, it supposedly tastes better when you let it sit after cooking for at least one day... Yup it may not sound so appealing when i describe it, but it's really good, trust me...

A church member had made a big batch to sell at church today for fund raising for an upcoming charity carnival that the church is organising. If i am not wrong, it was sold at $10 a pack, and if i am not wrong, it sold really well... Must be all the peranakan people in my church (we are in Katong after all, so there are nonyas and babas left right and centre) who made a beeline for it... I myself am 1/4 peranakan (though on my father's side, and since peranakan society is matrilineal, then technically, i am not peranakan...)

But anyway, ayam buah keluak is just one dish, and i could go on and on about other peranakan culinary gems like sate babi, sambal belimbing, itek tim, sambal pomfret... The only things that i have problems with in peranakan cuisine is the very liberal use of belachan and seafood in general, since i can't stand it, and can smell any form of it from a mile away (though sometimes i can't help myself and just squeeze a lot of limau on top, hold my nose, and eat it nevertheless, while trying to block out any sudden feelings of nausea), as well as the fondness of using very fatty pork in a lot of the dishes, which to me is just plain gross. But these are just little things, and are far outweighed by the good points of peranakan food, the most outstanding one for me being the abundance of chilli in the food, which is all i ever could ask for...

Yum.