Our Wild Day Out

The Chinese Hokkien restaurant - Restoran kuan hwa kuala selangor sat adjacent to the River Selangor, in Selangor state, Malaysia, and specialised in sea and river food. 

It was a bright Sunday during the Hindu celebration of Diwali. We travelled in convoy around Kuala Lumpur, stopping briefly for a rest-stop at Aunty Foo's Cafe, to enjoy a clean restroom environment and shudder at her prices for dark local nectar.

A constant, welcome, breeze wafted from a river the colour of tea and, surprisingly, there was only the scent of food cooking, not mud. While mud-dwelling crabs carried one large claw aloft, skitting on the approach of birds, our cut coconuts arrived sloshing with watery goodness. I reluctantly drew my attention away from the engaging mud crustaceans and refocussed on my hosts, family and the meal to come.

The meal was to be a treat. And the day, a relaxing one, eating and soaking up the chilling vibes, while being adjacent to the rice-paddy wilds of Selangor - the Malaysian state closest to Kuala Lumpur. If time permitted, we were to buy fish at the local fishing village and go on to buy rice direct from the buildings concerned with its production in the middle of the rice growing paddy fields.

A brusque waitress hurried small bowls of diced garlic and finely chopped green chillies - condiments. An oval plate of fried lettuce appeared next, and who says you can’t fry lettuce, they do it all the time here. The veg is the quickest to cook, hence coming first. It was quickly followed by another oval dish, this time of Bamboo clams (aka Atlantic Jackknife clams) looking for all the world like the hand-piece to a cut-throat razor. The meat was long, like pale worms, but the chili sauce with dried chillies and spring onions helped it along. My wife stayed clear of this one, claiming it to be unappetizing (by looks alone).

Next came tiny crispy fried squid, which were exactly that, and none more that an inch-and-a-half long. More veggies followed - a

gracious mixture of green beans, okra, aubergine and that pungent Malaysian favourite - petai. Petai is the vegetable equivalent of the Durian fruit. That is to say petai makes you fragrant, in the worse possible way. After eating that pungent bean your bodily discharges have a peculiar scent, this can last a few days and it is all with thanks to 1,2,4-trithiolane with a little help from hydrogen sulfide, ethanol and acetaldhyde, apparently. Petai is also called ‘stink bean’ for a very good reason.

The meal’s fish dish was a little disappointing. It was cutlets of fish unable to swim in a brown sauce loaded, as it was, with garlic. Of the dishes tasted that day, the fish was the least flavoursome. However, the meal’s crowning glory arrived in short shrift. Two more dishes - first a sweet and sour mud-crab, then Malaysia’s famous ‘chili crab’. The former was

balanced so perfectly that neither the sweet nor the sour dominated, but worked in perfect harmony. The latter was caressed with curry leaves as well as black pepper and other spices to make that crab rich and a little dry and sour in taste - no doubt because of the tamarind used. Deep fried ‘man tou’ buns lay crisply brown on the platter, and were perfect for scooping up the sauces of both crabs, The buns disappeared extremely quickly, once placed on our Arthurian round table. The Tom Yum (prawn) soup came in another coconut. This tom yum was

crammed with good sized prawns, and was traditionally spicy but, thankfully, not as sweet as some I’ve tasted.

We had forgotten that it was the first day in the Chinese lunar month. The (Chinese) fisherman had not fished. There were no fish to purchase at the fishing village. Instead, some sketched and some wrote, whiling away the time and letting that superb Hokkien meal digest. Cats, anxious for fish, walked away disappointed. My eyes were getting heavy. The meal, slowly digesting, was bringing on the afternoon lethargy. I was feeling like some gigantic anaconda after swallowing a goat, though to my knowledge there were no anacondas nearby and the goats had been already swallowed up by humans - at a previous religious festival.

Then we were off. My wife drove. The two boys and I let Hypnos blanket us with sleep as we were taken away from the fishing village, and out towards the rice paddies. It was still hot outside, and still bright. We could feel the heat of the sun trying to penetrate the air-conditioning. It was a struggle, but the car’s internal temperature eventually won out.

It had seemed like a thousand years ago, that I landed at Penang airport, and was transported, at the break of day, through my first ever paddy fields (in Keddah state, Malaysia). I had been in awe. I had never seen rice growing before. Wheat and corn yes, even barley but never rice and, at that very moment, the complete otherness of Malaysia had hit me. As I awoke from my partial Selangor slumber, the car stopped. We were on a small road running through fields of growing rice. The sky was a perfect blue. The clouds grouped as if for photographs, and the rice paddy was green. It was a brief idyll. Echoes of Lou Reed ran through my head.

The next stop was at Cap Asas (Basic Brand) PLS - the rice producer’s Sunday rice market, which was surrounded by their rice fields, and accessible only by those small roads. Rice was being sold in 5kg and 10kg plastic bags. Posher (pearl) rice, white or brown, was in briquettes of 2kg. It was a veritable hive of activity. Bags of rice seemed to fly from their stacks and into waiting cars, SUVs etc. The day was beginning to get overly long. We forsook the offer of yet more food, and a beach, and began to wander back to home and hearth, if we had a hearth but, in Malaysia, hearths are redundant. We slept. It was another lazy Sunday behind us, without rainbows. Our wild day out had been tamed and put back in its cage.