More Armada treats

Herb crusted lamb.

California maki from the cute little Japanese bistro, Shokudo.

I am into comfort food and comfort places. And the place I get both these days is Armada Hotel. I took my friend Justine Morais there for lunch. Justine does admirable work as the administrator of Home of Peace, a shelter for abused, neglected and underprivileged girls. She spends nearly all her time taking care of the Home and for once, I wanted her to have some time out.

Tempura, the baddest way to eat vegetables!

We lunched at Utara, and as usual Chef Chew rolled out his special lamb with the herb crust, and also offered some tempura and maki.

Besto pesto

Invest in a husband with green fingers for a lovely, fruitful marriage tinged with basil.

It’s lovely to have a basil plant growing happily in the yard. English basil is such a beautiful smelling herb. Just brushing against it releases the lovely aromatic oils, and it scents the porch magnificently.

It is also such a great herb to have. It’s so versatile. It can be used to empower a basic chicken soup; it can be stir fried with beef and dried chilli; toss it with some clams and Tabasco… the list goes on.

However, basil’s most famous use is pesto.

Here’s my favourite recipe for it, courtesy of The Naked Chef, Jamie Oliver.
Ingredients:
• ½ a clove of garlic, chopped
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 3 good handfuls of fresh basil, leaves picked and chopped
• A handful of pine nuts, very lightly toasted
• A good handful of freshly grated Parmesan cheese
• Extra virgin olive oil
• A small squeeze of lemon juice
Method:

1.      Pound the garlic with a little pinch of salt and the basil leaves in a pestle and mortar, or pulse in a food processor.

2.      Add the pine nuts to the mixture and pound again.

3.      Turn out into a bowl and add half the Parmesan.

4.      Stir gently and add olive oil – you need just enough to bind the sauce and get it to an oozy consistency.

5.      Season to taste, then add most of the remaining cheese.

6.      Pour in some more oil and taste again. Keep adding a bit more cheese or oil until you are happy with the taste and consistency.

7.      You may like to add a squeeze of lemon juice at the end to give it a little twang, but it’s not essential.

All mixed up

It's not much, but it's the taste of home!

Rojak is the quintessential Malaysian fruit salad. And please, rojak means the Penang variety, made with fruit and vegetables and prawn paste sauce. It is NOT pasembor, which is the Indian Muslim version of rojak, which is definitely more savoury, not fruity and uses lots of fried crackers and tofu.

Rojak is the evilest way to eat your seven helpings of fruit and veg, because it is slathered with a mixture of sweet prawn paste (petis udang or hae kor), some chili paste, crushed peanuts and fragments of deep fried prawn cracker. Ingredients vary, but the staples of a great rojak are cucumber, young green mango, ripe pineapple, turnip (that’s sengkuang or bangkuang to the Nyonyas and Malays, and also called erroneously yam bean by some Western writers), hog plum (kedondong), unripe papaya, water convulvus (kangkong, also called morning glory by weird Singaporeans) and sometimes cuttlefish (sotong).

The most unhealthy fruit salad ever!

It is a taste that can only be appreciated with people who have it in their DNA. It’s a funny mouth feel - a sticky, sweet, dense sauce coating crisp fruit and crunchy crackers – but it is so ingrained in many Malaysians that it is often, the taste of home.

Most times rojak is bought from street hawkers, but I have found a weekly fix at the club where the lady who also sells rojak (and its often counterpart, tofu bakar) at the Wednesday night market in SS4 stations herself on Saturday and Sunday.

It has gone up phenomenally in price. As a kid, a packet would cost RM2. Now, a serving for one is RM3.50, and is not all enough for a big appetite. Hence I always order a plate for four which costs RM10. I comfort myself by thinking that at least I am adding to my fibre intake!

All chooked up

You know how it is when you’re really, really hungry and are enroute to a meal you’ve had before and you just know it’s going to be so good because you can taste it?

Looks are massively deceiving.

Insipid saucing gives bean sprouts a bad name.

That was how it was at lunch. I’ve been known to be very fickle when it comes to what to eat, but today I knew I wanted the chicken rice at Yat Yeh Hing in People’s Park, opposite St Ignatius Church in PJ. We even managed to find parking.

I ordered roast chicken and bean sprouts. The drinks in the shop are catered by the restaurant owner, who also makes ala carte dishes, so I also ordered a tofu from her. I barely waited till the shutter clicked on my camera before I began eating. Shock and horror! The chicken was so tough and stringy that it has the texture of untreated hemp. I hoped it was just that odd piece, but three pieces in and I was masticating so hard I could have cut a wisdom tooth, had I any left to cut.

It was only after my plate of rice was finished that I got a decent, tender piece of chicken. By then my jaws ached and I was in a bad, bad mood. Kit reminded me that the last time we ate here we took the steamed chicken, so it may well be that the roast chicken was always a dud. Looking around, all the tables had the steamed chicken.

Still, it pissed the heck out of me to have the worst chicken I have ever eaten at this very meal. The place was chosen for its track record. It is inexcusable that he’d stink at roasting chicken while excelling at steaming them. And if he knew he stank at it, why the hell does he offer roast chicken? Even his bean sprouts were insipid. Although plump and fresh, they lacked the combination of oil, stock and sauce which makes it a crunchy, salty, satisfying mouthful.

For RM6 I could have had a whole banana leaf lunch. With a banana for dessert!

The only decent thing was the tofu. But at RM6 for that little cake, it was hardly worth it, seeing its topping was pickled radish and a little minced meat. Sure, it was molten soft inside and very good when warm, but if I have to sit through bad chicken for this tofu again, you can forget it.
The final nail in the coffin was the fact that the glasses the tea came in were so very badly washed that one still had the imprint of lipstick on it. While I am not squeamish and have eaten in more than my share of unhygienic places, this stinker was the final straw. I’m big on personal space and privacy and to have someone’s lip print on the cup I’m supposed to drink from is akin to asking me to French kiss a stranger wearing a very unfetching shade of coral.


Goodbye chicken rice shop at the corner, it was not nice knowing you and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I stop by again. I’d eat at the Chicken Rice Shop more willingly next time!

Undecided

The steamed flower buns are essential to an Esquire meal.

I wrote about the culling of some QSRs from my list of places to eat. It’s easier to bid adieu to places like that since for all the ID and the marketing research that goes into them, they are still soulless places.

However, when it comes to places like Esquire, I have a hard time deciding whether it is time to make the final cut. It is a place intrinsically linked with numerous family meals when I was growing up. It has with it part of my family DNA – from weekends browsing in Sungei Wang Plaza and lunching at the Esquire outlet on the top floor, to weekday dinners when Grandma did not cook. It was also a favourite meeting place between Ying May, one of my best friends and I, when there was still an outlet in Bangsar Shopping Centre.

I think the chain has undergone some changes. I believe it has changed ownership and is now run by the same people who managed the Nam Heong chain of chicken rice shops. Esquire outlets are in two places I like going because of the ease of parking – Subang Parade and Atria.

I’ve brought Erin to dine at Esquire twice. Both with Nana and Pops. She enjoyed the Esquire tofu both visits, but I am not sure if the food is really all that it should be anymore. I continue to order the same dishes, (except for the Japanese eel, which they tend to run out of so many times that they should take it off the menu) but I just am not sure I’m getting the quality I want.

Soggy dumplings and no vinegar!

Szechuan eggplant

Presentation does not exist in Esquire! Note the spring onions marooned on the edge of the bowl!

The wor tip (deep fried dumplings) was soggy and stodgy, and mum commented on the grey-looking paper base on the steamed flower buns, though the buns themselves are still soft and passably large. I think there could be a lot less oil used in the paprika chicken and the Szechuan eggplant, though the flavour is still good. There is a RM2 surcharge when you request for the Esquire tofu in a set menu (what the?!), and overall there is no presentation to speak of. But yet…

Erin likes the Esquire tofu, but I dare say she likes the kind I cook too!

Saying goodbye to Esquire is akin to putting my old leather bomber in the recycle bin. I probably won’t wear it again, but it is an intrinsic part of who I am, because it was the essence of what I used to be, which coloured the choices I made to become who I am now. To me, relationships with food can be like that too. So what do I do?