Cravings for familiar foods..

I read an interesting article in the Star today, by Mary Schneider. She talked about how one has cravings for food from their country, even when travelling overseas. This reminds me of the time in Brisbane, where I tried the Fried Kuay Teow and Hainanese Chicken Rice. I'll sum it up in one word, "Sucky!". Well so much for the intellectual speech. I'd say, nothing beats having Fried Kuay Teow from back home, it wins hands down even if the Kuay Teow seller was on a bad day.

Australia's a country filled with diversed cultures. With the great migration and all, you get some pretty decent food there. They have really authentic cuisines from all over the world, made by the natives. You don't go into some Japanese restaurant and find your sushi being prepared by a chinese chef. No offense to any great sushi chef out there, but it just loses the authenticity of it all.

Anyway, I guess what I'm getting to at here is that no matter where you are in the world, eating something familiar reminds you of home. I mean, living overseas and all, once in a while you would think about the things you missed back home. As for me, the first thing on my mind is the food back home. Now some people would argue that you can learn the recipes and all, but if you're an average cook like I am, it's impossible to remember every recipe that there is. Therefore the only thing that I could do was to go to the nearest place that sold chicken rice in Sunnybank, Brisbane... and order it from there.

Speaking of food, this brings me back to the first time I tried French food. Well, I had a French housemate, Cecile and one day she decided to cook a typical French meal. She researched some recipes and wanted to cook escargots. Now, I know that it's an exotic dish there but seeing that she was preparing it for the first time and going around Woolworth looking at the aisles for snails, that didn't quite appeal to me. I guess it was the way she put it, "I'm going to cook snails for you all." It didn't help the fact that I saw a few garden snails a few days before she said it, so I kinda lost my appetite. Came the big day, and was I glad that they didn't get the snails. I asked the other French girl, my neighbour Camille, and she said, "Not all French people love escargot...". I guess it's an acquired taste.

Thankfully, my housemate decided on cooking fondue. Since she couldn't get the particular cheese needed to make the cheese fondue, she decided on chocolate fondue. Interesting, now that's something that I could get used to. Talk about a lot of chocolate. All melted into a pot and we just dipped fruits, cookies, bread, berries and all. It was delicious!

Now that I'm back in KL, I haven't stopped sampling the food here. Ahhh, all the lost time... I need to make up for it!