Visitors, Culture, Eating and ....

I've been lazy in the past few weeks when it comes to writing my blog. For sure we had some visitors... actually quite a lot of visitors, then we moved house, then there was the big tennis tournament that I played in when Viv was away, then I hurt my back .... and then came the coronavirus which has locked us down in out apartment for at least the next two weeks.

Yes, I just slipped that last thing in. My goodness, this is the biggest crisis facing the world probably since WWII and to think I was going to write about the hardships of going out to eat in Penang!

But I'd started and had some really neat photos so I will go ahead and complete the blog but obviously with the benefit of current thinking. Realistically sitting here in our apartment, I would obviously love to go out to restaurants and stuff but that can't happen for a while. I'm still amazed how quickly all this has taken to come to pass when it was only just last week...

Anyhow, here it is:

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I think we've lived here long enough that the Penang coolaid that we've drunk is starting to take effect. Penang info front and centre always says that Penang is the foodie capital of (1) Malaysia, (2) the Far East, or (3) the world. I don't know about that but recently in some periodical or another (or maybe a Far East food programme on TV), it was announced that either Penang or Malaysia (can't remember which) has 162,000 small holding food sellers.... a better word was used but you can't really call fooderies here 'restaurants' because most aren't. For sure there are restaurants like you'd recognise in the west but they are realistically few and far between. You have boutique fancy restaurants too. Then you go to the non-fancy restaurants that are more like US diners and a couple of further rungs down you get to the hawkers and the guys that prepare food off trolleys (you can't call them trucks). Anyway there's 162,000 of these apparently either up and down the country or in Penang, probably up and down the country now that I think of it.

Hawker centre on Beach Street

It feels like we've visited them all this last week.

Also by some extraordinary combination of events, we have had some of the most stunningly good meals and dishes that we've eaten in the entire time we have been here. So you can't say no to eating them, can you? (That was pretty lame, wasn't it? Even so, 100% true).

We had guests in the shape of Viv's mum, Anna, and uncle Dick from San Francisco so were in tourist mode as well so visited some pretty interesting places too but I'll just keep to the food on this post.

After the obligatory chicken rice on collecting Dick from the airport, we went on a bit of a tour ending up at a local Malay Nonya Indian sort of 'fusion' restaurant which had recipes from all over the region. Called Jawi Restaurant, the chef told us that his people are Indian muslims that came to Penang 200 years ago bringing with them traditional dishes that they made with local ingredients, substituting as needed and intermarrying over the years which brought different ways and means to the cooking. Its in Armenian Street opposite the Sun Yet Sen Museum and was very nice.

Our friends Ted and Lisa had asked us all out to join them at a Teochow restaurant called Goh Swee Kee, a fish restaurant and yet another style of Chinese cooking from the Teochow region. Wonderful fish, amazing pork curry and those veggies!!

Viv's tennis buddy asked us (Viv, Dick, Anna and I) for a day trip that included Dim Sum in Butterworth and another fish restaurant on the beach at Batu Ferringhi where the specialty was Duck and Yam Soup. Talk about hearty!

I took Dick out for a walk around Georgetown that included breakfast and of course lunch. Along the way we found the famous Nasi Lemak stall on Beach Street and some amazing looking tandoori chicken in Little India on Chulia Street.

Banana Leaf, rice cooked with coconut milk (hence fatty or 'Lemak'), dried anchovies, hard boiled egg and a huge dollop of chilli out of those buckets makes Nasi Lemak (aka fatty rice), a spectacular breakfast dish.

We realised that we'd not taken our visitors to any Nyonya Restaurants in Penang. Nyonya are the local Chinese/Malay mix cuisine restaurants. I love the food and Ted and Lisa again found a wonderful place called Aunty Geik Lean's Old School in Georgetown. I'd walked past this place dozens of times and never realised I should have stepped in for the fish and indescribably good pork curry.

Then there was the 'quiet' dinner at the Penang Swim Club and the huuuuge Korean BBQ that we went to with our friend's daughter, Hannah...

I felt like a balloon at the end of all this.

"Alive, Alive-O"

I just downloaded these photos from a couple of months back so can write about our day at the Old Leigh Regatta, a once a year event in my home town.

Old Leigh is a great place and a first stop any time I visit the town.  It has great old pubs and of course the cockle sheds, the most famous of which is Osborne's across the street from the best pub there, the Crooked Billet.  Really what could be better than a pint and some local cockles, whelks or oysters?  My mum and dad used to bring my brother Jan and I here when we were young.  In those days you'd also eat the mussels but now the local mussels have some bacteria and are a health hazard so those on sale are imported from Chile.

Jan had told us of this event and we'd promptly advised our Bermuda friends Keith and Judy as well as the friends we were staying with, Kevin and Gill, who needed no second invitation to come down for the event too.  Jan suggested that we should all enter the cockle eating competition -- something he'd won a year or so back and which involved eating a pint glass filled with cockles as fast as possible.  He said that his son Rupert would take part whilst his daughters, Zophia and Gabriella, would be on hand to film the event and provide moral and other support.  This was a real treat as we don't see anywhere near as much of our nephew and nieces as we'd like.

Rupert, Jan, Me, Gabriella, Zophia

The intent was to turn up around 12 noon, ease into things with a pint or so and some palate opening plates of shellfish before facing the main event.

Interestingly none of Jan's children had ever tried oysters before -- and having eaten some with Jan a short while before and seen how many he could hoover away, this was not surprising.  I imagine there'd be none left for the children!  So first order of the day was to rectify that.  The oysters weren't Southend oysters, but they were Essex oysters -- from Maldon in fact which is just up the coast.

Gabsy's first oyster experience

They were really nice too and I felt opened the palate nicely.

Rupert's too

Preliminaries over the next step was the coconut shy that Gabriella apparently always insisted on trying out each year.  I hadn't done this for years but Gabriella showed uncanny skill and combined with Rupert managed to snag the cuddly toy of her dreams!

Looking for the cuddly toy

The event itself was a highpoint for the regatta and had 6 entrants -- 3 of us (Jan, Rupert and myself) and 3 others (2 no hopers and last year's champion).  The idea was to eat a pint glass filled with cockles as fast as possible.

Ready, Get Set…

They were horrible.  With no seasoning allowed, you relied on the taste of the cockle itself.  They are tasteless without seasoning and felt like chewy, sinewy, things.  I could barely manage a couple of mouthfuls but the champ and Jan's technique was the way to go: open the gullet and pour. By the time the champ had finished both my cheeks were stuffed full of an undigested mass of part chewed cockles that I surreptitiously returned to the pint glass -- Rupert had had the same problem with the cockles and did the same.

"How do you swallow these things?"

But it was all good fun and a great day out with family and friends.

Next time I'll bring my own seasoning!