Solitary
hey don’t stop and turn away
I’m sure you’d rather stay
than follow me into the alleyway
we were passers on the street
don’t turn it into grief
just follow me into disaster-- "Simonize", Pete Yorn.
Two Sundays ago, I wandered alone into Chinatown with the vague notion of perhaps having lunch at one of my favourite places. The weather was indecisive, hovering between a little too cold and a little too warm, plaguing the day with uncertainties, pockets of possibilities. On a sudden hunch I walked into one of the grocery shops, remembering that I am on the constant hunt for ingredients for some Malaysian dishes.
It has been one of my major complaints: I have found plenty of ingredients for Japanese and Thai cuisines (I call these cuisines "fashionable"), but as for ingredients stemming from the regions of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, it has been a frustrating search yielding next to none.
Except today ... against a backwall of this store I discovered a stack of large cans containing Singaporean curry sauce (close enough to the Malaysian curry of the same kind), and next to those, were jars of sambal udang. There exists at least a few varieties of sambal, and often they taste different even though they carry the same name, presumably depending on where they have been produced (people also make their own). So, I picked up a random jar of sambal and turned it over — the label announced that it originated from Malaysia. I blinked, put the jar back, and turned the one next to it on the shelf. My eyes weren't making things up, it appeared that I wasn't hallucinating. What remained a mystery to me today though, is why I didn't buy a jar that day ...
My mood lifted by several notches — first time in days — I weaved my way out and into the next store and scoured the shelves. There I found gula malacca (palm sugar), the package bearing its Malay name, something which I thought would have been impossible to find here. Wow, maybe I haven't been looking hard enough. If that wasn't enough of a discovery, on the back shelf, there were boxes of instant mixes for two or three kinds of kuihs. It was amusing to note that there appeared to be instructions in Indonesian/Malay and Chinese only, and none in English. I shall need to invest in big pots before I can try making these ...
Perhaps it was due to the day's uncertainties, my lack of a firm grip on the reality then, or maybe something unsettling in the air — instead of walking out of Chinatown with all these exotic ingredients, I left ... with three types of tea.
It was beginning to get chilly as the sun prepared to retire for the evening. I trudged home with a fairly unrefined oolong (with which I kick-start my day), a packet of this particular Japanese genmaicha that only seems to be available in teabags, and an unexpected purchase of a rather delicate green tea from Huangshan, but that's a story for another day. The warmth of home was calling, shrouded in the heavy fog of dreams.
Posted by sniffles at January 13, 2004 12:30 PM