Thursday, March 26, 2009

Kuala Lumpur Part 2

MidValley really stresses me out.

It stressed me out when I was younger and it still stresses me out today. One of the many endlessly sprawling shopping malls in KL; it's always chaotic, full of people, and every wing of the centre on every floor looks exactly the same. Which, for me, is a recipe for crankiness.

A couple of hours of stressful shopping in MidValley was forced to halt by my hungry Mum, so we stopped by Little Penang Cafe.

Fresh coconut, soya bean milk with redbean, acar fish set and prawn mee

The acar fish set was packed full of flavour - acar fish (deep fried fish with a spicy pickled/tumeric sauce), lor bak (marinated belly pork, wrapped in beancurd sheets and deep fried) and paku belacan (ferns fried with spicy shrimp paste). My favourite was the paku, something I had not tried previously. My Mum explained how my Grandmother used to walk into the jungle behind their house to pick the same type of ferns to make this dish when she was younger.

There were only two things at MidValley that I spent the rest of the holiday craving but never got to try again - the famous durian pancakes and the curry puffs.

Crispy and light curry puff and a sweet, rich durian pancake - a bit much for breakfast but who cares when you're on holiday?!
The curry puffs were some of the best I've ever had (and I've had a lot). The pastry was not too greasy, extra crispy and the filling inside was moist with just the right amount of curry powder and not completely overwhelmed by potato (something I find in a lot of curry puffs). It was so moreish - at first we only bought 1 but A and I gobbled it up before we had even walked 10 metres away from the stall - we ended up going back and buying three more.

Mmm food porn shot...

On the other hand, the durian puffs were a controversial food topic throughout the rest of the trip. I LOVED them, the thick layer of mashed fresh durian rolled up in a thin sweet pancake with light cream. It did smell pretty full-on, the pungent fumes kept wafting up towards us from the plastic bag we were carrying it in during our shopping trip, which alarmed A quite a bit. He was not a big fan of them, probably because of the strong smell and the concentration of the flavour in the cream and pancake.

Pancake filled with fresh cream and durian

When we finally got him to try fresh durian on its own he quite liked it. And we both loved the durian doughnuts from Big Apple - light fluffy doughnuts with a hint of durian and a crispy spiky outside. I hated durian as a child, the smell put me off from the very beginning, but now I love it!
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