Food Fantasies

Oh, my God. This is adorable: http://cupcakesandcashmere.com/food-fantasies/

I started disliking this blogger for a while but now I like her again. And I may have to follow her example and describe my perfect food day. It's very tough. If I was being completely legitimate, my perfect food day would involve me eating non-stop for at least 13 hours. Here we go:

7am: huge stack of pancakes accompanied by a basket of fresh bread and pastries. Today, I feast like a king.

10.30am: Snack time. Obviously. Probably a whole baking tray of brownies. But those infamous slutty brownies with the cookie dough and Oreos mixed inside.

I give up. I'm being overwhelmed by thoughts right now and I can't effectively translate them to this medium. I started writing a lunch menu that ended up just saying "LUNCH BUFFET" which is obviously not very specific and defeats the purpose of this post.

Food is my special place. But so is reading, writing, TV/movies, music, exercise and fitness (a winning combination with food, I'm sure), fashion etc. etc.

On a slightly unrelated note, I have to express my growing skepticism towards Asian fusion food. And all that "high class Asian food" where the plates are black and desserts include pandan flavoured panna cotta. Where a bowl of laksa is $22 and there are multiple rice varieties available (brown rice, wild rice, mystery unicorn rice etc.). If I wanted a bowl of laksa (which I rarely do, laksa being my least favourite form of noodle soup and pho being my favourite), I'd go to a suburban food court, pay $9.50 and get a vat of spicy, fish ball filled goodness.

Similarly, there's something inorganic and slightly wrong about classing up roti canai as I read about on so many food blogs these days. Roti canai should involve a heaping pot of curry that everyone shares (obviously, not slurping from a communal spoon or anything. We do have slightly more class (and hygiene) than that) and a big stack of roti on a plate that everyone can grab from. I feel so sad when I see tiny bowls of sad spicy sauces and fluffily plumped rotis. It feels so incomplete. Curry is such a... Curry should be shared, it should be in abundance (2kg of chicken abundance), it should be eaten from old plates with cutlery stolen from Malaysian Airlines when they still used real metal cutlery.

I have strong feelings about this. To be fair, I think the only time I've ever really had Asian fusion food was in Melbourne in a fancy (read: expensive) restaurant my loaded uncle took us to. That's the other thing; so damn expensive. Asian food should be inherently cheap. I feel like it should be automatically associated with either the ethically questionable back streets of Malaysia or Vietnam or Taiwan or China or the warm, slightly sultry kitchens of Asian mothers (because women belong in the kitchen etc.). In both these settings, food should either be cheap as hell or free as hell.

The restaurant my uncle took us to served a roast duck salad. It was nice and tasty... but it wasn't the same. But maybe that's the point.

J