©2009 Ashy's vegetarian recipes©2009 Ashy's vegetarian recipesMalaysia is a country in which you can enjoy quite a rich variety of vegetarian food. There are Indian restaurants every where, all offering the usual veggie fare of aloo muttar, saag paneer, daal and all that kind of stuff, and you can always find a Chinese restaurant that will put together a tasty stir fried vegetable dish with soy sauce, ginger and garlic, or maybe fried bean curd with chillies or mushrooms. In big cities you'll even find a Pizza Hut. But, you don't often find vegetarian Malay food. And that's sad really, because traditional Malay cuisine employs a rich array of spices and seasonings creating rich, fragrant, mouth-watering dishes that fill the air with delicious scents. But, aroma aside, if you're vegetarian you won't usually be able to enjoy much from the menu of the average Malay restaurant.
Most Malay people are Muslims, which means that the traditional cuisine is heavy with mutton, chicken and fish. Add to this the fact that the kind of cheap and cheerful restaurants you find in even the smallest towns and which you normally search out as a skint backpacker, are usually canteen-style places where the food is made in advance in huge quantities. It's not surprising then that after a couple of weeks in Malaysia, most vegetarians narrow their daily search for food down to Indian and Chinese restaurants, or park-bench self-catering from supermarkets. But there are occasionally opportunities to enjoy vegetarian Malay food, especially in places with a lot of tourists. There, you'll find that in the quest for the tourist dollar almost every beach cafe, backpacker lodge or street stall will offer a modest vegetarian selection of traditional Malay dishes. That's good news.
Sveta and I spent a couple of weeks on the Perhentian Islands in the north east corner of peninsular Malaysia. It's something we had wanted to do for a while, but were always travelling at the wrong season. The window for visiting the Perhentians is a relatively short one, from mid-March to the end of June. At other times it pisses with rain most of the day and there are very few people there. It can be impossible to make the boat crossing too, due to storms. Our visit was at the end of March. The tail end of the monsoon sent a few squalls our way and a couple of days it rained so heavily we had to shelter in our hut, but it we still had a great time. You can still go snorkeling in the rain and when it was sunny it was beautiful. There are blinding white sand beaches and the crystal clear turquoise water is full of colourful inquisitive fish. There are coral reefs literally a few metres offshore in some places and you can just float about with your mask and snorkel, as if you're in a big aquarium. We had a fantastic time there.
We usually ate lunch in our hut - instant noodles, fruit, biscuits and stuff like that. It helps keep costs down when you're travelling, but we like to go out for dinner in the evening. It's great to watch the sun set and feel the cool sea breeze as you're eating and on the Perhentians we found the quality of the food in even the cheapest cafes was surprisingly good. And this is where we get to the recipe. It's just one of the dishes we enjoyed during our stay, but the seasoning is quite typical of Malay curries and it was a pleasure enjoy at last the kind of dishes that are so common on the mainland.
This pot of curry will do about four people when you add steamed rice.
About 2 cups of chopped pineapple
1 or 2 potatoes
2 tomatoes
1 carrot
1 onion
A piece of ginger root
A few dried red chillies
A couple of star anise pods
A piece of cinnamon stick
A couple of stalks of lemongrass
A few cardamons
A few black peppercorns
A teaspoon of coriander seeds
A half teaspoon of cumin seeds
A small lime
Cut the potatoes into cubes or 'french-fry' shapes, slice the carrots and root ginger (no need to peel it) and cut the onion in half and slice it too. Fry on a medium heat with the whole chillies, anise pods, cardamons, cumin seeds and cinnamon stick, for about ten minutes.
Add enough hot water to make a thin soup, then add the soy sauce, pineapple, roughly chopped tomatoes, whole lemon grass stalks, crushed coriander seed and peppercorns and a little salt. Bring to the boil then simmer gently for five minutes. Cut the lime into pieces and add at the end of cooking time.
Serve in soup bowls with a small bowl or plate of steamed rice for each person.