Day 202: As a Malaysia Kitchen Blogger Ambassador, Prepare for Several Mouth-Watering Posts

Day 202: Malaysia Kitchen Launch Dinner

Malaysian food is quickly becoming one of the hottest types of food around the Sydney area particularly because of its unique mix of spices and colors. It is food that you can eat with your eyes just as much with your mouth.

I was chosen as a Malaysia Kitchen Blogger Ambassador here in Sydney in order to help spread the word of the cuisine, and last night was the launch dinner over at Kaki Lima in the suburb of Kensington. There was a small group of non-food bloggers invited along, including our family travel favorites of Craig and Caz from Y Travel Blog (how fun!). Over the next few months, we’ll be going out to a few dinners at authentic Malaysian restaurants around the Sydney area and sharing it all with our readers. So what does that mean for you? It means perhaps a little bit of me educating you on Malaysian cuisine and, of course, lots of enticing, delicious looking photos! [Note: I will for sure be bringing my better camera for the rest of the meals.]

Oh, and it also means honest reviews, which is why I’m glad I’ll be able to take Pat along with me on the dinners. There are certain parts of Malaysian cuisine that I’m not a fan of (personally, as I have pickier tastes than most), but those parts are what Pat loves! Perfect!

Let’s Get Started

We had a little bit of everything at Kaki Lima in order to make sure everyone in the group was introduced to the type of food one might talk about.

Eyeing the beef rendang to the right.

We started off with some delicious curry puffs, some beef, some chicken and some vegetarian. I’ll never get tired of curry puffs. At any Malaysian meal we eat at, I am always after the last one.

I heart curry puffs.

Inside a Curry Puff

Next on the list was satay, both chicken and beef, and yum! — these guys were very smokey and also a little bit sweet.

After that, we enjoyed a serve of laksa, either seafood or chicken. Laksa is a spicy soup filled with noodles, that of which can vary as curry based or sour, fish stock based (asam). The majority of laksa has fish or seafood mixed in, and it is generally served with a spoon of sambal (as in the photo below).

Chicken laksa.

When it comes to meat dishes, I absolutely LOVE beef or chicken rendang. The beef rendang (in the first picture above) was very tender at Kaki Lima as it is slow cooked in coconut milk and spices.

The pasembur (below) is a unique salad of fried potatoes, eggs, cucumber, beancurd and prawn fritters covered in peanut sauce. It reminded me of a rojak or even the straights of Malacca salad I had on Jonker street in Malacca.

Pasembur

My favorite part of a Malaysian meal, besides the roti, would be dessert. Malaysian desserts are awesome, especially when they include palm sugar syrup and coconut milk.

At Kaki Lima, we had something I hadn’t tasted before: black sticky rice. It consisted of somewhat chewy rice chunks, covered in salty coconut milk and a dose of sweetener somewhere in the mix. It was rather pleasing, and unlike the Malaysian drinks, it wasn’t too sweet.

Black Sticky Rice in Coconut Milk

And, when that was all said and done, a couple of beautiful shaved ice desserts were brought out. They were very much like my beloved ais kacangs I had over in Malaysia. YUM.

If you’d like to have some of the food in this post, you can head to Kaki Lima for an authentic Malaysian meal.
Kaki Lima: No. 3 / 228-230 Anzac Parade, Kensington, NSW 2033 (02)96626868