Lunch Food

After discussing about lunch time, lets talk about lunch food now. There is lots of variety of food for lunch.

If you feel like having Chinese food, just go to a Chinese coffee shop for the variety of food. It starts from various type of BBQ meat rice / chicken rice, mixed economy rice, wan-tan noodles with various types of noodles and their variety of condiments, e.g. wan-tan in soup, fried wan-tan, with BBQ pork, with mince pork, with curry chicken, with chicken feet and mushrooms, with sherded chicken meat, just plain wan-tan noodle dry or in soup, pan mee (a flour base dough cooked in soup or dry), clay pot yee mee, curry noodles, clear soup noodles with again various condiments, 'hakka' noodles, chee-cheong fun / yong tau fu, bak kut teh, yellow rice wine chicken either with or without noodles.

Even if you were to go there on daily basis, just try one type of food a day, you are not able to cover all the varieties for the whole week, anyway, one week is just 5 working days, i.e. 5 lunches only.

On rainy or cloudy days, something spicy is a great option. Indian curry houses are popular. There you will get variety of curries, e.g. chicken curry, fish curry, mutton curry, prawn curry, squid curry etc, anything you can think off can be cooked in curry. The way of serving is also similar to the Chinese economy mixed rice where the variety of dishes are displayed there and you will take to the amount that you think you can finish eating. No wastage of course, please.

The difference is that when having a typical Indian cuisine, eating with your fingers is so common and you can see many non-Indian actually does that. I myself eats well with my fingers too. It adds taste to the food and if the food is served with banana leaves, it enhance the appetite.

One of the best part of having lunch in an Indian restaurant is typically, the rice is served "all you can eat". Don't feel shy to go for second round of rice serving as this is a typical Indian custom. When I was younger, I remember my dad once told me before that a typical Indian meal will have 3 servings of rice. The first serving is with curry, the second serving is with 'rassem' (a kinda soup cook with tamarind juice and spices) and the third serving is with 'thairu' (basically it is yogurt).

At times, for a more economical option, Malay food is also as good. Again, the base of the food is rice. For rice variety, there is various options, nasi kandar (nasi = rice in Malay), nasi lemak, nasi dagang, nasi kunyit and many more. Of course not leaving behind the economy mixed rice with various dishes where you can pick and choose to you likings.

The next type I am not sure if it is a typical Malay food or it is a food from the Indian-Muslims, typically addressed as 'mamak' and it is the 'roti'. There are various kind of roti. Roti is in Malay language which basically translate to bread, but the 'roti' here is some kind of a flour dough which is stretched so thinly and re-folded to make it fluffy and pan fried on a hot plate to make it crisp to perfection.

Just for 'roti' only, there list is long. There are 'roti kosong' (kosong = plain), 'roti banjir' (banjir = flooded, where the curry is poured on to the roti when it is served serve), 'roti pisang' (pisang = banana), 'roti bom' (bom here means it is double folded for extra texture), 'roti salad' (salad = salad in english, what they have here is the vegetables, i.e. iceberg lettuce is dressed with generous portions of mayonise and wrapped in the roti and pan fried to perfection), 'roti telur' (telur = egg), 'roti john' (again an english name is used and this time, they add-on a fried egg and dress with mayonise and chilie sauce to the roti salad), 'roti goreng' (here the 'roti' is sliced into strips and stir fried with chicken meat and a few miserable pieces of vegetable), 'roti tisu' (nope, here the roti is not wrapped with tissue papers, but the 'roti' is stretched so thin like tissue paper and pan fried to extra crispy), 'roti bawang' (bawang = onions) and many more.

All the above is typically served with various curries, 'dhal' (a lentil base curry) or for those that cannot take spicy food, it is also common to have the 'roti' with sugar and condensed milk, yes you read is right, sweet condensed milk.

Those mentioned above are just the main type of food to choose from the 3 main cultures we have in Malaysia. There were others not mentioned e.g. the Japanese cuisine, Nyonya food, Western food etc etc.

Looking at the lunch food options we have here in Malaysia is really abundance. Therefore, how can it be enough for the employers give us just one miserable hour for lunch where it would have taken about 20 minutes to drive to the shop and find a place to park the car and 20 minutes to sit in the car to think what to eat with so many options????

So what you feel like having for lunch today??

Bon appetite!!