Dry long-grained rice cooked into pelau, caramel-coloured from all that burnt brown sugar and Golden Ray cooking margarine and ketchup (enough to make you westerners wrinkle up your noses, but you, you don't make use of these seasonings and flavourings the way we diasporados do, the way we wrangle them from unhealthy/fatty/cheap into something to nourish and soothe us), sweetly conveying along red beans and carrots, pigeon peas and those small cubes of stewed beef, small so everybody gets a taste as the pelau is scooped out of the pot and shared around.
Soft, sticky, steaming white jasmine rice that squishes a bit in your fingers, a too-hot bed under fried-and-curried fish with pieces of green mango cooked in, the flesh slipping apart in delicious sour melting, the rubbery skin to be snapped into pieces that will provide a blissfully toothsome counterpart to unctuous fish mixed with soft pearls of rice and eaten from the hand, licked from the fingertips, mouth watering even with the last morsels.
Rice slick with oil and soy, chased around with cream-coloured plastic chopsticks to be eaten with satisfied, greedy bites of lap cheong and nibbles of slightly bitter baby bok choy, sticking to the sides of the dish it's been steamed in until you scrape it off with the metal spoon, each and every grain precious and delicious and springy in a way that the rice you cook at home never is.
Big takeout containers of yang chow fried rice, heaped high and fragrant and faintly yellow, with its jewel studs of char siu pork slivers, little emerald peas and orange carrots, lazy threads of canary-yellow egg and busy hoops of scallion, big luscious curls of shrimp, and best of all those random mouthfuls of stuck-together rice, soft and white and un-broken-up, somehow infused with the scent of hot wok oil and the suggestion of all the flavours around it without actually having touched them, like a secret little gift every time.
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Date: 2011-06-07 08:22 pm (UTC)Soft, sticky, steaming white jasmine rice that squishes a bit in your fingers, a too-hot bed under fried-and-curried fish with pieces of green mango cooked in, the flesh slipping apart in delicious sour melting, the rubbery skin to be snapped into pieces that will provide a blissfully toothsome counterpart to unctuous fish mixed with soft pearls of rice and eaten from the hand, licked from the fingertips, mouth watering even with the last morsels.
Rice slick with oil and soy, chased around with cream-coloured plastic chopsticks to be eaten with satisfied, greedy bites of lap cheong and nibbles of slightly bitter baby bok choy, sticking to the sides of the dish it's been steamed in until you scrape it off with the metal spoon, each and every grain precious and delicious and springy in a way that the rice you cook at home never is.
Big takeout containers of yang chow fried rice, heaped high and fragrant and faintly yellow, with its jewel studs of char siu pork slivers, little emerald peas and orange carrots, lazy threads of canary-yellow egg and busy hoops of scallion, big luscious curls of shrimp, and best of all those random mouthfuls of stuck-together rice, soft and white and un-broken-up, somehow infused with the scent of hot wok oil and the suggestion of all the flavours around it without actually having touched them, like a secret little gift every time.