J, his mom and I spent the afternoon in Chinatown. We toured Jalan Petalin - a street popular for fake brand name anything. Watches, bags, shoes, belts, they're all here for a fraction of the real stuff. They even had fake Tiffany silver jewelry for goodness sake! There were also stalls selling fruits, roasted chestnuts, souvenirs, and lots and lots of food.

I sampled some Chinese herbal jelly at a traditional Chinese dessert stall and promptly fell in love. It comes delightfully cold and you can add as much (or as little) honeycomb sugar syrup as you like. It has a rather pleasant bitterish after-taste but oh! it was smooth. The perfect thing to eat on a hot, muggy, sunny day. Local Chinese believe this jelly to have a 'cooling' effect on the body, and when eaten regularly, can help relieve excema, psoriasis and acne.

J later insisted I try these famous Chinatown curry puffs (similar to Cornish pasties). These curry puffs have a mildly-spiced filling of chicken, potatoes and a large piece of hard-boiled egg, wrapped in a thin skin of dough and deep-fried. O-la-la! They were piping hot and delicious.

Other yummy things spotted but not sampled were the roasted chestnuts and peanut pancakes. The chestnuts are roasted with sugar and some oil in a big pan with hot grains of coal tossed among them. The meat of these chestnuts are flavourful and sweet. The peanut pancakes are a perfect snack, filled with chopped peanuts in a pancake that's crisp outside yet fluffy and chewy inside.

Then, it was time for lunch at Madras Lane - a dirty backalley with 4-legged stools and rather rickety tables under a zinc roof. If you can ignore the surroundings, plug your ears to the loud shouts of food orders, put up with the sweltering heat (no fans or airconditioning, mind you), you'll be in for a feast of some first-rate local dishes. Like KL's famous 'yong tau foo' (vegetables and tofu stuffed with meat, and eaten with piping hot soup and several dips), 'chee chong fun' (light as air rice pancake that's shredded, topped with sesame seeds and eaten with chilli and a piquant black sauce) and more. The best thing to wash all that down? A cold glass of homemade barley drink. I nibbled a bit of everything J ordered but couldn't eat much after all the earlier sampling.

*click on the pictures for more*

Labels: Christmas, Travel