Explore Culinary Asia

On my last trip to Bali, I couldn’t wait to get my Jimbaran hit. It’s a seaside village famous for its barbeque fish.

The smells are intoxicating and the early evening setting on the beach is a kick-back party as far as we can see in either direction. Our waitress invites us to select our dinner from lobster, sea prawn, river prawn, baronang, red snapper, white snapper, barakuda, clam, garupa, squid or crab.
With local beers in hand and a tropical beach sunset unfolding before us, we banter with our waitress while we anticipate dinner.
The fish was as amazing as advertised. Was it the slow grill over cocunut husks (there’s that coconut fetish again!) rather than charcoal? Or maybe that astonishing tropical sunset melting us into “Bali time”?

Barbeque fish on the beach at Jimbaran is an absolute thumbs up. While it’s on the menu all over the island, the mystic and the ambiance of Jimbaran, where it originated, is the perfect combination of freshness, skilled preparation and a jaw dropping setting. For the rest of our time in Bali, the locals would initiate conversations by asking “have you tried the jimbaran?”

The fishing village of Jimbaran is located in the southern part of Bali, halfway between the airport and Nusa Dua.

We suggest going late afternoon when the tropical sun begins to dip into the horizon, then staying after dinner for a stroll along the beach. By that time, you may be ready for round two of Bali’s famous barbequed fish!

However, be forewarned. If you make a stop at Jimbaran on your way to the airport, you may just book another week to experience Bali’s charms.

What goes well with Thai food? If you’re mind drifts to Napa, French or Aussie varieties, you’re in for a surprise. Thai food paired with local, as in truly local, wines are surprisingly compatible.

These New Latitude wines thrive astonishingly in both the coastal and upland regions of Thailand.

Disbelievers will be utterly amazed to stand in a vineyard, surrounded by palm trees and view the thriving vineyard from the back of an elephant, or see grapes being tended by long tail boat in the one of a kind “floating vineyards” south of Bangkok.

It’s a delectable dalliance to stroll down one of Bangkok’s sois, find a restaurant spilling over with locals and ask a charming wait person for their Thai wine recommendations based on your choice of dishes. Some of the high end, hip wine bars like Bangkok’s V9 are also featuring the local grape.

Join us for our Thai-Lao culinary adventure and experience New Latitude wines for yourself!

New York for exploring new places to enjoy world food is great! Hanging out with foodies who know the culinary scene here from the inside is even better. And when those foodies are my son and daughter-in-law, Nancy is in heaven!

For today, I get to luxuriate in their little piece of paradise – a brick rowhouse in Woodside, with edible plants stuffing the front stoop, the garden plot (yep, you heard right) in their back yard and more edibles clustered in every available window. There are cookbooks to peruse, a refrigerator full of exotic smells and row on row of beautiful spices and preserved fruits. There are even flower blossoms marinating in olive oil, catching some rays in the front window sill.

To truly surrender ourselves to the goodness of food that is good for us, we need to have where we call home be bursting with the fragrances, textures and tastes that whisper – welcome home.

So much to be thankful for including old and new friends who are joining me in stories beyond the plate! Have an amazing holiday

I just couldn’t resist this metal chopsticks thing.   When we first encountered them, there were some puzzled looks around the table.  Our host, Maureen O’Crowley, said they were originally used by royalty to test for poisoning.  Apparently they change color in the presence of the deadly stuff.

And then I found other stories on the net that the metal ones were used after World War II because there was no wood left, but there was an abundance of scrap metal!  And even better is the theory that Koreans use the flat metal chopsticks because they could be weapons.  So think about it before you insult someone over dinner!  The caveat here is that I don’t know if all these stories are true, but it doesn’t keep them from being intriguing.

I bought a pair of the Korean chopsticks and one of the long elegant soup spoons (very nice!).   I’ve been carrying a set of utensils including chopsticks around Asia for  a couple of decades.  It’s safer in backwater places to bring your own cutlery and it’s environmentally more conscious.   Mountains of the wooden kind are thrown away every year.

And now, dear readers, I promise to move onto other locales, but Korea remains high on my list and will be the center piece of some future posts.

This just in from Geun-mi Kwon, our Korean guide

We also have a sort of Halloween day in Korea, but it is rarely known, the day after Dae-bo-reum (literally “Great Full Moon”) which is also a Korean holiday that celebrates the first full moon of the new year of the lunar Korean calendar.  One familiar custom is to crack nuts with one’s teeth.  It is believed that this practice will help keep one’s teeth health for the year, as well as frighten ghosts and chase them away.  For breakfast on Dae-bo-reum, O-gok-bap, a five-grain rice consisting of rice, millet, Indian millet, beans and red beans is served with various dried herbs.

Two Questions, Geun-mi.

Do you eat it with kimchi?

And do dentists have increased business right after this holiday?

Imagine mimed street theater on steroids and you get NANTA, an over the top performance featuring four cooks who have one hour to prepare a wedding feast.  Throw in a bad tempered manager and the fun gets super charged.

For a group of foodies feasting on richly different Korean foods, this was the perfect climax to another full day.

Along side a mostly Korean audience, we laughed and applauded our way through death defying knife-throwing antics, eye-boggling plate juggling and movements that didn’t seem physically possible.

Do the Korean’s like broad comedy?  You bet!  Since 1997, this brilliant comedy has pulled in the largest audience numbers in the county’s history.   It’s even had an extended run on Broadway.

As we strolled outside on a warm October evening, we all agreed that we didn’t see how it was possible after a satisfying dinner, but we were hungry for more Korean food.  My friend Pom says that after she has watched an episode of her favorite Korean food sitcom, her husband knows he’s going to have to take her out for Korean food!  Don’t you love the power of suggestion?

Given the frequency of sampling Korean restaurants in Seattle as well as New York and Dallas, I thought Kimchi was, well, kimchi

My eyes popped, my taste buds applauded and I waxed lyrical with other foodies on my excursion to Korea last week.  Apparently there are over 100 varies of   this simple but vibrant pickled vegetable staple that have become synonymous with Korean cuisine.

While getting into chili paste up to our elbows didn’t make me or my fellow travelers experts on what we came to see as pure food art, it did give us a new appreciation for what we got to sample three times a day in Korea. As we chopped, blended and then spread the glorious red paste over leaf after leaf of Chinese cabbage, then rolled it into a small soccer sized ball, the best was yet to come.  

At our very next meal, the waitress arrived at our ladened table with a pair of oversized scissors and went after the ball of cabbage, revealing a palate of tempting aromas, textures and colors.

Before you race out for the ingredients, expecting to serve it to this week-end’s dinner guests, those neatly (ok, for us, not so neatly) wrapped balls ferment away in specially designed pots in the ground for a minimum of a year.  Talk about delayed gratification!

But I’m up for it!   Anybody in the Pacific Northwest know where I can buy one a couple of kimchi pots?

How naïve of me to think I would have the leisure to blog daily once I was in Korea.  It’s been 16 to 17 hour jammed packed days filled with surprises, delights, curiosities and the occasional, “what was that about?”    I drift to sleep with images of this newly discovered Asian destination and roll out the next morning for another intense day.

My travel friends and I have experienced sweeping nature walks and vistas, heritage villages where people still practice life as it used to be, meanders through a tea plantation, and of course food varied, vividly colorful, intoxicatingly aromatic, all providing regular opportunities to make friends with Mr. Chili.

Today it’s an urban day in Seoul, with a royal palace dating from the 1400s. The day is climaxed with a NANTA performance, featuring non-verbal, reckless rhythms in a comedic mode.  I’m really psyched because the theme is food – more on that in a later blog

Considering the long history of artistic expression in Japan, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some farmers in the rural village of Inakadate design truly amazing field art by using different types of rice to create the intricate patterns.

This certainly puts our Halloween mazes to shame, even the one on Sauvie Island outside of Portland Oregon, designed in the shape of the Trailblazers logo.

I thought maybe these Japanese farmers just tossed the rice in the air and then the gods went to work while they slept.  Alas, they have evolved from duplicating traditional woodcut patterns to now using computers to design their creations.  Still, it’s impressive!

Now the question is, how do they harvest it so they don’t have weird mixtures of different rice types.  Anybody know any farmers in Inakadate?

Here’s the confession from an incredibly sheltered, and narrow culinary childhood.

My mother tried to broaden our horizons by taking my brothers and me on regular pilgrimages to the big city of Dallas so we could be exposed to some culture that included visits to “foreign” restaurants.  I specifically remember Indian, Chinese and Scandinavian where my brothers and I adored the carousel of jellied desserts.  But even with the Indian restaurant, I don’t remember spicy.  Clearly the owners had dummied down their offerings for fear of losing customers.  The only spicy that still dances on my tongue from my early years was Tex-Mex chili.

So when I went to live and work in Europe in my early 20s, I thought I was prepared for ordering curry in a London Soho restaurant.  Even while my mouth was still on fire, I was hooked.  What really surprised me was the Brits long love affair with Asian spices.  With all due respect to my ancestors, I was disappointed to find that the rest of British food was, well, as bland as East Texas served up.  What’s up with that?

So what is it that attracts people everywhere to blazing hot chilis and the delicate interplay of herbs and spices that romance our taste buds?

While that makes perfect sense in countries where everything is degrees of spicy, how is it that so many Europeans and North Americans who eat basically no-taste foods can swoon over curry?

I have my opinions but would love first to find out about your opinions.