mud crab

the one thing i was told to do while in singapore was get out of the hotel district and find some mud crab. mud... crab. what could sound more appealing? crabs are the kings of mud, after all, sitting around in it all day as if they own the stuff. if you're gonna eat some mud, basically, you should make sure to wash it down with a crab or two, if only for the nutritional value. at least i think that's the idea. i wouldn't know, as i didn't leave the hotel.

neither did jimmy, seen here doing his best impersonation of a bathing crab:

a week earlier in suburban sydney, hanging out lazily as "the river" (it was in fact just a river) receded, i was privileged to watch thousands of the stupid little things blinking in the sun, running ferociously sidewards, and scurrying back into their muddy pits whenever anything larger than an apple approached. it was an astonishing sight, but not one that inspired anything less than malicious hunger. i'm sure they have a complex social life, and have cleverly evolved into the most perfectly suited-to-mud creatures on earth, but in the meantime i'm happy to accidentally crush them and throw them in a saucepan. because crab is delicious, isn't it.

especially when it's covered with chilli:

this is from leong's legends, a taiwanese restaurant in london's chinatown famous for its special xiao long bao dim sum (i had to look that up), and less famous for its generic cantonese alternatives.

i've wandered around chinatown before, and had fairly rubbish food. at a.a. gill's insistence i once went to bar shu with a similarly overeager friend, and spent a small fortune on odd, elaborate, and dubiously tasty sichuan food. it's all about the menu choices, isn't it, and for this reason it's essential to go with someone in the know (by "know" i do of couse mean an appropriate genetic heritage, preferably including a childhood of chilli-abuse)--someone, say, like my excellent friend "mel'ung".

i don't really understand a lot of this stuff: it seems to either be mostly mush or catastrophically spicy, and sometimes both at the same time. and what a generalisation! that's like a chinese person saying "i don't understand european food: it's either made of dough or...'' which, while not exactly incorrect, would be met with wildly varied but equally confused indignation by, say, an italian and a swede.

but i've never been to china--i've rarely been to chinatown--and i've grown up in a country mostly littered with disgusting chinese takeaways, so... no, i don't hold myself to blame.

anyway. leong's legend: ignorance aside, it was wonderful.

what isn't to like? the cosy wood panelling, the waitresses' stilted but self-assured service, the table opposite us of chinese businessmen noisily slurping everything in sight--all this is as you'd expect . and the food was delicious--steaming hot and full o' flava.

a light taro and tofu noodle soup, squished up aubergines, and a bowl of braised pork belly in brown-stuff so fatty that one of us couldn't quite finish every slavering mouthful.

the speciality xiao long bao are dumplings delicately filled with some kind of broth. cheerfully likened to pointy little breasts, appropriate chopstick method involved picking them up by their nipples, dipping the mammary whole in ginger and soy, and dropping it down in one. like so:

and the highlight, as above--chilli crab! it took about fifteen minutes of scrabbling fingers to admit to ourselves that there wasn't actually much meat on the thing, but i don't think that's ever really the point. it's a primitive, visceral, carnivourous delight--pulling apart a crustacean like we own the thing. which we most assuredly did.

where's your mud now, huh?

neuuuughdles.

part of the motivation for writing this blog was to record my experiences of eating around the world. naturally enough, you'd think. but i've been putting the whole project off and off for so long that i've missed hundreds of amazing, odd, and disgusting meals. this is a shame, but i'm not one for regrets, and so... from here on i'm aiming to document the ones worth documenting.

in the meantime it'll be retrospectively half-arsed.

so, yes... here's a generic out-of-the-hotel-window shot of shibuya, tokyo.

obviously japan has some crazy food. "crazy" is putting it mildly. it's another world, etc etc. truly alien. a common platitude, but it's unavoidably true. everywhere you go you're confronted with weirdness, often on a fairly basic level: the plastic models of curries and soups sat outside every restaurant advertising the food within, for example--hilarious the first time, but somewhat off-putting every time after that; the bento boxes available here there and everywhere which consist of no single identifiable food stuff--holding a soggy grey cube between your fingers you wonder if it's animal, vegetable or mineral, or potentially none of the above; and the fact that even the western-style packaged sandwiches in convenience stores look like they've been cloned, delivered via caesarean, and then boil-washed.

here's some kind of gravy jelly, from 2008.

and here is a raw shellfish salad.


mmmmmm. notevenkidding.

for better or worse this world tends to incite anecdote-hunting. inspired by sake and a camp sort of macho bravado , i set about on our first tour attempting to one-up anyone who'd have me in the game of "eat the most disgusting that the kitchen can offload on us'" led by my famed (not really) dictum that i will "put anything in my mouth once", i ended up eating raw beef cartilage (which can only be likened to the imagined experience of eating a human ear), raw frozen horse meat (which tastes like... a horse lollipop), raw squid guts (which caused the midnight juggern tm to spontaneously vomit--i proudly held mine down), and a whole bunch of stuff that i've erased from my memory.

fortunately for me this kind of behaviour, as dubious as it is childish, quickly wore thin, and i haven't done it again. unfortunately for you i don't have any photos of any of this. i do, however, have a photo of some ramen noodle soup.

mmm. egg-in-soup. what's not to like? this is from a small cafe somewhere in shibuya which we've been taken to twice recently by our uncompromisingly charming japanese hosts the first time was on arrival into tokyo after a harrowing week-long australian tour of self-deprivation and general self-abuse. fried and frazzled, there was nothing that could have been more comforting than this steaming bowl of uncomplicated deliciousness. fatty strips of pork fall apart at the merest chop-poke of a chopstick, the egg oozes gunk from the get-go, and beneath it all lies a swamp of noodles so heavy and dense that a decent night's sleep is almost guaranteed.

i tried to jazz this photo up a bit because i look so haggard. apparently that's how i roll nowadays. and--look!--my ears are half as big as the rest of my head. but, delinquency and deformity aside, i'm delighted.

i'm reminded of a japanese film that i saw years ago on the secrets behind the stock that goes into these things. no, i don't remember anything else about--certainly not the title--but it did make clear the otherwise murky distinction between great noodle soups and shitty noodle soups: love, skill and witchcraft on the one hand, and an oxo cube on the other. you just can't do that shit at home.

here's walter struggling with a shitty noodle soup elsewhere in south-east asia (begins with sin and ends with pore).

neuuuughdles.