Super sweet-tooth

When people ask me what I like most about living in Malaysia,  I have two answers ready: the weather and the food.

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The weather bit is pretty self-explanatory, what's not to like about a year-round tropical climate where you only need a wardrobe for one season and can spend every weekend lounging poolside or go to the beach on a whim?

Now not everyone would enjoy the food as much as we do - particularly if you have an aversion to spicy food (or fried stuff).  The food in Malaysia is much like the people - diverse.  It's an amazing blend of Chinese, South Indian and Malay cuisines - everything from deep-fried yam baskets stuffed with chili chicken to banana leaf curries to rich, spicy coconut-based soups full of ginger and lemongrass.

My preferences for Malaysian food definitely reside with the spicy, savoury stuff - but Malaysians are quite famous for having a bit of a sweet tooth and their deserts range from the bizarre to the truly disgusting.

Let me start by saying these people love sugar.  Love. They put it - in vast quantities - in everything.  Breads, juice, coffee, tea, even batter for frying. The sugar craze is so out of control that there are actual public service announcements telling people to limit the amount of sugar they put in their tea.  I've even heard that there are restrictions on how much sugar one can buy in a single trip to the supermarket.

Just yesterday, we went for a Sunday stroll in the park which was brimming with all sorts of vendors selling cold drinks, chips, popsicles and in once instance, what was quite literally an ice cream sandwich - a hot dog bun filled with three scoops of ice cream.

It gets worse.  Another common dish is a tropical fruit salad that has a dressing comprised of sugar, peanuts, chili and  . . . . shrimp paste.

Creamed sweet corn and red beans are also frequently featured as a topping for desserts like cendol (chen-dole) which is essentially shaved ice with coconut milk and these slimy, green worm-like noodles made from rice flour and pandan.

A lot of what I find so off-putting about Asian deserts is that they lack the sweet/savory distinction that is so  prevalent in Western cuisine - there is also often an issue of texture, I think the photo says it all.

I'm not a remotely fussy eater - and frequently blindly put myself into the hands of my Malaysian friends and trust that they aren't going to feed me anything that will kill me - but I drawn the line at slimy desserts. 

There's plenty of scary savoury stuff out there too, I was chatting to a colleague from Spain the other day who said, 'I quit eating wildlife after some tribesmen fed me monitor lizard.'  We all have our tipping point.