Shakeleg on Eat: Tummy Troubles

Adventurous foreigners bragged about tucking into bizarre local cuisines like crunchy goat's testicles, sweet-and-sour bats and fried dog meat in Indonesia.

All I had was a piece of "bakwan" (prawn fritter) bought from a street vendor in downtown Jakarta and I was cursed with explosive diarrhea for three months.



And I dropped eight kilograms!

Talk about losing weight fast, and naturally. It wasn't, however, painless.

I remember being on the phone with my boss discussing work when suddenly, I felt a strange wave in my stomach. The next second, I was a human Merlion.



"Are you okay? Do you want me to call the doctor?" he asked. Uwekkk.

"You don't have to suffer alone. Answer me," he said. Uwekkk.

He offered to send me to the hospital but I felt too sick to get out of my apartment.

Also, when you feel like death is near, it's difficult to accept quacks disguised as doctors telling you that whatever you're having is "nothing serious but due to wind entering your body."

Unfortunately, that was not a joke. "Masuk angin" which literally means "enter wind" is the standard diagnosis for most types of ailments. Colds, coughs and diarrhea all fall under the "enter wind" category which require a "push wind" (or "tolak angin" in Bahasa Indonesia) treatment.



Depending on where the doctor received his education, cure may be in the form of invasive needles, expensive Western medicine, or a homemade potion of three tablespoons of soy sauce mixed with lime juice. Farting, burping or drawing a coin over your oiled back repeatedly until your skin turns red and sore can help, too.

That fateful, tragic night, I passed out in the loo. Alone. I woke up the next morning finding myself lying in a fetal position in the bathroom.

My boss ordered me to stay home for a few days but for the next three months or so, I walked around with a leaky tap in my rear.

Drip, drip, drippety drop. My fragile Singapore tummy is indeed a flop.

My Indonesian friends berated me for being reckless and taunted me with horror stories of unhygienically-prepared street food contaminated with feces and laced with cyanide (kidding!).

"Sometimes, the hawkers use rotten meat . . ." "Sometimes, they use rat meat instead of beef . . ." "Sometimes, they fry the oil together with the plastic bag it's in so you're actually eating melted plastic . . ." They took turns to chip in.

I swore off eating street food, but only for a while.







They are irresistably yummy and cheap. For a Singapore dollar or two, I can get a generous serving of fried rice, bakso meatball soup noodles or a dozen sticks of satay. Ooh, God bless the skinny Indonesian cows which had to die in the name of making those tasty skewered grilled meat drenched in peanut sauce!

I've wisened up, though. Now before making a purchase, I will quickly inspect the food cart and ensure the vendor and his surroundings are acceptably clean.

I still get diarrhea but each bout lasts just two to three days. Maybe my stomach has toughened up.

Luckily, like Singapore, Indonesia is quite the food haven. There's a wide selection of international fare to choose from. Italian, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese restaurants are aplenty.

There are food outlets which claim to sell Singapore food like chicken rice, laksa and char kway teow. I traveled an hour to the upmarket district of Kemang one rainy day to try the roti prata but left disappointed. The prata bread was hard and the curry diluted.

Nasi uduk, or the Indonesian version of nasi lemak, is coconut rice with fried chicken, fried fermented bean and tofu served with a light brown paste that doesn't resemble or taste anything like Singapore's chilli sambal. And there are no cucumber slices, fried anchovies and omelette.

Food names can also be deceiving.

Murtabak, or "marthabak" over here, is not prata bread with meat filling. It is actually apam balik – a crispy pancake filled with sugared peanut paste that you can easily find at Joo Chiat night bazaars during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

But having grown up with my mother's Malay-style cooking, what I really need most are regular doses of chilli and spice or I'll get cranky. Padang food is similar to Malay food. Acehnese food comes a close second.

But prices at Padang restaurants like Natrabu can be outrageous and the dishes are left sitting on open shelves for hours, exposed to dangerous elements like hungry cats, flies and pollution.

So, what must a weak-stomached fussy Minah do?

Cook lah, sayang.



One of the most thoughtful farewell gifts I had received must be from my mother. She had painstakingly penned the recipes of all my favourite homecooked dishes in a notebook and given it to me just before I left for the airport in October 2008. I cried non-stop on the plane.

You see, my mother expresses her love through food. Thanks to her fabulous cooking, I'm more likely to die from obesity than anorexia.

She was not happy about my moving to Jakarta. While journalistic work was the official reason I gave, she suspected it was an excuse for cheap thrills.

"I know you're going there to play. You want to feel earthquakes and see bombings, right? Not scared of terrorists and thieves catching you, huh? Stubborn girl," she nagged disapprovingly.

Despite her protests, giving me that recipe book was her way of telling me she had given me her blessings.

And so, I started cooking, which comes with its own set of challenges and misadventures fit for another post.



My mother had visited me and I had worked up a sweat frying her noodles from her recipe book.

"OK. I give you an A," she said.

If cooking is the labor of love, her verdict must be the music of life.