Horse With No Name on Eat: Feeding the Soul in a Fast-Food Nation

Comfort food: It's the quintessential pick-me-up for any jaded traveller.

Sure, you can expand your horizons any which way when you touch down in new territory; eat where the locals eat, try out strange and exotic cuisine. But when you've had your fill of curious things and world weariness sets in, the palate craves something familiar.

That's been the case for the HWNN clan. Four months into our stay, having grazed on a steady diet of Western food, we began to look and feel a little like the meat on our plates.

We love Western food. We love our burgers, our pastas, our buffalo wings, our haute- and even not-so-haute pizzas (Hi Dominos!), even plain ol' grilled cheese sandwiches. Thing is, as comforting as some of these dishes are or can be, they can't beat the makan of our Singaporean childhood.

I'm talking about Hainanese chicken rice, chai tao kway (tapioca starch cubes fried with egg), fish-head curry, Indian mee goreng (fried egg noodles) and the créme de la créme of fatty, luscious, heart-stopping (literally) comfort food – char kway teow.

Can you feel your arteries clogging at the mere sight of this? I can. Mmmm... clogged arteries...

Whose cuisine reigns supreme?
Now, so magnificently satisfying yet scrumptiously unhealthy is this dish, that CKT deserves at least a paragraph or two all on its own. So I shall digress for minute. Join me on this delightful detour: CKT, or 'fried rice cake strips' (Thanks Wiki!), belies the intense, almost orgasmic experience of consuming it.

Slathered in a rich, dark sauce, drenched with the fat of Chinese pork sausages, often accompanied by a volcanically spicy and pungent shrimp paste-chili blend, and moistened with a squeeze (or three) of lime, CKT hits all the right notes in a sour-sweet-savoury-spicy quad-fecta. It is the epitome of Singaporean comfort food – in my book at least.

For a period in my 20s, I made it my life's work to try any and all CKT dishes across the country. Leave no hawker stall unturned. Yes, I was a woman obsessed.

So now, four months without this, my king of dishes? Left me just a little crazy-eyed.

Potato Potahto
Arizona has its fair share of Asian restaurants and we've found a couple that are our go-to places when we're too lazy to cook at home. But even their menus feel generic and foreign at times because most of the flavours seem to cater to an American palate. A lot of sweet and sour in everything; unspicy, often lacklustre curries and unfamiliar, tongue-twisty stuff like Moo Goo Gai Pan. Say what?

The only thing that might occasionally hint at Singapore is something folks here call Singapore noodles – a dish commonly found in Asian restaurants across the world, but not in Singapore. Think Mongolian Beef and you'll understand what I mean.


Sweet and spicy/sour anything. A staple at American-Chinese and Chinese-American restaurants.

So comparing a meal at any of these establishments to lunch at my favourite food court back home is like saying a ham sandwich and a hot dog are the same thing.

They are NOT.THE.SAME.THING.

Bereft of authentic options, I often turn to my own culinary heritage for inspiration: my late maternal grandmother and my mum are revered in our family for their supreme Cantonese-style cooking. On my father's side, I unabashedly declare that my aunts would easily win in a throw-down of Eurasian/Chinese cuisine. The stuff of legends, really.

So whenever a hometown craving takes hold, I cross my fingers and spring into action in the kitchen, hoping some of this culinary genius will genetically find its way into my food.

Note, springing into action in my case involves more of a gentle skip rather than a colossal leap because it's difficult to find the right ingredients at the local supermarkets to engage in aforementioned springing. (Also, eating of many burgers makes girl chunky. I'm sure Confucius said that.)

Most of the supermarket chains here devote a column of an aisle, but not an aisle in itself, to Asian sundries – by which I mean several types of instant noodles, some very small, very expensive bags of jasmine rice and about a hundred brands of soy sauce.

Note to supermarket stockists: Asian food is more than just soy sauce.

The COFCO Chinese Cultural Center in Pheonix appears to be the closest thing to a sort of Chinatown around here.



Essentially a strip mall, it is also home to an international supermarket that stocks a boatload of Asian groceries.

To be fair, the Asian population in my neck of the woods is far smaller than say, in Sydney, where we lived for four years.(For those interested in details, Arizona's Asian community makes up just 2.5% of the state's population of over 6 million people, so says the US Census Bureau's 2009 estimate. And most of that population isn't located in my city.)

In Sydney, Asian culinary influences were duly reflected in the way the large chain supermarkets like Coles bestowed huge segments of their stores to fresh and imported Asian foods.

Freshly-grown mangoes and longans, emerald green bok choy and kangkong, curries from Malaysia, sauces from Thailand, dried goods from Indonesia and India. The weary traveller could feel right at home.

If one craved even more exotic fare, there was always the large Asian supermarket in Pitt Street, located in Sydney's central business district, and close to the city's bustling Chinatown. A trusty port in a homesick storm, this supermarket carried everything from fresh durians to the most obscure dried Chinese herbs for soup.

The equivalent of this treasure trove in AZ would involve at least a half-hour's drive from where I live to one of three far-flung suburbs. However, once you get to LeeLee's Oriental Supermarket you will, no doubt, be stunned by the choice and variety of Asian and international foods available in small-town Arizona. It's like finding a reservoir in the Sahara.

Makan mecca: LeeLee's Oriental Supermarket in Peoria stocks all manner of Asian eats and treats.
And even some familiar household items and icons.

My only gripe (yes, so Singaporean) would be its lack of Singapore-specific food brands, like Glory or Ya Kun kaya - a rich, coconut-egg breakfast spread that I'm totally addicted to. There is no Singapore aisle to be found! Gasp. So I substitute. I improvise. I trawl the other nation's aisles for items that bear a fleeting resemblence to the ingredients I need to make my comfort food.

Which brings me back to char kway teow.

Culinary (mis)Adventures
Newly invigorated by a friend's awesome blog post on her family's char kway teow recipe, Mr HWNN and I did an 'Amazing Race'-style run through LeeLee's, hunting and gathering everything we needed to put this coveted dish together.

Because we couldn't find ingredients imported from Singapore, we made do: Japanese fishcake, Vietnamese 'Chinese-style' sweet sausages, thick and wide Vietnamese (or Thai) flat rice noodles made the grade.

Thankfully, LeeLee's carried the right condiments and vegetables to go with the dish. Best of all, we managed to find a massive block of Malaysian-style belachan, or dried shrimp paste, to make the accompanying chili sauce. Now THAT was the ultimate trophy. I was so happy, I held the smelly thing up in the air and did a dance of joy, right in the middle of the dried goods aisle.

Then we went home. And we cooked.


Rocking the sweaty-Ah-Seng-hawker-with-grubby-handtowel-on-shoulder look.

The result? Orgasmifying. I know, that's not a real word. Just humour me here, okay? After an hour of hard stove work, Mr and I spent 20 minutes in complete, utter heaven. Eating, that is. What were you thinking??

But as with all first-time experiments, I mean, attempts, at a new recipe, there were teething problems. Thanks to Skype, I could call my walking cookbook, I mean, Mum, for immediate advice.

Mum: So how was your char kway teow? Looked good on Facebook.

Me: It was super. And the sambal belachan was fantastic. Except it was so hot it nearly took out a chunk of my head.

Mum: How many chilis did you use?

Me: Um... 30?

Mum: Thirty?? Are you crazy? Did you de-seed them?

Me: ...Oh.

So much for that genetic culinary genius then.


Flaming Sambal Belachan of Evil Doom. Rare item: Does -50 damage to Health, -100 to Fortitude, -50 to Intelligence, guaranteed to send enemies screaming for a glass of milk.