The Delicious-est Catch - Season 2

Today, I reveal the pictures from the fabulous dinner at the crab restaurant. This was a re-creation of a meal that Bernie's family treated me to the very first time I came to Malaysia. Click on the pictures to enlarge. I've left them in high-res, though a couple are unfortunately blurry.

We'll begin with the appetizers:

Pork short ribs. The only non-seafood dish on the menu.

They call the above "La-la". It is clams in a brown sauce. I'm not much into clams unless they're deep-fried, so I didn't try this one. Looks good, though.

Missing from my photos is the dish of Mantis prawns, which were fried and in a black sauce. They were delicious.

Now for a short public service message:

What you see above is a small dish of sliced malaysian chilis. This is a condiment. This is also the hottest chili pepper I've ever put in my mouth and I wouldn't eat (another) one on a dare. And I like spicy stuff. Stay away.

Restaurants also serve a big dish of chopped raw garlic, which is also used as a condiment.

OK, now for the main course - the crabs.


Check out that menu. If you like crabs, this is heaven. Especially if you can't indulge your crab fantasies in the USA due to the prices. I'd love to go back here again and order the 20 or so crab dishes that we didn't get to try.
Crabs in butter sauce. This was the particular dish I had been dreaming of since my first time trying it three years ago.My favorite way to eat it. Spoon crab meat and sauce onto a slice of fried bread.

Crabs in tomato garlic sauce. Yummy!

Crabs in dry chili sauce. This one is hard to eat, as you tend to lose the sauce when you pick out the meat, but it really is delicious.

Following all that spiciness, Bernie and I wanted to cool down, so we ordered a young coconut.
You simply pry off the top, sink a straw in, and drink the coconut water. Since this is a young green coconut, the liquid inside is water, not the thick milk that is inside old husky coconuts. After you drink all the water, you scrape out the tender meat with a spoon and eat it. Both the water and meat are coconutty-licious.

The Chinese have a belief that certain foods cool the body or warm the body and they will use this method like medicine. Every time someone saw me sweating in the heat, they'd tell me to drink coconut water to cool down. It works! I prefer my coconut to be refrigerated, though (This one was cold and delicious).

It's a shame I'll have to wait two more years to do this again.