Kuala Lumpur: cooking class, a walk in the park, and ladyfingers for dinner

Kuala Lumpur is the largest city in Malaysia with just over 2 million residents. Relative to other large SE Asian cities like Bangkok and Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur is a relatively young city. It was established first because of trade from tin mining in the area. In the early 1900s, rubber took over as the leading industry of the area. Malaysia got its independence from the British in 1957 with Kuala Lumpur as its capital. Speaking of the British, Kuala Lumpur is the birthplace of hashing. In 1938, a group of Brits here formed a running/drinking club. WWII stopped it for a while, but these hashing clubs took off again in the late 1940s from here. "A drinking club with a running problem" is their slogan and beer consumption is traditional at the end of their non-competitive runs. My daughter Robin participates in hashing in New Jersey.

We neither ran nor consumed beer at our cooking class yesterday, but we did learn and eat. Our instructor, Renee, had us prepare rice with coconut milk, lemon grass, pandan and other seasonings and get it started in the rice cooker for the base of our nasi lemak.

We then prepared our dessert, onde-onde, a soft chewy dough with a brown sugar center. Made with glutinous rice flour, these tasty treats reminded me of mocchi. We made the dough, rolled it into small balls and filled them, then boiled them for 3 minutes or so and rolled them in coconut flakes. 

Our main meal item was nasi lemak, Malasia's national dish. We next made the sambal. Because we made our own portions, we were able to adjust the heat level. Renee had done two steps of the sambal preparation already, pureeing the garlic/shallot mixture and soaking and pureeing the chili pepper/onion mixture. We sauteed these two mixtures with a few other ingredients to compete our sambal.

With the coconut/pandan/lemon grass flavored rice cooked and our sambal prepared, we put together the dish. I went for presentation.

Phillip had a tough time getting his hard-boiled egg sliced!

Our nasi lemak was delicious! Phillip even ate the fried anchovies as they were more crunchy than fishy. We moved on to masala chai tea and another tea. Having made chai tea at home from scratch, I could identify all the spices that Renee was using. Phillip enjoyed adding the sweetened condensed milk.

Our cooking class was a morning activity. That afternoon, we did two loads of laundry. Our hotel had self-service washers and dryers in a room off of the parking garage. Not air conditioned like our Manila hotel's laundry area, but the room did have a fan, and the machines were very new. 

Our next foray out and about around Kuala Lumpur was a trek to KLCC (Kuala Lumpur Convention Center) Park this morning and a nice view of the Petronis Twin Towers. The distance was just over 1 km, a really easy walk. We were fortunate to find the overhead walkway so we didn't have to wait for the lights to change at the street-level crosswalks.

The Petronis Twin Towers were built in 1998 and until 2004, they were the tallest buildings in the world. Not being a fan of heights, I had no desire to go to the glass Sky Bridge, the 170-meter-high bridge that joins the two towers. 

We enjoyed the stroll around KLCC Park. We weren't sure if the dirt washed away or the tree roots grew above the dirt, but this was interesting.

We saw lilies, bougainvillea, and other flowers and shrubs in bloom, but this one really caught our attention. 

The park had several ponds, including this one with a whale and a dolphin statue. 

Another pond was called Symphony Lake because it had a fountain that sent up the dancing watersprays on the half hour for ten minutes. During the evening, music is played and lights illuminate the moving water jets.

This evening, we waited until dusk to go find dinner so that we could check out Jalong Alor, one of the famous evening street food vendor areas. 

We went at about 6:30 pm, walked the four-block length and decided on a restaurant. We wanted to sit and eat, so we didn't just get items from vendors. The street was closed to vehicles with restaurants on one side extending their seating areas out into the street and food vendors, without seating, on the other side. We selected a restaurant, sat down and ordered. The freshly cooked food came quickly:

Ladyfingers, known to us as okra, sauteed with sambal

chicken and beef satay with peanut sauce

nasi goreng with seafood (shrimp and calamari)

The peanut sauce for the satay was sweet, not spicy and the beef and chicken had been brushed with a sweet glaze before being grilled. The okra was perfectly cooked to the tenderness/crunchiness of the fresh okra cooked on the grill when we had the ranch. Phillip enjoyed his rice dish and said it had plenty of seafood pieces and it didn't taste fishy.