Offense Extreme
Saturday, July 08, 2006
You'd think after being Malaysian for nearly 23 years, I'd have a good sense of which local food combinations to take versus which I should stay away from lest I feel like taking a swan dive into digestion hell.
But no.
So once again, I am forced to swallow (or purge, depends) another chapter of what it feels like to consume excessive "heaty" foods (I'll get to that soon).
Introducing the durian in all its prickly splendor:
Prick me not; the sturdy durian shell.
You crack that open to reveal a tiny sampling of ambrosia:
One man's meat is another man's poison.
Ambrosia or not, that's really subjective. I've seen grown men keel over and five seconds later, watch their faces crumple into a distorted mass of agony and in drastic cases, say hello to their previous meal upon getting a whiff of the durian's magnificently pungent odor.
The more polite comments I've heard about the durian scent run somewhere between "extremely disagreeable" or an incoherent "too pungent...-strong-".
The more colorful ones sound somewhat like: "that's rotten", "smells like something died", "uhm, did your sewage piping burst?" and notably the classic face scrunch accompanied by a horrified "what the FUCK is that?!"
The durian is classified as a "heaty" fruit. Now what on Mother Nature's green earth is a heaty fruit?
It's not actually a proper term and the knowledge of what types of food are heaty versus cooling mystifyingly pre-dates historical records and are seemingly only known by your elders. Naturally, the knowledge will be force fed to me and eventually passed down to my child, who will undoubtedly ask me the origins of a heaty piece of food versus a cooling one to which I will have no answer to.
As far as I'm concerned, if you take heaty stuff, your inner body well-being "rises" upon consumption, causing an imbalance. An overdose of "heatiness" include (but is not limited to) having stored up too much "energy", sore throats, fevers, headaches and all that jazz.
Mind you, this heaty/cooling business is in no way related to the temperature of your body. The concept (according to my mom) is based on the yin-yang theory: you fall sick when your body falls out of its equilibrium. So, too much "heaty" food (yang) upsets the body as much as too much "cooling" food (yin).
Right, today's post was about gluttony but it transcended into a cultural food post...
Now where was I?
Oh, right. So that was the durian.
The other half of my meal consisted of the sexy, sexy satay, shamelessly lathered with generous helpings of peanut sauce.
Again, satay is classified as a heaty food. As a matter of fact, so is the peanut.
Lesson learnt: three heaty foods equals one sinfully satisfied piglet and makes for one volcano erupting, bad ass combination.
How bad ass? Let's just say I spent the most of my morning either in bed or paying my deepest respects to my toilet bowl while feeling my intestines turn inside out and watching yesterday night's dinner (or what's left of it) float about in water. Don't even get me started on the taste or smell of the murky, pale green durian flavored bile.
By the afternoon, my tummy, feeling less mutinous, allowed me to nurse a small bowl of hot, steamy chicken porridge as I winced every time I heard my mom say the words durian or satay.
Unfortunately, I'm still feeling the heaty side effects up till now; hot, sweaty, sticky and the gentle rumble of nausea once so often coming from the deepest pit of my stomach to remind me of my foolishness.
And my only method of combat is a gallon of water every hour or two accompanied by excessive showering.
T'was a bitter lesson learnt.
You'd think after being Malaysian for nearly 23 years, I'd have a good sense of which local food combinations to take versus which I should stay away from lest I feel like taking a swan dive into digestion hell.
But no.
So once again, I am forced to swallow (or purge, depends) another chapter of what it feels like to consume excessive "heaty" foods (I'll get to that soon).
Introducing the durian in all its prickly splendor:
Prick me not; the sturdy durian shell.
You crack that open to reveal a tiny sampling of ambrosia:
One man's meat is another man's poison.
Ambrosia or not, that's really subjective. I've seen grown men keel over and five seconds later, watch their faces crumple into a distorted mass of agony and in drastic cases, say hello to their previous meal upon getting a whiff of the durian's magnificently pungent odor.
The more polite comments I've heard about the durian scent run somewhere between "extremely disagreeable" or an incoherent "too pungent...-strong-".
The more colorful ones sound somewhat like: "that's rotten", "smells like something died", "uhm, did your sewage piping burst?" and notably the classic face scrunch accompanied by a horrified "what the FUCK is that?!"
The durian is classified as a "heaty" fruit. Now what on Mother Nature's green earth is a heaty fruit?
It's not actually a proper term and the knowledge of what types of food are heaty versus cooling mystifyingly pre-dates historical records and are seemingly only known by your elders. Naturally, the knowledge will be force fed to me and eventually passed down to my child, who will undoubtedly ask me the origins of a heaty piece of food versus a cooling one to which I will have no answer to.
As far as I'm concerned, if you take heaty stuff, your inner body well-being "rises" upon consumption, causing an imbalance. An overdose of "heatiness" include (but is not limited to) having stored up too much "energy", sore throats, fevers, headaches and all that jazz.
Mind you, this heaty/cooling business is in no way related to the temperature of your body. The concept (according to my mom) is based on the yin-yang theory: you fall sick when your body falls out of its equilibrium. So, too much "heaty" food (yang) upsets the body as much as too much "cooling" food (yin).
Right, today's post was about gluttony but it transcended into a cultural food post...
Now where was I?
Oh, right. So that was the durian.
The other half of my meal consisted of the sexy, sexy satay, shamelessly lathered with generous helpings of peanut sauce.
Again, satay is classified as a heaty food. As a matter of fact, so is the peanut.
Lesson learnt: three heaty foods equals one sinfully satisfied piglet and makes for one volcano erupting, bad ass combination.
How bad ass? Let's just say I spent the most of my morning either in bed or paying my deepest respects to my toilet bowl while feeling my intestines turn inside out and watching yesterday night's dinner (or what's left of it) float about in water. Don't even get me started on the taste or smell of the murky, pale green durian flavored bile.
By the afternoon, my tummy, feeling less mutinous, allowed me to nurse a small bowl of hot, steamy chicken porridge as I winced every time I heard my mom say the words durian or satay.
Unfortunately, I'm still feeling the heaty side effects up till now; hot, sweaty, sticky and the gentle rumble of nausea once so often coming from the deepest pit of my stomach to remind me of my foolishness.
And my only method of combat is a gallon of water every hour or two accompanied by excessive showering.
T'was a bitter lesson learnt.
[ soon-to-be useful ]
previously on nekomatta.com
timeless bitchings
nekomatta is...
Sean Sean Tan;
sarcastic wordsmith, dirty in oh-so-many ways, fun-loving IE-hating CSS worshiping markup "engineer", anime-styled arm flailing expressive communicator, proudly self-initiated member of the cult of milk and caffeine, snotty pink crayon lover, tree hugging hippy organic designer, pole dancer wannabe, swing-a-ling lindy hopper, rabid arcane mage/bitchin' disc priest/annoying resto druid--sometimes spazzy, often giggly, always loud.
20% sugar, 80% kink.
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