Throughout the trip, we’ve met people who make statements like, “I’ve spent two months in India every year for four years, but... I really don’t like Indian food,” or, “I love Thailand, but I hate the spicy food.” People like this make our eyes do a slightly subtler version of that cartoon thing where they bug in-and-out of your head in shock like they’re on power-loaded springs. Aaa-wooga?

The thing is, it’s not uncommon. Lots of people travel to places where they don’t like the food. It’s not even like it’s wrong to do so -- clearly, there’s plenty more to enjoy about a country than its cuisine. It’s just that for us, we’ve realized, food is a huge part of why we’re traveling.

I don’t think we would have said this at the beginning of our trip. I don’t even know if I realized it until Hannah pointed it out to us when we started hanging out and eating a lot of our meals together in Rishikesh, early on in our time in India. First she noticed that we’d scan every menu for dishes we’d never heard of, and without fail, those would be the ones we’d order. Then, a few days later, she remarked, “You know, you guys sure do talk a lot about food.”

Which is true. With each other, with people we meet, at restaurants and street markets, on bus rides -- wherever we are and whoever we’re with, we talk about food. Our favorite memories of our favorite places often involve food. But our blog entries haven’t always reflected this obsession, and I think it’s time to remedy that. All of which is an introduction to what follows -- some of those finest foodie memories, in all their drool-inducing detail.

Cendol in Melaka
Those of you we saw during our time back in the states this winter have already heard all about cendol, probably six or seven times. That’s because hardly a day has gone by, in the nearly eight months since we left Melaka, when we’ve failed to sing the praises of that finest of frozen treats, cendol (pronounced chen-dole). We searched narrow alleys and mall food courts and menus for it throughout the rest of our time in Southeast Asia, only to realize that nowhere in the world do they make it like they do in Melaka. It starts -- when you’re making it properly, Melaka-style -- with a generous dollop of sweet red beans and pale green noodles of cendol (a sweet, herby, gelatinous creation made of green pea flour and pandan leaves) in the bottom of a deep bowl; then there is a heaping dune of snowy shaved ice from a hand-crank shaver mounded high in the bowl, followed by swirls of coconut milk and sweetened condensed milk drizzled over the ice, and then thick, dark palm sugar syrup -- gula Melaka, it’s called -- ladled over the mound; and finally crisp peanuts, some still in their red paper skins, sprinkled atop the syrupy surface.

We discovered cendol on Jonker Street in Melaka’s Chinatown, a narrow one-way street lined with traditional Straits Chinese shophouses, many of which have been converted into restaurants and gift shops. Two side-by-side shophouse restaurants, Jonker Dessert and Jonker Delight, make the best cendol we ever tasted. Jonker Dessert has the advantage of also making the best laksa lemak I’ve tried -- a sweet and spicy coconut curry soup filled with sponges of deep-fried bean curd, prawns, meat and vegetables.

When I think of cendol, I think of those shophouses, and of the muggy, hot weather of Malaysia’s west coast on the shoulder of the rainy season. I think of the way sunlight streams in through the open courtyard in the center of a shophouse, and of the profusion of potted plants in big, brightly patterned porcelain urns that surrounds the courtyard. I think of the multigenerational families that would gather around tiny marble-topped tables, grandparents and toddlers alike slurping their laksa and cendol with wide metal soup spoons.

I also think of ice shavers: the sturdy, simple hand-crank machines that I began to be able to spot atop a hawker’s glinting chrome cart from a full block away. A huge metal contraption, painted blue or green or purple, with a block of glass-clear ice dripping on its platform. We love cendol so much that, in December, when we found out we’d be returning to the states, we spent two days scouring the alleys of Bangkok’s labyrinthine Chinatown until we found the block where people were selling ice shavers. We bought one, and used up a large portion of our luggage allowance toting it home, in the hopes that we’d eventually be able to concoct some semblance of Melakan cendol back in Philadelphia.

Street food at the Phuket Vegetarian Festival
Thai street food, in general, was one of the highlights of our time in Asia. When I read about Delhi’s proposed ban on street food, I said to Patrick, “If Bangkok ever proposes banning street food, I am getting on a plane and chaining myself to someone’s office in protest, because Thai street food is one of the best things ever.” We revelled in the delights of street food in every place we visited in Thailand -- from the Krabi night market to Bangkok’s Chinatown -- but nowhere was there more variety of temptation, all in one place, than in Phuket during the Vegetarian Festival.

We'd wake up in the morning, make our way to Ranong Road, and nibble our way down the line of hawker stalls that stretched as far as they eye could see. There was fantastic iced coffee at one stall -- strong and not too sweet. Another vendor sold a wide array of variations on sticky rice in coconut milk; one of the concoctions had large oatlike grains in a coconut base, while another had chunks of candied squash, and others involved red beans, rice-flour nuggets, black rice, and more. They made fantastic breakfast snacks, especially when combined with fresh papaya or maybe some soft vegetable-filled spring rolls.

For lunch, we'd usually hit up one of the "fast food" storefront restaurants along Ranong, behind the line of hawker stalls. These had a buffet-style counter with dozens of hot vegetarian dishes -- bean curd, eggplant, greens, beans, vegetables of every stripe and color in a diverse assortment of sauces. A plate of rice with two or three hot dishes would set us back 75 cents to a dollar. Or if we just needed a snack, there was the option of 25 cent pad thai on the street.

It was important to leave room for snacks and dessert, because to do any kind of justice to the mind-boggling array available, we needed to eat five or six times a day. There were easily a hundred hawker stalls up and down Ranong, most of them selling different items. We tried sweet corn mixed with coconut; deep-fried spicy vegetable fritters; little bite-sized custards steamed in tiny porcelain cups and turned out hard and jiggly into take-away containers; rice-flour cakes filled with taro or red bean paste and served hot off the griddle, crisp and flaky on the outside but with the tempting texture of raw cookie dough inside; and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The Phuket Vegetarian Festival firmly cemented what had been a burgeoning love and appreciation for street hawker food. I've given some thought as to why this food is so fantastic, and there are a few reasons that spring to mind. First, it's a matter of freshness. Rarely is the time between a dish being made and it hitting your tongue shorter than at the hawker stall. Often we'd stand around watching a vendor tend to his or her dumplings or fritters or soups or noodles, only to see each fresh batch whisked away by hungry customers the second it was pulled steaming from the griddle or pot. Second, it's about perfection of ingredients and technique. A hawker generally makes only one item, or at most, several variations of one item. That specialization allows a level of focus and care that's rarely seen in multitasking restaurants. My coconut custard-ball maker may not know how to make anything else, but I don't care -- he makes the best coconut custard-balls ever. And finally, but not to be underestimated -- hawker food is ridiculously cheap. Patrick and I walked up and down the hawker heaven of the Veg Fest, buying and eating as much as our appetites would allow, and found ourselves unable to spend more than five or six dollars on food all day. Our bellies just weren't big enough.

Crabs in Kep

Kep is a little seaside town a couple hours southwest of Phnom Penh on the Gulf of Thailand. Before the Khmer Rouge, Kep was a popular resort town, a place where Cambodian royalty and wealthy French colonists would retreat to luxurious villas when they wanted to escape the heat and bustle of Phnom Penh. Since the 1970s, it's fallen on hard times, and most of those villas are now abandoned, giving Kep a kind of ghost-town feel. We spent a few nights in a five-dollar-a-night guesthouse on the ocean -- the kind of place where there are thatched-roof hammock stands just steps from the water, but the electricity doesn't come on until six p.m. We rented some bicycles and enjoyed exploring the coastal road, with its abandoned buildings and ocean breezes and pretty countryside. But by far the best part of our visit to Kep -- and the first thing I remember when I think of our time there -- was the crabs we ate.

A row of bamboo and thatch seafood shacks hugs a stretch of coastline in Kep. The places are nothing fancy, but the view across the Gulf, especially at sunset, when fishermen in their longtail boats are silhouetted like paper cutouts against the glowing pink and lavendar sky, is gorgeous. The shacks are built out over the water on stilts, and so the soundtrack is of waves washing up against the shore below you. Moments after you've made your order, you'll see a woman wading out into the ocean and reeling in a line of traps, retrieving a bucket of live crabs.

Kep is in a peppercorn-producing region of Cambodia, and this means that fresh green peppercorns abound in profusion. Those that aren't dried and shipped out for export are used more like a vegetable than a spice. One of our favorite preparations of crab combined it with stir-fried fresh peppercorns, which look like clusters of green beads, in a tangy, oniony sauce. We also ate it in a lip-tinglingly spicy garlic, shallot and chili sauce that was so good I had to sop up the extra with rice. In both cases, the crabs were served halved down the middle, still in their shells, the savory sauces clinging to the sharp ridges along their coral-colored claws. We dispensed with our utensils for most of the meal, and dug into the crabs with our bare hands, sucking the tender, sweetly salty meat out of spicy sauce-coated shells.

Seafood, and fish in particular, was an ongoing highlight of our eating in Cambodia. Whether it was chunks of whitefish in the mild coconut curry of amok or a crispy deep-fried whole fish with a garlicky green-tomato sauce or a fresh pineapple and lime sweet and sour sauce, the seafood we ate in Cambodia was deliciously tender, and invariably paired with a sauce so tasty we wanted to lick it off the plate. If a Cambodian restaurant opened up in Philadelphia that prepared fish or crab anywhere near as good as what we had in Battambang, Pursat, and Kep, I'd be there in a heartbeat. For now, I'll just savor the memories.

So, those are perhaps the top three food memories that spring to mind. There are dozens more, descriptions of which we sometimes torture ourselves with when we're hungry. Dumplings in Bangkok's Chinatown. Manana's homemade khachapuri in Sighnaghi. Soto ayam in Cipanas. Banana-leaf lunches in Tamil Nadu. Roti canai in the Cameron Highlands. Ais kacang in Penang.

Lately, we've mostly been eating at home, taking advantage of the fact that we have a kitchen for the first time in nine months while we're renting an apartment here in Istanbul. That's been fun too -- though not as fun as eating cendol four times a day in Melaka.

Lots of love, and good eating, to our dear friends and family. If you want more details on what we've been eating, or have questions about anything else, please leave a comment (or send an email)... we'd love to hear from you