On a recent trip back home to Kota Kinabalu, my parents took me to one of their favourite coffeeshops for brunch. Located in a shop lot in Damai, H&H Kopitiam serves really good Yong Tau Foo or stuffed tofu and vegetables. One of my favourite Malaysian-Chinese dishes, Yong Tau Foo is usually served for breakfast or lunch together with noodles or can be eaten on their own.

Armed with my giant Nikon, the shopkeeper thought I was from the local council checking up on her establishment when I started taking photos around her shop! She relaxed abit when I told her I was just genuinely there for the food… To be honest, even if I was from the council, I wouldn’t be worrying too much as the level of hygiene at H&H Kopitiam is pretty good.

The menu at H&H is very straightforward – you can either have dry or soup noodles ranging from vermicelli, egg and flat rice noodles together with their selection of stuffed tofu and vegetables. They have two kinds of soup; a clear fish broth and a spicy curry. You can opt to have a combination soup with all the toppings, or you can pick your own selection from their glass display.

They have quite a wide variety of veges and tofu that are stuffed with finely minced fish meat. The stuffed veges on display are eggplant, bittergourd, chilli and okra. The quality of the food at H&H is pretty decent – all the veges and tofu are cut in generous sizes and taste fresh.

Besides stuffed veges, they also have fishcakes, fishballs and deep fried crispy tofu. You can actually pick the number of items to go in your soup and they will charge you by item. If you’re just after a light snack, you can just order the stuffed veges and tofu without any soup or noodles.

Their most popular dish is the special curry as was recommended to me by a few people. Being a fan of all things spicy, I ordered one of these with a combination of stuffed eggplant, bitter melon, chilli, tofu and fishcakes with a serving of flat rice noodles. However, when the bowl arrived I noticed that the portion was quite small compared to alot of other noodle soup restaurants around town.

The special curry soup was very tasty but I found it too oily, as you can see in the photos. There literally was a thick layer of oil on the top and to get to everything else in the bottom of the bowl one had no choice but to drink the oil too! The oil is from the coconut milk they use in the curry soup base. As it gets cooked, coconut milk slowly unleashes all its fatty goodness upon its bowl-mates!

This is probably the first time I have eaten a curry soup like this in Kota Kinabalu. The other curry soups I have tried were either Laksa or Tom Yum whereas the H&H Curry Soup had a very stong curry leaf flavour to it and wasn’t sour like Tom Yum. Despite being too oily, it was still delicious and I would definitely be going back to H&H to try the other dishes on offer. Meals here are very cheap and range from RM4-7.

One morning during a stroll through a convenience store in Kyoto in search of a hearty breakfast, I bypassed the rice balls, bento boxes and sandwiches and decided to get a bit creative with my meal. Japanese convenience stores never cease to amaze me when it comes to variety!

Four easy steps on how to create the ultimate D.I.Y. convenience store meal:

1. A packet of cooked rice – readily available from the cold food isle.

2. One serving of pickled cucumbers, seaweed and white bait.

3. A can of smoked sweet Mackerel.

4. Bring purchased items to a nearby park, combine ingredients and serve.

Naturally when in Hanoi we sought out the weird and wonderful for each and every meal. When we heard of a “Snake Village” called Le Mat on the outskirts of town we quickly decided that this was worth further investigation. After a quick taxi ride over the river we arrived to find a suburban area with very little sign of action. Luckily there were plenty of local hawkers eager to take us to their “friends” house where we could enjoy a meal of snake.

The man jumped on his bike and rode off to a local house to negotiate what kind of commission he’d get for leading four stupid westerners to the snake vendor. We followed through a dingy garage to arrive at the below scene.

So how much? For the low low price of $90 US we could eat the snake. Considering that almost every meal we’d had in Vietnam had cost less than a dollar we quickly left to find another restaurant / house. The fact that the characters in the garage looked like the shadiest men in all of Vietnam certainly didn’t help.

Our “good friend” on the motorbike rode off to find us another vendor. He lead us down a few dusty alleyways to a lavish mansion with some snake cages out the back. The man was friendly and the price quickly dropped to $35 US for all four of us to have a feast of snake with alcohol included. Expensive but what the hey, we agreed and the man went about selecting the unlucky snake.

Out came two jars, two funnels, a knife and a doomed Cobra. The snake’s neck was broken, it’s heart was located and a cut was made.

At this stage we have no idea what is going on. Why are they collecting the blood? I guess we’ll find out later.

A close up of the blood being drained.

The heart is cut out and slips down to the bottom of a small glass. It is still beating rapidly for several minutes before it begins to slow to just a beat here and there.

The men make another cut further down the snake and begin to drain it’s dull green bile. It looks something like very strong green tea but smells like… snake bile I guess! At this stage we are led upstairs to the guest area and take a seat. A bottle of snake blood and another of snake bile are brought up to us by our host and the sounds & smells of cooking snake waft upwards from downstairs. Several shots are prepared, the first contains the snake’s heart along with a healthy splash of bile and some home made rice wine just to make the entire concoction that much more appetizing.

By this stage we are all feeling a little queasy and the question is raised as to who is going to have the heart. I offer to be the guinea pig for this excursion and find very little in the way objections from my friends, one of whom has already gone outside for fresh air and fails to return until the meal is over.

Looks delicious doesn’t it? Our host explains that the locals drink snake blood to help them with “sexy lady boom boom”. Look out Viagra!

Surprise, surprise, it tasted just like snake bile with rice wine with a raw heart in it. Luckily the off burning aftertaste of the rice wine saved me from more than a few seconds of suffering. We now proceed with shot after shot of rice wine with snake blood.

These were not too bad and definitely far superior to the snake bile. Our host quickly works out that we are not interested in any more bile shots and so begins to help himself, quickly becoming outrageously drunk.

Our host’s wife enters with several dishes made from the unfortunate snake. The first being snake meat which has been battered with flour and sesame seeds and deep fried. Mmmmmm tastes like chicken yet with the consistency of mashed potato. We are all surprised and impressed, the crispy pieces of snake are quickly consumed.

Snake spring rolls anyone? Very Yum. After dipping in the traditional Vietnamese vinegar sauce (often used with rice paper rolls) they were a real crowd pleaser.

Our host now obtains a large bottle of something from the cupboard. The fluid within it is cloudy and has some mysterious “things” floating around the bottom. After some interesting sign language we understand that these “things” are indeed snake testicles and the liquid itself is rice wine. We were all quite amused until our host pours as each a shot. We took a bit of convincing but eventually caved in and downed our shots. The taste was foul and we all refused to touch our second shot, again leaving our host to enjoy the spoils.

Next we are served snake skin that has been deep fried to perfection. This was delicious, something like a cross between chicken skin and the crackling on roast pork. We all agreed it was the highlight of the meal and fought over the last few pieces.

With the meal over and our shot glasses empty we move to a new room downstairs where our host has readied a home made water pipe. Despite having one of the better homes in Hanoi, his pipe is nothing more than a scaffolding tube with a tin can strapped to it. He shows us his favorite party trick which is to overload his already massive pipe with tobacco, spark up and inhale the entire lot then hold his breath for over a minute. When he breathes out all the smoke is gone. Wow. We begin to wonder if he drinks and smokes this with all of his snake guests and if so how he hasn’t died from multiple organ failure. We thank our host and leave him with his well earned US dollars, now it’s time to see if we can locate that restaurant that serves locusts…