Popagandhi

More on Yemen. (I am now in Damascus, Syria! — I have to say where I am on my blog because my family is perennially lost about where I am! Hi mum! *waves*)

Singapore’s small Arab community came hundreds of years ago as traders and they almost always came from Yemen. Not just Yemen, but from Hadramaut (the area with “that bomb”, some weeks ago).

I’m not sure how but I’m convinced the local Malay cooking that I adore has seen a fair amount of influence from Yemeni food. For the first time in the Middle East, the food felt like something I really knew, with familiar spices like turmeric, and a heavy emphasis on intense flavours, as opposed to the fresher (but blander, to me) cuisines from the Levant (Lebanon, Syria, primary providers of Middle Eastern cuisine, even in, say, Dubai) and Iran. I like them all, but I’m particularly partial to the heavily spiced, full-on flavours of South, Southeast Asia and Yemen.

Travelling there alone was beyond anything I had ever done. With zero expectations, not having anything to count on or build up ideas about, other than “don’t go there!” — I fell into my favourite way of travelling: not expecting anything, but walking away with a wealth of riches. The experience I had in Yemen was incomparable.

I had the rare opportunity to live with a family in an Old City house, and the woman who hosted me was a phenomenal cook. My welcome feast, I did not know yet, would be lunch every day in the country: salta.

And I am such a fan.

Salta is a chicken stew dish topped with a froth-like fenugreek paste. Served piping hot in a madr, a heat-resistant stone pot, it is made by stewing chicken with spices and potatoes for hours, then transferring the potatoes into the madr. The by-now amazingly intense chicken soup is poured over the potatoes, which are crushed. Meantime, the ‘hulba’ (I think it’s fenugreek paste) is whipped repeatedly until a meringue-like consistency is obtained (minus the stiffness). Chillis, tomatoes and some local spices and blended together to form a salsa-like dip. Fresh bread, the hallmark of every Yemeni meal, is folded into a scoop and used as a spoon to scoop up the chilli-tomato mix, and the whole thing dipped into the piping hot salta.

Never one to turn down a well-cooked chicken, or any chicken by-product (I would have a soulful chicken soup, preferably the clear Chinese herbal sorts, or the Yemeni salta, as my last meal, thank you), I tucked into it with remarkable enthusiasm, and chased the salta from Hiyat’s Old Sana’a kitchen to Aden and Tihama, eating it at every restaurant and dusty highway rest-stop I unwittingly found myself in.

And of course, I made a video about it.

The things we eat — food and life in Yemen, part I in a series. The next one is about qat, the narcotic leaf chewed after lunch every single day :) Yes, still pimping the online travel show that I run with M. (Currently working hard on travelling, both of us, shooting videos, and also doing some behind-the-scenes revamps to the site — we’re announcing a tie-up with one of our favourite travel companies online, soon.)

Like we say in Hokkien. Mai keh kee! Kwa wa eh hee!

I don’t know why my peekture is so skewed in the video frame. For more details on salta and other Yemeni adventures, please see full post over at fortylove.tv

If you have any questions about Yemen, my friend and trusted travel agent in Sana’a, Ziad, is one of the country’s best, and will be pleased to take any questions or queries (even if you’re not about to book a tour with him).

Meantime, quick trip update: Lebanon really is all that. Roman ruins, interviewing men who literally built castles with their own bare hands (he dreamed, as a poor boy, of living in a castle and was taunted and beaten up for dreaming. Ever thought living your dream was hard? Moussa’s story makes me gasp), hanging out with Beiruti handbag designers (the fashionistas amongst you may know her: Sarah Beydoun of Sarah’s Bags! I hate fashion-y stuff but was so bowled over by her work), spending afternoons chilling with winemakers in the Bekaa Valley, or otherwise eavesdropping on the tortured artists at the Torino Express, an old-style crazy atmospheric cafe in Gemmayze, Beirut’s new so-holey-it’s-hip district. I’m now in Damascus, Syria. You know what this means? Sana’a, Damascus, Aleppo, Antioch, Istanbul… the idea of setting foot on a great deal of human history makes me so happy. In case any of you ever go to Syria: yes, if you hold a Singapore passport you WILL get a visa at the border for US$33. It’s for 15 days, but you can extend it for up to a month. (They won’t issue it to you at the border if your country has an embassy/consulate.) And when you get there — eat the ice cream at Bakdash! I’m off to Palmyra to see more ruins (going to be completely ruined-out after this), then on to Aleppo, Lattakia, before bussing or train-ing it into Turkey. One day I will write a blog entry about how to do all that for S$350 a week.

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