December 15 - Pandan Life Cycle in Kaya

December 15 - Pandan Life Cycle in Kaya, originally uploaded by Jesse_Laird.

Photo blogging foreign food - couldn't be happier!

Soooo.... in my former life, I served as a manufacturing engineer. My work brought me to Penang, Malaysia several times (see past blog entries for some photos). I love international travel, and even more so when a place I might not have gone to.

I've changed jobs, and no longer have business reason to travel to Malaysia. But the heart of a traveler gets scattered around the world. So every once in a while, I feel a tinge of desire to taste durian, kaya, ban chean kuih. To leave the air conditioning and feel a place with every pore. To feel lost, and a bit scared.

Before I wax poetic about travel, let me return to the point of this photo.

One of my former coworkers returned to Malaysia, and found a way to bring me some pandan leaf. This is a plant I brought back after my last visit (I brought back leaves only, for food, not propogation, in case any border control officers are reading this!)

I read that Pandan leaf is the vanilla of SE Asia. And I think that's the perfect description. I had meat wrapped in pandan leaves, rice steamed with pandan, and had breakfast of Kaya toast.

So tonight I made Kaya, which is a jam made with coconut milk, egg, sugar, and flavored by simmering the coconut milk with pandan leaves. It's a mild, vanilla-ish, earthy flavor that I can't even begin to do justice to by trying to describe here. Served on white toast with butter, it is heavenly. Add a cup of tea, a hard boiled egg with soy sauce, and I'm a happy camper.

Photo-wise, I used available light because, well, I can't get pandan leaf every day and so wanted to use this chance to explain to friends and family what I was making. Wasn't really thinking of the photo blog, except that I did need a photo today.

I've never made a diptych, or triptych, or any other form of photo collage. But each photo didn't stand on it's own so much as the timeline I saw at the filmstrip on Lightroom.

A quick google pointed me to a Digital Photo School article on doing exactly what I wanted to do in Lightroom, without fussy movement/alignment of the photos. See link here: http://bit.ly/2mprI

So I captured the moment, was able to tell a photo story, and learned a tool that is just way too easy and I'll probably use more in the future, especially for some of the family portrait series I do. Stoked to learn an easy technique so quickly, and to have it meet my storytelling needs exactly.

The recipe I've used both times I was able to get pandan is from LA Times. See the recipe here: http://bit.ly/11jCSf