Fasting In Foreign Countries

There's nothing like home-cooked meals for breaking Ramadan fast with family members. Mom would pamper her kids in preparing the overly bothersome dishes that require mundane preparation or tedious cooking procedures that would certainly test the patience of any yoga guru.

Mom's tender loving care over her cooking - either in the form of baking, boiling, brewing, broiling,  frying, grilling, heating, roasting, simmering, sizzling, steaming, stewing or even toasting - all in the pursuit of excellence tasting dishes to satisfy our fussy taste buds.

As if that's not overwhelming enough, then there would be certain craving for after meal desserts. And sweet tasting caramel is not good enough - that's a western poppycock dessert. In this hot humid climate you can't get enough of the pengat families to drown your sore itchy throat. Starting off with the evergreen pengat pisang, keledek, keladi or kacang hijau.

What about the Kelantanese influence of Puteri Berendam or Lompat Tikam? The colorful tri-tasting elements that truly melt in your mouth exquisitely much more then the overly exaggerated candy commercial! And if that's too bitsy to your appetite, go and get yourself the ugliest, meanest and most distasteful looking pengat - Badak Berendam or as translated in English - are you ready for this - soaking rhinoceros!

So how is it going for you guys fasting in foreign countries? Many-many eons ago we had had our own experience of fasting in Adelaide, Australia for six long years. Back then perhaps the Asian cooking ingredients were not easily available either in the condensed versions nor like those kinds of pre-cooked instant meals packets. Asian living in the early eighties for the Australian was not in vogue back then.

We tried to pacify our cravings mostly on weekends with some sort of off-the-shelf cakes or candies to munch over our television movies. We certainly could not wake up for suhur (or sahur in Malay) - the recommended pre-dawn meal of Ramadan simply because it's too cold in middle of winter and more so due to our staying up late as being the norm of student's life. Besides those six lovely years were the easiest fasting period for us as it's still dark outside at 8am and best of all we broke fast somewhere around 5.30pm!