By high noon each teaching day I am ravenous. That is perfectly reasonable seeing as breakfast in Chateau Lawrence, KL Branch, is sometime around 6.00am. However on Thursday food matters started to get a little out of hand.
It is a well known fact that teachers need quality infusions of hot caffeine at certain set times of the day otherwise they become grumpy, can't wave their arms around when teaching, lose the ability to crack terrible jokes or the world simply ends. Caffeine time in Drama land at my school is 0905 when either someone puts the kettle on and makes a cafetiere (or tea for the non-coffee drinking member of the drama gang) or scuttles off to Gloria Jeans coffee shop to pick up our regular order (large americano, large chai tea latte and large cappucino, just in case anyone wants to be nice and surprise us!).
On Thursday as we supped our GJ's conversation soon turned to the new school canteen and then very quickly to how, last year, the old canteen sold roti canai. Sadly no more. For people who have not had roti canai before then make it your mission in life to have one or two before your days are out. How to describe them? They start life as small balls of dough before being stretched out very thinly, with plenty of butter added. Then they are folded over and over, with plenty of butter added, and cooked on a griddle with yet more butter and eaten hot with lentil, curry or, occasionally, sweet sauces. It did not take long before we, collectively, yearned for roti. Google searches were undertaken for pictures, the nearest we were going to get with lessons starting again at 0925, and then one colleague played a conversational blinder and brought up the subject of garlic naan and teh tarik. By that time we were on the verge of madness. The tipping point came when somebody mentioned adding tandoori chicken and fish to the whole thing to make an amazing meal. Needless to say the Drama gang end of term outing has now been decided upon. In the last week of term the department will be unavailable for an as yet unspecified period of time as we scuttle off to a certain location to scoff tandoori, naan and quaff teh tarik.
Teh tarik, for those not in the know, is a controversial form of tea that even a non tea drinker like me finds palatable. It is tea brewed and boiled until thicker than the freshly made stuff, with sweetened condensed milk added and then poured from brewing receptacle to cup, at a dizzying height, several times in order to create a cappacino-like froth on top.
No prizes for guessing what the Lawrence Clan had for dinner on Thursday, although it was a struggle to hold things together until then.