Lunch just out of Ipoh

Hubby suddenly said he wanted to go to Lawan Kuda to look at something. Why not have lunch there?

Lawan Kuda is a little town about 1/2 hour's drive from Ipoh. It's just after Gopeng, another small town on the fringes of Ipoh.

We had a pleasant drive and met some buffaloes. Although we were quite a distance from them, they started getting to their feet and shuffled slowly away, with the male who was obviously the patriarch, assessing us just as we were delighting in watching them in their mud bath.

We had lunch in a restaurant called Ho Ho Chak on Jalan Besar, Lawan Kuda Baru. In Hokkien, the name simply means very delicious. We ordered their specialty, the snakehead fish or ikan haruan, a fresh water fish. We asked for the fillets to be cooked in ginger and spring onions, while the rest of the fish was made into ham choy (salted mustard vegetable) soup. We had a stirfried leafy vegetable, and finally, sweet and sour pork, which the children absolutely loved. All in, it was a very enjoyable lunch. And the place was also full of locals, a good sign that the food is good.

On the way home, we dropped by Gopeng. Suddenly (again), hubby asked if I needed to buy any soya sauce as he remembered from his childhood how his parents used to drive to a home-based soya sauce maker there. Why not, I said. If he could find it. And he did.

So the kids had the opportunity to see how soy beans were left in large clay pots for them to ferment and transform into soya sauce. The name of the maker is Hup Teck, and they said they only sell from their home. I bought a couple of bottles of soya sauce and meen-see (fermented bean paste), and a bottle of caramelized dark sauce.

A little jaunt outside of Ipoh where the kids saw some nature, and a traditional trade.