Nasi Dagang, that Kelantanese MUST

Any self-respecting Kelantanese loves Nasi Dagang.  This literally means "Trade or Trading Rice". It's a semi-glutinous rice that has tinges of red in its grains. The famous dish just known as Nasi Dagang consists of this particular kind of rice that is cooked in fenugreek and coconut milk, then coupled with some form of chicken or fish curry, with cucumbers and hard-boiled egg on the side to finish it.  It is simplicity at its best. In my home state of Kelantan, we typically have it for breakfast, and sometimes for dinner.

Friday is the day when the best nasi dagang known to my family is sold. It is sold in a place called Tumpat, a town probably 20-30km from where I live. The seller only sells it on this day, the weekend in these areas, Friday being the holy day for Muslims. In our state, Fridays are in effect like Sundays almost everywhere else.

Normally the drive is about 20-30 mins but today it took considerably longer because there was a huge mother of a jam for a quarter of the distance. School is out and many people are on holiday back here and unbeknownst to us until we got home, a huge international kite festival was happening at a well-known beach just outside Tumpat. Traffic was horrendous. And here we were lamenting the state of it almost all the way there. Once we got to the stall, the food was present, but the owner was not. She had a couple of people move her stuff over there for her, but she was nowhere to be seen or heard.

The food is here, but there's no one to sell it to us

Her helpers looked at the customers who came and went. They were tired of hanging out there with us. I think she must have lost at least 30 customers who either walked by or drove by, cast looks and left, having decided that it wasn't worth the wait. We on the other hand, were the first to arrive, so we were first in line, and we had promised some guests from out-of-town that we were bringing them this awesome nasi dagang from Tumpat! We had no choice but to wait for the elusive seller to show.

Little Malay girls dressed in their tudungs
and normal clothes. When I was a child, I hardly
ever saw this. Most young Malay girls wouldn't have
cared to cover their hair back then.

 I saw these cute little girls who had come to buy some flavored drinks from a stall close to this one. Unfortunately that girl dropped that whole drink on the ground right after I took her picture. Minutes later, they came back for a replacement. And our nasi dagang seller was still M.I.A.

I was getting really tired of waiting, and so was my mum. She's sat on a stool given to her by one of the helpers. Red ants were crawling around her feet. This was not the place to be putting up a stall. Even a make shift one. Come on!!

After waiting for about 45 mins, she finally pulls in in her beaten up Proton Saga. She saunters over lazily without apology nor guilt. It's so close to prayer time, of course I'm going to pray first, she muttered, after my mum jokingly mentioned she was kind of late today.

It really is nice to have people waiting in line for your amazing nasi dagang, isn't it?  And of course she knows it. She can afford to make people wait. She doesn't care if she pisses anyone off. If you like, you join the queue and wait, if you don't..piss off.

That big large bowl of nasi dagang will all be
 gone by sundown.

So Mum goes and places the order for 9 packets of nasi campur (nasi dagang and plain rice together, because nasi dagang alone is really filling, and hard to digest) with both chicken and fish curry. The packet isn't that big but this costs RM5.50 each. It's what you pay now for this. Of course it used to cost less way back when. But at under 2USD, I won't be complaining. It is the bomb! Cik Izan (Ms Izan) or in Kelantan-speak we call her Ize..(i-zeh), you really know how to make this tasty. I almost... almost, want to kowtow to you. But I won't!

I had no appetite for this food when I got home. We delivered it to our guests and my mum stayed with them to have dinner. I went back home and got on the treadmill to see if I could find my lost appetite. It didn't let itself be found by dinner time, but eventually I got hungry and I ate my packet of nasi campur. And I wasn't disappointed. Even if my appetite was largely suppressed.