A lot of Prudence's posts have food in them, it is true. But this one will be food and food alone. So...

-- Tried kawista juice. The kawista is a deliciously different member of the citrus family.

-- Discovered that the cake shop up the road does really nice brownies (here brownies come in the form of a long cake, and are often steamed rather than baked).

-- Wrestled with tricky-to-eat-but-delicious nila pepes at the always delightful Tembi, and topped it off with tela legi, an archetypal comfort food consisting of boiled cassava with sweet rice flour sauce.

-- Reacquainted myself with the deliciously filling food known as pempek. Hailing from Sumatra, and made out of a fish and sago paste, this has got to be a cousin of the keropok lekor they offer in the east of Malaysia. I hadn't had any during this visit, but this week ate it twice. I had forgotten how nice it is. And there are many different varieties, which I feel honour-bound to work my way through. The first time round, I went for the pempek lenggang, which is a kind of omelette with pieces of pempek folded in, served with cucumber and "cuka", the distinctive sweet-sour-spicy sauce. The second time it was pempek kapal selam, which translates as "submarine pempek" and consists of a boiled egg with the fishy dough wrapped around it (don't ask me how they do that).

-- Stopped off at the es tape stall that I'd been eyeing up for weeks. Tape is fermented cassava, and makes a wonderfully refreshing and different drink. It has a faintly alcoholic taste. But it is not haram, at least according to the opinions I read. What is forbidden, it seems, is not alcohol per se, which occurs naturally in various fruits, but rather substances that are designed to intoxicate. Which tape isn't. Indeed it would be pretty impossible to get intoxicated on tape. This is good, because I feel this will be a stop we will be making again in the future.