Malacca is home to a really great coffeeshop called the Geographers Cafe. It's clean and cheap, has decent food and a great view. It even has an electric plug for the laptop! Outside the window, at which I sit on a stool and drink my tea, is a vendor selling tofu fried rice. Normally I'd always figured tofu was a pretty healthy thing, and that fried rice - not that it was particularly healthy, but better than a sharp stick in the eye. Well, all vague thoughts of health have been banished from my mind watching this man prepare his dish. He has this huge wok lit from beneath by a constant flame, and into the wok he pours something like a gallon of cooking oil. It must be at least this, as the entire wok was filled perhaps two-inches deep with the stuff. This he heats to its critical point, when he adds the tofu. Instantly, as if I blinked and he were performing a magic trick, all the oil is gone and he's just cooking tofu. Er... huh? To this he adds even more oil, which is soaked up by the rice he...
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