Harmonie - Mystery Meat Revealed - Singa Besar Island, Kedah State, Malaysia

Mystery Meat Revealed - Singa Besar Island, Kedah State, Malaysia

Harmonie

Don and Anne Myers

Sun 28 Nov 2010 06:44

06:13.633N 99:44.765E

Before leaving Darwin, Australia for Indonesia, we bought a lot of meat. Pounds and pounds of it, which filled our settee-sized freezer to the brim. It all came from one very nice butcher shop that agreed to vacuum pack and freeze everything for us. All good except they neglected to label the packages. Not such a terrible thing since the identity of most of the frozen meat lumps was obvious. It's hard to mistake a sausage for a lamb chop, or a pack of bacon for a half-kilo of hamburger. However, mixed in with the other identifiable meat lump packages, were two rather large vacuum packs of brownish, Unidentified Meat Lumps (UML). Over time, these UML's took on the nickname 'mystery meat', and were shunned every time we reached in the freezer to pull out a meat pack for dinner. Whenever we defrosted the freezer, the mystery meat packages always seemed to sink to the bottom of the pile, and didn't re-surface until our meat supply started to run thin just about the time Michele and Bryan arrived. This was all part of the plan since it was getting toward the end of the season and we needed to empty the freezer anyway. So, as we approached the Langkawi group of islands, we decided it was time to dig out one of the UML packages, thaw it, cook it, and serve it to our guests in a perfect island anchorage setting. That way if the mystery meat meal turned out badly, the scenery would more than make up for it.

On November 13th, after a leisurely hour motor around a series of hilly, jungle-covered, small islands bristling with white limestone cliffs and echoing with monkey calls, we arrived in a broad sand bay on the east side of Pulau Singa Besar (Big Singa Island), a nature reserve and favorite stopover of sailboats and fishing boats. After a short dinghy ride to shore including disembarkation that did not involve Bryan getting dunked in chest-high water (no one ever said Bryan wasn't trainable, if fact, Don mentioned several times in the two weeks Bryan was with us that he was surprisingly trainable - Michele agreed), we went for a walk along the beach and were almost immediately met by a monkey, who must have been volunteered by his friends to come greet us. All in all, it was a perfect spot for the mystery meat dinner.

After shuffling the UML packages around the freezer for three months as we cruised through Indonesia, we pretty much convinced ourselves that the mystery meat was a nice beef tenderloin, so our plan was to grill it. After cocktail hour, I pulled the defrosted UML package out of the fridge while Don cranked up the grill. Then I cut open the vacuum pack and four, thinly sliced pieces of meat slithered out. Since when does a butcher slice up a beef tenderloin? How odd. Then we looked closer. Definitely not a beef tenderloin. It looked a lot like.....like veal. Aha! Mystery meat revealed. Ok, so having never really cooked veal before, I enlisted Michele's professional help and together we slapped together a veal meal. The only trouble was that it took about 90 minutes longer to slap together than the original beef tenderloin grill plan. Extra time that was filled with gin or vodka and tonics, and a few extra glasses of wine. Ten o'clock rolled around and the veal meal was finally served. It tasted really rather good, but it's unclear whether it actually tasted that good, or whether the gin/vodka/wine somehow influenced our senses. After dinner, the single malt scotch and cigars came out and the evening spiraled down from there. It was a short night (or long, depending on which end of it you look at) even though no one stirred until at least 9am the next morning (which is a feat in itself with this heat).

We stayed just one night at Big Singa Island before moving on to explore Langkawi Island from a base at the Royal Langkawi Yacht Club.