Photographic proof!

Last weekend's birds' nest soup experience definitely needed to be captured for posterity - and of course I had to do something with the photographic evidence that we really had eaten bird spit!

So here's the double page layout I have done, with a tongue in cheek Chinese-style title.  The design is based on a Becky Fleck sketch, and the papers used are Kaisercraft Secret Bird Society (very apt, I thought!)  The birds are cut with a Sizzix swallow die cut, the title is cut on the Cricut using Deng Thick font, and there's a bit of inking and stamping on there too if you look hard enough ;-)

Birds' nest soup - yummy! (not)

I dug an enormous hole for myself on the way to Melaka on Saturday when I said to the kids:  "Your challenge for this weekend is to eat something that you've not tried before".  Little did I know that, just a couple of doors down from the hotel where we spent the night, was a newly opened building, dedicated to the history, making and selling of birds' nests.  Not just any old nests, but the edible kind, the ones that are considered a delicacy by the Chinese.  The ones that they believe have great health-boosting properties, and so are prepared to pay an absolute fortune for.  Well, yes, they have been proved to be high in protein - that's so the tiny fledgelings can eat them and grow big and strong so they won't be next-bound for too long.  But frankly if I was going for something high in protein, I think I'd much sooner eat a nice juicy steak!

So anyway, these nests are made by swiftlets. Legend has it that a great Chinese sea captain, forced with his crew to seek refuge from a fierce storm in a cave, decided to try eating them when they ran low on rations.  And he discovered that after a couple of days, the crew were all much healtheir and stronger.  And thus the appetite for these tiny little nests, made of bird spit, was born.  These days a lot of the nests are farmed in purpose-built buildings.  It's a lot safer and easier than collecting them from cave ceilings hundreds of feet high.  The building we saw had become home to the swiftlets when it was abandoned, and the new owner, a birds' nest magnate, paid a fortune for the run down house simply because the birds and their nests were worth so much.  Here's what some of the nests look like, before processing:

And this is how they look after processing, when being sold in the shops:

That big round box on the top had a price tag of 5,878 RM - that's roughly GBP1,175!


Before touring the house, we ordered a bowl of soup between us, so we could at least say we had tried it.  At 50RM (10 pounds) for the bowl, it was apparently a bargain.  We had seen the nests in the rafters, plus a few birds, and we had seen Malaysian workers painstakingly picking out all the bits of feather and other, um, waste materials.  Now it was time to taste the cooked results.

The soup came with a choice of raw cane sugar or honey sugar, we were recommended to use the honey sugar.  To be honest, it was fairly innocuous.  It smelt a little like egg white, tasted of honey sugar (!) and the stringy bits were just gelatinous, a bit like tapioca and semolina, except in longish pieces rather than little balls.  But knowing what it was made all the difference to our "enjoyment" of it - it was hard not to feel ill, and it would be fair to say that none of us has an overwhelming desire to go back for more.

We had a great time in Malaka - I'll be back with some more stories and photos soon.