vampyrichamster

To the best of my memory, while I was growing up, I managed to never try the classic Hakka dish of tea rice (lei cha fan), a kind of Hakka herbal ochazuke. My mother is half Hakka and half Cantonese. Most of the food we ate was Cantonese. I actually think the Hakka dish that most commonly appeared on our table was stuffed tofu (and miscellaneous stuffed vegetables, usually bell peppers). Mom only really got into the pickling thing relatively late, that I recall. We have enough seasonal fresh vegetables back home that pickling foods was often just a flavour-enhancer, or something specific for a recipe later down the line. More importantly, our food already used a great deal of fermented (primarily seafood) products anyway, and just about any food item that could be dried and stay dead, roughly in that order. (Oh, unsmelly salted fish, where art thou?)

Both of us have been buried under work lately. My eating habits have gone to bits, and Seth's belly is still delicate enough to require careful, mild eating. Comfort food is required. We both like tea rice from various cultures, and I had these mustard greens pickling with leeks the past couple of weeks. The general idea behind Hakka tea rice is topping steamed white rice with various fresh and pickled vegetables, and a protein, if available, before pouring on a ground herbal tea mix. It's meant to be rustic and filled with simple flavours (although versions in Malaysian restaurants these days can get kind of posh). I definitely didn't have the herbs or the time on hand to grind up my herbal tea, but I did have good genmaicha, which has all that lovely toasted rice and green tea flavour.

You're probably wondering about the kimchee. Well, on St. Patrick's Day, I made a batch of chocolate stout cakes, and was also looking to make more kimchee. I wanted to try making a kimchee that wasn't Chinese cabbage, and we'd just bought a large bag of baby mustard greens. So I used some of the chocolate stout and molasses that went into the cake as my liquid base for the kimchee seasoning, and threw that into a jar with mustard greens and chopped leeks. I must admit, it smelled awesome going in, like barley miso, very earthy and hoppy. It still smelled like barley miso after a week. When I sampled some of the pickled greens, they had taken on a mustard green noir profile almost. Actually a little strong even with plain congee, and that's where I got the idea it would taste great stir fried with something. My original idea was to sprout some bean mix and stir fry it with that, but chicken is faster.

The final result, rice topped with stir fried chicken and green tea, was everything we needed to pick us up after a really long day. It wasn't too filling, but it made us feel content. I'll probably only make this occassionally, as I only get a craving for this many particularly earthy flavours in one bowl only occassionally, but it is a nice taste to remember.

Mustard Green, Leek & Molasses Kimchee
1 big bunch mustard greens (kai lan) or ½ bag baby mustard greens, chopped into bite-sized pieces
½ stick leek
3 tbsps rice flour
1 tsp Korean chilli flakes
2 tbsps molasses
1 cup dark stout
½ cup water
1 tbsp minced ginger
1 tbsp minced garlic
3 tbsp rough salt

1. Mix greens and salt in a ziploc bag. Marinate for 6 hours, shaking the bag every hour or so to evenly distribute the salt.
2. Rinse and dry greens at least twice. Try to get out as much salt as possible.
3. Bring stout, water, molasses, chilli flakes, garlic, ginger and rice flour to a gentle boil. The paste should thicken before you turn off the heat. Let cool.
4. Layer greens and kimchee paste in a jar (with lid), leave about an inch or two off the top for fermentation. Cover jar loosely with its lid.
5. Keep jar in a warm, dark place for about 3 days, or until bubbles actively start to form in the paste. Tamp down the pickles with a clean spoon or chopstick every day, to release bubbles.
6. Refrigerate. They're best eaten after a week of maturing. Good pickles almost never die.

The Stir Fry
2 chicken breasts (thinly sliced)
½ stick leek
2 cloves garlic (minced)
1 cup pickled mustard greens with pickling liquid (from above)
2 tbsp cooking oil

1. Marinate chicken and mustard greens. Set aside.
2. Heat leek and garlic in oil on high flame until fragrant.
3. Add chicken. Stir fry until chicken is thoroughly cooked. Add about a tablespoonful of water at a time if the 'sauce' is too thick.
4. Serve chicken on top of steamed rice, with or without green or oolong tea poured on top (like a soup).

As we hit the colder parts of the year, I've come to appreciate a simple stew I began throwing together a couple of months ago. I like regular stew well enough, but there often is no way to make just enough for two. I could reuse chilled and frozen portions all year, but this quickly gets dull. I've also been on a fish binge of late. Fish, more than chicken or beef, holds up really well to quick cooking, especially if say, you've forgotten to defrost something in good time, which I do often. My preference, just for the colour, is salmon or rainbow trout, but any fish you enjoy in broth works.

The stew I make uses a few other ingredients I've come back to enjoy -- konnyaku, which has such a lovely, jelly-like texture that resists mild boiling, and fu, whose peculiar bread-like texture softens in the milk broth but doesn't quite disintegrate. Tofu adds slivers of soft silkenness, while carrots can be cooked fast enough to be tender bites of sweet and bright. What brings everything together though, is the milk, miso and seafood broth. Seafood in particular for the umami flavour, which balances out nicely with milk for richness. I add a teaspoon of honey to round out the overall sweetness at the end. Temper the fishiness of your broth with a tablespoon of ginger juice (or minced ginger) if you like. Especially if you are using soymilk for the broth, this really brings out the warmth and heart of the dish.

Ingredients:

1 fillet of salmon (cubed)
2 cups fish broth
1 - 2 cups milk (preferably soy)
2 tsps white miso paste
1 tsp honey
1 carrot (cubed)
3 leaves Chinese cabbage
¼ block silken tofu (sliced)
1 handful fu cubes
¼ cup konnyaku jelly (cubed)
2 scallions or ½ leek (sliced thin)
½ cup sliced glutinous rice cakes/mochi (optional)

1. Over medium-low heat, bring broth, milk, carrot and cabbage to a gentle simmer. If using rice cakes, add them at this stage.
2. Dissolve miso paste separately in about 2 - 4 tablespoons of hot broth or water.
3. When carrots are tender, add fish then miso paste and remaining ingredients, honey and fu last.
4. Once fish is cooked to your preference (I like mine medium rare), turn off heat and serve stew warm. The stew goes well with steamed rice, though if you are already using rice cakes in the stew, this won't be necessary.

Comes with this prefacing comment from the spouse: "Oh, my god. The food is so good!" (dying space marine noises in the background)

It is even a white sauce on white rice, which makes this a totally Swedish dinner. I know it would taste so much better with brown rice, but I didn't have any of that lying around. Most of the flavour comes from my attempt at mixing together a Creole mustard. Although I was afraid it would come out too spicy, once mixed into the sauce, it mellowed out rather well. Because I don't generally keep cream around the house lest I use it all in tea, which by the way is perfectly alright to do, I use a cream substitute I learned from my mother. This involves gently curdling a bit of milk in lemon (or lime) juice. The result is a soft, lightly sour curd suitable as a cream or sour cream substitute. It goes particularly well in stroganoff.

( Read more... )

Way back, I posted a version of kimchee a Korean friend gave us once. Since then, I have experimented with all kinds of different kimchee recipes to get a particular flavour I remember from the Korean restaurant near our house in KL. After a few years of trying stuff, I finally came up with a flavour I really liked. The secret to good kimchee is that there is no substitute for Korean chilli powder. It's the actual floral-fruity perfume of the chilli powder that opens the tastebuds in kimchee for me. Substituting it with other kinds of chilli powders or flakes gives the wrong scent and the wrong colour. I get my Korean chilli powder from Hmart, which has online orders and home delivery, as well as various sizes of chilli powder packs in varying levels of spiciness.

My entire opinion on fermented foods hinges on the idea that it is tasty. I've heard the health stuff one way or the other, but my final verdict on the subject is that it's tasty. Fermented foods were a big part of my taste vocabulary growing up. At least half of the Chinese/Malay dishes we ate at home or outside contained belacan, spiced fermented shrimp paste, which lends a distinctly pungent, warm aroma and flavour to foods. scanner_darkly once described a dish of water convulvulus fried in belacan I ordered as tasting like car exhaust, but there are more ways to cook it I have yet to experiment with. If I wasn't so afraid of making my kitchen smell like oil and fermented shrimp for the next year, I would probably make belacan fried chicken, a treat I still sometimes crave.

Many fermented foods in Malaysia were treats, or daily foods. Mom got on the miso bandwagon early, long before it was popular, so I had miso soup regularly as a kid. Chinese cuisine invented tofu, soy sauce and salted bean pastes, so these flavours naturally influenced my taste in food as an adult. Soy sauce is the main flavouring of my household. The Kampar chicken biscuit (does not contain chicken) is a savoury-sweet cookie considered a regional specialty in Malaysia, whose main flavouring is fermented, salted tofu. Cincalok, another regional specialty, is basically dried prawns in the runoff from washing rice, which, if done right, actually smells fresh and pleasantly shrimpy with the sweetness of rice (otherwise, it just has the most incredible pong). One of the most coveted fermented flavours in Malay food comes from fermented durian, tempoyak, which is like, double the pungent, nostril-stopping action. My favourite thing from the Ramadan markets is sweet potato shoots cooked in coconut milk with tempoyak, if it can be found. It's salty, pasty and ideally a little sour, with the richness of durian.

The only fermented food I've found a little too strong for me has been Thai fish sauce. Used sparingly, in Thai cooking, balanced with other flavours, it's awesome. As a flavour on its own though, it's like the stiff, peaty, fermented swamp water quality of Seth's preferred whiskey.

Kimchee is possibly the only pickle I've ever had time to make. A little kimchee, a bowl of rice and an egg on top is a quick meal when I'm particularly busy. The leftover kimchee liquid is a marvellous marinade and a great base for savoury pancakes. I tend to make small amounts, about one month's supply for a single person, as I'm the only person who eats it in my house. No vats, sterilization or specialized jars required.

( Kimchee ver. 2.0 )

Since I began making soto, I've been trying to recapture that wonderful flavour of Indomie Soto Flavour. As fond as I am of my mother's style of soto, I've always found the flavour a bit too clear and clean, but I couldn't quite figure out what was missing. There was a missing richness to the soup, even if the soup was made from strong, bone-derived broth, and as tempting as it is to order a 30-case of Indomie to lunch on for the next 3 months, the greasy, nummy, MSG-ness is probably not in my best interests. (All married now. Kinda need my hair to stay on my head.)

I started poking around online, and found that some cooks favoured adding a touch of coconut milk into their broth. A few experiments later, I finally came up with a soto that wasn't exactly Indomie, but sure came darn close. Coconut milk does round out the flavour, adding a new dimension to the broth. I've also tweaked a few things, using whole cumin and coriander seeds, which makes those savoury spice flavours all the more prominent.

( Read more... )

'Cause they're a treat!

I actually like making tea eggs on a regular basis. Like hard boiled eggs usually do, they keep fairly well for about a week in the fridge, and they're ready to be chopped into salads, toppings, stuffings and munched on for a snack. The sauce the eggs need to be steeped in is its own perpetual machine. Once you've made tea eggs once, the sauce can be frozen for as long as you need it around. Further batches can be made with the defrosted sauce, and additional ingredients can always be added to top up the remainder. The same sauce also does wonders for steeping other boiled proteins - shelled boiled peanuts, tofu cubes, boiled beef or chicken - just not fish.

When I first started making this, I ended up making huge batches because I followed my mother's recipe for lots of 24 eggs and up. The recipe below should work for 6 - 12 eggs.
( Tea Eggs )

Stir frying is one of the simplest, quickest, most gratifying forms of cooking I know. The range of foods that can be prepared with this style is far more extensive than virtually any other form of cooking, requires little effort, takes up a tiny amount of time, provides nutritionally-balanced one-dish meals and mostly saved me from starving on ramen throughout college. Please refer to the table of contents below for quick links:

( Table of Contents )

( A Basic Stir Fry (How to Go About It) )

( The Wok )

( The Meat )

( Fish )

( Marinading )

( Saucing )

Now here's a bit of breakfast food I tend to miss quite a bit from back home. In Malaysia, you may be able to purchase lodeh with nasi himpit (compressed rice cubes -- think of them as a square, tighter form of onigiri without the vinegar) for breakfast from the same places that sell nasi lemak. I still remember how I'd have this when I was a kid every time I had to visit the old National Registration Department in Shah Alam. The basement of the complex the NRD was in had lots of breakfast places, because the NRD office would require one to line up for queue numbers at something like seven in the morning, so everyone would head there for a number and a form, and find breakfast in the area. There was this one place we'd go to that specialized in nasi lemak and lodeh. I loved getting my rice cubes, scooping on my vegetables and then topping it all with the most gloriously oily deep fried egg. It's that sort of fried egg that only a place with a hot, greasy skillet or wok can pull off, edged in the most delightfully crisp lace of brown carcinogens. This is, by the way, my favourite method of cooking an egg.

Lodeh itself is a real comfort food. The gently stewed soft Chinese cabbages, carrots and slightly jelly-like texture of the glass noodles, in a milky gravy that's just gorgeously creamy yellow from the turmeric, makes it a very kind dish on the stomach when you can't take much else (and had it up to here with rice gruel and soups -- nice though those dishes are in themselves). Originally, one would use a mixture of water and coconut milk, which can be hard on the cholesterol, and unfriendly to people with allergies to coconut. I prefer to use a combination of dairy milk and a bit of coconut milk for flavouring, which offers a mild, sweet flavour. It should further be possible to substitute dairy with soy, which would work out well with the tempeh and tofu that can be added to this dish. This dish can be as vegetarian as one wishes.

Nasi himpit refers to a Malay dish of boiled rice compressed into squares. After cooling, it is further cut into cubes and usually served with curry or rendang. It is derived from ketupat, which is made by weaving a square case out of coconut leaves (giving the cooked rice the fragrance of coconut) and generally served to guests during festive occasions. I found this pretty nifty recipe for simple nasi himpit using a square baking tin. Alternatively, Adabi makes instant nasi himpit, which can be easily boiled in water to create enough impressive (and authentic) nasi himpit in abundance. Finding instant nasi himpit might take some work, however, as one would have to look up a pretty complete Asian grocer carrying Southeast Asian goods, or alternatively purchase this product online. You don't really need nasi himpit to go with lodeh though. Regular steamed rice will do just fine. I've also tried this with molded and cubed polenta, which turned out to be awesome. The custardy polenta holds it shape well when served in the thick, creamy stew.

( Steamed Rice via Microwaving )

( Sayur Lodeh )

I have two good reasons to have homemade liver pate. The first is that many store bought pates are not halal (but yes, this recipe has optional wine in it, go figure), which makes it difficult for my family to eat. The second is that however we look at it, pate that's been stored in a chiller for up to a month or more, loaded with preservatives, just doesn't skim the bare minimum of flavour that comes from freshly made pate. When made well and stored properly, homemade pate can last up to about 2 weeks in the fridge too. It's absolutely essential that the chicken livers used for this recipe are purchased as fresh as possible, and cleaned just as thoroughly. However well-meaning your supermarket is, please go to a reputable butcher for the livers, because you just never know where the market stuff's been.

You'll also notice that this authentic recipe stolen from my mother uses Chinese glutinous rice wine to flavour and boil the livers. The specific wine being used, Hua Chiew, has this gorgeous rice wine perfume, slightly floral, very sweet and heady. This is the wine of choice used in virtually any dish requiring wine in my house. One can just as easily substitute this with any other sort of wine or water, though I seriously would not recommend boiling the livers in animal broth, as this dish has to be preserved in the fridge for a fairly long time. It's further possible to influence the flavour of the livers by infusing aromatics and flavourings into the liquid you're boiling the livers in.

( Read more... )

Over the last few months, I've been having the oddest craving for yellow chicken curry. Specifically, the cheap, heavily watered down kind they sell with roti jala and murtabak during Ramadan in the tiny plastic bags where one is lucky to receive a pea-sized cube of potato. My version of the curry is high on the coconut milk and dramatically more generous with the ingredients, because hey, I have to eat something.

( Yellow Chicken Curry (Malay Style) )

( Curry Laksa (Variant) )