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As easy as A-B-C

Monday, February 6th, 2012

 

There was once upon in my life when I had an obsession with cookbooks… I bought cookbook after cookbook because there simply wasn’t a cookbook I didn’t think was uninteresting. I had a list of cookbooks I absolutely must have, and at least a cookbook I was reading cover to cover. There were cookbooks everywhere at home; beside the bed, under the bed, in the living room, in the kitchen, in the spare rooms (I have more than one), and even in my mother’s house in Penang.

And I was of course too busy reading cookbooks to actually cook from them… although there were some recipes I wouldn’t have tried if not for those cookbooks.  I went through a Claudia Roden phase, so I cooked Middle Eastern for awhile, and a  Madhur Jaffrey phase when I tried quite a few lamb recipes. I am now re-discovering Donna Hay, an interest rekindled not by her cookbook but her iPad apps… but that’s another story – suffice to say my favourite dessert recipe is her lemon meringue pie.

But for all my cookbooks and bouts of experimentation, the dish I cook most often is A-B-C soup.  I don’t know why it’s called A-B-C soup – it’s what my mother and aunts call it – but just maybe, it’s because it’s as easy as A-B-C to make. Sometimes it’s the only dish my daughter is fed with, and sometimes she is fed that weekend after weekend – especially when I am too guilt-ridden to feed her fast food and hawker food and too busy (ok, lazy) to cook anything more elaborate. The best thing about A-B-C soup is it’s not too shabby – it is wholesome and nutritious, and tastes good. And if the kid refuses to eat the potatoes and carrot, you can always mash them up, add some minced pork and onions, and make cutlets.

There really isn’t a recipe to this soup; it’s basically boiling together meat, potatoes and carrots. I like to use pork spare ribs or chicken, and I also usually add a big onion, two tomatoes and half a teaspoon of black/white peppercorns. I usually use about 500g pork ribs or half a chicken, with 2-3 potatoes and a big carrot. I then boil everything with about half a pot of water for about an hour or so – bring the water to a boil, and then add the ingredients. Then, turn down the heat and let it simmer slowly till the meat is tender, and the potatoes and carrots soft. Serve hot with rice, and a saucer of light soy sauce and cut chilli padi for the meat.

 

Posted in Chinese Food, Home Fares, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

One bowl rice

Sunday, November 6th, 2011

I started a blog with grand promises of providing easy recipes for a friend who was overseas and missing home-cooked meals. I think I must have gone on and on about how cooking is not that hard… (which is true), but blogging is a little hard going these days. Another friend recently went overseas, and I promised to post easy recipes he could use – he has been away two months and has complained about tasteless English food, and I have yet to post a recipe.

Anyway I somehow got my act together (and it’s a three-day weekend), and so here goes the first easy recipe…

This is actually a one pot rice that my mother used to make in a rice cooker. It’s a common Chinese dish, and the hawker version is the claypot chicken rice. This dish is essentially chicken marinated with soy sauce which is then added to the rice, and cooked together. It tastes much better if you add Chinese sausages and mushroom, and a small piece of the best quality salted fish.

As I was only cooking for two, I prefer to steam the rice in individual bowls. You could also microwave the rice instead of steaming it.

First thing to do is to marinate the chicken. I usually use chicken thigh and drumstick, and it’s better to debone them. You could also use chicken breast fillet for a healthier version. The marinade is usually light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, oyster sauce, ground white pepper, a little sugar and some oil. If you don’t have all these condiments in your pantry, just use light soy sauce, salt, white pepper and oil. Sesame seed oil lends a nice aroma, so use it if you can. It’s also good to add some ginger juice. This is home cooking at its simplest, so just make do with what you have.

Chicken is the main ingredient, but it’s nice to add Chinese sausage and mushrooms. You could also used waxed meat, like duck, that’s available during the Chinese New Year season.

Once you have marinated the chicken for about half an hour, it’s just a matter of assembling your bowl. Put the chicken, mushroom and sausages at the bottom of the bowl. Then spoon the rice, and add enough water to cook the rice. Steam over high heat for half an hour. You could also microwave it, and cook it like you’d cook rice. It should take about 25 minutes.

My mother cooked this dish in the rice cooker. She’d stir fry the marinated chicken with the mushroom and sausages, and only add them to the rice after it’s half cooked. I prefer the rice steamed because it’s much softer, but cooking it in the rice cooker is better if you are catering to a bigger family.

I like my rice with lots of chopped spring onions, and with soy sauce and bird’s eye chiili. My daughter’s plate must be clear of even the tiniest speck of green, so I suspect that’s how the boys would like it too – one less item in their shopping list.

RECIPE

ONE BOWL RICE

(makes 4 bowls)

2 cups rice, washed

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

300g boneless chicken

4 dried Chinese mushroom, sliced

1 Chinese sausage, sliced

Marinade for chicken

1 tsp light soy sauce

1 tsp dark soy sauce

1/2 tsp ground white pepper

1 tsp ginger juice, or 4 slices young ginger

1 tsb oyster sauce

1 tablespoon oil

Add 1 tsp salt and and 1 tsp sugar to the washed rice.

 

Marinate the chicken for 15-30 minutes, then add the mushroom and sausages.

Divide the mixture into four, and spoon them into a bowl.

Add half a cup of rice to the bowl, and add water till about half the bowl (abt 1/4 cup).

Steam for half an hour, or until rice is cooked.

Garnish with chopped spring onions and sliced red chilli. Serve with a saucer of soy sauce and chopped bird’s eye chilli. You could also make sauce by mixing together 1 tablespoon of light soy sauce, 1 tablespoon of dark sauce and 1 tablespoon oil.

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Sambal Tomat

Sunday, October 2nd, 2011

I tried making ayam kalasan because I liked the recipe when it was first recited to me – boil the chicken in coconut water, and then deep-fry. It turned out good the first time I tried it, and the recipe is in today’s StarTwo. Fried chicken is my all time favourite, and this Indonesian version is full of flavours. Even the breast meat is tender because it’s gently boiled. But the next time I make it, I’d probably just use thighs instead of a whole chicken.

But as delicious as the ayam kalasan is, it’s not why I wiped off two plates of rice. It’s the sambal tomat, recommended as the accompaniment for the chicken, that really whetted my appetite. I have always liked a little condiment or side accompaniment to my dishes. I actually ask what kind of accompaniment is available before I order my food – pickled green chillies for Cantonese stir fry, sambal belacan for nasi pattaya, pan mee, Thai fried rice, chilli and garlic sauce for chicken rice, garlic sauce for loh mi, shrimp paste for asam laksa, mint for lamb chops, mustard for roast beef….

At the very least, I need my saucer of soy sauce and chopped bird’s eye chilli.


Sambal belacan is a staple; I always have a jar in the refrigerator. A simple meal of fried fish and sambal belacan with a little kalamansi juice is satisfying enough for me. It’s also good with fried rice, or fried noodles. Sambal belacan is also the base for kerabu..

Lately, I am into sambal, Indonesian-style. It started when I began eating at Nasi Padang stalls, and I found myself looking forward more to the sambal merah and sambal hijau than the curries. My friend’s mother shared her sambal merah recipe, and it has become one of my favourites. This sambal tomat, with tomatoes as its main ingredient, is also fast becoming a favourite.

I followed a recipe the first time I made this, but I have since just made it intuitively. I use cili padi instead of red chilli because I love how its sharpness laces the sweetness of the tomatoes. You could adjust the flavours to your liking, use more tomatoes for a gentler sambal or more chilli for a sambal full of kick.

RECIPE

SAMBAL TOMAT

6-8 red chillies, or 3-4 bird’s eye chillies
2 shallots
1 garlic
1 tablespoon cooking oil
2 tomatoes, chopped
salt and sugar to taste

Pound chillies, shallots and garlic roughly.
Heat the cooking oil, and add the pounded ingredients and chopped tomatoes.
Saute till tomatoes are soft.
Season.


My daughter is of course unimpressed with my sambal tomat, sambal belacan, sambal merah…. whatever; they are all too hot for her although she has no such problem when it comes to curry chicken or beef rendang. She is happy with kecap manis… another obsession I think I taught her.j

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Posted in Home Fares, Padang Food, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Char Keow Teow

Sunday, July 3rd, 2011

 

THE recent weeks haven’t been so good in the kitchen for me. I haven’t had much success trying out new recipes, especially in baking bread. I wanted to try to cook pad thai, just so I could have a noodle dish that I can add condiments to, the way they do in Thailand. I finally found the dried rice noodles used in pad thai and followed a recipe I found online. It turned out tasty, but I am obviously an amateur at stir-frying noodles cos I ended up massacring the strands. By the time I was done manhandling them, the noodles were in bits…. don’t ask why or how!!!

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I wanted to try making the pad thai again. The dried pad thai rice noodles is actually like keow teow; just not so oily and smooth. Looking at them, I just decided at the spur of the moment that I’d rather eat char keow teow. When I go back to Penang, I hardly eat char keow teow from the hawker stalls because my mother fries good ones for us. She’d fry the char keow teow for us individually, and we will stand next to her and specify how we want ours – mine used to be with lots of chilli, barely cooked cockles, lots of beansprouts and no chives. I like chives these days, so I’d ask for lots of chives too if I were to order char keow teow from my mother. And since she was not around, I had to fry my own.

So, I went and bought the beansprouts, chives and the most important ingredient of all, the cockles. People are wary of eating cockles these days, but we used to have so much of it when were kids. We’d go to the provision shop and buy a bag. Then we’d come home and blanch it quickly in boiling water. We’d all gather around and dig in while they were still hot, deftly cracking open the shells and dipping the bloody cockles in chilli sauce… such simple pleasures.

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Anyway, I cooked my char keow teow the way I remember watching my mother do it thousands of times. I prepared the condiment of dark soy sauce, thin soy sauce, sugar and white pepper. First, I fried the chopped garlic, then I added the prawns and then the blended chilli. When it’s fragrant, I threw in the noodles and stir it around (gently), and added the condiment. Then, I cracked an egg in the middle and stir the noodles around it. Then, I added the beansprout and chives, and finally the cockles.

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It doesn’t taste like my mother’s char keow teow – the noodles is wrong, for one. And it didn’t have the wok hei, don’t think the wok was hot enough. But it didn’t taste too bad, and I think I prefer my version than the ones sold at the hawker stalls manned by foreign workers. Of course, I am totally biased. But I won’t give a recipe because because it’s not exactly what char keow teow should be.

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Posted in Chinese Food, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Domestic Science Class Recipes

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

THIS tattered recipe book is almost 30 years, yes I am ancient. It was the first thing we had to do when we started our Sains Rumahtangga (SRT) or domestic science classin Form One. At that time, students were streamed into either Commerce or SRT. Traditionally the best students study commerce, and the weaker ones learn domestic science. Maybe the smart ones were being equipped with skills to conquer the commercial world, and the less bright ones are supposed to prepare for marriage and looking after the household.

The year that I entered Form One, my school decided that it was not such a great idea to segregate students like that – and they started a new policy whereby the first class did SRT, second class commerce, third class SRT…. you get the idea. Of course, the idea didn’t go down well with many students and parents, especially the top scorers. There was a flurry of furious parents in school that first week requesting that their daughters learn more useful stuff than domestic science… except for my father who was quite oblivious to how detrimental being deprived from learning to do accounts will have on my future.

I was 13, and I guessed I also didn’t care all that much… and besides, all the kiasu girls were gone. I had always helped at home, but it was a bit different learning domestic science formally. I think we learnt theory, and the practical classes were divided into cooking and sewing. I messed up the sewing big time, but the cooking classes were my favourite school periods. I loved the work stations – it was like playing masak masak but with proper tools. It was the one subject I didn’t have to study hard at.

I looked at the domestic science text book recently – my sister who is a teacher bought it for me last year – and realised that it was actually a good syllabus. We were taught different cooking methods, but at that time all I remembered was that I learnt to make food that we didn’t cook at home – rock buns, sago pudding, agar agar keminyan, kuih cara…. and of course sardine rolls. It was one of my favourite recipes from domestic science class – I thought it was most sophisticated to be able to make pastry.

For SRP (the equivalent of KBSM now?) we had to do up a menu and cook up a meal all on our own in three hours (I think). I remember I made a fish roll – fish paste rolled up in a thin omelette, and steamed. I thought it was pretty fancy…. I was probably not all that deluded because I scored A1 for my domestic science paper. Then, we all went on to form four and quickly got immersed in new subjects like chemistry and Add Maths (which I loved) and Physics (which I totally sucked at).

But I kept that recipe book, and scribbled more recipes in it. There were many years that I didn’t look at that book, but it was always tucked away at some shelf and I never had the heart to chuck it away. I made sardine rolls for our feature in Don’t Call Us Chef on road trip treats, and I found myself leafing through the book for other recipes to try. I was of course only limited by whatever ingredients I have at home because it was too hot and muggy an afternoon to go out shopping.

In the end, I decided to make cucur bawang, prawn and onions fritters. It wasn’t too bad, but I have had better fritters. And it got me thinking of corn fritters, Padang-style – I’ll post that recipe soon…. errrr, maybe later, considering how infrequently I blog now …. yeah, life is not as carefree as in those days when my biggest worry was if my teacher would scold me for my bad handwriting jotting down recipes.

RECIPE

Cucur Bawang

120g flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 egg
150ml water
160g prawns
1 onion, diced
2 chilli, diced
2-3 stalks spring onion
oil for frying

Sieve the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Make a hole in the middle, and add the egg. Dilute the mixture with the water, and beat the batter well.
Add the prawns, onion, chilli, and spring onion. Mix well.
Heat the cooking oil, and spoon the batter in the wok.
Fry till golden brown.
Serve with chilli sauce.

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Posted in Malay Food, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Kerabu Cekur and Salted Fish

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

I WAS stressed out over work last weekend; mostly from not being sure of what I had to do. Instead of turning on my notebook and actually doing work, I procrastinated…. by reading cookbooks. I read Nigel Slater’s The 30-Minute Cook: The Best of the World’s Quick Cooking, and came across his recipe for plum on white bread. I didn’t have white bread but I had a few ripe plums that had been sitting on the kitchen counter for days.

So, I started Saturday morning lining a dish with slices of buttered sourdough bread (courtesy of Marty Thymes), and topping it with plum halves sprinkled with sugar. I baked that in the oven over medium heat, and I have something to bring to my friend’s house. We had that in the afternoon, after we have coloured each other’s hair, trying to keep the grey at bay.

I was still listless on Sunday, but there was kebab to make for StarTwo’s Don’t Call Me Chef column. The kebab was real quick to put together – it was just a matter of mincing the lamb and chopping up some onions and herbs. With a food processor, that was done in minutes.

And since I was already in the kitchen, it makes sense to cook curry chicken for lunch. My colleague Kalai gave me her curry recipe – something she has cooked for years and years, and she can do with one eye close – and it actually works for me. As usual, I over-cooked and there was enough for me to have for dinner three nights in a row this week. I worked late and microwaving the curry was the easiest, not that it was so good I had to have it everyday.

What I could have everyday is kerabu – and last Saturday and Sunday, I made kerabu with cekur leaves and salted fish. Cekur is my favourite ulam; it is aromatic and almost always used in nasi kerabu, and it has a bitter tinge. I find that it’s always sold out at the Pasar Tani, and I usually have to go early to buy it.

My sister Pamela solved the problem for me by planting cekur for me, and giving me a pot. I am glad to say I have managed to keep it alive and well. So, now I just have to walk put and snip off some leaves whenever I want this kerabu.

This is my grandmother’s recipe, and calls for freshly fried salted fish that is then pounded. I don’t use kerisik (fried grated coconut) but you can add some if you want. If you add more herbs and mix it with rice, you’ll have a nasi kerabu. But I like this kerabu with only daun cekur.

This kerabu is real moreish because it also has sambal belacan in it. It’s sour, sweet, salty… with an aromatic bitter edge. It’s not something I’d recommend you make if you are on a diet, because it’s best only with rice and I polished off two plates. Not good for the thickening waistline, but great for the soul.

RECIPE

KERABU CEKUR WITH SALTED FISH

3-4 shallots, thinly sliced
Juice from 2 kalamansi limes, or according to taste
1 tablespoon sugar, or according to taste
10-15 cekur leaves, rolled tightly and sliced thinly
2 tablespoons pounded fried salted fish
2 tablespoons sambal belacan, or 6-8 sliced cili padi

Marinate the shallots in the kalamansi lime juice and sugar for 5-10 minutes.
Then add the rest of the ingredients, and mix evenly.

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Posted in Peranakan Food, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Tomato and Cucumber Salads

Monday, April 4th, 2011

I haven’t been cooking much lately. It’s been a whirl of trips and weekend excursions, and I am hoping things will start to settle down in April. But that doesn’t mean I have not been eating well. I had wonderful meals on my trip to Hatyai, Milan (will get around to posting about them) and in Kota Bharu (one my favourite food places), and we have also been eating out with our visitors from overseas.

In the midst of all that inactivity in my kitchen, I somehow still managed to feed my constant craving for tomato and cucumber salads. I don’t know if it’s just my body protesting against all the rich food that I have been indulging in, or this hot spell that we are going through, but all I really want to eat these days is tomato and cucumber salad. I always have tomatoes, cucumbers and lemons/limes in my refridgerator these days so that I can make the salad anytime I feel like it.

A tomato and cucumber salad is pretty versatile too as you can serve it with a meal of rice and curry, or as a side dish in Western meals such as roast chicken and pasta. I am happy to eat up a whole big bowl of this cool and refreshing salad as a meal. I have brought it to work for lunch and had it as a late night snack. But then I go through stages of obsession, although I think I’d be happy to keep this one around for awhile…

This is an easy salad to put together, as there isn’t really a dressing. I just cut up the tomatoes and cucumber, squeeze lime/lemon juice over them and sprinkle some salt in. I like adding mint and basil leaves in my salad because it makes them all the more refreshing, and the fragrance is so amazing. That’s also because I have planted mint, basil and Thai basil in my garden, and they are actually growing. I am a new gardener (or rather planter, since all I know of gardening is planting and watering), and I am pretty thrilled every time I harvest (ahem!!!) my mint and basil.

I added olives to my salad above, as I love olives (also obsessively) and some bread because I happened to have some leftovers. My colleague Marty Thyme who bakes bread like a pro – she makes her own yeast – has given me her homemade bread so I can make more of this salad. I brought that huge tupperware of tomato, cucumber and loads of olives salad to work last week, and we decided that it needed more bread to soak up the flavours and add bulk.

I am making this for lunch again today because I feel like I need to give my body a break – all I feel is my girth spilling out of my waistband and I don’t usually whinge about my weight….really.

I also like feta cheese in my tomato and cucumber salad sometimes, especially when I am serving it with pasta. That makes it almost like a Greek salad, but actually a tomato and cucumber salad is present in a lot of different cuisines. I like a tomato and cucumber salad with my briyani too, and I just add some onions and green chillies. The one I made below didn’t have cucumber because I ran out, and couldn’t be asked to run out to the stores.

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Ordinary Days

Monday, March 14th, 2011

I have been watching the news of the tsunami that hit Japan, and grappling with the sheer magnitude of the disaster. It’s pretty surreal seeing the wave of black water making its way ashore, and grabbing everything in its wake. The news feeds don’t quite capture the horror of the losses; they are reciting and repeating facts, and interviewing people about their experiences of the earthquake and tsunami but the voices of the Japanese people at the heart of this tragedy are strangely silent… at least on CNN and BBC.

I am a news junkie, and I have long realised that I watch the news with detachment – Egyptian revolt, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bali bombing, London bombing…. But it’s hard to be indifferent to the reports on the tsunami and earthquake, followed by the meltdowns in the nuclear stations, the volcano eruption and more aftershocks. The reports are about how it’s the strongest earthquake to hit Japan, and how many are missing… but I am horrified mostly by how a home is suddenly no more, separated and lost family members, freezing in a shelter.

There is a lot of talk on how no one is more prepared for natural disasters than the Japanese. But how do you ever prepare for how fragile life is, and how everyone and everything that you think matter to you can just be taken away in a blink – no matter how good you have been, or how you follow all the rules….

I am not sitting down and moping in front of the television or crying over the tsunami tweets crawling all over my Blackberry. I am not hugging my daughter tightly, not like how I did when I watched the footages of the Chechen school hostage crisis and felt my heart literally turned cold with terror.

But I am appreciating how ordinary my weekend is – how my house is standing, never mind that it’s a little messy and a little too dark to my liking. I went through last Saturday and Sunday acutely aware of how wonderful the most mundane routine is; doing the laundry, changing the sheets, fertilising the plants, feeding the hamster, feeding the child, driving out for swimming class, grocery shopping, cooking dinner, watching television, haggling over mangoes…

I am reminded these few days of how wonderful it is to fall asleep easily, not kept awake worrying over loved ones or feeling like there is a weight on my chest threatening to choke me if I don’t sit up. It’s great to wake up early this Monday morning, and work out on my cross trainer while laughing over Cougar Town.

And it’s nice that we have guests in the house, people we are fond of sleeping in and anticipating a good day.

We had loads of mangoes in the house because our visitors love them. It was the last thing we ate before we went to bed the night before, and I wanted more mangoes on Monday morning. I read somewhere that you are supposed to plant three trees in your garden – and one of them is mango, for “pleasure” because of how sweet and delicious the fruits are.

So, I decided to make mango smoothie – just lots of mango, yoghurt, milk, and honey – to start the day nicely.

In the days to come, I’d want to contribute to efforts to help the Japanese rebuild their lives. But just for these few days, I am going to just bask in the ordinariness of my days… and enjoy them.

RECIPE

MANGO SMOOTHIE
(4-5 servings)

5 mangoes, deskinned and deseeded
1 cup plain yoghurt
1 cup milk
2-3 tablespoon honey, or to taste
5 icecubes

Put all the ingredients in the food processor, and blend

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Pickles

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Blame it on my sour tooth, but I can’t resist pickles. I eat at Overseas Restaurant because I love their vegetable pickles, the ones they put on the table as soon as you sit down instead of the usual peanuts. I don’t know if they still serve that because they didn’t have it the last time I went there for lunch.

And when I enquired, the waitress said they don’t serve vegetable pickles…ever! But the only reason I was there for lunch was because my friend had dinner there the night before, and had the pickles… and it got me craving for pickles…so don’t tell me they never had it….and then they won’t let us change our tables even though there was a strong smell of turpentine and paint…the waitress said she doesn’t smell it.

Already pickle-deprived, and now told I (and the rest of us on the table) were now imagining the strong nauseating paint fumes, it was just too much trouble arguing with waitresses, and so we left. Yeah, so I like my pickles!

New Formosa Restaurant in SS2, Petaling Jaya also has good vegetable pickles. And there is a mixed rice stall in the Asia coffee shop in Senawang, outside Seremban (with the famous curry laksa stall) that also serves delicious vegetable pickles. I asked for a small plate, and ended up leaving the shop with a bottle.

The pickled cucumbers in Daily Grind in Bangsar Village, KL is also yummy. It comes in the burger, and they graciously obliged with a bowl of pickles when I asked for extras. I don’t remember if they put it on the bill, but I am going back there for the pickles… ah, I mean burger…with extra pickles, of course.

When I reviewed David Chang’s book Momofuku, which he wrote with Peter Meeham, I thought there’d be the usual long winded chef’s recipes that’s impossible to replicate. Everything is done from scratch in Momofuku, and there are recipes that require mastery of specialised techniques, but there are recipes that are not so daunting such as the chicken liver terrine and pickles.

I made Chang’s banh mi, Vietnamese sandwiches, with chicken liver terrine, daikon and carrot pickles, coriander and Kewpie mayonnaise. I didn’t make the ham terrine because I am still figuring the pork cuts to use for that recipe – what do you call pork shoulder in Cantonese?

Anyway, I love the pickles in this sandwich. The carrot and daikon have to be julienned right (3 in X 3/16 inch) – good luck figuring out 3/16 inches. Try using a mandoline’s middle blade instead, as suggested by Chang.

And there is also a Grilled Lemongrass Pork Sausage Ssam recipe, also featuring this julienned carrot and daikon pickles with fish sauce vinaigrette. I also cut some carrots, daikon and cucumber into bigger pieces to pickles using Chang’s pickling brine recipe.

Unfortunately I have to wait a week for the pickles to mature before I can taste them. If you don’t have time, do the short cut method – sprinkle a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of sugar for every cup-ful of vegetables, toss and let it sit for as long as you can spare – this recipe is also from Momofuku.

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MASTER RECIPE FOR VINEGAR PICKLES (from Momofuku)

1 cup water, piping hot

1/2 cup rice wine vinegar

6 tablespoons sugar

2 1/4 teaspoons kosher salt

vegetables or fruit, prepared as indicated

Combine the water, vinegar, sugar and salt in a mixing bowl and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Pack the prepared vegetables into a quart container. Pour the brine over the vegetables, cover and refrigerate. You can eat the pickles immediately, but they will taste better after they have had time to sit – 3 to 4 days at a minimum, a week for optimum flavours. Most of these pickles will keep for at least a month.

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Chicken With Preserved Lemons and Olive

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

I was in New York last month for the screening of Sex and The City 2. Hewlett-Packard (HP) hosted journalists from around the world for the screening; they collaborated with Warner Bros on the chick-flick which is in line with their strategy of focusing on their women clientele. Journalists were introduced to HP’s stylish netbooks, which were designed by Vivienne Tam and the latest is their ‘Butterfly Lovers’ series.

Everyone was of course more excited about the movie screening at the Paris Theatre, only a day after its premiere in New York. No, we didn’t meet the SATC cast as they were all in Tokyo, Japan for the Asian premiere.

Still, HP hosted us in style – chauffeuring us to the screening from our hotel in Time Square in a stretch limo. By now, everyone would have seen the movie, so I’ll not go into that – let’s just say that I am more a fan of SATC the tv show than the movies. Still, I am in New York… and two and a half hours of watching beautiful people in beautiful clothes is no hardship.

After the movie screening, there was an after party at the Bergdorf Goodman store. The window dressing all had SATC themes, and they were gorgeous. There were loads of fashionable and beautiful people at the party. Willie Garson (Standford Blatch) and Mario Cantone (Anthony Marantino) were there – they had the best scenes in the movie; the gay wedding scene was the blast.

Malaysian supermodel Ling Tan was there. Ivanka Trump was sitting a few rows in front of us, but she didn’t stay for the party. I was starving by the end of the movie, and was looking forward to the party (for the food….of course).

And I was pleasantly surprised to find the Middle Eastern buffet – because of the Abu Dhabi getaway, I guess. There were lamb kebab with yoghurt sauce, couscous, lamb stew with olives, red pepper salad, bread and hummus. I ate my share, but didn’t eat all that much. It was a little hard to eat as there were loads of people milling about.

My New York trip wasn’t an eating trip. I walked a lot, and only stopped to eat whenever I was hungry. And as I was on my own, I didn’t eat in restaurant but only grabbed pizzas and nachos and burritos.

Anyway, I have been craving Middle Eastern food on and off since that party. In New York I was drawn more to the falafel and kebab stalls than I was to the hot dog stands; I just never got around to eating from the stalls because the hawkers were either not ready yet or I was too stuffed from another meal or rushing somewhere.

And at the Whole Foods Market at Columbus Circus, I love the selection of olives – a tub of gorgeous mixed olives and they cost less than they do in Malaysia. I thought of lamb stew with olives, but mostly I just wanted to snack on them. So, when we were doing the column for StarTwo this month with the theme of preserving food, I immediately thought of making preserved lemons. And when it comes to Middle Eastern food, my most trusted cookbook author is Claudia Roden.

With the preserved lemons, I made Claudia’s Moroccan Tagine of Chicken with Preserved Lemons and Olives. It’s easy to make, and absolutely delicious – the preserved lemon lends aroma, depth and its distinct flavours. The olives are of course delicious; wash them a few times if you don’t them too salty.

Recipe

3 tablespoons of extra virgin oil

2 onions, grated or chopped finely

2-3 cloves of garlic, crushed

1/2 teaspoon of crushed saffron threads or powder

1/4-1/2 teaspoon of ground ginger

1 chicken, jointed

salt and black pepper

juice of 1/2 lemon

2 tablespoons of chopped coriander

2 tablespoons of chopped parsley

peel of 1 large or 2 small preserved lemons

12-16 olives

In a wide casserole, heat the oil and put in the onions.

Saute, stirring over low heat, until they soften and add the garlic, saffron and ginger.

Put in the chicken pieces, season with salt and pepper, and pour in about 300ml of water.

Simmer, covered, turning a few times and adding a little water if it becomes dry.

Lift out the breasts after 20 minutes, and set aside.

Continue to cook the remaining pieces for another 25 minutes, after which time return the breasts to the casserole.

Stir the lemon juice, coriander, parsley, the preserved lemon peel (cut into strips) and the olives into the sauce.

Simmer, uncovered for 5-10 minutes, until the reduced sauce is thick and unctuous.

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