Tuesday, June 15, 2010

RAW MANGO CHUTNEY


Ingredients:
Raw mangoes ..... 2 (grated)
Ginger ................ 1 tbsp
Garlic ................. 1 tbsp.
Mint leaves ......... 8-10 (for flavour)
Jaggery ............... 2 tbsps.
Red chilli powder ... 1 tsp.
Salt ...................... to taste
Oil ....................... 3 tbsp.
Method:
1. Grind the mango, ginger, garlic and mint leaves.

2. Heat oil in a pan and add the ground mixture and season it with chilli powder, salt and jaggery.
3. Stir fry on low flame for 3-4 minutes.
4. Let it cool and you can store it in the refrigerator.
Goes well with puris, parathas and snacks.

Flowers

Namanya Ajisai, ga tau bahasa indonya apaan..
Mekarnya sekitar bulan 6 pertengahan, seblom musim panas.
Fotonya diambil di depan mansion yang gw tinggalin..keren, banyak warna, ada pink, biru muda, biru, putih, ungu. Yang paling bagus si biru ini, yang paling menawan.







Yang ini namanya tsutsuji, biasanya mekarnya bulan 5 mpe 6..bagus banget, soalnya ada di pinggir jalan raya...so kalo driving, mata jadi seger banget liat bunga2 bagus di jalan ya ga?










Dalam bahasa Jepang namanya Yuri. Cantik banget ya...ga tau dalam bhs indonya bunga apaan ini?

Bukan gw yang nanem...cuman waktu itu lagi ke post office, trus didepannya ada buket pot bunga ini...cantik banget, ga tahan buat fotoin..hehe

Eugenio, mon cheri...


Maybe you didn't know, but I simply love Eugenio Recuenco.




Quizas, quizas, quizas...

Toffee with Fleur de Sel


Woo hoo, I love it when people ask me to post specific recipes!  I found out recently that some of you have requested my toffee recipe.  I actually posted it last December, so here's the link for you.  It's another one of those easy but fabulous recipes.  I hope you enjoy it and don't hesitate to let me know if you have any questions.

http://nevertrustaskinnycook1.blogspot.com/2009/12/christmas-trees-and-hannukah-candles.html

Javanese Chicken Curry (Kare Ayam)

Javanese Chicken Curry (Kare Ayam)

Ingredients & spices :

1 whole free range chicken, cut into 8 pieces
2 cm galangal, smashed
2 bay leaves
250 ml cocounut cream (450 ml light coconut milk)
2 tbsp chicken stock powder
1/2 tsp white sugar

Paste:
5 Asian shallots or 1/2 small red onion
3 cloves garlic
1 tsp coriander ground
1/2 tsp turmeric ground
1 tsp salt

How to prepare :

Boil chickens until are just tender, discard the excess fat
Heat 2 tbsp cooking oil in small fry-pan, stir fry paste until fragrant
Add paste, galangal and bay leaves into the soup
Add chicken stock and salt, adjust the taste
Cook for another 10 minutes, stirring occasionally
Remove from heat

Cabbage, thinly slice
Bean sprouts, soak in hot water about 30 seconds, drained
Emping crackers
Spring onion, thinly chopped
Celery leaves, thinly chopped

Serving Suggestion :

Put veggies into serving bowl
Sprinkle with spring onion and celery
Spoon chicken and soup into the bowl
Serve with emping crackers

Javanese Chicken Curry (Kare Ayam)

Javanese Chicken Curry (Kare Ayam)

Ingredients & spices :

1 whole free range chicken, cut into 8 pieces
2 cm galangal, smashed
2 bay leaves
250 ml cocounut cream (450 ml light coconut milk)
2 tbsp chicken stock powder
1/2 tsp white sugar

Paste:
5 Asian shallots or 1/2 small red onion
3 cloves garlic
1 tsp coriander ground
1/2 tsp turmeric ground
1 tsp salt

How to prepare :

Boil chickens until are just tender, discard the excess fat
Heat 2 tbsp cooking oil in small fry-pan, stir fry paste until fragrant
Add paste, galangal and bay leaves into the soup
Add chicken stock and salt, adjust the taste
Cook for another 10 minutes, stirring occasionally
Remove from heat

Cabbage, thinly slice
Bean sprouts, soak in hot water about 30 seconds, drained
Emping crackers
Spring onion, thinly chopped
Celery leaves, thinly chopped

Serving Suggestion :

Put veggies into serving bowl
Sprinkle with spring onion and celery
Spoon chicken and soup into the bowl
Serve with emping crackers

im so sorry

Hello fellas, maaf nih aku lagi jarang update blog aku yang ini.
Bukan karena aku enggak mau atau apalah.
Tapi aku tengah disibukkan dengan banyak deadline.
Iyap deadline, lagi banyak artikel yang numpuk, dan juga ada project baru film dokumenter tentang kanker serviks, dan juga suka sok sibuk ngekor senpai zeke Khaseli yang lagi banyak gigs.
Ayo loh para bloggers yang tercintah gabung nonton aksi panggungnya Zeke Khaseli yang dahsyat.
Untuk Sabtu ini, 19 Juni 2010, bisa hadir menyasikan di konser adit surya (insomnia) sama malamnya di Teraskustik at teraskota BSD.
Buat info lebih lengkapnya bisa mampir ke zekekhaseli.com atau twitternya di @zekekhaseli.
Ayo mampir ke planet Salacca Zalacca dan saksikan kehebohan para aliennya!

Anyway yang nanya aku kuliah dimana, aku sepertinya tahun ini menunda kuliahku dulu, aku mau menyelesaikan beberapa project yang enggak pernah kelar karena sibuk sekolah *alasan* dan juga mau menikmati liburan di kala low season. Ada yang mau gabung.
Dan semoga setahun ini aku bisa lebih produktif.
Udah lama banget mandul nih. hehehe.

Oh ya aku juga enggak mau ketinggalan euforianya world cup. Jagoanku tetap England dan ditambah satu yang baru Spain. Setelah kecewa menyaksikan beberapa pertandingan yang kebanyakan draw. huhu.

Mohon doanya yah semua biar aku enggak termakan malasnya libur berlama-lama hehe.
Caw dulu

Kelantan

June 15

This dish might not look particularly appetizing, but blame that on my photography, not on the food.

It’s ayam percik (pronounced perchik), one of the specialties of the Malaysian state of Kelantan, in the country’s northeast. It’s charcoal-grilled chicken topped with a coconut milk sauce.

Sounds good, right?

It is typically served with nasi kerabu, which is rice topped with herbs and other nutritious green things, plus bean sprouts. And two nights ago, when I took this picture, it also was served with shrimp crackers.

You can see a picture of it on the right.

Ayam percik and nasi kerabu are delicious together, they really are, and I think they’d translate well to a western state of mind.

We also had them with clams cooked in sambal (what’s not to like about that?) and peppers stuffed with fish paste and served with salted, hard-boiled eggs that were sliced in half and served still in their shells.

I suspect going to Kelantan was my doing: As this trip was being planned I mentioned to one of the organizers that I’d had the best mangoes in my life in this state’s capital, Kota Bahru.

Next thing I knew it was on our agenda.

Apparently I had given entrée to Wan Norma Wan Daud, director of the Product Section of the Product & Services Development Division of the Malaysia External Trade Development Corporation, or Matrade.

Matrade sponsored this trip, and Norma is a native of Kelantan.

We had a good time there. Kelantan, I’m told, is quite distinct from other parts of Malaysia. It’s the most Muslim of the 13 states, but also displays strong influence from its neighbor to the north, mostly Buddhist Thailand, a country of which it was once a part.

The part of Thailand that shares a border with Kelantan is actually mostly Muslim, but the Malaysian state still has a number of Buddhist temples and monasteries, and it shares some words and eating habits with Thailand, too.

The Kelantanese expressed pride in their elaborate wau (pronounced “wow,” which, in a perfect world, is also how it would be spelled). It’s a word for kite they share with the Thais.

They also share a love for funky, fishy flavors, such as budu, made from fermented and, to my taste, slightly rotten, anchovies.

That was served to us during lunch yesterday, they day after our dinner of ayam percik and its traditional accompaniments.

Kelantan was unseasonably, unreasonably, inhumanely hot yesterday and, cognizant of the fact that I was in a serious Muslim state, I chose to forego shorts and wear long pants instead. Thus did I swelter with my fellow westerners as we were led through the market, breakfasting on a hot soup of laksam — sort of like boiled rice gnocchi — and looking at the region’s signature blue rice, dyed from a flower we haven’t yet identified, and at silks [June 16 update: the flower, according to my new friend Krista, is bunga telang; she hasn’t lied to me yet].

I had Paco buy some mangosteens — a fruit I’ll discuss later, along with the salak that we’d found the night before — before we went off to look at how serunding and dodol were made.

Remember, it’s easily 90 degrees out. And humid. Feel your scalp as the sweat pools there and then trickles behind your ears and down your neck and back as I explain that serunding is shredded meat made by stewing beef or chicken in massive vats of a rendang-type curry for a couple of hours, until the meat falls apart into strings.

We stood over hot cauldrons watching this happen, and saw the meat in other cauldrons being further dried out over huge flames.

Remember that heat as we moved on to watch the production of dodol, a type of caramel made of palm sugar and coconut milk that are slowly cooked together, again in big, bubbling cauldrons.

Dodol’s interesting, because coconut milk has a gelatinous quality that becomes evident as it solidifies; dodol has a softer, gummier, less chewy and more tender texture than a western caramel. It’s frequently flavored with pandan, although Paco gave me one with durian, which he has decided is my new favorite flavor (it’s not; I like it now, but I like pandan, too).

It was all quite interesting, as was seeing the coconut-milk snacks made by pouring coconut milk mixed with flour and eggs into cast iron molds over smoldering fires, covered with coconut husks to give them a bit of extra smoky coconut essence.

But did I mention how hot it was?

We didn’t have much of an appetite for lunch, which was another traditional Kelantanese meal called nasi ulam kampung (rice and village greens, I believe).

The name of the meal focuses on the rice, but it really reminded me of the Thai meal known as nam phrik, which means (roughly) “chile paste.”

Here’s how they both work: You start with rice in the middle of your plate, and you add to it, one bite at a time from an array of dishes in the center of the table, any of a wide variety of greens and a dab of chile sauce (nam phrik in Thailand, sambal in Malaysia), augmented occasionally by a bit of meat or fish.

Our nasi ulam kampung also had a tasty roast chicken, fried fish and a couple of different fish curries, plus that fermented/rotten fish called budu that I was telling you about.

I told Paco that budu was one of those tastes that are not easily accessible to Westerners, and he said that lots of Malays don’t like it either, “including this one,” he said.

But A’dzimah showed me how to eat it.

Both A’dzimah and Paco are from near Kuala Lumpur, but A’dzimah married a man from Trengganu, the next state over from Kelantan, which shares an appreciation for budu.

The key, she basically explained, is not to eat very much of it. You mash some chile up in it, then get a bit of fish and a vegetable, and eat it all together.

I agree that if you have to eat fermented fish, maybe because, I don’t know, no other food is available or something, it’s a pretty good way to do it.

Along with various faintly aromatic greens that looked like weeds, we also had green jackfruit, which has a texture very much like artichoke hearts, and a vegetable that looks like a gigantic pea pod, maybe from the Cretaceous era. I knew it from Thailand as satoh, but Paco just called it “stinky bean,” probably because of its tendency to linger on the breath. I’ve always kind of liked its weird nuttiness.

I later learned its Malay name: petai.

We all agreed the chicken was terrific.

Magic Bean in Memory

I have a sad news to tell u. I lost my magic bean. Akhirnya, dia pergi jua. Bln lepas Ain tak balik Shah Alam 2 weeks. Pokok ain pun mati. Huhu =(( sgt sedih masa Ain tgk.kering, layu & tak bermaya. Huhu. Magic Bean ni mie yang bagi..ada tulis "Good Luck"..tapi ain terpaksa ckp Good Bye kepada my dearest magic bean..














p/s : Semoga ain dpt tanam lagi magic bean ni..hehe =))

Phad Thai and Cooking Like a Pro

Professional chefs work differently to home cooks. This is a lesson you learn very early on in a restaurant kitchen.

Working a successful service relies on a number of key practices but chief amongst these is doing one’s meez before the first ticket comes in.

Meez , short for mise en place, a French term for ‘putting in place’, means getting everything ready to go so you aren’t faffing around chopping vegetables when you should really be concentrating on cooking that sea bass for table 14.



It is getting everything how you want it, where you want it so when the time comes all you have to do is cook.

Whilst this is good working practice for a professional environment, it is a lesson I’ve brought home with me as well. I approach cooking differently, first doing any peeling or butchery then moving onto chopping and the like.

Only when everything is ready to go, do I start cooking. This actually cuts down the time spent in the kitchen and means that hands on cooking is as swift and smooth as possible.

More importantly it means there isn’t a mountain of washing up to do after dinner because all the clearing up is done as you go along – another lesson you learn very quickly in professional kitchens.

A chef friend of mine put it rather more succinctly. ‘The six Ps,’ he said when we were talking about cooking for paying customers. I looked at him blankly. ‘Proper preparation prevents poor performance.’

‘That’s only five,’ I replied. ‘Five Ps.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I gave you the clean version. Commis chefs get the six P chat. Proper preparation prevents piss-poor performance.’

And he’s right.

One dish that really benefits from this approach is a stir-fry when you have a matter of just a few minutes to actually cook everything and Phad Thai is a real favourite. Last time I visited the family, my sister asked me the best way to cook this. I gave her a little lesson but neglected to write down the recipe so, Ellen – this one’s for you.

Ellen’s Phad Thai
The key flavourings are palm sugar (although you could sub in brown sugar) for sweetness, tamarind and lime for sourness, fish sauce and soy for saltiness and chillies for heat.



The core philosophy of Thai food is ensuring these are balanced so feel free to play with quantities as you see fit: There are no rules – it is a dish from the streets of Bangkok. It is fast, filling and very tasty indeed.

Ingredients are listed in the order they should be cooked

Per person:
Cooking oil (2-3 tablespoons)
½ carrot, sliced into thin strips
½ onion, finely sliced
2 cloves of garlic, finely sliced
Tablespoon of pickled radish or pickled turnip (you should find this in your friendly local Chinese supermarket)
Fresh red chillies, finely sliced
2 spring onions, finely sliced

10-15g palm sugar
2 tablespoons of tamarind
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce

100g rice noodles, cooked in boiling water

1 egg, beaten

Tablespoon of peanuts, roasted and roughly ground
Tablespoon of dried shrimp

To finish
Bean sprouts
Finely shredded spring onion
Finely shredded red chillies
Roasted and ground peanuts
Lime wedges

Once the first ingredient goes into the hot oil this dish is about two minutes away from the plate so you have to work quickly. Get all your ingredients ready to go and set up in order – this is your mise en place. Congratulations, you are now a chef.



Heat up a wok so it is good and scorching. Add the oil then tip in the onion, garlic, carrot, chillies and pickled radish (or turnip). Move around the wok then add the flavourings: tamarind, palm sugar, fish sauce and soy stir well then add the cooked noodles. Coat with the sauce then make a well in the centre and add the egg. Let it cook, scramble it and incorporate it into the dish.

Sprinkle in the dried shrimp and peanuts, stir one last time and spoon into bowls. Garnish with bean sprouts, spring onions, chillies and peanuts then feel free to go crazy with the seasonings to pep up the dish to your own personal tastes. Finely chopped bird’s eye chillies in fish sauce is a real favourite that always brings back the memory of Thailand.

Who needs a takeaway?