Inspired by the mint, curry leaves and green chillies growing in our little courtyard garden, the flavours of Kerala recipes came to mind.
This light, bright biryani is quick to make and is delicious with a zesty salad and Spicy mint and coriander pesto
It has flavours of Prawn Caldine imbued into a delicious coconut rice topping finished off cooked “dum” style in the oven.
Recipe to come….but here are some photos to whet your appetite!
These easy to make curry puffs are a great starter for any festive occasion. So popular i almost missed getting a photo of them before they were gone at our Christmas lunch today.
Using the same filling as my samosas. But much quicker and easier to make using store-bought puff pastry.
They are delicious wrapped in the buttery goodness of puff pastry too.
A sure fire winner as an appetiser.
I make them into bite-sized parcels of deliciousness but you can vary the size and shape to your liking.
Use the filling recipe from the samosa recipe below:
This version of the famous Hokkien Har Mee, spicy Malaysian prawn and pork soup, was inspired by our daughter’s recent visit to have Laksa at Abel’s Komi Tiam in Canberra.
Stuck here in Sydney, with a couple of pork short ribs in the freezer, I googled around for a recipe to use the ribs and come close to an almost irreplaceable Abel’s Mum’s Laksa experience.
I read with interest about all the different versions of street hawker soups …which brought back great memories of our trip to Malaysia many moons ago.
The solution came forward in the form of a combination of recipes and my decision to just buy a good ready-made curry paste to start off the process. I bought this and other ingredients at a new Asian supermarket Summit at Bondi Junction
The great thing about this recipe is that it’s easy to make and you can pre-prepare most of it and just repeat and assemble at the end.
The other inspiration was this article in The Guardian Use your Noodle By Yottam Ottolenghi
The end result, somewhere between a laksa and a har Mee was just the soupy Asian fix we were looking for, and I got to use up the pork short ribs!
This recipe will serve 3-4 people.
Ingredients:
Method:
1. Cut pork ribs into single pieces in between the ribs, set aside
2. Peel and remove veins from prawns, reserving heads and shells.
3. Heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil in a large stock pot or casserole, add half the curry paste (reserve the rest for later). Stir fry curry paste until dark and fragrant, add prawn heads and shells (not the prawns!). Stir fry until prawn heads turn pink.
4. Add pork ribs, rock sugar and salt and cook turning until ribs are covered in curry paste and meat is sealed.
5. Pour in all the water if you can and bring to a boil, then reduce to a low simmer for 1.5 hours, checking from time to time to skim off impurities and oil from pork ribs. Check to see park is fall of the bone tender, add more water along the way to ensure you have enough soup for all your diners. (End result should be about 2 litres of delicious soup stock.)
6. After about an hour, hard boil your eggs, blanch your green vegees and set aside, blanch Hokkien noodles and vermicelli noodles, chop herbs, wash bean sprouts …so you have all your ingredients ready to go.
7. After an hour and a half of simmering…..Strain soup stock into a large bowl through a fine sieve or strainer. Remove pork ribs from sieve and set aside to cool in a bowl.
8. I then strained the stock one more time through a fine sieve, but that’s not totally necessary.
9. Clean stockpot or casserole dish. Pour stock back into the pot and place on stove ready to heat up and pour into your bowls.
10. In a small non-stick pan, add the other 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil, heat, then add all the rest of the curry paste. Once the curry paste is dark and fragrant and the oil is separating from it, place half of it into a small sambal dish. Add the prawns to the remaining paste and oil in the pan and fry until prawns turn pink and paste is nicely coating the prawns.
11. Heat the soup stock until simmering and add vietnamese mint leaves, tofu puffs to warm up….Quickly reheat ingredients in microwave if needed, an assemble bowls.
12. In large soup serving bowls, arrange your ingredients starting with equal amounts of Hokkien and vermicelli noodles sitting side by side, top with warmed pork, green, prawns, bean sprouts, heated up tofu puffs and halved boiled eggs.
13. Remove vietnamese leaves from stock if using, then ladle soup over bowls until just under the brim of ingredients.
13. Sprinkle with herbs and crispy shallots and serve piping hot with the sambal on the side for those who want an extra chilli kick.
It was lovely to drop back in to Hujan Locale in Ubud for a family lunch last Sunday. With the mix of colonial and Asian touches of decore, the backdrop of a traditional Balinese family compound and sunlight and beautiful breeze streaming in to the upper dining room, it is still a beautiful space made even better with their delectable cocktails and food.
True to Will Meryck style, the menu featured fresh seasonal Indonesian ingredients and at Hujan Locale, the menu ranges across specialities from various regions, with strong nods to Malaysian and Chinese flavours and styles.
The style is certainly more Pan Asian but the focus is on great Indonesian ingredients and is very different menu to that at Nusantara., so is a very good option as a contrast.
We began with the superb slipper lobster dumplings in a tangy tomato sauce.
The Crispy While Fish (Tilapia River Fish) served with a green papaya salad., lettuce leaves, and a tangy tamarind sauce …which followed was stunning in its presentation and deep fried in a way which separates the bones from the fillet making it easy to share and enjoy. The combination of the crispy fish, the sauce, papaya salad wrapped in lettuce leaves was delicious.
We tried the light vegetable curry cooked in a mild coconut sauce with yellow rice. Lovely as a side and/or a vegetarian option.
We finished our lavish lunch with the spectacular whole pig hock cooked in a sweet “Babi Kecap” style sauce, with steamed buns, cucumber and spring onions. The expertly deboned and shredded the pork at the table adding a sense of theatre to the occasion.
Definitely another High Five for Hujan Locale at Ubud. Here’s a link to my first review 7 years ago when it was just a new kid on the block.
On our last night at Arcadia Retreat in Rarotonga our friend Neil made this delicious and nifty version of nachos and chilli.
As we know Nachos are usually multi-layers of tortilla chips with cheese and a variety of toppings often including versions of chilli con carne or meatballs. Inevitably the chips go soggy in parts, but with Neil’s Nifty Nachos, there is no danger of that!
The nifty trick is simply serve the cheesy tortillas baked in the oven separately to the chilli, sour cream and guacamole!
His recipe for the chilli con carne is also delicious, imbued with spices such as cinnamon and cloves!
In exploring tips for great nachos I found these two articles which focus on the more traditional multi-layered versions.
This story from the Cape Cod Times suggests using the cheese as a buffer zone to protect the crispiness of the chips. (This story also has some interesting suggestions about the creation and naming of nachos.)
And Bon Appetit lays out 10 rules for making nachos.
But neither suggest Neil’s Nifty Nachos version of simply separating the chips and sauce and completely avoiding any chance of soggy chips in the first place!
So here’s how he does it.
Make the chilli first, but don’t forget to get the ingredients for the nachos and sides when you go shopping!
Chilli Ingredients
Method:
1. Heat oil in a large heavy based pot or pan with a lid, and add cinnamon, cloves, cumin seeds and bay leaf ..heat until fragrant.
2. Add pork and beef mince, garlic, onion, chopped chilli and chilli powder.
3. Turn up heat frying and breaking up mince continuously with a spoon for about 5 minutes until well coloured and onions are translucent. It’s important to dry fry the mince rather than allow it to stew.
4. Add tinned tomato, tomato paste and can of kidney beans with brine and simmer over medium heat for 20 minutes or so to allow mince to absorb flavours, adding 1 cup water if mixture is sticking.
5. Add green capsicum, half the fresh coriander and fresh tomato and cook for another 15 minutes until sauce is reduced and capsicum is just cooked.
6. Add the rest of the fresh chopped coriander and mix through.
7. Serve with tortilla chips, sour cream, pickled jalapeños and guacamole on the side.
Nachos ingredients:
Method:
1. Turn on your grill to high heat and line baking pan with baking paper.
2. Alternately layer tortilla chips generously sprinkling the two types of cheese between them, saving enough for a thick layer of cheese on top.
3. Grill chips until cheese is melted and chips are crispy. Serve immediately on the side with Neil’s chilli, sour cream, pickled jalapeños and sour cream on the side.
Lift the cheesy tortilla chips with the baking paper onto a platter or just place baking pan (on a placemat) on the table with chilli con carne and sides such as sour cream, guacamole and pickled jalapeños to the side.
Guests serve themselves, layering the chips with the chilli and sides to their taste, but you can be guaranteed that the chips stay crispy and the chilli is delicious!
This zesty finger lime cucumber salad was a delicious accompaniment to our warm beef salad, and would also be lovely with grilled or poached fish or chicken.
A friend of ours had gifted us native Australian finger limes which are becoming a very trendy ingredient on restaurant menus “down-under”, but they are still difficult to find in shops. If you see any, make sure you grab them as you will love their unique “caviar” like texture with tiny balls of lime that pop in your mouth.
You can read more about this intriguing fruit https://tuckerbush.com.au/finger-lime-citrus-australasica/
I really wanted to make a dish that would showcase their flavour n texture ad thought cucumbers would be a good “backdrop” for this purpose.
I found this great recipe on The Devil Wears Salad but didn’t have all the ingredients to hand so improvised with things I had to hand.
The resulting cucumber salad topped with the caviar-like pearls of finger lime was delicious and the perfect zesty accompaniment to our warm beef salad.
(Thanks Helen for gifting us such a wonderful new ingredient!)
Ingredients:
Method:
1. Slice and chop one cucumber into small chunks. I slice then quarter each slice. Then using a large vegetable peeler, “peel” the second cucumber into long ribbons. Mix the 2 styles of cucumber in a bowl and set aside.
2. Chop the chilli finely and crush the ginger.
3. Mix together the soy sauce, sesame oil, crushed ginger , chopped chilli, and vinegar in a small bowl.
3. Cut the finger limes in half, horizontally. Onto a plate, Squeeze the end of each half gently but firmly until “pearls” of lime emerge. Repeat with all lime halves until you have a glistening pile of finger lime “caviar”. (You want to do this as close to serving your salad as possible so the finger lime pearls don’t dry up and clump together in lumps)
5. Gently toss dressing through cucumbers, then place the dressed cucumbers on a serving plate and scatter the finger lime caviar over the salad and serve immediately.
