Spice Kitchen

PREVIOUSLY, you have feast your eyes on my lovely garden! I hope it has inspired you to do more. If I can do it, so can you ... and I think you'll be more brave on the manure than me ... so go ahead, get down and dirty!

Hey! I know you are laughing. But we've got to start somewhere, haven't we? I started with that garden. It is a slow and painful start, but when I get to point B, you will see how sweet it is the fruit of my labour ...

Now I'd like to share with you some of the spices that I constantly used in my kitchen. We have seen them in thousand of other places before, so take this as my way of welcoming you into my house. It is warm and full of the smell of the seductive aroma of the exotic spices ... ummm no, I think that would be my bedroom. Let's go to the kitchen ...

I like to keep them labelled. Others who are not familiar with the spices, especially the Asian spices, might confused curry leaves for bay leaves. Or fennel seed and cumin seed. Also, when I shop in the supermarket, I like to get the required products that are sold in glass jars, so I can recycle the jars for, well, my spices storage jars. Plus, I am allergic to plastic ...

The four ladies of spice: Cardamon, Cinnamon, Cloves and Star Anise. They can always be found in my kitchen shelves. Others that I should include in here are seeds or grounded cumin, fennel, coriander, to name a few. I do have them, and so should you.

Fresh or dried, I can't live without chilli. This one was bought in an Asian supermarket in Central Market in the city. They are quite hot, better then the Sambal Oelek, so this is good to have in the kitchen. Think about having stir-fried chicken with ginger and garlic, with one or two, or more dried chillies!

Black pepper. When I was growing up in the village, at school holidays I would sometime take up work harvesting black pepper in my uncle's farm. We also made white pepper and I always keep both in my kitchen. The white ones makes a simple vegetable clear soup nicer. Much nicer!

I knew dried assam slices from coming from the village. I can guarantee that not many know what this is, or what is the original fruit look like. One day I will go back into the jungle and take a picture of the fruit and share it here. Maybe they farm this assam these days, but to get them from the jungle would be so much fun. And you can actually eat the ripe fruit, almost sweet and look like mangosteen.

Herbs Garden

WHEN I cook, one of the factors that I'd always found helping me a lot, is the availability of the ingredients at hand. I do follow recipes and at most of the time, make the preparation days before I do the cooking (when cooking for special occasions or big dinner), but sometimes, I'd also like to challenge myself and say, let's see what's available in the supermarket and we go from there ... Let me tell you, if you are not the adventurous or creative kind, get yourself ready and well prepared BEFORE you start cooking.

When I was living in Germany, I tried to have a garden on the balcony, but every three months I had to leave the country for my healthy does of tropical sun and leave the three-leaves lemongrass to suffer the coldness of winter. I had never had real luck with gardening there.

Now that Adelaide has a hot summer Mediterranean climate, I th

ink I could try my luck here. The soil around the house doesn't seem to be promising, but as my Thai neighbour would say, put a lot of manure and you'll be blessed with gorgeous bushes of lemongrass. I would really love to see that. I imagine the sight behind my home in the village back in Sarawak, where the road leading to the house is lined with lemongrass, chillies, eggplants, beans ... and many more that my mother would effortlessly plant and enjoy watching them grow, more than hundred percent guaranteed success.

So I tried and keep on trying. I have thought about getting the manure, but it has not warm up enough in me to be surrounded by manure. I am sure it won't be that bad, and I will be rewarded with much needed green fresh vegetables and herbs. I will get there ...

Turmeric

Ginger

Vietnamese Mint

Chives

Curry plants

So for now, I am happy with this very small start of my potted garden. I did planted some chillies though in front of the house, and though they have rewarded me with some chillies to grace my cookings, they unfortunately have to suffer the constant summer heat in order to satisfy my obsession. And I am not going to mention tomatoes, who have decided to die slowly after one or two batches of bearing deformed fruits. It's too tragic to include them in here, so just the chillies for now ...

And for my interest in getting more western inspired cooking I have also included a few more ...

Sweet basil and parsley

Thyme

Sage

Rosemary

Bay tree

I know that one day I will be a happy person happily cooking in my kitchen, looking out at my healthy garden. One day ...

Saturday Night Dinner

It has been quite a long time since I last hosted a dinner at home. This last weekend I invited some friends over for a simple get together. Catching up especially with one of my friends who have just came back from his Chinese New Year holiday in Malaysia.

One of the dishes that I have always been serving is curry and since the last dinner we had has also included a curry dish, I decided to try something else this time. I settled for a chicken kurma. it would be fun since the last time I cooked kurma was maybe a few years back at home in Kuala Lumpur. And to try it hear, getting all the ingredients would be a challenge I was more than interested to face. I was thinking, if I could pull this out nicely, it will be included in my (so far still in my dream) restaurant.

I will share the recipe for the chicken kurma at the end of this blog.

For a start, we had some cold cuts and cheese slices served with pears. And to balance it out, I braved myself and served my home made vegetarian spring rolls! Unfortunately for this blog, pictures of the spring rolls is not available. I somehow managed to forget taking pictures of them but one day when I make them again, I will blog about it (or brag about it!)

Another dish I was putting on the table was kangkung friend with belacan, one of my all time favourites! Kangkung, as per wikipedia is also known as Water Spinach or scientifically called Ipomoea aquatica, if you fancy!

This is actually a very simple dish to prepare. Let me show you the way how I did mine.

You will need:

2 bunches of fresh kangkung (get this at the Central Market on Gouger Street). cut the stems, as you do long beans.

3 shallots

2 cloves garlics

2 - 3 red chillies

1 tbsp shrimp paste

Method:

Using mortar and pestle, pound all the ingredients (except kangkung), with the shrimp paste added last into the roughly pounded first three ingredients.

In a wok, heat about 3 tablespoons vegetable oil. Saute the pounded ingredients till fragrant. Add kangkung and a little bit of water, about half a cup. Stir to mix. You can add a dash of pepper to taste but I'd recommend not to add salt because the shrimp paste is salty enough. And too much salt is not good at all anyway!

Kangkung should not be fried too long, so when it is well mixed, ladle out onto a plate and serve hot.

And now for the main dish, the chicken kurma. Here goes ...

This dish is my interpretation of a recipe I found in a cooking book and from browsing for ideas in the internet.

Ingredients:

5 skinless chicken thighs - cut into 3 pieces

5 tbsp cooking oil

+ dry spices

• 5 cm cinnamon stick
• 4 - 5 cloves
• 5 cardamom (I love the smell of cardamom!)
• 3 star anise

* blended ingredient (to paste)

• 7 shallots
• 4 cloves garlic
• 4 cm fresh ginger
• 1 large onion

5 tbsp kurma powder (i used Baba's, available in the Asian supermarket in Central Market) - mixed with water to make a paste

5 candlenuts (finely pounded)

1 l coconut milk

2 slices dried assam

4 medium potatoes (peeled and halved)

3 tomatoes (quartered)

3 large onions (quartered)

2 each green and red chillies (halved lengthwise, do not split)

Method

1. Heat oil and saute the dry spices for 1 minute.
2. Add in the blended paste. Stir till light brown.
3. Add kurma paste and pounded candlenuts. Mix till the oil floats.
4. Put in the chicken pieces and mix well. Gradually pour in the coconut milk.
5. Stir occasionally until the gravy boils. Add the assam slice, potatoes and salt to taste.
6. When the potatoes are almost tender, put in the tomatoes, onions, green and red chillies.
7. Cook until the oil rises to the top. Dish up onto a serving platter and serves.

My note:

You can halve the amount of coconut milk used in this recipe and add a can of 375 ml evaporated milk. Another item that can be added is yogurt.

To make the gravy thicker and the dish a bit more yummy, add kerisik :-)

My Obsession

I have decided that I should create a separate space for my passion (or rather an obsession since I basically plunge myself into this) for cooking. I am not a professional cook, I only cook at home. For myself and surprisingly for me, for my friends and family on several occasions.

I have been told that I can really cook. Sometimes, better than what you can get from an average restaurant (so I am better than average!). It has also been suggested that I should open up a restaurant. I might. I have really been thinking about it and even toying with the idea of how to set up the business (not to mention how to decorate the interior of the restaurant!).

So other than sharing my home cookings in here, I would also write about starting up a restaurant business. I am not sure if people do this, starting a business by starting a blog about starting it up, but I've got to start somewhere. I know that this starting is, again, done in the v

irtual world of the web, but since the internet is my constant source of information, ideas and guidance these days, I think it's not really a bad platform for my venture. One day it will birth itself out of these myriad of dreams and materialise in the real world.

So let's get started ... !