Omnivore's Hundred

Through Chocolate & Zucchini, I found a list, The Omnivore's Hundred on the food blog Very Good Taste. Not supposed to be the best food in the world (some bad, some good) but what an omnivore should try for once in their lives.

His suggestions are:
1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten (I've asterisked them).
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating (I've faded them).
4) Optional extra: Post a comment at http://www.verygoodtaste.co.uk/ linking to your results. (comments in parenthesis) The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison*
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile (to be honest, I really can't remember)
6. Black pudding*
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht*
10. Baba ghanoush*
11. Calamari*
12. Pho*
13. PB&J sandwich (peanut butter and jelly - I don't like PB)
14. Aloo gobi* (potatoes and cauliflour, Indian style)
15. Hot dog from a street cart*
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle (not a whole one)
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns*
20. Pistachio ice cream*
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras*
24. Rice and beans*
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters*
29. Baklava*
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas*
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl (clam chowder yes, sourdough bowl no)
33. Salted lassi*
34. Sauerkraut*
35. Root beer float*
36. Cognac with a fat cigar (no cigar)
37. Clotted cream tea*
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail*
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala*
48. Eel*
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin*
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone*
54. Paneer*
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal*
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian*
66. Frogs’ legs*
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis*
69. Fried plantain* (umm... aka goreng pisang?)
70. Chitterlings*, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho*
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe*
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu* (Chinese white liquor. Absolutely deadly. 40-60%)
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail*
79. Lapsang souchong*
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum*
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky*
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers*
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam*
92. Soft shell crab*
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish*
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox*
97. Lobster Thermidor*
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

My total score: 44. What's yours?

Kacang Kelor

To my horror I find that I am writing a series of food posts. Not very balanced in what is supposed to be a general blog about Katong, its residents and lifestyle. But sometimes, things just work that way. Today's post is about an unusual vegetable called drumstick, kacang kelor (pronounced Kah-Chang Kay-loh), or the seed pods of the horseradish tree.

This is a very unusual vegetable in that the exterior (the seed pod) is horribly hard and fibrous. But when cut into pieces and then cooked for some time, the exterior can be broken easily to get to the soft, juicy interior. This is the vegetable seen frequently in Indian curries, especially dahl (lentil) curries. But it really goes well in other curries as well, eg chicken, fish curries.

My grandmother's neighbour has a horseradish tree somewhere in his garden. Every now and then, he harvests the seed pods and my grandmother gets a share of his bounty. She passes much of this on to my mother. My mother used to cook it in fish or chicken curries. Then she realised that the meat was just taking up the surplus space in the pot. So now we have our drumstick cooked in vegetable curries, so that the main attraction of the dish is just this vegetable. After the end of the meal our plates are piled high with the thick, fibrous, remnants of the seed pods, all with their insides dilligently scraped clean. So here is a picture of kacang kelor, on the outside and inside.

Prawn Bostadar

We cooked some prawn sambal bostadar the other day and given that this blog has been silent for about a month now, I thought I'd put up an entry on this. Prawn bostadar is a very, very Eurasian dish. It is more commonly called green chilli prawn sambal, and used to make sandwiches with. In fact, what I like doing is eating the dish itself one day and eating the left over chillis in sandwiches the next morning for breakfast. Talk about eating your cake and having it too. But the traditional Eurasian birthday party tea (at least, for those living in Katong) would have red chilli and green chilli sambal sandwiches, sausage rolls from Chin Mee Chin, (next to Holy Family Church), and a birthday cake from either Cona Confectionary (other side of Holy Family Church) or Tay Buan Guan's cake shop (see older post here). Plus other goodies of course! And we'd play games like "Musical Chairs", "Passing the Parcel", "Crocodile, Crocodile, may we cross your river" and the like.

But back to the dish. Prawn Bostadar is a sambal, but because of the coconut milk it is not really a dry sambal (in fact the way I cook it is a rather wet sambal, coz I like the gravy on the rice). What makes it really unique is that the chillis are not used as a garnish, but as a vegetable - they appear in this dish in the same quantities as you would expect, for example, green beans to appear in a vegetable dish. And they are meant to be eaten! A dish not for the faint hearted indeed. I've used the proportions from the recipe in Mary Gomes' book, "The Eurasian Cookbook" but I've slightly varied the method. The major difference is that lazy people some of us are, the spices are pureed using a blender.

Ingredients

300g prawns, shelled and deveined

10 sliced green chillis (more, if you like)

1 teaspoon sugar

125ml (or so) thick coconut milk (I tend to add more)

5 cloves garlic, sliced finely

For the rempah (spice mix):

10 shallots

5 buah keras (or candlenut)

1 small cube belacan (Mary Gomes says 1 teaspoon.)

1 teaspoon kunyit (tumeric) powder (you can use the tumeric root - maybe about 1 cm's worth - but I always stain my fingers with this so I'd go with the powder).

Pound or blend (using the blender) these ingredients together. It's important not to skimp on the candlenut, and not to overdo the belacan or kunyit powder. Dish should come out a nice, sunny yellow rather than a bright orange.

Instructions:

1. Heat oil in saucepan and when hot, fry the garlic till golden brown. Remove from heat, dry on kitchen towels.

2. Add the rempah to the pan. Fry until fragrant, don't let it burn (medium-lowish heat)

3. Add the green chillis, and cook for a few minutes.

4. Add the prawns and fry (turn up heat). Because they cook quickly, after 1 minute or so, add in the coconut milk and sugar. Let the coconut milk thicken.

5. Remove from heat, serve garnished with garlic.

Babi Pongteh says Welcome Home

It’s funny what you miss when you’re out of Singapore. We all miss food, but somehow what I miss is green vegetables. There’s no kangkong or kailan in France, where I was for two weeks last month. French cooking relies heavily on seasonal foods, and obviously they never believed in growing the green leafy vegetables which we here in Singapore take for granted.

So when I got back to Singapore, I had a good time eating green leafy vegetables. But I was especially pleased when my mother whipped up a pot of Babi Pongteh for me. Babi Pongteh is made of a cut of pork called twee bak, the pork shoulder. It has a generous amount of pork fat laced through it which makes it really tender and juicy. But the distinguishing feature of Babi Pongteh is that the pork is cooked with taucheo, or preserved soya beans, with sugar, cloves and cinnamon. The gravy is absolutely delicious. I can eat any amount of rice so long as I can spoon the gravy over it.

Babi Pongteh is a standard recipe in most nonya cookbooks, as long as it is not a Penang cookbook. It is definitely more a Malacca/Singapore nonya dish, but I love it anyway. My mother uses a simplified version of the recipe in “A Singapore Family Cookbook”, by Violet Oon. Here is her recipe:

Ingredients:

600g twee bak, cut into chunks

150g sliced bamboo shoots

15 or so dried Chinese mushrooms - soak and cut into half.

1 tablespoon of taucheo

8 cloves of garlic

5 shallots

2 tablespoons of dark soy sauce

1 tablespoon of sugar

2 cups water

2 cloves

1 stick of cinnamon

Instructions

1. Pound the garlic and shallots, stir fry till fragrant.
2. Add the taucheo, fry till fragrant.
3. Add the pork and cook for about 5 minutes.
4. Add the bamboo shoots and mushrooms, cook for another 10 minutes.
5. Add the soy sauce, water, sugar, cloves and cinnamon.
6. Bring to the boil, then simmer for 2 hours till the gravy is thick. Alternatively, pressure cook for 20 minutes or so (add more water if needed, and reduce after pressure cooking).
7. Garnish with green chillis (cut chillis into 2-3 pieces).

Serve with sambal belacan and rice. And sambal kangkong. :-)

Father's Day at PeraMakan

Well, it's been a year and Father's Day has swung around again. So I asked my father where he'd like to go. I suggested a few places and met with pretty lukewarm responses. Then I mentioned PeraMakan (where we went to on his birthday) and the response was immediate. "That's quite good", he said.

So we arrived at PeraMakan (again) for lunch, and ordered their beef rendang, sambal lady's fingers, otak-otak, ikan kuah nanas (lemak) and the Father's Day special, nasi ulam. Of course we had to take care not to eat too much of the main courses or else there would be no place left for their yummy desserts.

All too soon it was over. PeraMakan's quality control is high and all the dishes come out just right. It was a bonus getting the nasi ulam, as this dish is not commonly found in peranakan restaurants. I do recall however that the Princess Terrace buffet also includes nasi ulam. Other than that, the only one which regularly put nasi ulam on the menu was the now-defunct Yuen restaurant on Upper East Coast Road. Even there it was available only on Fridays. The reason why this is so is probably because this dish is very labour intensive to make, with the many herbs which must be located and chopped up really small in order to make the dish.

There are also many different recipes for nasi ulam, with each family having its own combination of herbs. It is really a good opportunity to get to know and use more Asian herbs. Tasting PeraMakan's version of nasi ulam, the main flavours which came to mind were the laksa leaves (daun kesom), lime leaves, and the bunga kantan (ginger flower). The cooked rice is mixed with fried fish, hae bee (dried shrimp), toasted grated coconut, finely cut long beans, belacan, and the herb mixture. PeraMakan tops it off with some shredded omelette and prawns but that is purely optional. It is eaten cold and I like eating it with sambal belacan on the side (Yuen's version, if I recall correctly, had a little more belacan flavour).

u n a m i actually has posted a recipe for nasi ulam from "Nonya Flavours: A Complete Guide to Penang Straits Chinese Cuisine" - with photos of the herbs used. I was pleased to see that I correctly identified three of the main herbs, but there were so many more - lemongrass, basil, mint, cekur leaves (type of ginger), kadok (wild pepper) and tumeric leaves. I have found two other recipes, one from "Cooking with Asian Leaves" by Devagi Sanmugam and Christopher Tan (does this name sound familiar?). In their recipe, there are slightly fewer types of herbs but the key ones - daun kesom, lime leaf are there. Plus some green chilies for extra kick! The other is in Sylvia Tan's cookbook, "Mad About Food" where she confesses to using a food processor to cut up and blend the herbs. She too has a slightly different herb mixture and her focus is different - she emphasises the lime leaf whilst others emphasise the laksa leaf.

So the idea, I suppose, is to experiment a little when making your own nasi ulam. Maybe I too will give it a try.