Thai Deep Fried Egg Salad - Yum Kai Dow

I first had this dish at a picnic cum potluck a few years back, where a Thai friend of mine, Noi, proudly presented this dish to the crowd. I was shocked at how delicious this dish was, considering the few very simple ingredients and steps involved in its preparation. Unfortunately I never got around to asking her for the recipe.

Just last week, we had invited another Thai friend of ours, Pang, over for dinner. This time, I was madly craving for Yum Kai Dao and decided that I HAD to make her show me how to prepare it. I've eaten Pang's Thai cooking before, and I can seriously vouch for its goodness; I guess I could rely on her to recreate Yum Kai Dao for me. So she did. And it was lip smacking!



Yum Kai Dao - Deep Fried Egg Salad

4 large eggs
1 brown/white onion, thinly sliced
2 tomatoes, wedged
a bunch of lettuce/salad greens
a bunch of coriander

Dressing:
1 tsp finely grated raw garlic
4 tbsps fish sauce
4 tbsps fresh lime juice
4 tbsps palm sugar
chopped fresh chilli, quantity as desired

Crack eggs into very, very hot oil and deep fry till fluffy and crispy, and yolks are cooked through. The hotter the oil, the fluffier and crispier your eggs will be. Let cool slightly, then cut into rough chunks and toss with vegetables. Combine salad dressing ingredients in a bowl and further adjust the taste as necessary to suit your liking (I like mine quite sour and hot, so I tend to give a few more bits of lime and chilli). Dress the salad and tuck in!

Thai Wi Rat - Our Favourite Thai Joint

Thai Wi-Rat in the Valley is by many standards our favourite Thai restaurant here in Brisbane. No doubt, it could also easily stand up to any other great Thai restaurant that you'd find in this big country.

The restaurant has been around for a while now, and Bev and I have been there at least 6 times this year alone (talk about a lot, geez). And everytime we go there, the food never fails to impress. We've tried most of the stuff on their menu by now, and feel confident enough to announce to the whole of Brisbane that Thai Wi-Rat absolutely rocks!


Yen Ta Fo noodles- noodles and seafood in a tasty red soup, topped with crispy pork crackling

Unfortunately, and oddly enough, everytime we eat there, we forget to bring our trusty camera along. Perhaps its because we're always too excited about the thought of eating there that we blindly rush out of the house. Well, this last ocassion was different, and we finally arrived at Thai Wi-Rat prepared. Here's some incriminating pictoral evidence of what we pigged out on that day.


Pad Thai with juicy prawns- possibly the most well known Thai noodle dish outside of Thailand

The food boasts regional integrity, something that's increasingly hard to come by these days. The food is of Thai-Laotian influence, and deviates away from most of the run of the mill Thai-restaurant-syndrome dishes (think green, red and yellow curry, fried rice, spring rolls, etc). Although they do offer these dishes still, the focus is on the not-so-stereotypical fare. Our favourite dishes thus far have been the lipsmacking grilled thai pork sausages, stir fried pork leg slices with chilli and green peppercorns, duck larb (mince meat salad), calves liver salad, pork fried with pickled bamboo and pad see ew noodles. They do the usual fare very well too, and we adore the pad thai, som tum (green mango salad) and chicken rice just as much. But ooh, please promise me that you'd order a side serve of deep fried egg and/or fried pork cracklings (just $2 each) to top things off - superduper unhealthy, but just too darn good!


Yum Thai Wi-Rat (Thai Wi-Rat salad)- crispy fish maw, calamari and cashews with herbs and red onion in a sour dressing

To add to the excitement, the restaurant even has a couple of their own no-joke looking metallic "spice kits" which they bring around to every table when it's not too busy. If they don't bring you one of these, you should go hunting around for them; some people like to hog them at their table. Inside them you will find four compartments containing the essentials of Thai eating: chilli powder, fish sauce, sugar, and a sour chilli sauce.

Price-wise, Thai Wi-Rat serves up fantastic food that would'nt break your budget. In fact, it was even featured in the Australian Gourmet Traveller magazine's Cheap Eats column a while back. Apart from the food and the price tags, our other favourite thing about this place is that it opens early and doesn't close till late. That means that you could drop in anytime in the arvo between lunch and dinner and still be served. Now, thats one hell of a joint eh?

Thai Wi-Rat
TC Beirne Building
Shop 48
20 Duncan St
(same stretch as Burlington supermarket)
Fortitude Valley 4006 QLD
Phone: (07) 3257 0884

Technorati tags: food and drink, food, brisbane, food blogs, thai food, spicy, thai restaurant, brisbane restaurant, fortitude valley

The Perfect Laksa- Mastering the Art of 'Tumis'

For those new to laksa, it is a traditional Singaporean and Malaysian dish which is served with permutations of a strict few condiments: boiled prawns, fish cake, tofu puffs, bean sprouts, cockles, and hard boiled chicken, duck or quail eggs. Some vendors like to vary the toppings by adding shredded chicken or crayfish to the mix. Either way, real laksa deviates not much further from this set of toppings. So, now that you have been introduced to the real deal, if you ever see roast duck, pork, beef, scallops or bok choy coming into play, please let it send alarm bells ringing.

For an interesting article that talks about real, authentic laksa, please visit this link.

Making laksa from scratch is simpler than it sounds. All you need to do is learn the art of 'tumis'.



The art of making the perfect laksa, or any other curry for that matter, lies in this one simple process known as 'tumis'. Tumis is a Malay term that refers to the act of frying a spice paste till it is properly caramelised. All too often, I have witnessed fellow colleagues and Aussie TV chefs frying spice pastes for a mere 2 minutes before adding the other ingredients for a particular recipe. Please allow me to insist that cooking a spice paste should take at least 15 minutes, not 2 or 3. Undercooked spice pastes turn out dishes that are bland and horrible.

This techinque of tumis-ing can almost be compared to caramelising onions for French Onion Soup. You need to make sure that the base of the dish is completely and thouroughly caramelised before adding in any other ingredients, or else the dish just wouldn't take off. This, in my opinion, is the trick to cooking many a South East Asian dish.

The picture above shows a laksa spice paste which has just gone into the saucepan. It is mild yellow in colour, homogenous, and emulsified. It needs to be fried with the addition of a little oil in the saucepan till the solids in the paste caramelise. This will take a good 15-20 minutes of continuous stirring over a low heat (just imagine you are cooking risotto, keep stirring and don't walk away till its done).



This next picture (above) illustrates what a properly tumis-ed spice paste should look like. It has now transformed from a pale yellow into a deep red/orange. Notice also that the solids have 'split' away from the oil, and are now frying in their own fat. This is the easiest way to tell when the spice paste is done; the oil seperates from the paste, and the solids begin sizzling in the oil. Now now, there's no harm frying it even longer after this stage; you will just be deepening the colour and intensifying the flavour, which is always a good thing! Thus, I generally continue frying my pastes for a further 5 minutes past this point.



In the above picture, the dot of yellow stuff is a laksa spice paste that is 'raw'. The reddish dot above it is the same paste that has been cooked for 20 minutes over a slow flame, till it has been properly tumis-ed. Now, that should make for a pretty good bowl of laksa!

Laksa paste:
3 lemongrass stalks, lower 2 inches only, sliced
1 cm galangal peeled and sliced
3 candlenuts (or macadamia nuts), chopped
12 dried chillis, reconstitued in warm water
6 shallots, sliced
2 tbsp dried shrimp, reconstitued in warm water
1 tbsp tumeric powder
1 tbsp coriander powder
1 tsp shrimp paste (that smelly stuff from Asian grocers)
water
vegetable oil

Place all ingredients into a blender with a little oil and water to facilitate blending. Blend till smooth. Add more oil and water as necessary to keep the mixture blending.

Tumis as per guidelines above.

2 cups coconut milk
3 cups water
salt
sugar
noodles and condiments to serve
vietnamese mint (laksa leaf), chopped

Once paste is properly tumis-ed, add in water and coconut milk. Return to the boil and simmer for a few minutes. Season to taste with salt and sugar. Ladle over a bowl of noodles and top with condiments such as bean sprouts, hard boiled eggs, cooked shrimp and chicken. Scatter generously with Vietnamese mint, a must-have ingredient in laksa. Do not fret, Vietnamese mint, and all other ingredients listed are available in Coles and Woolworths supermarkets; the exceptions being dried shrimps and shrimp paste, which are easily available at most Asian grocers.

Technorati tags: food and drink, food, brisbane, food blogs, slow food, kitchen expeditions, recipe, recipes, laksa, tumis, home cooked, spices

Teriyaki Glazed Pork Cutlets

Teriyaki sauce is much easier to make than most would think. I do agree, it may come across as rather silly to trouble yourself in making a sauce so easily available in supermarket aisles. "It's as ridiculous as making your own ketchup!", a friend of mine once exclaimed.

Nonetheless, I'd like to tell all my dear readers that it's dead simple; it calls for only 4 ingredients (sake, mirin, soy, sugar), and takes at most 30 seconds to make! Some might be put off at the thought of finding sake and mirin althogether, but truth be known, sake can actually be found at your local bottle shop, and mirin at any supermarket. Eureka!

Teriyaki sauce goes with anything.. absolutely anything: steaks, chops, fish, prawns, vegs.. Take a minute to make up a little batch of this and it will keep in the fridge for weeks. Whip it out at any time to season grilled meats or spruce up stir fries. See, cooking IS easy when you have versatile sauces like this on hand!



Teriyaki Sauce

Basic ratio:
3 tbsps sugar
5 tbsps mirin
5 tbsps sake
100 ml Japanese soy sauce

Measure and mix all ingredients in a bowl. Simple as!

You may increase the yield of the recipe by simply multiplying the ingredients, following the same ratio.

Teriyaki Glazed Pork Cutlets

4 pork loin/leg cutlets
2 tbsp oil
1 quantity teriyaki sauce (recipe above)
Toasted sesame seeds and seaweed sheets to garnish (optional)

Grill pork cutlets in a hot pan with the oil on both sides till half cooked. Add in teriyaki sauce and let simmer until it thickens enough to coat and glaze the chops. Garnish with sesame seeds and shredded seaweed sheets. Apply this same technique to other proteins such as beef, chicken and fish.

Tip: If cutlets are cooked before the sauce has reduced to a honey-like consistency, remove them to a seperate plate first. Continue to simmer the sauce until it thickens and becomes sticky. Return cutlets to the pan and smear with the sticky sauce. Please do not be tempted to leave the already-cooked pork in the sauce just because it seems "troublesome" to take it out and put it back in again later. Overcooked pork is mighty tough and horrible!


Technorati tags: food and drink, food, brisbane, food blogs, slow food, kitchen expeditions, recipe, recipes, pork, teriyaki, japanese food, pork cutlets

Stir Fried Snake Beans, Tofu and Scallion

We stumbled upon some lovely looking snake beans (a.k.a. yardlong beans) today. Snake beans are, as you can probably tell, a member of the legume family, a close cousin to the more familiar green or haricot bean. These beans are wrinkly and pretty long, measuring up to over 30 centimetres. They can often be found on Chinese restaurant menus, stir fried with a fiery and garlicky pork mince. You can easily source them from most Asian grocery stores and some green grocers.



Tonight I took a much simpler approach to cooking these. This stir fried dish literally takes minutes to prepare from the wok to the plate, or in my case, Chinese soup spoons. Lately, I've also been experimenting with the 'under 5' formula, something that I have come about to believe in. Basically, this idea holds that the number of key ingrediens used in a particular dish should be no more than 5. Hence, with such great simplicity, the beauty of the individual ingredients can truly shine through. These 5 ingredients include all solids, but exclude liquid seasonings such as oils and vinegars, and salt and pepper.

Here the fabulous 5 ingredients were:
snake beans, diced
firm tofu, diced
scallion (spring onion), diced
chilli, sliced
garlic, sliced

paired with the following seasonings:
sesame oil
fish sauce
salt
white pepper powder

Method:
Saute diced firm tofu in a wok or pan with a decent amount of oil to coat. Once cubes start to brown on all sides, add in the garlic, snake beans and a pinch of salt. Continue to fry for 5 minutes till beans soften slightly. Season with a moderate amount of fish sauce, sesame oil and white pepper. Throw in scallion pieces and chilli slices. Stir fry for a further 30 seconds and serve.

These go great with steamed rice as part of a large family style meal. Or you could even be a little more adventerous and use it as a vegetarian taco filling; there's nothing more liberating than letting your imagination run wild!

Nonya Style Glutinous Rice Parcels Wrapped in Bamboo Leaves

A mouthful of a title, isn't it. Well, that's pretty much what a Nonya 'Chang' is - Nonya styled stewed meat, stuffed in a bamboo-leave wrapped glutinous rice parcel. It is an East Asian delicacy that fervent households would churn out annually to mark the month of the Dragon Boat Festival. It is tradition that Chang or Zongzi is made during the month when the festival is held. There are many variations of this delicacy, but this Nonya one happened to be the 'easier' version that I was willing to attempt as a first timer. What I also mean to say is that, as much as I welcome a challenge, I'd rather not shoot for the sky and risk setting myself up for failure afterwards (and not to mention, making a terrible mess of the kitchen and wasting good ingredients).



I got this particular recipe from Miss Lily's lovely site. Apparently, she in turn took her recipe from the book, The Best of Singapore Cooking by Mrs Leong Yee Soo. The recipe was titled Kueh Chang Babi, and a great recipe it is indeed! Most of the ingredients listed can be purchased at any large Asian grocers' here. Try Yuen's at Suunybank or Fortitude Valley and Burlington's at Fortitude Valley as well. There are also more Asian supermarkets around Sunnybank, but we usually stick to the above mentioned places.

Now, to the part where we actually make the chang.

T'was a rather daunting task for us, attempting to make chang. Not only are there several different components to prepare beforehand (soaking bamboo leaves, rendering pork fat, preparing blue dye, etc), but the long cooking process to acheive the perfect al dente yet soft, delicious glutinous rice (bursting with rich, meaty stuffing) makes the whole cooking experience an ardous but rewarding one.

May I also add that folding these little parcels of goodness is an entricate artform in itself! Right now, we're still greenhorns with a long way to go before we master the art of folding chang, or at least getting the hang of making proper symetrical pyramid shapes. Oh, and having Bjorn around didn't help much either, for he made an equal mess of them.

Fruitful as it was, the whole exercise took the most part of the day, and cleaning up wasn't funny either. But they tasted and looked nice, and we hope you enjoy the pictures nonetheless!

Technorati tags: food and drink, food, brisbane, food blogs, slow food, kitchen expeditions, chinese cuisine, chinese, chinese cooking, nonya, bak chang, glutinous rice, bamboo