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!

Buffalo Wings with Blue Cheese Coleslaw

Sorry guys, we know it's been a while since our last post. Bev and I have been pretty tied up with work and all for the last few weeks. Anyway, we're back again, and here is the first of a few backlogged entries to come.



This is a recipe for buffalo wings from Bev's stack of recipe cuttings. I matched these wings with a recipe for blue cheese cloeslaw that I chanced upon at CHOW.com, one of my favourite foodie sites. And as funky as it sounds (blue cheese coleslaw), it actually makes perfect sense, seeing that buffalo wings are typically served with crunchy vegetables and a blue cheese sauce!

Just keep in mind, if you were to use the Italian Gorgonzola for the blue cheese, be sure to use Gorgonzola Picante (a sharp gorgonzola) instead of Gorgonzola Dolce (a milder, sweeter gorgonzola), as there will be huge variances in the results. Also, instead of undertaking the labour intensive task of shaving my own vegetables for the slaw, I simply popped open a bag of ready shaved coleslaw vegetables from the supermarket. Ah, the conveniences of modern day grocery shopping!



Buffalo Wings

1/2 dozen chicken wings
2 tbsps melted butter
4 tbsps tabasco sauce
1 tbsp smoked paprika
1/2 tsps salt
1/2 tsps cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp cracked black pepper

Toss wings with all of the specified ingredients. Marinate for at least one hour. Grill in a hot oven, at 210 degrees celcius, for 10 minutes on each side, basting frequently with the left over marinade.

Blue Cheese Coleslaw

recipe at CHOW.com

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

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!

Barang, Indooroopilly

Barang, pronounced as Bah-rung, opened barely two weeks ago along the Station Road stretch of surburban Indooroopilly. Opened by a young Singaporean couple, Barang aims to educate the general population who "can't tell between a Nasi Lemak and Nasi Goreng, Penang Laksa or Nonya Laksa" on the specifics of South East Asian food.

New Brisbane was first in to conduct a review, and it did a great job of covering much of what I'd like to say about this new eatery/retail outlet. Apart from that, what I can add is that the food is really tasty and authentic. Being particularly familiar with Southeast Asian food, I have to comment that their chicken curry beats the other Brisbane competition hands down.

All the extra little touches in their food, such as the addition of fresh curry leaves in their chicken curry, truly reinforce their claim to authenticity. Now this is the REAL stuff.

Assurance in their food is very evident here, given their 6-dish main course menu. It takes a lot of confidence for a full scale restaurant to offer such a small range of food. But true enough, the food itself does live up to the confidence they've placed in it.

Compare their 6-dish menu with the stereotypical 101-dish menus in most Asian eateries which are, for the lack of a better word, mind boggling. At Barang, we can finally rest assured that the food we order undergoes a fast turnover, and ingredient items aren't sitting in the chillers for weeks, waiting to be utilised when someone finally orders number 87 off the menu.


Concise menus: reader-friendly, educational and informative, attached clipboard-style alongside chinese newspaper cuttings. Very funky indeed.


Nasi Lemak: coconut rice, fried chicken, beef and chicken curries


Roti Prata Singapura: a must-have in Singaporean cuisine. Pan fried flat bread with their awesome chicken and potato curry


Nasi Beef Rendang: spicy beef chunks in a robust curry


Hanoi-style beef soup with udon noodles: tender beef slices cooked in a rich and peppery broth

For those who are a tad unfamiliar and intimidated by Malaysian, Indonesian and Singaporean food, have no fear: everything is explained well in the menus, and friendly owners Chris and Kat would be more than willing to guide you along. As for those who've already been introduced to these foods, just get yourselves down to Indooroopilly quick.

Barang
Shop 5/8 Station Road
(Opposite Indooroopilly Hotel)
Indooroopilly, Brisbane
Phone: +617 3720 0169


Technorati tags: Food and Drink, Food, brisbane, food blogs, slow food, restaurant reviews, food outings, brisbane dining, cafe reviews, laksa, nasi lemak, chicken, chicken curry, curry, asian cuisine, beef, beef rendang, udon, beef soup