No sooner had I published my Braised Pork Shoulder Article and Recipe than I came across a version done in the traditional style, with Pork Belly.

Happy days back then, but it is indeed correct that the traditional Pork Braised in Soy Sauce with Five Spice Powder, or Babi Kecap in Bahasa Indonesia, used pork belly.

I changed my recipe to use Pork Shoulder, albeit a fatty portion, out of guilt at the amount of fat in Pork Belly. Still, the writer makes a convincing argument that an occasional indulgence is OK.

What I especially like about her recipe is the inclusion of shiitake mushrooms. It adds a different texture to the dish, and rounds it off. An excellent idea that I will be adopting next time I cook this dish.

Last night I cooked my usual Pork Vindaloo, but thought I’d give it a bit of a tweak for a change.

Nothing dramatic, just cut back on the dried chillies from 20 to 12, and added 1 heaped teaspoon of Garam Masala.

It turned out quite nicely, mellower due to the reduction of the chillies and with a deeper flavour due to the addition of the Garam Masala.

 It will be interesting to see how it freezes (I froze 4 portions), as typically the chilli heat diminishes in the freezer and a richer flavour develops.

Time will tell.

Usually on weeknights, I have a soft spot for quick and easy recipes. Not too many ingredients, not too much prep, easy cooking. Usually.

Since I cook because of the freedom of choice it gives me in terms of culinary indulgence, from time to time I get overwhelmed by that urge to cook purely for taste, never mind the effort.

So this week has seen me do somewhat long recipes on two days straight.

Monday, I cooked Lamb Shanks in Indian spices. If you have cooked Raan, North Indian Moghul style Roast Leg of Lamb, you will know the sort of dish.

This one started with an impulse buy in the supermarket – I saw a pack of 2 New Zealand lamb shanks and immediately thought of using them in this dish.

So, a lot of trimming of the shanks, preparation of marinade, frying the whole spices and masala, adding in the shanks, then transferring all to a casserole just large enough to hold the shanks.

I would have liked to have done 3 hours in the oven at 110°C / 230°F, but I started late because it was a busy day, and settled for 150°C / 300°F for 2 hours. Plus 10 minutes under the broiler.

This is not one of those stick it in the oven and leave it dishes. Since there is very little masala, it is fairly dry and does not even qualify as a braise. So, the shanks had to be turned after 45 minutes, 90 minutes, 2 hours then again after 5 minutes under the broiler, each time spooning some masala over the shanks.

It turned out well, served with rice, an Indian style tomato soup and a very un-Indian French beans sautéed in butter.

Tuesday, I decided to cook an Indonesian ox-tail soup. This one is a joy – it took much experimenting before I finally created a recipe I was happy with.

It does however have a number of steps that are there purely for taste and quality, at the expense of expediency. I first slowly bring the ox-tails to a boil in plain water, removing scum as it rises. Then that water gets discarded and the pot scrubbed off to remove any scum sticking to it.

I then start over, frying spices etc, until the water goes in again, then simmer for 2 hours. This too is not a leave it sort of dish. It does require periodic monitoring that it is at no more than a simmer. If you boil it with all the fat still there, it will become an oily emulsion, ie. ruined.

After 2 hours simmering, in go the vegetables, then simmer for another 30 minutes. Put the pot into a basin of water to cool it down. After 3 changes of water, it is cool enough to go in the fridge. That will allow the flavours to mature and the fat to solidify on the surface.

Today, Wednesday, I will de-fat the soup, re-heat it, season, garnish, and we will have it for dinner.

Quite a week. I also took all the requisite photos, and will be publishing the articles and recipes on my site in due course.

And was it all worth it? I reckon so. Easy stuff gets boring after a while.

I wrote in my post of 16th June, 2008 that freezing the cloud ear fungus (mushrooms) seemed to give them a slightly powdery texture.I since cooked a larger batch, and as noted, prepared more gravy so that the mushrooms could be submerged in gravy when frozen.

This has done the trick - texture was normal, so obviously any deterioration was due to freezer damage from exposure, albeit in an airtight container.

Cooking with Cloud Ear Fungus

Sometimes in your travels, you come across a great dish that you cannot forget. Trying to re-create it at home can be a challenge, but it is worth the effort.I first came across the dish on one of my regular business trips to Jakarta. Staying at a hotel that was popular with the locals and not tourists meant that the food there was pretty authentic. I quickly developed a selection of favourite dishes from the menu that became dinner must-haves.

One trip, I noticed the menu had changed and on it was Ikan Bakar Colo Colo. I decided to try it, and was struck by how simple it was and the great taste. They used a nice thick seabass fillet in that hotel, though they did say that restaurants outside would grill whole fish, rather than a single portion fillet. One of the things that made it special was the colo colo sauce, some call it a sambal, which because it was served in a small quantity, did not overwhelm the fish.

So, the dish went onto my list of must-haves. Some trips it was not so good, I suspect because the chef who got it onto the menu was the expert and if he was off, then another chefs efforts did not quite measure up.

Re-Creating The Recipe.

When I got back to Thailand, I searched the net and downloaded a recipe. I tried it as is, and it was a veritable disaster.

So, I had to content myself with having the dish whenever business took me to Jakarta. One day, waiting for a flight at an airport out in the provinces, I came across a cookbook at the airport bookstore. In it was a recipe for Ikan Bakar Colo Colo, so I bought the book on the spot.

Soon after, I tried the recipe as is. It was good, but not exactly what I had in the hotel. So, the next trip when I got to eat the dish, I made a careful comparison of ingredients and taste, to the best that one can tell by looking at and tasting the finished dish.

The difference came from the green chillies, which have a unique taste, addition of bird chillies which give a ‘kick’ to it, a little garlic and I believe the Indonesian kecap manis, or sweet soy sauce, which has a taste rather different from Chinese Sweet Soy Sauce.

And so, all set, I cooked the dish back in Thailand. It was wonderful!

As I no longer travel to Indonesia on business, I cannot readily get kecap manis, but I do intend to ask anyone who travels there to bring back a bottle.

Article / Recipe

It’s hard to get bored with food if you always tweak the recipes you use. I do that, even with my own creations. If the result is great, I’ll share it as an update, which is what I am doing today.

In May, I posted an article and recipe for Fusion Duck Curry. At the time I was eating the curry, I made a note that I would like to try it with the addition of curry leaves and garam masala.

Well, some time has passed and I was asked if I would cook the dish again. As I did that, I saw my note to try the variation. So I added 3 sprigs of curry leaves at the same time as the sliced onions, and ½ teaspoon garam masala together with the other spice powders. I also reduced the water to 1 cup, and reduced the heat to get the barest of simmers. Cooking time was the same.

It worked wonderfully, with a thicker, more flavourful gravy. Try it, you will not be disappointed I assure you.

As a kid, whilst Ceylonese Banana Leaf Cuisine was a treat, prawn or shrimp curries were not on my list of favourites. When it came to prawn curry, we had a choice of ‘wet’ prawn curry, ie a prawn / shrimp curry with gravy, generally with smaller prawns, or a ‘dry’ prawn curry, ie. stir-fried prawns, generally larger ones. The larger ones would be salt-water prawns, as Tiger Prawns were unknown back then.As we bought the curries from restaurants, the prawns were usually cooked shell-on to save time, hence my dislike of them; I was never one to eat the heads, so the shell was just a needless nuisance at that time.

Today, a spicy stir-fry of prawns (shrimp) has certainly become one of my favourites, though I do remove the shells for cooking. And yes, I am partial to a nice prawn curry with gravy.

The stir-fry that I like is a visual treat with the different colours of the ingredients and the great texture of the dish - yellow from the turmeric, red from the slivers of ground chilli and sliced onions, green from the sliced chillies and curry leaves, black from the pepper and mustard seeds and the golden colour of fried garlic. All these, with a taste and aroma to match.

Full Article and Recipe

One of the undoubted favourites in Thai cuisine, leaving aside touristy stuff, is grilled chicken. It is usually served with som tam (Thai papaya salad) and sticky rice (glutinous rice).

Getting a good recipe is difficult. I have 3 from my collection of Thai cookbooks, and they can be best described as not having any commercial potential. So, I have been experimenting, with a fair degree of success, but still not at the point that I can say “This is it”.

Last night I made another change to my recipe, and instead of grilling the whole chicken, I just roasted it. To be honest, I was lazy to set up the rotisserie and just used the smaller oven. The fan supposedly gives the effect of a rotisserie, but moves the air around the chicken instead of moving the chicken - so the manual claims, doubtless with input from the marketing department.

Anyway, I decided to try the circular heating element in addition to the upper and lower elements, and this time I positioned the roasting tray on the lowest rack level. This positions the chicken so that most of it is directly in front of the fan. Not a good idea. Within 20 minutes it became apparent that spots were going to char long before the chicken would be done. I dropped the temperature from 180°C / 360°F to 160°C / 320°F for 10 minutes and raised the rack 1 level so that only the top third of the fan blew directly at the chicken.

When I was comfortable the chicken would not char, I raised the temperature to the original setting. By then my calculated timing was out of course, and I was flying by the seat of my pants. No matter, at least I had things under control. (For more on the circular element and timings, please see my earlier post under category “roast chicken”).

The chicken was done 10 minutes later than I expected, though I must say that I was deliberately trying to get the breast meat to the point where it just crosses from ‘moist’ to ‘not moist’. You see, Thai grilled chicken is usually served with a dipping sauce that is bottled and sold commercially under various brands, and it is a real treat. So, having the breast meat just ‘not moist’ would I thought go well with the sauce. Of course, leg meat remains moist even so, but that is OK.

We ate it with jasmine rice and raw vegetables, with the dipping sauce of course.

I ate most of it with a knife and fork, but as with all good grilled or roasted chicken, at a certain point you are better off using your fingers, which is what I did. I enjoyed it very much, and pretty much picked the bones clean.

And the crying dogs? Apparently in Thailand when you pick the bones clean and leave no meat for the dogs, some people call it “making the dogs cry”.

Growing up in Kuala Lumpur in the ‘60s, we had a Sunday routine of Banana Leaf Cuisine for lunch. We’d take a 5-tier tiffin-carrier to the Ceylon Restaurant in Malay Street and buy the food there and take it home where we’d eat it.Fish, chicken, mutton or a different chicken preparation, 2 types of vegetables, and pappadum packed separately. The chicken was always Ceylonese Chicken Curry; that was the one thing that never changed, because it was such a fantastic tasting dish that the whole family loved it.

The Ceylon restaurant had two floors. On the ground floor, the centre section had long communal tables. At the sides and upstairs were smaller tables.

At meal times, people would come in and either sit at the long communal style tables or smaller tables. Without a word, a banana leaf would be put in front of the person, and a generous helping of rice dished out.

The waiter would then ask the customer if anything special was wanted, special meaning chicken, fish or meat or some such item. Meantime, another waiter would come with a multi-sectioned serving platter and dish out portions of 3 types of vegetables. This would be followed by the ‘gravy’ waiter who would come with this 3 sectioned container and offer a choice of fish curry gravy, chicken curry gravy or dhall. One of them would then return with any extra orders, and put down 2 or 3 pieces of pappadum.

Unless you made an order for the specials, it all came at a fixed price. For that price, you could ask for more rice and gravy if you wanted. Basically, you were guaranteed a full stomach at a fixed low price.

Fish would be sold by the piece, as would large kurma style or fried chicken pieces. Small chicken pieces like the Ceylonese Chicken Curry would be sold by the plate, a plate being a small saucer holding enough for a single portion.

The Ceylon Restaurant continued to be popular well into the ‘70s. Indeed, when I started work in Kuala Lumpur, Saturday lunch there was a routine.

Then I left Kuala Lumpur in the late ‘70s. When I went back sometime in the ‘80s (if my memory serves me correctly), the place was gone. Friends recommended other Banana Leaf restaurants. Whilst some of them were good, none had the very special Ceylonese Chicken Curry.

There were obviously people who knew how to cook it. The caterers at a friends wedding some years back served a pretty good version of it. So, I experimented with several recipes, made a few tweaks and came up with the one on my site.

As usual, I continue to experiment, and am considering increasing the quantities of coriander seeds, among other things.

I mentioned in the post that I would give an update on how well the dish took to freezing.

Well, I’m pleased to report that it does keep well and taste and texture do not suffer as a result of freezing.

I defrosted only in the microwave, as I am not a huge fan of microwaving vegetables and the like. Then to complete reheating, I put the thawed braised pork and cloud ear fungus into a shallow bowl, which I then put in the electric rice-cooker. The one I have includes a steamer insert, so once the rice is cooked and it switches to keep warm mode, I put in the insert and the bowl. It heats through in about 20 minutes.

If you do not have the steamer insert, you can also put the bowl directly onto the cooked rice. In any case, just be sure that you use oven mitts to handle the bowl when removing, as it gets very hot. 

And if you do not use an electric rice-cooker at all, or if you are reheating a large portion, you can always reheat gently on the stove top.

Only two points are firstly, I wish I had more gravy, it is delicious and more would be nice. Secondly, there was a very slight powdery feel to the mushrooms, which only I noticed, and this is perhaps because there was not enough gravy to submerge the mushrooms in the freezer. Nothing too obvious, as I was the only one who noticed it. And the overall taste was great, just like curries and stews which improve with freezing.

So, all told a good candidate for bulk cooking and freezing.