Archive for the ‘Sesame’ Category
Sotong kangkung is one of my most favourite Malaysian dishes, and I’m sure many of you like it too, which is why I’m sharing with you my mum’s recipe! If you feel that making your own sauce is too daunting, however, go ahead and cheat – buy ready made kuah rojak (rojak sauce). I promise I won’t tell anyone!
Main ingredients
1 sotong kembang (red cuttlefish)
300gm or one bunch of kangkung (water spinach/convolvulus)
To add to boiling water
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon cooking oil
Optional ingredients
1 cucumber (sliced or grated)
4 pieces of fried firm tofu (sliced)
Sauce ingredients
1cm cube of toasted belacan (dry shrimp paste)
3 tablespoons of petis (thick shrimp paste)
1 tablespoon of dark soy sauce
1 tablespoon of sweet soy sauce
3 tablespoons of sugar (add more or reduce to your taste)
Salt to taste
2 tablespoons of tamarind paste mixed with 2 tablespoons of warm water
1/2 tablespoon of chilli paste (optional)
Garnish
2 tablespoons of toasted peanuts (pounded)
1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds
Method
- Cut the cuttlefish into bite-sized strips.
- Bring a pot of water to boil and add salt and oil. Blanch the sotong kembang strips for a few minutes and then drain.
- Blanch the kangkung for a minute, drain and cut into smaller pieces.
- Arrange the blanched sotong kembang and kangkung pieces on a serving dish.
- Add optional ingredients such as cucumber and tofu (if any).
- Mix all sauce ingredients into a pot and bring to a boil.
- Allow sauce to cool slightly and pour it all over the sotong kembang and kangkung just before serving.
- Sprinkle peanuts and sesame seeds.
- If you like it hot, chop up some cili padi or bird’s eye chilli and sprinkle over your dish.
- Ready to serve.
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One of my favorite breakfast joints in Penang is Eng Loh Coffee Shop in the heart of Georgetown. It is located at the end of Church Street, diagonally across the Pinang Peranakan Mansion and is exceptionally crowded during lunch hour.
Besides serving good coffee, the coffee shop operator also serves choices of Western breakfast of sausages [...]
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I will be the first to admit I seldom eat food that we normally associate and categorize loosely as “Chinese”. But porridge is one comfort dish that I could hardly say no to, on days where I am just too sick and tired to taste and to chew, and on days that are particularly cold and chilly. As many of you would be aware, there are two different types of porridge.
There is the plain type that you eat along with side dishes. Here, the rice grains remain fairly distinct and the porridge is watery. Sometimes you find peanuts or sweet potato chunks cooked with it. The side dishes are often preserved and canned, thus quite salty and the plain porridge is a really suitable vehicle to add balance. I never really fancy this type of porridge though.
Then there is “jook”, where the rice grains are cooked down to disintegrate into a massive pool of white, sticky gruel. How does “jook” become so smooth, do you know? My mother tells me it is a combination of techniques and tricks. Slow cooking short grain rice is one, adding a bit of quick cooking oatmeal (just a handful) is another. I find these little tips interesting and it is rather sad that the younger generation generally have little interest to learn how to cook. Imagine that all these nuggets of information will be lost forever.
No prizes for knowing that I prefer “jook” anytime. For a quick fix, Crystal Jade Kitchen solves my problem. Here is a bowl of fish slice porridge with preserved egg and parsley.
Three of my favourite ingredients for porridge, all in one. It would be slightly over the top, if I had to say so myself, but it would have been the bomb if it had a raw egg cracked in as well. A freshly prepared bowl of porridge may look boring initially but a major fun for me at least, is digging into the bowl and trying to find the hidden treasures within. Concurrently, I will the porridge to cool down so I could start eating. A burnt mouth is. not. cool.
There is a lot of personalisation in a simple dish like porridge. I think that is what I like about it as well. Not only do I get to choose what sort of ingredients goes into the base porridge, I could also top it off the way I like it. My usual toppings are: a small dash of sesame oil and a lot of white pepper. Soy sauce is optional, more applicable if I had a raw egg. The “yow char kwai”, I could do without.
Where do you go to satisfy that porridge fix? How do you like your porridge done your way?
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Josh, the owner of the famous HK food blog, Chaxiubao, readily agreed to meet up for dinner shortly after I contacted him.
“You are a fish person right? How about sushi?”
You can never go wrong with sushi.
With that, we were led to Sushi Imamura, located at this tall and non-descript building that amazingly houses nothing but levels and levels of restaurants and bars. As we stepped in to join Josh at the counter, I felt reassured to see a Japanese chef already hard at work serving a pair of Japanese ladies. I would later find out, he was none other than Take-chan, the chef/owner. Anyway, needless to say, I was excited about what the rest of the evening would bring.
We decided to save brainwork and go omakase. We started with some appetizers and then fresh sashimi, each kind served ala minute and piece by piece.
It must be the season for bivalves of all sort, because we got an enslaught of them. But because I am not a big fan of most of them, I could only remember the x-large oyster, which had just arrived earlier that day, and was huge that it could be cut into three sections. Served with a bit of lime and ponzu sauce, it was sublime and tasting every bit like the sea.
An interesting take on the geoduck sashimi was this version wrapped with crunchy cucumber and then with nori and sesame seeds. The latter ingredients lent their umami flavours to the otherwise tasteless geoduck and turned this “maki” into a tasty treat.
The most interesting item was definitely the shirouo. In fact, it is by far the most interesting thing I had ever eaten. These are very small transparent fish to be eaten alive. We were instructed to let them “dance” in the mouth first before finishing them off. They were surprisingly not very metallic in taste and the texture was a little bit similar to eating konnyaku.
We could not resist fresh uni when we found out they were available. Unfortunately, these ones were not as full of roe and not as creamy and rich as we had hoped for. I don’t mean to imply they were bad, because they were good, just not as satisfying.
The other highlight for me was the kuruma ebi. This black shrimp is not commonly available. The body was plump and slightly chewy with a bit of bite. Its big head was later deep fried to be enjoyed as “prawn crackers”.After our sashimi course, Take-san took over and made us our sushi. His sushi was beautifully made at just the right size. The rice tasted a little bit off balance, with the sour note a notch beyond my personal preference. Otherwise, they would have been perfect.
A couple of pieces were particularly memorable because of their appearance. One was this kohada sushi. I took a picture of Take-san plaiting the fish into this beautiful creation. He sauced it with his special house sauce before requesting for us to eat it as it was.
The other one was this shima aji sushi topped with a pickled sakura flower. The sourish flower contrasted with the fish, inevitably highlighting the sweetness from the fish.
The whole meal cost about HKD 1,200 per person, without sake or other drinks. Not cheap but certainly oishii deshita!
Sushi Imamura
523-527
16/F
Tel: (+852) 28360035
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We had an opportunity recently to attend a food review that is out of what we have covered till now. Up to now, PenangTuaPui has limited posting on Indian food which we are beginning to cover for more. We are lucky to be in touch with Karaikudi Restaurant to do a food review about their Indian Cuisine as well as to understand more about indian culture and indian food.
There are two Karaikudi outlets in Penang with this one at Market Street, which is inside Penang’s Little India itself while the second outlet is at Tanjung Bungah. The chefs for these two restaurants are different although it is handled by the same management.
We have the upper floor for the food review purpose so that our presence will not disrupt the present business operations below. In fact, we were there during the dinner so the tables below were pretty much packed anyway.
Most of the decorations inside Karaikudi are imported from India to imitate the environment of the original Karaikudi city, the capital of Chettinad. The painting above is also an import from the homeland of Chettiyars.
Meet the fellow bloggers , , , , , and . Where is PenangTuaPui? As usual, the 4 of us are at the lower right of the picture 
We are lucky to have Hafiz (Marketing Manager) and Lakshmanan (Restaurant Manager) to be our hosts for the food review. Both of them provided lots of explanation and background about Karaikudi and the dishes we had to enable us understand more about Indian Cuisine.
For a start, we decided to do something different on the food review with the use of an evaluation form. This form actually helps us to jot down our taste and perception at the moment we taste it when things are still clear in the mind. It will also let the restaurant know of the so called customers’ feedback.
Mango Lassi (RM4.00) was the drink of the day which came in medium height glass. Any Indian restaurant you go to will tell you that their Mango Lassi is good and this one is no exception either. The mango lassi is thick and full of flavour but less creamy (less butter taste) compared to Passions of Kerala.
Chettinad Style Vegetable Soup (RM3.00) is a home made vegetable soup with spices and the yellowish colour on the soup is because of the use of dahl. The soup is watery type and not as thick as the western style while the taste is not that strong either. Perhaps, this is not just our style.
Bittergourd chips (RM6.00) is an addictive appetizer served with fried chilies and curry leaves. The bittergourd used is smaller type which is much bitter compared to its bigger brother.
Taking the first bite of this bittergourd, one can feel the spiciness surrounding the bittergourd snacks but gradually the bitterness taste becomes more evident and the effect seems to linger for some time. The spices used have encapsulated well the bitter taste at the begining but tingling your taste buds with spiciness before letting the bitterness sets in.
The crispy bittergourd can be quite addictive too despite the bitter taste. Each time after we finish one chip, there was a mix feeling for spiciness and bitterness that somehow tempting us to take the next bites. The Kashmir Chili used was quite crispy as well but not too hot in taste. Still the spiciness flows down the throat as we swallow it.
Chicken cutlet (RNM6.00) comes in a lovely shape that bring smiles among some of the bloggers. Want to take a guess why? Because it is made into the heart shape specially for us…hehe
The boneless pieces of chicken is marinated with eggs and bread crumbs before being fried. It contains chopped green chili and coriander as well.
The chicken cutlet is quite tender without sign of being overfried and taste a little bit, (yes, just a little bit) spicy because of the chili. Tam Ciak said it feels like eating the spicy KFC chicken nugget….
We thought this is supposed to be a dessert but Chettinad Special Dosai (RM4.00) can just be a sweet dish to have with main dish.
The dosai (thosai) is actually a favourite among the kids because of its colourful and sweet taste. It has cut dried cherry on top as well as sesame seeds. Once you open the inner part, it reveals the dessicated coconut in different colours red, green, yellow and original colour.
We initially thought nutmeg was included as well but we got it wrong. The dosai can be eaten on its own or it goes well with the dishes we have too.
Chicken Briyani (RM9.50) comes in a typical Indian container that we normally see in the movie except this is much smaller. The briyani uses basmathi rice which is longer and more fragrant compared to normal rice. One piece of chicken drumstick is included in the briyani rice with an egg served on top of the rice.
Sometimes we just cannot help ourselves laughing when we see the names although we know this is how each dish is called. Yes, our bad for being such mischievious… Chicken Kothu Paratha (RM9.00) is essentially Prata (bread) that has been chopped and served together with cooked chicken. This dish looks simple enough with nothing to be amazed yet perhaps it is the simplicity of this dish that makes it special at Karaikudi.
Some of the dishes we have, clockwise from bottom left; Mutton Chukka Varuval, Chicken Briyani, Chettinad Potato Masala, Kadai Vegetable and Ladies Finger Pepper Fry. To know more about each of this dish, stay tuned for next post~!
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