SPRING ROLLS

There shouldn't be a recipe for spring rolls unless you like it in a certain way. And I do.

I like it when the spring roll skin has been lined with lettuce leaves for prettiness, smeared with 3 kinds of sauces for piquant-ness, heaped with julienned vegetables for crispness, piled with fruit for sweetness, sprinkled with crushed peanuts for crunchiness and maximised with shards of prawn crackers for saltiness. And only then will my spring rolls be perfect, nice, fat and outrageous.


That's the way I like it..... uh huh

But there is some work to be done beforehand. Don't be scared......just a little slicing, shredding and some Aristotelian compartmentalizing. And maybe a little boiling.... Uh huh...

Sengkuang or turnip I like. But I like them cooked. And I like them sweet. Because that's what my favourite spring roll stall does. I know because I asked. The turnip is shredded and boiled in brown sugar syrup until the turnips become gentle and soft and sweet. As sweet and gentle as you like it to be.


The carrots and the cucumber are to be brilliantly julienned, the sunshiny pineapple is to be peeled and chopped into bitty bits, some roasted peanuts crushed with a little love and some prawn crackers (or potato crisps) fragmented into tintillating pink shards. That's the Nigella part.

The 3 sauces are to be ready on the work top with a teaspoon dipped in each. Hoisin sauce from your supermarket shelf, taucheo sauce (yellow bean sauce) from the same shelf and a cooked chilli paste either bought in a bottle or homemade from blended dried chillies and sauteed in some amount of oil with a wisp of sugar and salt. That's the saucy part.


The spring roll skin would behave if separated and peeled before hand and covered with a damp cloth to prevent drying.

And the lettuce leaves would be very happy if they were washed and patted dry very tenderly.

Get a spring roll skin to lay quietly on the board. Introduce the pretty lettuce to the spring roll skin and let them be together. Spoon tiny dollops each of the saucy sauces onto the lettuce leaves to add some excitement. Bring the sweet shredded turnips (drained of syrup), julienned carrots, julienned cucumber and pineapple bitty bits together in a heap of fun. Then add a dash of crushed peanuts and the shards of pink prawn crackers for some wickedness.


Bring your fingers together and rock and roll.

Have a great party!

SESAME SEED AND PEANUT FILLED COOKIES

Flat aluminium lids of aluminium pots were what I felt like baking these cookies on.

They are old school, plucked out from a time long ago, when cars had fans fixed onto dash boards instead of air conditioners or when tropical mornings were so dewy and cool you had to wear a cardigan to school or when primary school teachers were still lovely and patient and occasionally brought lessons outside when the weather was good, with school children reading their readers in unison or when Chicken Little was part of a school text, and most probably with a huge Flame of the Forest quivering and casting shadow beams on the grassy ground just outside the classroom. And, perhaps too, when tiny giggly school girls were dressed in little white tunics with little crimson belts, looking like miniature nurses, at the Penang Primary Girl's School.

Penang and Malacca were where the Straits Chinese lived mostly and where they developed their unique Nyonya cuisine.


Florence Tan is one such person. A Nyonya from Malacca and so proud of it. Can you tell? Terribly excitable, effervescent, and bursting and bubbling with life, ceaselessly it seems, that I sometimes don't quite know whether to beat her or to join her.

When I saw a photograph of these cookies in her "Rahsia Masakan Nyonya"/ Secrets of Nyonya Cooking cookbook I knew at once that I wanted to make them. I loved the sight of the glowing amber of its egg yolk sheen that is typical of old world Asian cookies and the seemingly intricate and time consuming work involved.

But it was a few weeks and days before I dragged myself to my swivel kitchen stool that waited at the edge of the kitchen table. Then I lost myself in cookie world. Rolling, stamping, filling, crimping and clipping at miniature curry puff-like cookies.

In the end they looked divine and were worth every crimp.

However, I did not use the sesame seeds called for as part of the filling. I only used a mixture of crushed peanuts and castor sugar. Perhaps it would have tasted much better with the sesame seeds. But I was happy with my work and the way those cookies turned out.


Surprisingly the dough was very forgiving and easy to work with, hardly ever drying out, breaking or crumbling up. I had my doubts at first when I saw the number of eggs used in the recipe but finally I knew that it was those very eggs that gave the dough its flexibility and workability. The 1 or 2 hours I spent shaping the cookies were spent without the slightest frustration. In fact the ease of shaping and crimping each cookie, one after another, were like being besotted with gifts of sweet surprises all the way.

These cookies, however, should not be under baked, even the slightest, or the dough will be somewhat doughy and not very nice. But if baked well it will be pleasantly crisp with all the crunchy insides.

I made my cookies very, very tiny. About an inch in length. Simply because I liked the challenge. The ones in the recipe were at least 3 times larger with one and a half teaspoons of filling used in each. I, on the other hand, had only used a scant half a teaspoon of filling for each cookie.


The recipe..................

The Dough :

300 gm plain flour
a pinch of salt
150 gm butter
2 egg yolks
1 egg white
2 T iced cold water
1 egg, beaten for egg wash

The Filling :

90 gm roasted peanuts, crushed finely
45 gm roasted sesame seeds
50n gm granulated sugar or according to taste

Sift flour with salt into a bowl. Cut in the butter and using hands break it down until teh mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.

Mix the eggs and water with a fork in a small bowl. Pour it into teh flour mixture and bring them together until it becomes a smooth and soft dough. let the dough rise in a cool corner for 30 minutes.

Roll out the dough until 0.3 cm thick and cut out circles with a cookie cutter that is 7.5 cm in diameter.

Place 1 1/2 teaspoons of filling in the middle of the circle of dough and fold over like a turnover. Press the whole edge with your finger tips to seal. It will be a semi circle shape now. Then crimp (starting at one end) by pinching the edge with your thumb and forefinger thus flattening out the edge a little at that point and then folding the pinched bit over itself. Repeat the process until the whole semi circled edge is completely crimped.

Once the filling is sealed in and the cookie in a semi circle shape complete with the lovely crimped edge you then use the clipper to mark patterns on the surface. Clip or pinch the surface of the cookie with the clipper (thus making little ridges and grooves) parallel to each other until a row of ridges form from one end of the cookie to the other.

Then start the clipping all over again but on the next 'empty' part of the adjacent surface of the dough that hasn't been clipped yet, this time clipping at a slightly different angle from the first row thus making zig zag patterns.

The grooves will form naturally as you pinch or clip the surface with the fine toothed clipper making delicate patterns wherever you clip the dough.


Obviously all this is much easier done if your cookie is larger in size than the ones I had made.

Place the cookies on an ungreased baking tray ( I used non-stick baking paper) and then bake for 10 minutes WITHOUT EGG WASH. Take out after 10 minutes and brush the egg wash over the cookies and then bake another 10 or 15 minutes until the cookies are a beautiful deep golden amber.

By brushing the cookies with egg wash AFTER they have been baked for 10 minutes allows the pattern to remain embossed and stand out as opposed to being 'washed out' and buried if the cookies were egg washed from the beginning of baking.

Cool and store in an airtight container.

EGG SAMBAL

What makes this dish unique from other egg dishes is that the egg is not just simply boiled and then thrown into a sambal or a sauce or a dip. It is boiled. Hard boiled. Peeled and then deep fried whole until the surface of the whole egg is golden brown and blistered.

The Thais have a dish quite similar to this where the egg is also deep fried to a golden blister. And they call this Son-in-law eggs. And "it is interesting to speculate from the grins of the Thais that it has something to do with a mother in law who doesn't have a very high opinion of her son in law.!" (Excerpt from Thai Cooking by Jennifer Brennan).


Now, this was the very first dish that I cooked when I visited my daughter and son in law in the US a couple of years ago (without hub). In fact I cooked this dish quite regularly when I stayed with them. In fact I cooked it so regularly that I would be surprised if my son in law did have a very high opinion of me or of my cooking.


I did so because my daughter had a ready bottle of homemade ground dried chillie paste in the refrigerator. I did it because I could boil eggs blind folded. I did it because it was my chance to eat really spicy food for a month without having to cook a separate dish for hub. And I did it because eggs do not need to be chopped, minced, fiddled with or skinned. In fact it need not even be fried into a golden blister if the fancy does not strike you. It just needs to be boiled. Hard boiled that is.

Because what makes this dish really really lovely is the sambal. In fact to a South East Asian being what makes any dish really scrumptious is the sambal. Period.

You could throw anything into a sambal....deep fried chicken, prawns, deep fried fish, deep fried brinjals or eggplants, squid, thin slices of deep fried beef, deep fried tempe, deep fried crispy anchovies, deep fried anything and it's heaven sent and good to go.

All that is needed to complete the meal is a plate of white steaming and freshly cooked rice. A big white and pristine mound of it.


And the rest they say is.............burp.....oops ...scoosh me

The recipe...........................

5 eggs, boiled, cooled and skinned
2 medium red onions or 6 shallots, peeled and sliced
2 or 3 cloves garlic
6 fresh red chiilies, seeded if you prefer it mild, which defeats the whole purpose of a sambal by the way.
2 teaspoons of ready ground chillie paste in a bottle
1/2 inch piece of belacan or shrimp paste
1 teaspoon of tamarind paste mixed with 1/2 cup water and juice squeezed out

cooking oil

Dry the boiled and peeled eggs thoroughly. Heat up a wok and pour enough oil into it to deep fry the eggs. When the oil is hot drop the eggs in gently one at a time and deep fry them until the surface is blistered and golden brown. Remove with a slotted spoon and keep aside on a kitchen towel to drain of excess oil.

Pound the sliced onions or shallots, garlic together with the fresh large red chillies in a pestle and mortar until it becomes a coarse paste. Add the belacan and pound a little more. Keep aside.

Strain the tamarind juice and keep aside.

Take away some of the oil from the wok that was used for deep frying the eggs leaving about 4 tablespoons.

Heat up the oil again a little and then saute the pounded chillie and onion mixture. Add in the chillie paste almost immediately and saute until fragrant and the sambal turns a darker red and the oil rises to the top. Probably about 6 or 7 minutes. Pour in the tamamrind juice, add salt to taste and a pinch or two of sugar. Let it come ot a boil and then a slow simmer until the sauce is reduced to a wet, thick paste.

At this point you can throw in the eggs, whole, and mix to combine and cover the eggs completely with sambal of if you prefer slice the eggs in half and place on top of the sambal in a serving dish. Personally I would have preferred it the first way but because I wanted it to look a little pretty to be photographed I halved the eggs.

Enjoy.

FISH BALLS

Fish balls have always intrigued me. I have always been skeptical of recipes which tell you to dump fish meat into a food processor and then to shape the processed paste into balls. And you're supposed to get fish balls.

Simply because I've heard stories and seen recipes where fish meat is chopped up on a board with a mean looking cleaver until it becomes mush, then pounded in a pestle and mortar and then given a good beating by a pair of biceps. All the rigmarole one has to go through for bouncy, springy fish balls that deliver you a good bite.

Then I think of commercially made fish balls and I wonder at all those biceps hard at work in the din of the factory? The sweat of highly able-armed persons mixed with grunts, thin, white cotton T-shirts clinging to bodies and sucking up the sweat? And then those wet and glistening arms dripping with sweat? The whole place dimly lit in a far flung humid and tropical corner of nowhere? Add mosquito infested for some drama. And a murderer skulking by? Gosh. It must be quite a sight. If indeed that is how they make fish balls for commerce.

But I chose to brush those stories off as half truths since I was living in the 21st century. So I made fish balls. In my kitchen. In my food processor. Without biceps. No sweat.


I managed to make fish balls. Clean, full-flavoured and with enough bite to make me kind of happy. I squeezed one between my thumb and forefinger as I've seen some people do as a test for bounciness. It was there. Kind of. I bounced one into a bowl and it jumped right out. Need I say more?

It was bouncy enough for me. And had enough of a bite as far as I was concerned. And all without the lye water.That dreaded toxic substance used in commercial fish balls to add that ever sought after bounce and bite.

Terri from hunger hunger, my invaluable repository for Chinese cooking, guided me along. Bounciness, she says, is all in the fish, the whole fish and nothing but the fish. No lye water needed if you use the right kind of fish. And she named a few, well 3 to be precise.

1. The spotted mackeral
2. 'Tofu' fish with the yellow tail and
3. Yellow tail barracuda

The 'tofu' fish Terri says makes the smoothest and sweetest fish balls. Terri says she can never make fish balls as good as her maid, Vera, does. She wished me luck. I needed it.

So I went fishing and I got 3 'tofu' fish with yellow tails at the night market, all for 11 ringgit. Cheap! Cheap?

I had the surprised fish monger fillet them for me and all I did when I went home was to slice the fillet down the middle and sliced off the tiny spikes of bones that are embedded and that run down the middle. Then I scraped the flesh off the skin with a metal spoon. Easy. I made sure I cleaned the scales off thoroughly first of course.

A mackeral would have been a lot easier to deal with, I would imagine, but it would have cost me much more.

So that's the story of how I made fish balls. And from now on I hope to live happily ever after in my fish bowl...uhm....fish ball world.


The recipe......................uh oh... my son swallowed up half the fish balls before I could count them. But I think I got between 30 and 35 fish balls. It all depends on how small or big you make them of course.

The recipe.......................


300 gm fish meat of one of the 3 fish mentioned above
2 T ice cold water
1tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
1 tsp oil
1 tsp cornflour

Place fish meat in a food processor and start to whizz.When the meat becomes a paste add in 1 tablespoon of cold water, reserving the other tablespoon in a bowl. Continue to process until the meat is a fine and smooth paste. Remove from the machine and place the fish paste in a medium bowl.

In the bowl with water add in the rest of the ingredients and stir to combine. Pour this mixture into the fish paste and using a fork stir vigorously until the two combine and come together into a firm and shiny mass.

Place in the freezer for about 10 or 15 minutes.

Using 2 teaspoons pick up a blob of the paste and shape by moving the blob from one teaspoon to the other until it is compact and smooth. (you could grab a whole mass of the paste in the palm of your hand, make a fist, squeeze and release a blob through your thumb and forefinger and scoop off the blob with a spoon).

Place the shaped fish balls in a bowl of water and ice or just on a medium stainless steel tray in one layer. Carry on until the paste is finished. If you used iced water you can skip the 'place in the freezer for 15 minutes'. Place in the freezer for 15 minutes.

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Take out the raw fish balls and drop them in one at a time until the bottom of the pot is covered with a layer of fish balls. Do not let water to boil vigorously....only a gentle simmer until the balls float to the surface by which time you can scoop them of with a spider web. Do the same for the rest of the raw fish balls.

Done. Let cool. Use for a noodle soup like here or in stir fried noodles, rice etc.