Spatula, Spoon and Saturday

Book: Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen Theme: Soft Recipe: Salt & Pepper Tofu

First of all, I have to apologise profusely about being useless with the whole Cookbook Challenge thing. I am going to catch up. I promise. This was for Week 7 with the theme of soft. The reason this has stopped because my computer has decided to stop recognising my portable hard drive so my photos have been stuck there. That, and I have been away a lot and um, lazy!

First of all I love, love, LOVE the Secrets of the Red Lantern. It was the only cookbook I have ever read from start to finish (skipping the recipes) because it is just a truly special book. I remember sniffing on the train reading it everyday!

The theme soft was inpired by my (then) recent visit to New Kum Den where I fell hard in love with their salt and pepper tofu and soft tofu is one of my favourite soft foods ever. I unfortunately had decided that I should half wing it and half follow the recipe. I went for two separate types of tofu – one Japanese silken tofu and one egg tofu. I found that the egg tofu was by far tastier and much easier to handle while the silken tofu tasted average and was extremely hard to handle.

Anyway! What a disaster! I hate deep frying stuff, it’s horrible. Messy, messy, messy! Because I used the silken and egg tofu, I had to adapt a little. To be perfectly honest, this recipe really isn’t worth the hassle. Not only that, I managed to forget about the oil and caused a HUGE fire! Lesson learned: go and buy a fire blanket and keep it handy. Australia Post sells them relatively cheaply.

Salt & pepper mix

1. 1 tsp of white pepper, ground (I ground the peppercorn in pestle & mortar)
2. 1 1/2 tsp of salt
3. 1 tsp of ground ginger
4. 1/2 tsp of five spice powder

Mix all ingredients together well.

Deep fried tofu

1. tofu
2. corn flour to dust
3. oil for deep frying

Heat vegetable oil in a saucepan until it shimmers. Carefully slice the tofu and dust with the corn flour and deep fry until golden brown. Season with the salt & pepper mixture.

Spring onion mixture

1. 2 spring onion, chopped
2. 2 red chilli, sliced
3. 2 large cloves of garlic, finely chopped
4. 1/2 onion, finely chopped

Fry the onions, chilli and garlic in a bit of oil until fragrant. Top the tofu.

Right, these are all the Cookbook Challenges outstanding for me. I’m going to try to get them out over the next couple of weeks or so. Stay tuned.

• Week 8 Monday 4/01/2010 Sweet
• Week 9 Monday 11/01/2010 Berry
• Week 10 Monday 18/01/2010 Cool
• Week 11 Monday 25/01/2010 Mixed
• Week 12 Monday 1/02/2010 Eggs
• Week 13 Monday 8/02/2010 Love
• Week 14 Monday 15/02/2010 Japanese
• Week 15 Monday 22/02/2010 Muffins
• Week 16 Monday 1/03/2010 Noodles
• Week 17 Monday 8/03/2010 Vietnamese

No. Not really. I am one of those people who can safely say that I have no family recipes as my parents never really cooked so there was nothing to pass down. But last week I had a play around with the pad thai sauce and came up with something I rather liked.

Basically, a pad thai should always be made one serve at a time in a heated wok or frying pan. The idea is to get all the ingredients ready to go and fry them off in quick succession. Hence the origin of the pad thai sauce. I have tried a couple of pre-made pad thai sauces and they were never really any good.

Pad Thai Sauce
(this makes about 1 cup of pad thai sauce – about 8 servings)

1. 1 small onion, finely chopped
2. 1 red chilli, finely chopped*
3. 5 tbsp of tamarind paste**
4. 8 tbsp of fish sauce (substitute with mushroom soy sauce and vegetarian oyster sauce for vegetarian version)
5. 2 tbsp of water
6. 1/2 tbsp of vegetable oil
7. 2 tbsp of palm sugar or 1 tbsp of normal sugar

Sautee the onion and chilli very slowly in the vegetable oil until the onion becomes translucent and softens. Add the sugar, fish sauce and tamarind. Add a bit of water and bring to boil (yes your kitchen will probably smell of fish sauce). Simmer very gently for about 10 minutes. Let it cool and blend with a stick blender.

(oooh double yolk!) Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of my favourite Chinese dishes of all time. Thanks to my new (well, kinda new) Chinese cookbook, I think I have finally managed to crack the mapo tofu sauce. I used to buy those expensive Japanese pre-made sauce packets. While good, they are rather expensive (around $4-5) and they’re definitely not spicy at all!

To cut the long story short, this is what you need for a big serving of mapo tofu for four lucky people:

1. 100 g. minced pork
2. 2 packets of firm tofu*
3. 3 tbsp of light soy sauce
4. 2 tbsp of shao hsing rice wine
5. 1 tsp of sesame seed oil
6. 2 cloves of garlic
7. 2 tsp of chopped ginger
8. 1 red chilli
9. 1 tsp szechuan pepper (husks removed and crushed)
10. 1 tsp of tomato ketchup
11. 2 tbsp of chilli bean sauce (picture)
12. 4 spring onion, chopped
13. 1 tbsp of corn flour mixed with 2 tbsp of water

Marinade the minced pork with 1 tbsp of soy sauce, 1 tbsp of rice wine and 1 tsp of sesame oil. Set aside for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, chop and crush some ginger and garlic. Cut the chilli into slices. Cut the tofu into cubes.

Heat a little bit of oil in a non-stick frying pan or a wok on very high heat and fry the mince with ginger and garlic until it’s golden. Add sliced chilli, the rest of the soy sauce and rice wine. Add 1/3 cup of water and bring to boil. I use the tomato ketchup to round off the taste but you can use a pinch of sugar instead. Since the dish is strong-flavoured, you wouldn’t notice the tomato taste while it will give you nicely rounded taste without the dish being at all sweet. Hardly traditional but I do like the balance of flavours in my dishes.

Just taste the sauce and see how you feel. It should be quite strong because you’re about to add a lot of tofu to it.

Thicken the sauce with corn flour mixture, one tablespoon at a time until you reach the desired thickness. Add water if it’s too thick. Bring the sauce to boil and add the tofu and the spring onions. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes.

Serve sprinkled with the szechuan pepper.

* This is what you get at your local supermarket in the tofu/fake dairy section. Getting tofu at your Asian gricery store is a bit more challenging. You basically want a tofu that’s soft enough. So don’t get those hard tofu cakes, sometimes labelled as firm. But also firm enough so that it doesn’t fall apart, so don’t get silken tofu.

I miss the proper Indian mee goreng that you get in Malaysia and Singapore. It’s always spicy and rich and just bursting with flavours. Most of the mee goreng you get in here in Melbourne is just not spicy enough. There needs to be that element of dried spices: chilli powder and tumeric. And sometimes they get it so red, it’s scary!

I can’t say I have successfully replicated the real Indian mee goreng yet. In fact, it tastes just like most mee goreng you get at restaurants here in Australia. But it’s all right, it’s still quite good.

For 4, you’ll need:

1. 1 pack of Hokkien noodles (500 g.)
2. 10 medium-sized prawns
3. 5 fish balls, sliced (or 100g of fish cake, sliced)
4. 2 medium potatoes, peeled
5. 1 onion, sliced
6. 3 cubes of fried tofu, sliced*
7. 2 cups of beansprouts
8. 1 tomato, diced
9. 5 spring onions, sliced
10. 2 tbsp dark soy sauce (or kecap manis)
11. 2 tbsp soy sauce
12. 2 tbsp sambal oelek (reduce depending on taste)
13. 1 tsp chilli powder (reduce depending on taste)
14. 1 tsp tumeric powder
15. 3 tbsp of tomato ketchup
16. 1 red chilli, sliced (or yellow)
17. 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
18. 2 tbsp of fried shallots
19. 1 egg

Boil, steam or microwave the potatoes until cooked. Cut into 2cm cubes and sprinkle 1/2 tsp of tumeric and mix well. Separate the noodles and set aside.

Add 2 tbsp of oil onto a large heated non-stick frying pan. Add the fish cakes and fry until browned. Add prawns, garlic and onion. Fry for a minute. Add the noodles and fry until the noodles become well heated and starts to char in places. Add tomato ketchup, dark and light soy sauce, the rest of the tumeric, chilli powder, sambal oelek. Fry well until the sauces and the noodles mix.

Push all the noodles to one side. Crack an egg onto an empty space on the frying pan. Scramble the egg slightly and pile the noodles back on top of the egg. Wait for a minute or so before stirring everything together.

Add beansprounts, potato cubes, fried tofu and tomato and stir fry until everything comes together. Turn off the heat, add chilli slices and spring onion. Stir through until the spring onions wilt.

Served topped with some fried shallots and a wedge of lime.

* I didn’t really have any so I used supermarket-bought firm tofu. I cut them into slices and fry in a non-stick pan with a bit of oil until well browned on both sides and just placed them on top of the noodles.

I found this from 2006! You can even see my old kitchen (the one with natural light as opposed to my current kitchen with very little natural lights. Pictures from that period are so much nicer)

This is the basic Thai red curry that I added a whole bunch of not-so-Thai vegetables to it. Any veggies will most likely do. I like the combination of broccoli, carrot, zucchini, green beans, tomato and tofu puffs*. Don’t forget the Thai basil. It makes everything much nicer.

You will need (for four people), one small carrot, a handful of green beans, a small zucchini (not a huge one like I got from Jim’s – I’m still so impressed about its size, seriously), one tomato, a handful of broccoli florets, five-six tofu puffs (halved). You’ll so need one tablespoon of Thai red curry paste (I use Mae Ploy due to its availability in Australia), a small can of coconut cream (I like Ayam and Aroy-D), and about a tablespoon of fish sauce (I insist on a Thai brand). Substitute with soy sauce if you’re a vegetarian.

As I said previously, it matters what curry paste and coconut cream you use. You need to taste. Sometimes you won’t need to fish sauce and some times you’ll need a bit of sugar to round it off if your coconut cream isn’t sweet (note: coconut cream is naturally sweet. I’m not talking about the sweetened coconut cream that you put in your pina colada). Read the rest of this entry »