M is for Malaysia

In my last food blog, I mentioned that I had made my last country meal in DC; Little did I know I would have the opportunity to make another DC country dinner a few months after moving back to Pittsburgh.  For Thanksgiving this year, Noah and Emily suggested that we all get together at their new house for a Friday night country meal.  While they did almost all the work planning the meal, shopping, and cooking, I was sous chef and took responsibility for blogging about the meal.

The first dinner I blogged about (Afghanistan) was also a Thanksgiving Friday night dinner, as was the Iran dinner.  This dinner that Noah and Emily hosted was much larger than what I had hosted in the past – both Noah’s and Emily’s families attended.  With 18 people overall, we needed three tables!  Fortunately, their new house can handle it, although they did have to borrow chairs.  The guest list included: my children (Noah, Rachel, and Josh); Emily’s parents (Mitch and Becky), her brother (Jeremy), and her grandmother; Noah’s grandmother (Brenda), aunts, uncles and cousins (Daniel, Janice, Naomi, Roger, Marissa, Zach, Jacob, and Jacob’s girlfriend Naomi).  Oh, yes, and Rachel’s dog, Charlie, visiting from Los Angeles, who (eventually) became good friends with Emily and Noah’s dog Liam.

There are many good “M” countries to choose from, and we had several discussions before deciding on Malaysia – exotic, with interesting food combining Southeast Asian and Indian, yet not overly unfamiliar for those in attendance with less adventuresome palettes.  Emily and Noah did good research and planned a full and exciting meal.  Since almost every recipe had some amount of garlic, shallots, coconut, and lemongrass, they bought massive quantities of each of those ingredients.  It was quite an adventure chopping and preparing everything – I have so much admiration for chefs who make dozens of meals every day!

The Appetizer:

Satay is a quintessential food in Malaysia and Indonesia.  It is fun to eat and flavorful, especially when grilled.  The chicken satay recipe that we used is relatively simple, although there is a lot of prep work cubing the chicken and chopping the garlic, shallots, galangal, and lemongrass – especially when you have to quadruple the recipe!  We started with marinating the chicken and left it to absorb the flavors for several hours while we worked on the rest of the meal.  We made a traditional peanut dipping sauce for the satay, although we used a lot fewer dried chili peppers than the recipe calls for, in order not to overwhelm the satay’s more delicate flavors (or our family’s delicate palettes!).  As with the satay itself, we quadrupled the recipe, but once we started grinding the peanuts, I realized that we were making enough peanut sauce to feed half of DC!  Fortunately, the sauce was good on other things, such as bread (in lieu of peanut butter), because we had so much left over!

Noah grilled the satay skewers on his outdoor gas grill, and the char on the meat really enhanced the flavors.  It was a bit of a balancing act, trying to get dozens of skewers cooked and served at about the same time, but Noah pulled it off.  I really liked the satay and could have had a whole meal of them.  The rest of the guests were more mixed – the average rating was 5.4, mostly 5’s and 6’s, but also a couple of 7’s and several 4’s.

The Soup:

Laksa is a very popular soup in Malaysia.  Most laksa’s, however, are made with sambal, which contains shrimp.  Fortunately, Emily found a great vegan laksa, made with butternut squash, one of my favorites!  It was a rather involved recipe, made more involved by one of my mistakes.  The recipe calls for grinding coriander, cumin, and fennel seeds in a mortar.  I bought Noah and Emily a mortar and pestle as an early Hanukah gift, mostly to enable us to make the recipe as written.  Well, the coriander seeds just did not want to get ground up.  We did the best we could and decided to put the spices in the soup semi-ground.  After tasting the soup an hour later, as it all came together, I realized that the coriander seeds were very bothersome and annoying, if not actually a choking hazard.  By that time, we had pureed about a third of the squash, and the soup was nice and thick.  Time was running out, but we decided that we had to strain the soup to get rid of the seed coverings.  It was a very tedious process, and we lost a lot of the squash pulp along with the seeds, but the end result was very smooth – and very tasty.  We pureed most of the rest of the squash to give the soup sufficient body and left a few chunks in each bowl for texture and appearance.  We boiled rice noodles, as the recipe indicated, and put them on the bottom of the bowls and topped each bowl with a basil leaf. 

I think it was a beautiful dish, and the taste was amazing, in my opinion.  Again, the guests had a diversity of opinions on this dish – the average rating was 5.5, with most of the ratings in the 6’s and 7’s, but also some 3’s and 4’s.  I will definitely put this on my keepers list – a very hearty and satisfying soup!  I plan to make it for Davida in the depth of winter, although I will likely use ground spices next time (Noah just made it again, however, using a coffee grinder for the spices, and he said it worked just fine). 

The Main Dish:

Rendang curry is a common Malaysian dish.  While many of the recipes are made with beef, Emily opted for a Chicken Rendang recipe.  We inaugurated their Creuset pot for the meal, filling it to the brim with chicken for 18.  Again, the recipe involved a lot of chopping of garlic, shallots, lemongrass, and onion, but the steps themselves were relatively straightforward.  I had told Noah and Emily that cooking for 18 was not much more work than cooking for 10, but I forgot about all the prep time – while the cooking itself doesn’t involve much more work, the cutting and chopping is pretty much proportional to the number of people being fed.

Fortunately, all that cutting and chopping was worth it.  The sauce was rich and flavorful – and not too spicy. Fortunately, Noah and Emily had made the Rendang recipe the week before to try it out and found that it was way too spicy with the number of chilis called for. So, for the family meal we used only a fraction of the amount of what was called for, despite tripling the rest of the recipe.  Most people seemed to enjoy the chicken, indicating that it was both flavorful and moist.  The average was 6 –an even split between 7’s and 5’s, with a few 6’s thrown in (tough crowd!).  But, yet another recipe to add to my keepers!

The Starch:

We were thinking about making either compressed rice or nasi lemak rice, which is one of the national dishes of Malaysia, but ran out of time (and energy).  In the end, the starch was just plain basmati rice – nothing to write home (or a blog) about, but excellent for soaking up all the great juices from the Rendang.

The Vegetable:

The vegetable recipe that Emily found called for Kangkong (water spinach) and sambal (shrimp paste).  Since the sambal is not kosher and she couldn’t find water spinach, we kind of made up our own recipe.  The Asian grocer suggested to use baby bok choy, spinach, and some other green that we couldn’t identify as a substitute for the water spinach.  I chopped the greens and stir-fried them with a bit of canola oil and some chopped garlic, and then added a bit of soy sauce when the greens were tender.  Over the years, I’ve used a similar recipe for making green beans, so I was fairly confident that it would be okay.  People were mixed on the dish – the average rating was 4.8, with mostly 4’s and 5’s (plus a couple of 7’s!).  One complaint was that the portions were too small; I must keep reminding myself how much leafy greens cook down – the wok was initially overflowing with greens.

The Dessert:

Long-time readers of the blog (see Afghanistan and Iran) know that the dessert for Thanksgiving Friday evening dinner is always our family’s traditional pareve chocolate cake in honor of Rachel’s birthday.  I’ve probably made the cake over 50 times and it is a big hit every time (when I remember to include all the ingredients).  This time was no exception – the cake averaged a 6.4 rating with the guests, and you can tell from the photo that Rachel was definitely satisfied (Charlie looks less than thrilled, because he knows dogs cannot eat chocolate).

Looking back on the blogs, I notice that I have not previously included the cake recipe, which I got from my mother probably some 40 years ago.  Enjoy!

Two-layer cake:

·       2/3 cup soft margarine

·       1.75 cup sugar

·       2 eggs, room temperature

·       1 tsp vanilla

Cream at high speed of mixer until fluffy, about 5 minutes, scraping bowl occasionally; Blend in:

·       2.5 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted in double boiler

Slowly mix in the following, alternating with 1.25 cup ice water:

·       2.5 cup flour

·       1.25 tsp baking soda

·       ½ tsp salt

Put into two 9” greased pans, bake for 30-35 minutes at 350 degrees, until toothpick comes out clean; Cool on cake racks.

Frosting:

·       Melt 4 oz unsweetened chocolate and 1/3 stick margarine in double boiler

Mix together until creamy:

·       3 cup confectioner sugar

·       1/3 cup soy or other non-dairy “milk”

·       1 tsp vanilla

·       Pinch of salt

·       Melted chocolate and margarine

Add more sugar if the frosting is too runny.  Use about ¼ of the frosting between the cake layers, and the rest for the sides and top.  Decorations are optional.

Up next: Nepal!

L is for Liberia

Two and a half years ago, Davida and I moved to DC for me to take a position at the National Science Foundation.  Two months ago, Davida moved back to Pittsburgh to continue her research at Carnegie Mellon.  Now it is my time to bid a fond adieu to our nation’s capital.  It will be difficult to leave – not only did I have a great time at NSF, but we really enjoyed being in Washington, participating in cultural and political (read “protest”) events, and having a great time being so near three of our children.  But, I am looking forward to returning to Pittsburgh to enjoy the city, see (and cook for) friends, be director of the new undergraduate program in AI at Carnegie Mellon, and (hopefully) pick up on my research. 

Before leaving, I wanted to make one last country meal (this meal was on August 19).  Josh had recently come back from a work-related trip to Liberia, and I was up to the letter "L", so it was the obvious choice.  I asked him what foods he liked from his two-week stay in Liberia, but he hadn’t had much of the local cuisine.  He did say he liked a dish called corned-beef gravy and fried plantains.  OK, it’s a start…  The guests included Josh, Katie, Noah, Emily, and Hannah.  Unfortunately, Davida couldn’t make it back for this meal – I believe this is the only one she’s missed over both cycles (38 meals, to date).

While I have found significant thematic commonality in sub-Saharan cuisine, I wanted to try some new dishes other than the peanut soup and jollof rice that I have made several times before.  Fortunately, Liberia seems to have a rich food culture (maybe influenced by the Americas), so I was able to find many new dishes to serve.

The Soup:

I had some leftover goat meat from the Ghanaian meal that I wanted to use before leaving DC (ugh – I just realized how old it was; glad I didn’t poison anyone!).  As luck would have it, goat is popular in Liberia and I was easily able to find a recipe for pepper soup that would use up all my diced goat meat.  Obviously, I did not include the pig’s feet or the shrimp that the recipe calls for.  Instead, I doubled the amount of goat, cutting it up into about half-inch pieces.  Other recipes that I found for pepper soup called for a specific peppersoup seasoning mix, which I was able to find at an African grocery store a few miles from our house (we’ll see if I can find a similar store in Pittsburgh).  I also used some gluten-free bullion instead of the indicated seasonings. The soup smelled delicious and had just the right amount of peppery “zing”, but I felt that it was too watery, so I added some cut-up okra and chopped onion, to help thicken the broth, along with the whole okras and quartered onions called for in the recipe.  I also made some fufu to put in the soup.  I had made fufu, a yam-based starch, for the Ghanaian meal and everyone seemed to like it.  Though it is fairly bland, it soaks up flavors very well and added a nice, spongy texture to the soup.

The guests mostly liked the soup – the ratings ranged from 5 to 7, averaging 5.8.  I would think of keeping it, but it seems to rely so much on the goat flavor, and I am doubtful about getting goat again, at least any time soon.

The Main Dish:

I wasn’t able to find a recipe for corned-beef gravy that Josh liked, but I did find a fairly popular recipe for chicken gravy, which sounded similar based on Josh’s description.  Again, the recipes I found called for shrimp, which I naturally left out.  Other than that, I followed the recipe fairly closely.  There was a huge amount of chopping to do (I more than doubled the recipe) and pureeing all the vegetables took time in the relatively small food processor that I used.  But, the flavors melded together really well, getting better as everything simmered together.  The rich, deep red appearance of the dish was striking.  While the dish is supposed to be fairly peppery, I left out the cayenne pepper to make it more palatable.  Nobody seemed to mind.

I really liked the sauce, especially over the rice (see below) and the crunchy green beans were a pleasant treat.  The guests mostly liked this – average rating was a 6.2 – but the ratings were either 5’s or 7’s (no 6’s), so there was a significant difference of opinion.  Personally, I thought it was very tasty, but not exceptional.  I’ll probably put it in my keepers folder, just because it is rather unusual.

The Starches:

The main rice dishes in Liberia appear to be jollof and check rice.  I had made jollof rice several times before, so was eager to try something new, especially since various websites indicated that it goes well with chicken gravy (it does!).  Check rice is typically made with jute leaves, which I didn’t find, but the recipe for check rice that I used indicated that a combination of spinach and okra was a good substitute.  I wasn’t quite sure how to parboil rice, but I think I did it correctly (steaming the rice until it was not quite soft), since the rice turned out somewhat chewy but not hard.

I was a bit concerned about how rice, spinach, and okra would work together – it seemed like an odd combination, especially with nothing else flavoring the dish – but it was very good, even on its own.  And, it was so much better with the chicken gravy.  The guests were completely split on this dish, with ratings spanning from 2 to 6 (average 4).  Definitely not a keeper.

When he was in Liberia, Josh really liked his meal of corned-beef gravy over fried plantains, so I made a batch of fried plantains as another starch/vegetable.  I didn’t really use a recipe, as I had made them several times before. I cut the plantains in half, lengthwise, then cut them into about 3-inch pieces, rubbed them with ginger powder, and fried them in canola oil.  The plantains that I used were ripe but not overly so, and they came out fairly sweet.  We mostly ate them plain, without the gravy – I think Josh was disappointed that they didn’t compare to what he had in Liberia.  He’ll have to go back there and bring me back a real recipe.  The guests mostly did not care much for the plantains, with ratings of 3’s, 4’s and 5’s (average 4.2).  Not great ratings – perhaps the plantains were too oily, or maybe just not interesting enough.

The Vegetable:

Various websites indicated that fried sweet potato leaves were a common vegetable dish in Liberia.  I had grown potatoes for years in my backyard garden, and it never once occurred to me that the leaves could/should be eaten.  In fact, when I mentioned that I was making fried sweet potato leaves, several people said that they hadn’t realized sweet potatoes had leaves.  I was prepared to use a substitute, such as collard greens, but I was lucky to find packages of frozen sweet potato leaves in the African grocery store.  As with many of the other Liberian recipes, the recipe for fried sweet potato leaves called for shrimp, which I left out.  In fact, it also called for chicken, beef, and smoked turkey (I 4guess the latter is one of the things Liberians got from the New World), but all I used was some cut up chicken, and only about half of what the recipe calls for.  I didn’t have any seasoned salt, but I did use some bullion and, instead of the hot peppers I used some cayenne – not a lot, just enough to give the dish a bit of “pop”.

As with the Check Rice, I was skeptical about the combination of ingredients, and the dark green color was a bit off-putting.  But, as I told the guests, how can you go wrong with frying anything.  Apparently, that’s true, as the guests mostly liked the dish – most of the ratings were 6’s and 7’s, but a 3 and a 4 rating brought the average down to 5.2.  While I thought it was tasty, I don’t think I’ll keep the recipe, since getting the sweet potato leaves will be difficult in the future.  Although, maybe I’ll try the recipe using collard greens and see what that’s like.

The Dessert:

Yes!  Finally, a dessert that came out well and everyone seemed to like!  It is not clear whether in Liberia rice bread is served with the meal or as a dessert, but when I tasted it, it was sweet enough that I thought it should be used for dessert.  It is basically a banana bread (the recipe calls for either bananas or plantains, and I used bananas, since the main meal already had plantains), but with rice flour instead of wheat flour.  Perfect for gluten-free guests!  The texture and taste were a bit different from regular banana bread, but in a good way. The guests agreed, giving the rice bread an average rating of 6.5.  Definitely a keeper and, as Noah suggested, maybe I’ll put in chocolate chips next time, like the banana bread recipe that we typically make.  It surely cannot hurt!

Up next: TBD – so many good choices for “M”