Cooking The Books

Banana Leaf Curry

A popular way of serving Indian food in Malaysia is on a banana leaf.  This few ringit (about a quid) meal (a thali basically) starts with a banana leaf in front of you, on goes some white rice then dishes of various vegetable curries - beetroot, breen bean and cabbage amonst others in that photo - are scooped on to it, then usually a pot or three of daals is dumped on your table and you can pour as much as you like on the rice.  You can add meat curries too, but you need to pay another 3 or 4 ringits for these maybe.  Tasty food aside you're expected to eat with your fingers, stirring some rice and dal together and using them (don't let it touch your palm) to get it into your mouth.  Messy, spicy, tasty fun.

They're served everywhere but some of the nicest I've had were in Brickfields, an area 10 minutes walk from KL Sentral, the main commuter hub in the city so very easy to get to.  If you do make it up that way you have the honour of eating in the same restaurant that Malaysia's PM recently did - Restoran Sri Kortumalai.  A marketing opportunity the owners weren't going to let pass them by.

Prawn Patia and Tarka Dal

Sweet and sour is such a fine flavour combination, Whether it's a Thai soup balancing sugar and lime, an English pancake with lemon and sugar or, and I'm not ashamed to admit this, the dayglo orange English Chinese sauce poured over thick batter covered chicken or king prawns we're on to a winner.

There's a time and place for dayglo sweet and sour chicken though and it's not now, it's when you're tired and hungover on a Sunday and fancy some trash.  Here we deal with far more classy dishes and today's offering is the sweet sour curry called prawn patia.  I'm a fan of Mamta's website and one recipe from there I've heard many a person rave about is the prawn patia and this weekend it made the rare journey from to do list to belly.  For its sweet and sour element the patia balances palm sugar or jaggary against tamarind and depth is added with cumin, coriander, chili and turmeric.  It was amazing, tart and complex - the compliments I'd heard previously well deserved. 

I had some toor dal that needed using up so went with a tarka dal recipe from her site too, tempered with some onions fried crisp (they're not burnt, honest) and poured over, oil and all.  It was tasty, although I've had nicer dals - I prefer a bit more texture - so whilst the patia will definitely be made again I'll move onto another dal.

Split Green Pea Vadas

With the trip planned and the lease on the flat cancelled there remains the small task of packing the contents of the flat into boxes and getting everything into storage.  Being a big fan of procrastination, and not remotely fanatical about packing, I set about using up food rather then putting things into boxes.

Looking through my cupboards there's always loads of near full bags, boxes and tubs of ingredients.  I never shy away from trying a recipe due to having to buy 500gr of an ingredient which the recipe uses only 50gr of and this is reflected in my ingredient reserves.  One thing I'd bought and used less than 10% of was dried split peas.  I couldn't think of any recipes that used them except soup, and whilst I love the bland pea and rich meatiness of pea and ham soup there's been rather a lot of soups on the blog recently and so I wanted something different.  A post on a food forum asking for advice resulted in the following recipe - split green pea vadas.

They sounded falafel like, far from a bad thing, and so I cracked on.  The recipe said to deep fry but I didn't have much oil and the mixture was wet enough that I had no confidence in balls of it holding together if dropped into hot oil.  The shallow frying worked well though leaving crisp outside and soft, well spiced middle, definitely falafel like but with an obvious pea, rather than chickpea, taste.  The chili powder I have is fairly fiery stuff and the raita (yoghurt, mint, paprika, cumin, S&P) was a welcome foil to it.  Well worth a go if you have some split peas leftover from a scotch broth, or just because they're damn tasty.

Split Green Pea Vadas

225gr split peas
1 small onion
3 cloves garlic
Small handful of fresh coriander
1/2 TB ground cumin
1 ts chili powder
1 ts garam masala
1 ts salt

Method

Soak the peas overnight then drain and add to a food processor with everything else, chopping the garlic, onion and coriander before it goes in.

Pulse well till smooth enough to hold together.

Heat oil to a depth of a centimetre in a frying pan over a medium heat and then add patties of the mixture, making them maybe 2cm thick and whatever diameter takes your fancy.

Cook for 3 minutes a side until golden and cooked through.

Serve with a raita or any other sauce/chutney that takes your fancy.

Spiced Red Lentil Soup

Over in Zurich last week my mum got out an old recipe binder of hers she'd found from days gone by, possibly as far back as the 70s.  It was quite an interesting read, both to see how tastes have changed but also how some things that seem modern have been popular for quite some time.  Maybe due to the lack of spice over the Christmas period one thing that really caught my eye was a spiced red lentil soup.  Copyright for recipes is a strange thing, what with most new recipes being slight tweaks of old recipes, but as I've altered quantities, removed a couple of ingredients and added one or two more this recipe is definitely now mine.

It's chili hot, but not overly so, with the nice curried flavour that cumin and coriander give.  The final addition of some garam masala adds a welcome fragrance that would have been missing in the original.  It really reminded me of the pots of daal you get with roti canai for breakfast in Malaysia and I ended up having this for breakfast, with a couple of chapati, the next day too - a fine start to the day.

Spiced Red Lentil Soup

Ingredients

200gr red lentils
1.25 litres chicken or veg stock
1 medium onion
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 red chilli, finely chopped
1 ts cumin seeds
1/2 ts ground coriander

Juice 1/2 lemon
Handful fresh coriander
1 ts garam masala

Method

Cook the cumin in a dry pan till fragrant then remove and crush lightly.

Finely chop the onion then fry in some olive oil till starting to take on a little colour. 

Add the garlic, chilli, cumin and coriander and cook for a minute or two more.

Add the lentils (picked over for stones and rinsed) and stock, bring to the boil and simmer for 45 minutes.

Add the lemon juice, coriander and garam masala, stir well and serve.

A Rogan Josh for Josh

I like my name, not only is it reasonably uncommon (well at my age anyway, it's rather popular amongst kids nowadays) it's also a verb (just joshing with you) and the name of a curry (rumour has it it may be pronounced differently though).  As this is a culinary not literary blog I'm going to be focusing on the Rogan Josh.  I think the only time I've had this before was a cheapo sauce out of a jar at uni so I turned to the fantastic Mamta's Kitchen for a recipe.

I've never had bad recipe from Mamta's site but I did have a look around at others anyway.  One thing that struck me in my research was the focus on tomatoes in Mamta's recipe compared to yoghurt in most others.  I'm not normally one for altering recipes first time around but I decided to meet in the middle on this one.  This meant the half cup of water was replaced with another 125ml of full-fat yoguhrt with the aim of a creamier sauce.  Due to the contents of my fridge the tomatoes were replaced with half a tin of tomatoes and their juice and I also stuck four thin finger green chilies in to heat it up a bit.  Outside of that it was Mamta's recipe.

What of the taste?  I'm glad I added the extra yoghurt as I was left with a fantastically rich sauce with delicate but complex spicing.  I love coriander and chilies and as always they worked well with tomatoes and lamb.  I shall be making it again.