The Cocoanut

One of the best pleasures in my daily routine is simply coming back home after a long day at uni, the mind completely blank, body leaked of any traces of energy and stomach groaning with hunger. However, the joy of returning home is sometimes cut short by the groaning stomach’s painful realization that there is absolutely no food at home.

Cooking is the last thing on the mind of a tired soul, but unfortunately dinner doesn’t grow on trees, unless of course you don’t mind munching on an apple for your meal. Most people I know would have no hesitation in grabbing a packet of instant noodles from the pantry and fantasizing at the thought of eating in the next two minutes. But the day I am forced to slurp a bowl of Indomee, or Maggi Mee, or any other mee for that matter, is the day I die. This is not foodie snobbery or a case of over-dramatization. I just hate the metallic, over-compensated taste of these 99c instant noodles dressed up as convenient meals.

For mains, I find it hard to resist a plateful of potato gratin, but instead of the usual cheese-topped scalloped potatoes, I opt for Jansson’s Temptation, a Swedish dish that is rightly famous among the Swedes, but without the cliché of their meatballs. The dish is basically creamy layers of julienne potatoes, onions and anchovies topped with breadcrumbs.

The contrast between the soft potatoes and crunchy breadcrumbs gives way to another play in contrast, this time between the saltiness of the anchovies and the bland cream. It’s just so wonderful. The authentic version uses Swedish anchovies, which are not actually anchovies as we know it but is another type of fish called sprats. However, they are not readily available here in Melbourne, and I doubt you could find them in Malaysia unless you stop over at Ikea, so the normal bottled anchovies will have to do.

Jansson’s Temptation (Jansson’s frestelse)

2 medium onions
700 g potatoes
100g bottled anchovies
200 ml cream
2 tablespoons breadcrumbs
salt and pepper to taste.

Peel the onions, cut into quarters, slice thinly and sauté in butter until soft, translucent and golden. Set aside. Peel the potatoes and julienne (cut into thin strips). You could plunge the potatoes into cold water to remove excess starch. Drain and dry off the potatoes with kitchen towel. Drain the anchovies from the bottle and chop into smaller bits.

Layer the potato strips, anchovies and onions in a buttered casserole dish, starting and ending with the potatoes. Top with 2 tablespoons of breadcrumbs.

To intensify the flavour of the anchovies, you could mix in 2 tablespoons of the anchovy liquid with half of the cream and some pepper. I normally don’t bother. In any case, pour this cream mixture into the casserole dish. Dot the surface with butter and bake in an oven preheated to 200ºC for 30 minutes. After that time, take it out from the oven and pour the rest of the cream into the dish, baking for another 10-15 minutes until the surface is golden and quite dry. Serves 2 as a main meal.

In Asian culture, desserts are not an integral, structured part of the daily meal. Unlike Western cuisine where the mains are finished off with a slice of cake, pudding or a scoop of ice cream, many Asians end their meal simply with fresh fruit. It’s not that we are deficient when it comes to sweet dishes; it’s just that they are eaten less formally, as an afternoon snack, a tea-time treat, or really whenever we feel like it.

This lack of emphasis on desserts as an end to a meal could be one of the reasons for the pathetic choice offered in most Asian restaurants in Melbourne. While there is a huge, almost ridiculous variety of rice, meat and vegetarian dishes, desserts will almost certainly consist of banana fritters with ice cream, fried ice cream or canned mango slices with ice cream. It’s all a bit sad really.

Last month, a close friend came over for lunch. As both of us are sweet-toothed ( I say it like it’s a serious medical condition), I knew from very early on that the most important part of the meal would be the last, and although I dedicated an adequate amount of time in preparing appetizers and the mains, it is in dessert that I was most interested.

Instead of baking a big, heavy cake, I opted to make two, smaller dishes, chocolate cannoli and strawberries coated in caramel. I have always found the concept behind cannoli a bit overwhelming, this hollow wafer filled to the brim with a creamy cheese filling. How could anyone tolerate mouthful after mouthful of such rich, sweet cream?

In fact, the thick layer of cream cheese is balanced quite perfectly by the crunchy wafer shell. If you could think of the common biscuit-base cheesecake as analogous to thick crust pizza, then cannoli is its thin crust, cigar-shaped equivalent.

Originally, the two main ingredients for the filling were to be ricotta cheese and white chocolate. However, my itchy hands could not resist adding coffee essence, which resulted in the unsightly brown-on-brown color combination. However, the lack of visual appeal was more than compensated by the beautiful coffee flavour of the ricotta mixture.

For the strawberries, I pierced the fruit with bamboo skewers, dipped them in caramel and hung them from a raised platform. The caramel drips and eventually hardens, resulting in caramel stalactites that cling tightly to the strawberries.

I love the golden, glass-like quality of the caramel coating. The air bubbles encased in the hardened stalactites give the impression that time has been frozen, and we on the outside are free to observe the momentary entrapment of air.

Unfortunately, caramel hates moisture and heat, and even in spring, when the climate is temperate, the stalactites begin to melt after no more than an hour. It would be almost impossible to make them in summer, when the berries are in season and at their best.