The Cocoanut

photo courtesy of Cece

A little more than a month ago, a friend and I made the trip to Brunswick Street Fitzroy. Inner-city Melburnians invest a lot of emotional attachment on this part-yuppie, part-grungy strip, and lately there has been this love-hate relationship over the inevitable gentrification of this café-studded street. Perversely, those who protest the loudest are usually the ones contributing to the gentrification. You hear complains about the “self-conscious grunginess” of the commissioned graffiti on some of Brunswick Street’s commercial establishments and the “loss of character that made the place so special”. I’m quite content with its character at the moment, but they’re more than welcome to visit my local strip Sydney Road if poverty and delinquent graffiti is what they’re after.

Anyway, one of Brunswick Street’s popular spots is Babka, a bakery whose breads are much talked about. It’s a small cosy café bustling with energy, and although I’m not a regular customer, I can attest that their egg loaf, which is essentially challah minus the Jewish identity, is really quite good. Fresh from my trip to Tasmania, I had this hitherto unbeknownst urge for meat pies, so the beef burgundy with rocket salad and kasoundi (a sort of relish) seemed the obvious choice.

We were served a basket of bread slices - a multigrain, spiced rye and a white variety, which were all really flavorsome. So flavorsome, in fact, that we didn’t mind waiting half an hour for our pies, until we were told they’d forgotten all about the pies. I was in an unusually laidback mode so I was quite happy to wait an extra 15 minutes, although the bribe that came in the form of another basket of bread slices certainly helped.

Halfway through the wait, a loud crashing noise exploded across the room and one of the waitresses was lying on the floor, with broken pieces of plates splattered all over. It must’ve been quite painful. I’ve always felt that waitressing is a rather dangerous occupation, like a circus performer in the middle of a balancing act but without the glamour and thunderous applause.

The pies eventually came and hurriedly consumed. Hot steaming meat encased in puff pastry makes a good antidote to winter, which incidentally is the coldest in a decade. We paid the bill, which was surprisingly cheap, and then we realized we were only charged for one pie. I wasn’t entirely sure if this was deliberate to make up for their forgetfulness or the staff really did make another blunder, but since I was in such a laidback mode I thought I’d just give myself the benefit of the doubt

Sambal terung (eggplant) has got to be one of my favorite Malaysian dishes, the savory smoky sambal piggybacking on the velvety creamy flesh of the eggplant. However, eggplants are notorious for their sponge-like ability to suck in oil. Sambal eggplant done the traditional way starts off with deep frying the eggplants, where more than half of the oil inevitably gets absorbed into the flesh. To this is added the sambal, fried in even more oil, and you end up with a vegetarian dish that gives more grease than fish ‘n chips.

The carefree use of oil, along with the labor intensive and time consuming process of deep frying the eggplants are inefficient remnants of cooking methods that belong to a bygone era, when food was solely prepared by stay-at-home mothers and obesity unheard of. To time-poor sedentary workers who are constantly anxious about putting on weight, sambal terung has become the culinary equivalent of asbestos.

We could either abolish this dish from our diet (which for eggplant lovers like myself is akin to gastronomic fundamentalism), or we could apply simple engineering solutions to minimize the financial, time and health costs associated with this much-maligned dish. The goal is to create a healthy and easy sambal terung dish without compromising its distinctively savory appeal.

My definition of an “easy” dish is something that doesn’t demand more than 5 ingredients, and my sambal terung consists of

2 large eggplants
2 shallots
2 cloves garlic
2 heaped tablespoon blended red chilies (which may be equivalent to as much as 4 tablespoons, but whatever)

and basic stuff like vegetable oil and salt.

Engineers like to work with arbitrary numbers that, based on experience, seem to work. In the same spirit, “2” was chosen to quantify the ingredients because, from experience, that amount seems to work and it makes for easy memorizing. Who has the time to look up recipe books when we don’t even have time to say Hi to our loved ones?

Begin by slicing the eggplants into rather large cubes of around 2-cm in thickness (again, based on experience and for ease of memory). Instead of deep frying the hell out of them, I simply place them in a shallow rack and roast in an oven preheated to 220ºC (can you see the numerical pattern here?) for 30 minutes.

Roasting the eggplant in the oven not only minimizes oil and effort, it also frees up time to chop the shallots and garlic and blend the chilies. The Italian way of roasting eggplant involves brushing the surface with olive oil. I found this to be redundant – at least in the case of sambal terung – because the flavor comes from the sambal oil which is added later.

After the eggplants have been roasted, fry the aromatics in about 100 ml of oil. Bear in mind that no oil has been added prior to this process, so 100 ml (approx. 6 tablespoons) is not at all unreasonable. When the air is dancing with the unmistakable fragrance of the sautéed aromatics, add in the freshly blended red chilies and continue frying. I stir only occasionally, because I want some of the chilies to be left idle on the base of the wok until it chars a little to give it a smoky flavor, and also because I’m lazy.

After the chili is thoroughly cooked, add the still-hot roasted eggplant, season with salt and stir gently to exfoliate the eggplant with the sambal mix. You will end up with a dish perfect for the terung lover – smoky eggplant covered with savory aromatic sambal, with just a pleasantly meager trickling of oil.

Now that the spam is in control (or so I hope!), it seems as good a time as ever to return to writing on The Cocoanut, transcribing my hunger pangs and appetite into words that last longer than the sensations that tease the tastebuds.

This time around, I decide to go back to basics and keep things simple. There’s not much point in making things complicated when my life is already a jumble of mess. So gone are the less-than-successful experiments with Google ads and food blogging communities; I’ve never been good at Internet socialising.

So The Cocoanut will be what it was always meant to be; a memo to preserve the lingering thoughts of greed, hunger and pleasure.

I love eating those old school Mediterranean dips, hummus, baba ghanouj, tzatziki, with dry, rye crispbreads. Some people enjoy them with raw carrot or celery matchsticks, due to personal taste or purely for health benefits, but I find the individual flavours of the veggies quite distracting. In order to fully appreciate the nuttiness of hummus or the velvety, roast eggplant smokiness of baba ghanouj, the nondescript neutrality offered by bread, or crispbread, is best.

I’m not sure if it’s inflation or agflation, the current phenomenon of sharply rising food prices, but dips at the supermarket these days are really expensive (or am I just poorer?)

In any case, I won’t allow my addiction to dips to bring me to the brink of financial insolvency, so I’ve resorted to making them at home instead. Dips from pulses like chickpeas, lentils and broad beans are very convenient to make, as you could just buy them already tinned. Of course, you could also soak them overnight and cook them for a further 2 hours, but that would kinda cancel out the Convenience factor.

Essentially, dips are a combination of 3 things, the body, which consists of the main ingredient; seasoning like salt, spices or herbs; and fats like oil and tahini (sesame paste), which flavours and loosens the dip. In the hummus recipe below, I’ve excluded tahini simply because I don’t have it at home, but the result is no less tasty.

Hummus in a jiffy
Serves 4 or 1 if you’re me

1x 400g tinned chickpeas, drained, washed, and loose skins discarded if you can be bothered (I hate the skins, so I don’t mind the extra effort)
½ tsp ground cumin, chili powder
1 clove garlic, crushed
juice of 1 lemon
olive oil
salt

Mash the chickpeas thoroughly, add the seasonings according to taste, then finish it off with a few lugs of olive oil and stir until you get a consistent paste. In one version I added 2 tsp of mayo just to experiment, and I found the dip had a more consistent texture, although I’m not sure if the same result could be achieved simply by adding more olive oil!

Spicy Lentil dip,also in a jiffy

1x 400g tinned lentils, drained and washed
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
a small piece of ginger, about 1 cm, grated or finely chopped
½ tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp ground cumin, ground coriander
1 tablespoon tomato paste

Heat some oil in a frying pan, and sauté the onion, garlic and ginger until the onion is soft. Add the turmeric, cumin, coriander and lentils and cook, stirring, until fragrant. Add the tomato paste and continue stirring. Take off the heat, and mash the whole thing until it becomes a paste. Add some olive oil to loosen, and season with salt and pepper if need be.

Not being able to tolerate such disservice to the eating experience any longer, I decided to make my own marinade. It can’t be that hard. And I found out, it isn’t. All I needed was confidence to adjust the seasoning until I found a taste to my liking. I used the recipe below to marinade about 500g of chicken pieces, poked with a fork so the flavors penetrate deeper, and then baked in the oven at 200º C for about 35-40 minutes. It can easily be doubled as you see fit.

Honey Mustard & Herb Marinade (adequately seasons 500g of meat)

1 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp honey
1 clove garlic, crushed
a pinch of herbs, such as dried parsley, basil or thyme
salt and pepper to taste
a few drops of oil

Combine the ingredients and rub all over the chicken pieces, leave for a few hours and bake in the oven when you feel hungry.

There has been this snobbery over dried herbs where they’re treated like some outcast creation of the industrial age. Dried herbs have actually been around for ages, to either give a different dimension to the dish, or as a substitute ingredient for the lazy cook such as myself. I’m quite happy to substitute dried parsley for its fresh variant, on those days when I have neither the time nor the inclination to visit the supermarket solely for the pursuit of fresh parsley.

In any case, my favourite herb is the lemongrass. This beautiful herb usually works behind the scenes, adding gently its subtle floral essence in braised dishes or dry curries. Southeast Asian dishes tend to include a whole multitude of ingredients, and at times I often wonder if some of the herbs or spices are redundant. But lemongrass is one of those herbs whose presence can seem to be missing amidst all the different flavours, but whose absence is definitely felt when it’s removed from the recipe.

There are many ways to enjoy lemongrass. It can be blended with onions and other aromatics into a paste, or sliced thinly and scattered over meat. I extract the greatest pleasure by bruising the stalks and throwing it into the pot, letting it simmer and slowly release its beautiful notes of citrus in the background.

The tom yam fish prepared in the photo involves steaming a whole fish (I think it was barramundi that day, but any fresh white fish will suffice). While steam is happily puffing away gently cooking the fish and turning its flesh from its translucent shine into soft tender white, I make the sauce by frying sliced onions, too much garlic, oyster sauce, tom yam paste and the bruised lemongrass stalks.

When all the meat has been consumed, some people enjoy sucking the bones of the fish. I much prefer to suck on my bruised lemongrass, extracting the essence for all its worth.

A mainstay in any Malay feast, the chicken rendang manages to assume both a regal distinction and a common presence in the culinary landscape of Malaysia. It is as pedestrian as nasi lemak, readily sold in makeshift stalls along the roadside, yet it also occupies the ornate pages of celebrated cookbooks, passed down as family heirlooms to be shared with the masses.

Unfortunately, as can be seen in the photo, the rendang, together with deep fried fish braised in soy sauce with fried chilli and toasted coconut, share a most unfortunate feature of Malay food, the ‘brown gravy syndrome’, where virtually all dishes end up as a pile of indistinguishable meat pieces bathed in a puddle of brownish gravy. But what they lack in aesthetic appeal they more than make up in the indulgently heady, rich spicy taste and lingering aroma that fills the room.

Stir fry veggies, deviating from the pure ideals of vegetarianism through the addition of ikan bilis (dried anchovies) and tiger prawns, provided a safe, classic option for everyone. I personally would have preferred kangkung belacan or steamed eggplant sambal, but then I have very little say among the elders.

Vegetables are an integral part of Southeast Asian cooking, featuring heavily in rice, noodles and even meat-based dishes. This is probably why the concept of vegetarianism in Asia is not treated like a kind of subversive, almost heretical movement in some of the meat-obsessed European cultures, where pompous chefs take pride in treating vegetarians even worse than the animals they butcher.

One of the most excellent treatments that could be accorded to fish is to submerge it completely into a vat of hot, golden oil, a process which miraculously elevates the fins and bones from being an unavoidable and messy nuisance to a crisp, crunchy component of the sweet flesh.

However, Malay cuisine suffers from an over-reliance on the deep frying method, and there is a real danger that in the years to come this overdependence will manifest into a major health battle which has now become a daily reality in countries such as the United States and Australia.

My current favourite dish is sweet and sour fish, which I know is perfect when deep-fried. We wanted to test whether a similar result could be obtained by grilling it in the oven. This would not only be a much healthier alternative, it would also provide a welcome respite from the splashes of hot fat bursting angrily from the wok.

We found that it was quite difficult to turn the fish over halfway through grilling without tearing the skin and breaking the flesh apart, because while the top part of the fish is firm and charred from the overhead grill, the bottom side is soft due to the natural fat of the fish dropping off from it. Therefore, we placed the fish onto the platter as it was from the oven; the charred part would remain as the top side. Onto this is poured the sweet and sour sauce; a blend of Thai sweet chilli sauce, vinegar, sugar, salt and lots of aromatics like shallots and garlic, lightly sautéed in oil to release the unmistakable fragrance that never fails to whet my appetite.

For me, the one thing that makes me happy is garlic. I can never go wrong with garlic. The pungent smell, the taste, the after-effects on your breath. I eat burnt garlic with as much joy as I would a perfectly fried clove; they’re all good to me. When my mom cooks her signature sambal ikan, using my favourite fish, kurau, and of course with a bit of coconut milk (which self-respecting Malay wouldn’t), she leaves her garlic cloves whole, so that I may eat it with all the flavour and juices intact.

It comes as no surprise then, that one of my favourite things to have is garlic bread. Nothing fancy, just a piece of good crusty bread, a slash of butter and crushed garlic and we’re ready to go. Dusting it with parsley not only creates an appealing visual effect, it also makes the act of eating garlic bread seem like a healthy thing to do (all the goodness of herbs packed in a lump of butter-softened bread!). A squeeze of lemon juice provides a hint of acidity that cuts across the sometimes overwhelming richness of the garlic and butter. Or, if you are the sort that loves to be overwhelmed, just add parmesan.