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Malaysian fried chicken – inche kabin

Inche kabinI’m on a bit of a Malaysian kick at the moment. I’ve not been back in six years, and it’s getting to me. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to head for Rasa Sayang in London’s Chinatown, where, if you half-close your eyes and relax, you can imagine you’re eating in Kuala Lumpur. (In one of the clean bits.) Failing that, you can get out your wok.

To serve four, you’ll need:

1 jointed chicken OR 200g chicken wings
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar
4 tablespoons coconut milk (this is an occasion on which the brands with emulsifier work best)
2 heaped tablespoons curry powder
2 inches ginger, grated and squeezed for the juice
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
50g rice flour
Oil for deep frying – I used grape seed oil, which has a very high smoke point and a neutral flavour

Try to find a Malaysian curry powder like Linghams which is meant for chicken – they have a very specific and delicious flavour. Failing that, Bolst’s Madras curry powder is always an excellent fallback.

Marinate the jointed chicken or wings in the sugar, coconut, curry powder, ginger juice and soy overnight in the fridge. If you were in Malaysia, you’d take the chicken outside at this point and lay it in the blistering hot sun for half an hour or so, until the marinade had dried onto the meat, and then fry. Fat chance of that in Cambridgeshire.  So I use a tip I picked up from one of my cousins, and dredge the wet, marinaded meat with rice flour. Rice flour gives this dish a fantastic crunch, and also retains that crunch when the chicken is cold, making this a brilliant selection for a picnic.

Heat enough oil in your wok to half-submerge the pieces of chicken (or use your deep fryer), and bring to a frying temperature (about 180°C/360°f). Fry the chicken, turning regularly, for about 12 minutes, until cooked through and tender.

Serve immediately, or cool and eat as part of a cold supper or picnic. Worcestershire sauce is a common accompaniment for this, but I much prefer a bowl of soy sauce with some green bird’s eye chilli snipped into it to dip the chicken pieces into.

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Beef rendang

Beef rendangIt’s my firm belief that every culture in the world has at least one dish which looks like something the cat dragged in, ate, digested, and left as a gift on the hall carpet twelve hours later. Beef rendang is Malaysia’s offering to this noble pool.

I’ve not come across a dish like rendang anywhere else in the world. Beef is simmered in a thick mixture of spices, browned coconut and coconut milk until nearly dry, soaking up huge amounts of flavour during the simmering process; the cooking method turns from simmering to frying as the mixture reduces and the oils from the coconut leach out. You end up with a thick, rich, dark brown sauce, packed with herbs and sweetness from shallots and roasted coconut. It’s a dish that takes a while to prepare, so make plenty and freeze what you don’t eat immediately.

CoconutYou’ll need to tackle a raw coconut for this recipe. Opening coconuts doesn’t have to be anything like the palaver we seem to make of it in the UK – all that business with towels and hammers. As you can see from the picture, my coconut was bisected neatly. All you need to do to achieve the same thing from yours is to hold it over a bowl, and, using a meat cleaver or large knife (cleavers are available very cheaply at Chinese supermarkets, if you have one in the neighbourhood), tap hard with the blunt edge along the equator of the coconut – the pointy tuft at one end and the three “eyes” at the other are your north and south poles. Keep tapping with the blunt side, not the blade, as hard as you can, turning the coconut as you go, and once you’ve circled it about five times (by which point you will be sweating and swearing that all this work hasn’t made a blind bit of difference) the coconut will split neatly in half, the juice inside falling into your cleverly pre-positioned bowl. It’s magic. Give it a shot.

A word on that coconut juice. It’s not the same thing as coconut milk (the stuff you find in a can), which is the grated white flesh of the coconut, moistened and squeezed. Coconut juice is very pleasant on a beach somewhere when your coconut is green and straight off a tree, a nice man has sliced the top off it with a machete, and you have a few shots of rum and a straw; but once your coconut has turned brown and been shipped to the UK, it will be bitter and horrid. Drink it if you must. If you’re smart, you’ll pour it down the sink.

Coconut milk is a different matter. For this recipe, it’s more important than ever that you buy some without emulsifiers – you’ll be using the thick, creamy part of the milk separately from the more watery part. I always buy cans of Chaokoh, a Thai brand. If you’ve difficulty tracking it down locally, you can find it (and a paradise of other Chinese, Malaysian, Korean and Japanese ingredients) at Wai Yee Hong, an oriental supermarket in Bristol with an internet shopping arm – I order from them every couple of months, and they’re super-reliable.

To serve four, you’ll need:

1 coconut
600g beef topside
1 tablespoon soft dark brown sugar
1½ teaspoons tamarind block (surprisingly enough, I found some at Tesco)
10 blanched almonds OR 2 candlenuts, peeled
2 teaspoons turmeric powder
2 Kaffir lime leaves
2 stalks lemongrass
1 in piece galangal
1 in piece ginger
10 small shallots
3 fresh red chillies
8 dried red chillies (look for Malaysian cili kering in an oriental grocer)
2 cloves garlic
1½ tablespoons palm sugar (or soft dark brown sugar)
2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
1 can coconut milk
Salt and pepper
Boiling water

Open the coconut according to the instructions above. Pry the white flesh away from the shell, and use a sharp knife or a vegetable peeler to remove the brown skin from the flesh. Grate the white flesh and dry-fry, stirring regularly, until dry and dark brown but not burned.

While the coconut is frying, soak the tamarind in enough boiling water to cover, poking with a fork until the tamarind is soft. Pick out the seeds.

Cut the beef into pieces and marinade in all but 2 tablespoons of the toasted coconut, the tamarind and its liquid, two teaspoons of sugar and a teaspoon of salt. Set aside while you prepare the other ingredients.

Put the remaining toasted coconut in the bowl of the food processor with the almonds, turmeric, lime leaves, lemongrass, galangal, ginger, peeled shallots, chillies and garlic. Whizz until everything is reduced to a fine paste. Put the paste in a thick-bottomed saucepan with the runny, milky part of the coconut milk, 100ml boiling water, the palm sugar, another teaspoon of salt, a generous grating of pepper and the dark soy sauce. Stir well and bring to the boil over a moderate heat. Add the meat with any juices, and bring back to a simmer. Continue to cook, without a lid, for an hour, stirring frequently to prevent burning. Most of the liquid will have reduced away by this point.

After an hour, add the creamy part of the coconut milk to the mixture and stir well. Add a lid and continue to cook over a reduced heat for another hour, stirring occasionally. The finished rendang should have a thick, dense sauce, and look oily, the fat having come out of the coconut, almonds and coconut milk to fry off the other ingredients.

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South-East Asian salmon curry

If you made a batch of the curry paste to cook the prawns earlier this week, you’ll still have half of it in a little bowl in the fridge. This is a very easy dish to cook, and many of the ingredients should already be sitting around in your storecupboard. Swap the green beans for another appropriate-feeling vegetable if you fancy, in keeping with the “what’s in the fridge” nature of this one.

My salmon was bought and frozen before Christmas. It was going to be made into gravadlax before I realised that the fillet I’d bought had, for some reason, been pre-skinned. A skinned salmon fillet’s a pest to cook with if you’re not doing something very simple with it – too much moving around and it’ll flake into bits. So a gentle poaching in a rich curry sauce is an ideal method for a fragile piece of fish like this. If your salmon has the skin on still, so much the better. Don’t bother to remove it before cooking.

To serve 4, you’ll need:

One large salmon fillet, about 2lb (900g), defrosted if frozen
Curry paste (see recipe)
1 large onion
2 large potatoes, chopped into 1in squares
50g green beans
1 can coconut milk
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 heaped teaspoon Madras curry powder
1 cinnamon stick
2 bay leaves
1 large handful fresh mint
1 large handful fresh coriander
Juice of 2 limes
Salt and pepper

Chop the onion into medium dice and fry it with the bay leaves, cinnamon stick and curry powder in a large pan until translucent. Add the curry paste to the pan and cook, stirring all the time, for five minutes. Pour over the coconut milk and tomatoes, and stir through the potatoes. Bring the mixture to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes without a lid, stirring occasionally.

Stir in the chopped beans and slide the salmon into the dish, making sure it is covered with the bubbling sauce. Put the lid on and continue to simmer for 12 minutes.

While the salmon is cooking, chop the mint leaves. When the time is up, stir the lime juice into the curry with salt and pepper to taste. Serve over white rice, scatter the herbs over each serving and get stuck in.

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Indian rice pudding

My elderly rice cooker died earlier this year, and my lovely Mum and Dad forbade me to buy another one in the UK, where rice cookers are usually expensive and primitive. They happened to be visiting family in Malaysia over the summer and came back with creation’s most technologically advanced rice cooker – it’s digital and has fuzzy logic (I’m not exactly sure what that means); it has settings for congee, sushi, nasi lemak, brown rice, white rice, reheating and quick cooking; it works as a steamer for meat or veg; it keeps the rice hot and perfectly textured for as much as a day; and you can use it as a slow cooker. (It’s the Panasonic SR-MPA18 – good luck finding one outside SE Asia. I believe Panasonic also makes one that you can bake cakes in.) I love it, use it several times a week…and yesterday discovered that the fridge contained two bowls of leftover rice.

Cold rice in this house usually gets turned into fried rice, with the addition of some Chinese sausage, an egg and so forth. This time I fancied something different, and remembered the Indian mother of a schoolfriend who used to turn their leftover basmati rice into a very sweet, sticky rice pudding with milk, coconut milk and Indian spices in a frying pan. Here’s my attempt at something similar – I’m pretty sure that this is a long way from being authentic, but it’s close to what I remember my friend’s mother making, and it tasted great.

You’ll need:

250g leftover cooked basmati rice
275ml milk
50g palm sugar (use soft brown sugar if you can’t find palm sugar)
1 can coconut milk
5 cardamom pods
1 stick cinnamon, snapped in half
2 tablespoons sultanas
2 tablespoons mixed peel, plus extra to garnish

Put the rice in a frying pan with the sugar, spices, sultanas and peel, and pour the milk over. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook, stirring so the bottom doesn’t stick, until the mixture is thickening and the milk is being absorbed into the rice (5-10 minutes).

Spoon the coconut milk over the rice and continue to simmer over a very low heat, stirring now and then. The mixture will thicken as you go. When it reaches a dense, creamy consistency, take it off the heat and cover until cool. Divide into bowls and scatter each with a bit more mixed peel. This pudding is best eaten at room temperature, but you can also have it warm if you can’t wait!

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Sweet potato and chickpea curry

I like to make a vegetable curry as an accompaniment when I make a meat one, but this curry is substantial and tasty enough to stand up as a meal on its own with rice. This curry is in a southern Indian style, with coconut milk making the curry rich and thick, and lime juice adding zing. It’s great for vegetarians – it’s loaded with flavour, and will have the meat-eaters fighting among themselves (probably with forks) for a helping too.

I have been lazy in this recipe and haven’t made my own curry paste. A good shop-bought curry powder works very well here – as usual, I recommend Bolst’s Madras powder, which is really well-balanced and fragrant. To serve four, you’ll need:

3 sweet potatoes
2 onions
6 spring onions plus more to garnish
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 inch piece of ginger
4 cloves garlic
1 can chickpeas
1 can coconut milk
1 bird’s eye chilli (more if you want a hotter curry)
1 handful chopped coriander leaves
Juice of 1 lime
3 tablespoons oil
Salt to taste

Dice the onions and slice the spring onions, and sauté them in the oil with the curry powder and the coriander, cumin and fennel seeds until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the garlic and ginger, both chopped finely, with the diced and peeled sweet potato and the sliced chilli, and continue to sauté until the sweet potato starts to caramelise and brown a little at the edges.

Pour the coconut milk over the curry, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes, until the sweet potato is soft. Add the drained chickpeas to the pan with half the lime juice and a teaspoon of salt, and simmer for another five minutes. Taste for seasoning – you may want to add more lime. Remove from the heat and stir in the fresh coriander, and garnish with some sliced spring onion.

This curry tastes even better if you leave it in the fridge for a day before reheating and serving. If you do this, add some more fresh coriander when you serve it.

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Coconut ice

This is a recipe that’s ideal for child-centric bake sales – school fêtes, church fairs, that sort of thing. Kids love making sweeties, and coconut ice is one of the few sweets that doesn’t require any cooking, so it’s a safe recipe for little hands to get stuck into.

If you’re making this with children, it’s worth buying pink food colouring rather than just using a teeny amount of red. Children let loose on red colouring can easily produce coconut ice that looks like the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, so spend 40p on the pink stuff for a reliably Barbie-pink finish.

I have found myself a little queasy around condensed milk since John Prescott announced his uncanny ability to “sup a whole tin of Carnation…just for the taste” (and then spew it forth again). Coconut ice a very good way to rehabilitate the stuff. The amount this recipe produces will help you erase any such nasty images from your mind via the diabetic coma you’ll fall into if you eat all of it.

To make just over a kilogram of coconut ice, you’ll need:

400g dessicated coconut
400g icing sugar
1 tin (397g) condensed milk
½ teaspoon pink food colouring

In a large bowl, stir the dessicated coconut, icing sugar and condensed milk together until you have a stiff, sticky mixture. Remove half the coconut ice to a clean bowl and add the food colouring, then stir again until the colour is blended in smoothly. (Stirring this is hard work because the mixture is rather stiff, so children will need supervision.)

Line a small rectangular dish with cling film, making sure there is plenty overhanging at the sides. (Later, you will fold these overhanging bits over to cover the coconut ice.) Grease the cling film with a few drops of vegetable oil. Take the white portion of coconut ice and pack it firmly into the lined dish, making sure you produce an even layer. Pack the pink portion into a neat layer on top of the white layer. They will stick together firmly, thanks to the amazing adhesive qualities of sugar and condensed milk. Fold the cling film over the top and refrigerate the coconut ice overnight.

When the coconut ice is nice and firm from the fridge, turn it out of the dish, using the cling film to help, and peel the film away. Chop into little squares (a serrated knife is useful here), dust with icing sugar and pack in greaseproof paper for the school fête.