Pineapple Chilli Crab

Yesterday I was already planning what to cook today.  Suddenly have the urge to eat crab.  I used to cook crab my mum's style (more dry type) so thinking maybe it's good that I try to cook it with more gravy type like Singapore Chilli Crab yet I want it to be slightly different from what is available outside so I added Pineapple and didn't use as much Ketchup as them!

Ingredients:
2 Mud Crabs (about 1.2 to 1.5 kg in total)
1 Stalk Spring Onion
2 Eggs
1 tbsp Corn Starch + 2 tbsp Water (mix well)
1 tbsp Maggie Extra Hot Chilli
1 tbsp Ketchup
1 tbsp Fish Sauce
1 tsp Salt
2 Cups of Chicken Stock

Chilli Paste (Blend all together):
2 Red Chilli
8 Bird Eye's Chilli
10 Stalk Dried Chilli (Soak in hot water and  drain first)
5 cm Old Ginger
2 Red Onions
10 Shallots
5 Garlic
Half a small Pineapple
2 Lemongrass

This is how the chilli paste looks like after blending!







Method:

• Kill & clean crabs
• Heat wok with 5 tbsp oil and add in the chilli paste and stir fry chilli till fragrant and oil appears on top with low-med fire.  Keep stirring to prevent it from burning!!
• Add in Chicken Stock and let it boil
• Add in Crab and stir well.  Cover with lid to simmer for 7 minutes
• Open lid and stir well then add in fish sauce and corn starch mixture to thicken the sauce.
• Switch off fire and pour in the eggs.
• Garnish with spring onion and serve!

Usually people eat with deep fried buns if eating chilli crab but I have some milk toast bread left so I use it to dip the gravy and eat and it's heaven!!!

Cook's Note:
* You can adjust the level of chilli hotness base on your own taste.  The quantity I used are consider medium hot only!!

* You can also sprinkle some toasted grinded peanuts onto crab sauce before serving....it's nice..just that I can't find peanut today so I didn't use it!!

Sambal Chilli Sweet Potato Leaves

Today went marketing and saw a bundle of nice young sweet potato leaves and thought would be nice to cook with Sambal Chilli!!

I used to live in Woodland area and there's a hill behind the house where SAF used it for exercise sometimes!  I remembered I used to go up the hill with friends after school hours but before our tutorial time.  There's still kampong hut up there with people staying at that time!  The boys will go around picking emptied bullets and Girls will just walk around chit chating and enjoying the greens....

There's once we venture further up the hill and found that there's few plot of land with nice and fresh veggies growing on it!!  The uncle there was so good to us...we saw a lot of potato leaves along side of the farm and he said it's FOC....told us to pluck as much as we like!  I took back one big plastic bag filled with it for my mum to do the cooking hee....

Here's the ingredients needed:

Sambal (Grind all together)
2 Red Chilli
2 Bird Eye's Chilli
4 Dried Chili (Soak in hot water first and drain)
1 cm Belacan (Dried Shrimp Paste)
4 Shallots
10g Dried Shrimps

1 Bundle of Sweet Potato Leaves
3 tbsp Water
1 tbsp Minced Garlic
1 tsp Fish Sauce

Method:

• Grind sambal paste
• Heat wok with 2 tbsp of oil and stir fry the sambal paste with low-med fire till fragrant
• Add in minced garlic and Sweet Potato Leaves to mix well
• Add in the water and fish sauce and quick stir and dish out!

As you can see I didn't add in any other seasoning except fish sauce because Belacan is already salty.

Easy...try it!!

Penang Assam Laksa

Last week I ate a bowl of Assam Laksa at Jurong Point Red Laquer Restaurant.  The laksa there was good.  Sourish and thick enough!  While eating it, I told myself...this will be the next dish I'm cooking when I have the time.  Searching thru the websites and seeking friend's opinion, I finally managed to get all the necessary ingredients from Supermarket and Wet Market and started cooking the "troublesome" laksa today!

Why I said it's troublesome?  There's so much to buy, so many things to wash and cut...but tell you what...end result was good and worth while when you see the bowls are empty!!

I adopted my recipe from RasaMalaysia but modified some ingredients and quantities to suit my hubby and my taste!

Fish Stock Ingredients (Boil together till fish cooked and remove from fire):

1.5 Kg (Mackerel Fish + Kembong Fish) - I mix it as Mackerel fish is tougher and will have more chuck pieces of fish in soup!

2.5 litre Water

Chilli Paste Ingredients (Grind together): 

15 Red Chilli

100g Shallots

200g Onions (slice)

50g Galangal (蓝姜)

1 Stalk Ginger Flower (cut tip finely and put aside as condiments and use the rest for the chilli paste)

1 Stalk Lemon Grass (cut pieces)

Other Ingredients:

150g Belacan (soft type -fresher)

20 pieces Dried Tamarind Peel

200g Assam + 1 rice bowl of water to make Tamarind Juice (remove seeds)

10 Stalks Laksa Leaves (clean and put aside)

2 Stalks Lemon Grass

Seasoning:

1 tbsp Sugar

1 tbsp Fish Sauce

Condiments:

1 Cucumber (slice thinly)

1 Sawarak Pineapple (cut small chuck)

3 Onions (slice thinly)

Lettuces (slice thinly)

Mint Leaves (use only the leaves and cut thinly)

Ginger Flower (the balance from making chilli paste)

Red Chilli (cut and remove seeds)

Prawn Paste (Heh Go)

Of course not forgeting to get some Laksa Noodles!!

Method:

• Remove fish from pot and strain soup and save for later use.
• Remove fish meat from fish and discard the bones and keep fish meat aside.
• Boil fish stock in pot and add in the grinded chilli paste and all other ingredients and simmer stock for 1 hr.
• Soak Laksa Noodles with hot water and strain then keep aside.
• After 1 hour, add the fish meat back to stock and boil for another 1 hour till soup thicken.
• Place a portion of Laksa Noodles into a soup bowl.  Add in all condiments (quantities based on yr likings) on top of noodles and scoop fish soup base into bowl.
• Add a spoonful of shrimp paste before serving.

Hope you enjoy your Penang Assam Laksa as much as I do!

Sawadee Kaa...Chan Gin Tom Yam Goong Kaa

Ha ha ha....you must be wondering what is this all about right?
Direct translation = Hello, I'm eating Tom Yam Prawn Soup

I first learned to cook Tom Yam Soup from a Thai Taxi Driver's wife in Bangkok few years back.  He heard we looking for places to fish (we went to Bangkok for fishing) so brought us back to his village.  He said there's a place with lots of fishes so we decided to explore.  I got a shock at his so-called fishing place...it's actually just a drain that the villages dig that link to a nearby river!  Knowing that it's definitely a waste of time to fish there, I uses sign language to tell him that I'm interested to learn Thai cooking.  Once they understood my intention, His wife took me to their local wet market in a bike to get ingredients to cook some simple home cooked Thai dishes.  I saw crabs at the market and decided to show off our famous chilli crab to them so also brought all the necessary ingredients I can find there (seems like a cooking exchange program that day).  We seated on the wooden planks floor of a high-rise wooden kampong house and enjoyed a wonderful dinner.

Recently, my guy have been busying learning to speak Thai so I also take the chance to go learn some Thai dishes too ha!  Besides the one time eventful chance of going to the Thai Taxi Driver house, we get to know another Thai friend (our fishing kaki) and since then we kept in touch occasionally and we sure meet up whenever we go to Thailand.

I think it's good that my guy impressed them with his Thai language and I hope next time when I go Bangkok, I can impress them with my Thai cooking skills hee.

Today let's learn the signature dish....Tom Yam Goong!

Ingredients (recipe serves 4 pax):
1000ml Water
250ml Evaporated Milk
8 Slices Galangal
6 Kaffir Lime Leave (Remove the stem)
3 Stalks Lemongrass (cut into 2 pieces every stalk and flatten with chopper)
500g Medium Grey Prawns
100g Oyster Mushroom
100g Baby Corn
15 Bird Eye's Chilli (put it in a plastic bag and use your knife to smash it)
3 Bunch of Coriander Leaves (Cut into 1 cm length)
3 Coriander Root (cut from the Coriander Leaves, scrap clean and flatten with chopper)
5 Garlic (remove skin and smash it)
5 Shallots (remove skin and smash it)
2 Chicken Cubes
3 tbsp Lime Juice from Green Lime
2 tbsp Fish Sauce
3 tbsp Chilli Paste (buy Tom Yam Paste Chilli from Supermarket - too troublesome to teach you to cook the Chilli on your own and you will have very oily kitchen after frying the chilli so let's cook smart!!)

• Boil water and add in chicken cubes, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, coriander roots, lemongrass, garlic and shallots for 10 minutes.
• Add in the chilli paste and simmer for another 5 minutes.
• Add in the Baby Corn, Abalone Mushroom and prawns and boil for another 2 minutes.
• Pour in the Evaporated milk and add in the Bird Eye's Chilli and cook for another minute.
• Turn off the fire and add in fish sauce and lime juice.
• Serve and garnish with Coriander leaves before serving.

Done!!  Tasty and spicy Tom Yam Goong is ready to be served.