Sunday, June 28, 2009

Laksam


I´ve been craving for this cuisine eversince coming to Germany. It is one of the Kelantan cuisine, a type of rice noodle (only thing is, it´s not the long, thin type) and has to be custom-made and eaten with fish, coconut soup and garnished with beansprout, kesum leaves, long beans and beansprouts.

I never made it myself before. As usual back in Malaysia, if you are lazy, you get to buy everthing from the stalls. Plus, I always thought that this cuisine is complicated to make, so I never thought to give a try.


So for the first trial, I got a not-so-bad taste of laksam.

I got the recipe from Myresepi.

For noodle:

Note: To make the noodle, I used spring foam base (in Malaysia, people use the flat pot cover).


Ingredients:

3 cups rice flour
1/2 cup wheat flour
4 cups luke water

Mix all the ingredients and blend well. Rub a little cooking oil on the spring-foam base. Spoon the flour batter onto the spring-foam base to make a thin layer. Put the spring-foam in a steamer. Take out the spring-foam when there are bubbles on the layer. Leave it to cool. Then carefully fold the layer as shown in the picture below:

Cut into short length as desired when you want to eat.

For the soup:

Ingredients:

1.Fish meat - you can use the fresh fish like mackerel, clean it up and boil then separate the bones from the meat or you can use the tinned mackerel with natural sauce.
2. A little bit of garlic
3. A little bit of ginger
4. 2 big onion (or several shallots)
5. Some fresh grounded black pepper (or powder)
6. Coconut milk
7. 2 pieces of sour slices (asam keping)
8. salt (to taste)
9. Brown sugar/white sugar (to taste)

Blend together item 1 to 4. Put the blended item into a big pot and add the rest of the ingredients. Simmer with medium heat until the soup is thick. Add the salt and sugar to the taste.

For garnishing:

Cucumber - cut into small, long pieces
Kesum leaves - mince
Long beans - mince
Beansprout - wash and soak dry
Sambal - fresh chilies with salt and shrimp paste - blend together.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Cek Mek Molek

OMG...I've neglected this blog for more than 2 months!

Not that I didn't cook for the past 2 months, I did...but I was busy with life, hence blogging about cooking is not a priority in daily activities.

Well, this time around I think I should continue blogging about what I have cooked. It may be just the normal, typical food but we are in the internet world, where most people doing search by using Google and perhaps that simple, normal food for you, is something new to somebody else. Maybe I could introduce a food that one probably never heard of, right?

So let´s see I want to blog about....

Cek Mek Molek!


I bet even for some Malays, this delicacy sounds alien to them. Cek Mek Molek is a traditional Kelantan cuisine (my husband comes from there), eaten as a snack. The main ingredient is the sweet potatoes, mixed with wheat flour, a bit of margarine/butter and has sugar filling. I´m not really a sweet tooth person but I made it for my husband.

I took the recipe from Mesra.Net

The ingredients are:

1. Sweet potatoes

2. Wheat flour

3. Margarine

4. Sugar

5. Sugar

6. Cooking oil for frying

Methods:

1. Peel the sweet potatoes and cut into small pieces. Put them into pot and cover with cold water. Add some salt. Bring to boil or until the sweet potatoes become soft.

2. Drain the sweet potatoes and mash it. Add wheat flour and margarine (proportion the amount until you are able to make a dough of the mixture).

3. Take some portion, make a ball (about a ping-pong ball size). Then press it flat. Put a small amout of sugar in the middle. Fold the dough to cover the sugar and form it into long oval shape (I made it just oval)

4. Deep fry until golden colour.

Easy, eh?