A Tiger in the Kitchen (32 page)
Read A Tiger in the Kitchen Online
Authors: Cheryl Tan
My mother looked at me keenly, seeming to wonder whether I would actually bother to do all this back in Brooklyn. “It will cool you down, help you
bu shenti
—strengthen your body,” she said. “Mummy always sees you running around, so busy. You’d better take care of your health, okay? Listen to Mummy.”
I promised that I would try.
“Cheryl ah,” Auntie Alice said in a phone call the day before I left. “So how did your dinner go?”
“Good, good,” I said, telling her about the text that I’d gotten from my cousin Jessie the next day: “Thanks Cheryl for your dinner. the food was great. . . . especially the braised duck . . . my mum said yrs is so much better than hers. . . . You Won her heee . . . heee . . . real good. . . .”
“Wow!” Auntie Alice said. “Not bad ah! Clever already ah!”
I started to say “No lah, no lah” before she cut me off.
“You know, there’s this Chinese saying:
Jingde liao chu fang ye jingdeliao dating,
” she said. “It means you are skilled enough to be in the kitchen but also skilled enough to be in the great hall.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you can do both—you’re a superwoman!” she said, laughing. “You have really grown up, Cheryl.”
TANGLIN AH-MA’S PINEAPPLE TARTS
Makes about 100 tarts
Quantities aren’t exact. My aunts don’t use a recipe, and they laughed at me the first ten times I asked them for this one. The initial set of instructions they gave me for pineapple jam was “Aiyah, you just juice the pineapple, add sugar, and then boil, boil, boil!”
For the jam
4 pineapples
2 to 3 pandan leaves* knotted together
1 long cinnamon stick, broken in two
At least 2 ½ cups sugar, depending on desired sweetness
*Leaves from the pandan tree, also called screw pine, can be found frozen in some Asian grocery stores.
Peel the pineapples, dig out the eyes, and chop the fruit into chunks. Run the chunks through a juicer. Place the pulp in a wok or pot with a large surface area and heat it on the stove. Add the juice until the mixture has the consistency of porridge or grits; add the knotted pandan leaves and cinnamon stick. Bring the mixture to a boil and keep it there for 3 hours, stirring often. Halfway through, taste the jam, and add sugar by the ½ cup until the jam is as sweet as you desire. (Note: The amount of sugar needed will vary greatly depending on how ripe the pineapples are.)
The jam is done when the pineapple mixture has changed from bright yellow to brownish ocher and most of the liquid has evaporated, leaving a dense but moist jam.
For the pastry
3 sticks plus 2 ½ tablespoons butter at room temperature
About 4 ¾ cups flour
4 egg yolks, plus 1 yolk for brushing onto pastry
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
With a mixer on low speed, combine the butter, flour, and egg yolks, mixing for 3 to 5 minutes.
Place the dough in a cookie press fitted with a disk featuring a circle of diamonds. Press the cookies out onto greased baking sheets. Form small balls of dough and press each one into the hollow of a cookie, forming the base of the tart.
Beat the remaining egg yolk with ½ teaspoon of water. Brush the rim of each tart generously with this mixture. Take a scant teaspoon of jam (more or less, as desired) and form a ball, then press it into the hollow of each tart. Pat the sides of the jam to create a small dome.
Bake for 15 to 20 minutes at 350 degrees, until golden brown. Remove the cookies from the baking sheets and cool on a rack.
Yield: About 4 cups
10 eggs
½ to 1 cup sugar, depending on how sweet you like it
Milk from shredded pulp of 1 coconut (squeeze milk out in 2 batches)
3 pandan leaves, tied in knots
Crack the eggs in a bowl; whisk them together. Add ½ to 1 cup of sugar and coconut milk and mix it up well. Transfer mixture to a glass bowl, add knotted pandan leaves, then perch that bowl atop a steaming rack in a wok.
Steam the mixture for 45 to 60 minutes, untouched (if using Ah-Ma’s method), until the desired consistency is reached. If you are using the method E-Ma and I experimented with, stir occasionally.
When you remove the
kaya
from the steamer, stir it, let it cool, and spread it over toasted bread. The consistency should be smooth and creamy.
Yield: About 40
2 pounds glutinous rice
1 pound pork belly
2 pounds pork leg
2 pounds shallots, peeled
¾ to 1 cup vegetable or corn oil
10 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
4 ounces dried Chinese mushrooms, soaked in water for 2 hours, drained, and cut into ¼-inch cubes
1 tablespoon salt (or more, to taste)
4 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon white pepper
2 ½ tablespoons ground coriander
2 to 3 tablespoons dark soy sauce
80 to 90 bamboo leaves and string
10 pandan leaves
Wash the rice and soak it in a tub of water for at least 5 hours.
Bring a pot of water to boil, place the pork belly and pork leg in the water, and cover. Cook it until it’s 50 to 75 percent done. (Poke a chopstick in. If it goes through easily, the meat is ready. You want it to be solid enough to be easy to cube.) Then chop the pork into ¼-inch cubes.
Place the shallots in a food processor to chop them, not too fine. Heat about ¼ cup of oil in a wok. When the oil is hot, add the garlic and fry until it’s slightly brown. Remove the garlic, then add the shallots to the same oil and fry until soft. Add more oil (½ cup perhaps), and fry some more to mix. Remove the shallots. Then add the mushrooms to the same oil and fry for about 10 minutes or until the mushrooms are soft and the water they release has evaporated. Add the pork and fry it all up together. Add 1 tablespoon of salt, fry it a little, then add the garlic and shallots. Add the sugar, white pepper, and coriander, and fry it all together for about 20 minutes, then taste. If you’d like any more of any of the spices, add them now. Finally, add the dark soy sauce and fry until everything is well mixed. Remove from the wok and set aside. Let the filling cool for a few hours or overnight.
Soak the bamboo leaves in water to soften them.
Drain the rice and set it aside.
Take 2 bamboo leaves and fold them in the center so you form a triangular hollow, with the ends of the leaves pointing upward. Place in the hollow 1 or 2 tablespoons of rice (or more if you’d like), then 3 or more heaping tablespoons of meat mixture (or more, if you’d like), and top it with 2 or 3 tablespoons of rice, until the hollow is filled. Then fold over the leaves to cover the top of the hollow, twist them to seal, and tie the
bak-zhang
with string.
When all the
bak-zhang
have been wrapped, heat a large pot of water with the knotted pandan leaves. When the water is boiling, place the
bak-zhang
in the pot and boil them for 90 minutes.
Bak-zhang
can be kept in the refrigerator for a week or the freezer for up to 2 months. Serve with chili sauce on the side.
Makes 4 rolls
3 tablespoons canola oil
12 peeled, deveined shrimps
1 tablespoon sesame oil
3 tablespoons minced shallots
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 pound julienned jicama
2 tablespoons preserved soybean paste
1 tablespoon oyster sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
1 ½ cups water
Salt and pepper
4 (8-inch-by-8 inch)
popiah
(spring roll) wrappers
4 lettuce leaves
4 ounces julienned five-spiced tofu
2 tablespoons minced scallions
For sauce
1 tablespoon Sriracha chili sauce
1 tablespoon preserved soybean sauce
In a pan, heat 1 tablespoon of canola oil over medium heat, add the shrimp, and sauté until they are cooked through. Remove the shrimp from the pan and set aside.
Add the remaining canola oil and the sesame oil, heat over medium heat, add the shallots, and cook until soft but not brown. Add the garlic and continue cooking for another 30 seconds; stir constantly to prevent the mixture from browning. Add the jicama, 1 tablespoon of soybean paste, oyster sauce, and sugar, and toss evenly. Add the water, turn the heat to low, and let the mixture cook for 15 minutes or until the jicama is soft. Season with salt and pepper. Strain the mixture, set the solids aside to cool, and reserve the “juice.”
Lay a sheet of
popiah
skin on a clean surface; put a piece of lettuce on top; place the cooled shrimp, jicama, tofu, and scallions in the middle; and gently fold the extra skin over to form a roll. Continue making the rolls.
Add Sriracha sauce and the remaining soybean sauce to the juice.
Slice up rolls into ¾-inch-thick slices; serve with dipping sauce on the side.
AUNTIE KHAR IMM’S SALTED VEGETABLE AND DUCK SOUP