Some Flavours From Home

Besides some home-made Penang Hokkien mee, relatives sent me three jars of home-made spice pastes last week. A cousin just started doing this on the side and is only making these pastes to order, so there's no big push to market.

But this was part of an unexpected but much-needed care package - that's what I'm calling it - as I've not been out to shop in two weeks while the second jab settles in, and the pastes added colour and flavour to my otherwise drab rice dishes that reminded me of mask-free days of yore.

You take it for granted that café or restaurant you found and whose dishes you like will be there forever - until they close down. I'm terrified of checking up on these. Who knows how many are still in business in the current situation?

...Ah, yes.

An aunt - said cousin's mom - offered me samples of the pastes through WhatsApp. These were supposed to be sold but she "belanja" me, she said. I took up the offer. If these are as good as the Hokkien mee, I'll be ordering more.

The noodles and pastes - two sambals and a ginger-scallion paste - arrived at the condo, Uber-ed to me by the cousin's husband. He arrived pretty late, so I could only figure out what to do with the pastes the next day.

I made a batch of rice with chicken stock, almonds, cashews, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds in a saucepan, then mixed it with a beaten egg. I split the rice into two portions and mixed one sambal with each. I would do this with the ginger-scallion paste days later.

The versatile and familiar Sambal Hae Bi perhaps needs no introduction. The meaty sweetness of dried shrimp in chilli paste means extra protein is optional ... though this one could be a little spicier. The texture is a bit rough but it's a given, and the occasional crunch of shrimp shell feels kind of good.

The temptation to add extra sambal is strong after the first few bites. This contains shellfish, so those with allergies are cautioned. Several relatives on my dad's side developed allergies to shrimp, a future that might be on my cards. But until then, I'll be living it up.

The Sambal Bunga Kantan - torch ginger flower sambal - was new to me, though not necessarily novel. Others, I would learn, are making this. Mellow, floral, yet zesty, it made me think of all the Nyonya dishes I've seen in cookbooks.

The flavours also brought me back to my family dining table in Penang - specifically, to Mom's sambal-stuffed mackerel. The stuffing might be the same thing, albeit another recipe.

Again, I just want to pile this on, but keep in mind not to mix other stronger flavours that tend to overpower it. Let it be the star in a rice or pasta dish, or spread on bread or croissant. I can also see this going into a mackerel or used as a marinade.

I couldn't find many uses for the ginger-scallion paste, which also has garlic. I imagine it would go well with stir-fried vegetables, atop steamed white fish, chicken or pork, or mixed into congee. I was surprised to find that it gave my base rice a Hainanese note - like chicken rice.

An ex-colleague suggested marinating some chicken with it, plus some soya sauce, then steaming it. I suppose it could also be used as a composite ingredient, like the ginger-garlic paste that YouTube chef Sanjay Thumma often uses for his curries.

Looks like raw chicken is going into my shopping list for next week.

I don't dare eat this for dinner or use too much of it because ginger really gets your blood pumping - not good if you're winding down before bedtime. Also, this paste tends to brown while thawing and exposed to the air, so it's probably best to stir it into whatever you're cooking as soon as it's out of the jar.

Wonderful stuff, though the pastes harden when refrigerated - probably because of the oil. No preservatives means a shorter shelf life - up to three to four weeks if kept in a fridge, but at the rate I'm going the jars will be empty by then. At least that's better than having to throw out what's left that's gone bad.

It would be great if this venture can grow. With so much competition out there, however, it'll be quite a slog. But in this climate, we do what we can. I wish The Night Owls success.

Cooked Rice In A Saucepan

Twice. And it turned out okay.

What led me to my stove were a couple of clips of Puerto Rican streamers reacting not too favourably to Gordon Ramsay's "pegao-cooking" segment.

A rice dish made in a saucepan. No discernible difference
between what comes out of a rice-cooker.

What Puerto Ricans call pegao is the crust of crispy, brown-in-places rice at the bottom of a pot - probably a rare treat in some homes these days with the advent of modern cooking tools and techniques.

And if the crust resulted from, say, the cooking of claypot rice, fuiyoh. Crispy, fragrant caramelised flavourtown.

This substance is also familiar to other cultures where rice is a staple. The Vietnamese call it cơm cháy, Iranians have tahdig, in Japan it's okoge, nurungji in Korea, and in Indonesia and perhaps Malaysia it's called kerak nasi. The Chinese have guōbā, but the Cantonese call it faan jiu.

Though most of these are a by-product of conventional rice-cooking, sometimes this scorched rice is deliberately created, as might be the case with cơm cháy, guōbā and nurungji.

But then comes this white dude with his idea of scorched rice: pressing cooked rice into a piping-hot frying pan and searing it until it's "crispy", melts butter down the sides of the pan to make it easier to come out, then taps it out onto a plate when it's done.

One of the streamers I linked noted that rather than pegao (a derivative of pegado or "stuck" in Spanish), what Ramsay had made more closely resembled arroz mamposteao. Given Ramsay's reputation, we can acknowledge that his version won't suck - far from it - but it's not what he said it was.

I can only assume that the making of bona fide pegao wasn't enough to showcase the Michelin-starred chef's moves, and he didn't get the memo about what he ended up cooking.

I guess what I'm trying to do here is burn away the shame from getting carried away by a comedian's indignant, low-brow one-note act. The guy is still harping on Jamie Oliver, recently over Thai green curry.

This time, I noticed the energy Oliver radiated in that segment, and others before. This is a bloke who has nothing left to prove, is SO DONE being judged, and is now winging it for all the joy in the world. "Not authentic"? Go elsewhere.

Doesn't look that nice now, but when mixed together...

So I cooked rice in a saucepan. Rice, almonds, cashews and sunflower seeds were followed by thawed-out mixed frozen veg and mashed tinned sardines when the rice looked half-cooked. A good thing about an electric stove is the built-in timer and off switch.

I was concerned that I'd screw up and burn the rice, as I can't remember doing this before. However, only several per cent of the rice was glued to the bottom, nicely dried but not too charred, because I turned down the heat earlier.

I had to keep an eye on the pan until it boiled. A rice cooker is not completely covered by design even if the lid is on, so that extra steam can escape, but it still doesn't prevent spills from boil-over starchy water.

Once the rice started boiling, I waited a bit before adding the rest of the ingredients. After that, I waited a bit longer before lowering the heat and letting it simmer and steam away.

The results didn't taste too different from how I normally cook rice these days: steaming it in a steel bowl propped up by a steaming rack and a bit submerged in boiling water inside a rice cooker. This was a tip from Twitter for single-portion rice cooking that emerged during the first MCO, and it has served me well since.

The next day, I repeated this with a tin of Yeo's beef curry and roughly diced carrot. The resulting "pegao" was spicy as well as savoury, albeit low in volume. In both cases, the flavour reminded me of rice crackers.

But oh, wow, getting it out of the pan was tough. I broke a spoon made of a rice husk compound - a good spoon! RIP - to extract the crust because I didn't want to scrape the bottom with a metal utensil. Considering that the pan is stainless steel, I probably shouldn't have been so delicate about it.

The aftermath of saucepanned rice #2, after the rice grains
were scraped off. Hard work, but worth it.

I have concerns over using a claypot on my glasstop ceramic stove, so for now this is a viable alternative when I'm in the mood for a one-pot meal, made in a pot.

Some would say that it won't be like how it's made in a claypot, but that's okay. With the pandemic changing our relationship with our kitchens (I love you, kitchen!) and our regard for hawker food and outside dining (OMG you're all heroes!), some things need to be re-evaluated.

Here Are Some Words

I had more to say in this post, but decided not to, lest I mention something that might be offensive or proven incorrect later. But that's just one of several fears I've borne since I began writing less.

Voltaire was believed to have said, "Perfect is the enemy of good". However, he was apparently quoting some Italian proverb and somewhere down the line it was mistranslated a bit. But its profundity has encouraged some writers to keep writing, internal - and external - editors be damned.

That has become a monumental feat for me because I had a job that demanded a certain degree of perfection in my writing and my current job compels me to demand the same in myself - still! - and in others. Vague briefs and bad writing habits of others complicate matters further. Unfair, but that's how it is.

I had been comfortable with how I wrote for a long time, and in the job where I was first called on to write, my flair and self-possessiveness were shattered. My words were not perfect. All their imperfections were pointed out to me, and in some cases I wasn't allowed to fix them the way I wanted to.

Perhaps it's why I've been subconsciously "counting my scars" now and then, while acquiring new ones.

Someone dragged me into the business of words when they entered my life, but they're gone now, leaving a gaping void I still struggle to fill today.

Words wouldn't fit. Either I haven't written enough of them or it's the compulsion to harshly judge my output. Perhaps due to the nature of their departure, I've come to associate the whole business of writing with this person and have come to loathe it, to be as far away from it as possible.

Regardless, all this led me to distrust my words, and the ever-growing, ever-thickening pandemic fog is not helping.

The lockdowns have kept me away from my old haunts, stripping me of havens where the words can flow a little and depriving me of what little respite I have from my daily troubles.

Some of these factors are beyond my control. What I can do, however, is write. Even on days when I'm not called on to write, when the words don't flow or aren't right, or when I just feel like a pound of fried chicken skin slathered with cheese sauce, a bucket of mashed potatoes and a pile of coleslaw, the mind swarms with words, however chaotic or terrible they sound when put together.

So here I am, and here are some words.

Perfect may be the enemy of good, but I've been told a few times that what I've written is good. My scribbles have been published in newspapers in print and online, so they have to be of a certain standard.

Still, when I pound the keyboard, the desk, and ocassionally the wall in frustration when the words don't fit, all that seems insignificant.

Who the hell am I still trying to please?

What is shattered can never be put back perfectly together - some pieces shall remain missing, however minute. The Japanese practice of kintsugi supposedly illustrates that these gaps can be beautiful when filled with the right things. You probably can't eat out of that bowl again but damn, it looks good and broke the ice with your guests.

So here I am, and here are more words.

My ability to write doesn't have to win a prize or generate social media buzz. It just has to be good enough. Though time and heartache have distorted my Good Enough™ sense, pulling it back into shape shouldn't be too difficult.

Because every time I write, just write, I pound the keyboard, the desk, and ocassionally the wall with less and less frustration as I remember the original shape and feel of my wordsmithing. The journey back is hard but doable because the words still swarm in my head, trying to escape.

Bit by bit, I'll fill that void in me. I can't do a perfect job but hell, I'll do my best to make it interesting.

And instead of asking "Who the hell am I still trying to please?", someday I hope to ask, "Why the hell did it take me so long to figure it out?"