Laksa

While supermarket shopping in Thailand the other day I came across fried tofu puffs which I have never seen in Laos and immediately thought Laksa. Now, I have made many Laksa's over the years and while they are usually very tasty they are often really, really time consuming. I mean really, on most days, who could be bothered to boil prawn heads to get a stock - even if it is a damm tasty stock. So I took a risk and attempted a recipe from my new 'Bowl Food' cookbook purchased from the Cambodian chain bookstore that sells a wide range of photocopied, copyright infringed books. It looked easy and surprisingly was quite tasty. Anyway, that is why a make this post -it is a recipe for a tasty Laksa that you don't have to dedicate a day to.

For paste

1 ½ tablespoons coriander seeds
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 onion, chopped
1cm x 3cm piece of ginger, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
3 stems lemongrass, sliced
4-6 small red chilies
2-3 teaspoons shrimp paste

For soup

1 L chicken stock
½ cup oil (I only used a few tablespoons)
3 cups coconut milk (I made do with a 200ml can coconut cream)
4 fresh kaffir lime leaves
2 ½ tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 table spoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons palm sugar or brown sugar
Handful of prawns or pork or beef or veggies
250g dried vermicelli noodles

To serve

1 cup bean sprouts
Handful of fried tofu puffs
4 hardboiled eggs
Mint, coriander – chopped
Lime wedges – to serve
Fried shallots – to serve

Dry roast the coriander seeds. Grind in a mortar and pestle. Repeat for cumin seeds. Put all of the ingredients for the paste in a blender and add half a cup of stock and blend to a paste.

Heat the oil and cook the paste on a low heat for 3- 5 minutes while stirring. Add remaining stock and bring to boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 min, until slightly reduced. Add the coconut milk, lime leaves, lime juice, fish sauce and palm sugar and simmer for 5 minutes. At this time pour some boiling water over the vermicelli and leave for about 5 minutes until soft. Drain.

Add meat or vegies to soup and simmer until cooked.

Add noodles to each bowl. Top with soup and then garnish with eggs, bean sprouts, tofu puffs and herbs. Serve with lime and shallots. Serves 4-6.

Smoked Fish with Vegetables, Matapha and Gari

The food from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique has some similarities. The use of peanuts. Coconuts. Dried and smoked fish. Leaves from cassava and other plants as a primary ingredient. Combine all these ingredients with some onions, chillies, palm oil, and garlic and you have a fusion of Mozambican Matapha and Congolese Pondu. Served with some pap, rice or gari and you have a delicious and filling dish. We prefer to add another dish, like smoked chicken with peanut sauce (DRC), or (very) spicy fried okra with prawns (Mozambique). Since I’ve made these dishes many times before, I opted for a new addition: fried smoked fish with vegetables.
So here they are.

Fried Smoked Fish with Vegetables

Found in Dorinda Hafner's A Taste of Africa, purchased at Borders for $10!

Ingredients

500g smoked herring or mackerel

3 tbs peeled and finely grated ginger

½ cup vegetable or peanut oil

2 onions, minced

4 tomatoes, blanched, peeled and puréed

1 tbs tomato paste blended with ¼ cup water

2 red chillies, minced

250g green beans
½ teaspoon garlic salt (or salt and garlic)

Directions
Season the fish with salt and ginger. Heat the oil in a heavy-based pan, and sauté the fish (I used mackerel) until crisp and brown. Remove from the oil, drain, and set aside. In the remaining oil, add the onions and sauté until they are almost brown. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, chillies, green beans, and garlic salt. Return the fish to the pan, cover, and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the sauce thickens.

Matapha / Pondu

This is an amalgamation of many internet recipes that I no longer have because I wrote them in Rakas departing present, the cook's companion recipe journal.

Ingredients
6 handfuls Cassava (or Matapha) leaves
3 tbs palm oil
2 onions
8 cloves garlic
one piece of dried, salted or smoked fish, broken up
3 chillies (or more if they’re not very hot)
salt to taste

For Matapha add:
1 can coconut cream
1 cup roasted peanuts

NB: I’ve guessed the quantities as I normally make it by taste, so you may need to adjust.

Equivalent ingredients
Cassava or Matapha leaves have a distinct chlorophyll fragrance and taste, which is difficult to replace. If you can’t find them in Footscray or some other suburb of Melbourne which I don’t know about which has African grocers (sorry Melly, but I have no idea if you’ll have an option at all here), use 8 handfuls of spinach.

Palm oil is thick, red and sticky. Again, if you can’t find an equivalent, use peanut or ground nut oil.

For the smoked fish I tend to use half a small smoked fish (see picture), but you can also use a bunch of those tiny dried fish you get at Asian grocers (although not as fragrant).

Directions
If using fresh leaves, grind leaves in mortar and pestle with the garlic and chillies. Otherwise grind garlic and chillies then add frozen leaves. Place in a saucepan, cover with water and cook until almost dry (approximately ½ hour). Add all remaining ingredients and cook for one hour, adding water if necessary. For Matapha, once cooked, blend until almost smooth (it should be the consistency of a pumpkin soup). The dish should be nutty and smoky, but not spicy despite the inclusion of chillies.

Gari

Again, taken from Dorinda's cookbook

Gari is a new addition to my African recipes, and is delicious. It is actually a Portuguese and/or French dish which has been adopted by the Ivory Coast (I think it might be a Portuguese dish adopted by French colonies). It is almost like a cross between polenta and bread, and is very simple to make. If you can’t find it in African or Portuguese / Spanish grocers, use polenta, rice or mashed potato instead (I’ll explain pap another day).

Ingredients
Farine de Manioca (in French, or Farinhe de Mandioca in Brazil, or Farinha de Mandioca in Portugal, or dried ground cassava)
Water
Salt

Directions
Put 2 cups gari in a bowl and add enough lightly salted water to cover it completely (I also give it a little stir). Let is stand for 10 minutes, or until the gari absorbes the liquid and swells (it will swell to about twice its original size). Fluff the gari with a fork and serve with the fish and the Matapha poured over it.

Serves 4

Ban Keun Soup

When I first moved to Laos I lived for a year in Ban Keun. My kitchen was fashioned from a concrete shell of a room with old school tables for benches. There was no glass on the windows and I used to wipe the red dust from the surfaces daily. I had no sink, cupboards or stove - just a bucket of water, an electric frypan and a few bowls and spoons. To put it quite simply, it was uninspiring. But it was from here that Ban Keun Soup was created.

Essentially a one-pot dish created from whatever fresh ingredients you can get your hands on, plus some longlife staples such as miso paste, canned tuna and eggs, Ban Keun soup for me is now one of the most soothing, simple, healthy things I can think of. It is Monday night food!

Serves 2
1 brown onion - sliced
1 small piece of ginger - diced small
1 japanese eggplant - halved longwise and sliced

handful of oyster (or other) mushrooms - sliced

1 small green cabbage (or chinese cabbage - wong buk) - sliced
1 small bunch morning glory - cut into thirds
1 medium sized can of tuna
2 tbsp miso paste (shiro or the light brown one)
2 tbsp soy sauce (yellow boy brand is best)
1.5 tbsp white vinegar
3 cups water
1 egg
2tbsp fried red shallots (pre bought is far easier) (to serve)
chilli paste or sauce ( to serve)

Fry onions in a small amount of oil in a wok or deep based saucepan till transparent. Add ginger, eggplant and mushrooms and fry for about 3 min, until the eggplant is a bit soft.

Add water (it will pleasantly sizzle!) miso, soy and vinegar and bring to boil. Add tuna. Taste for flavour, adding more miso, soy or vinegar if necessary. Turn heat down to a simmer and add vegies. Cook for another 1-2 min. Break egg into liquid and stir a little. Cook for another minute or so and you're done.

Serve with a spoon of deep fried shallots and some chilli sauce.

* this version had tomato too....flexibility is the key!

Cha Ca - Fish with dill, turmeric and white noodles

Adapted from Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen

I have wanted to eat this again ever since we visited Hanoi last year. There you cook it at your table with a rustic charcoal burner, but luckily you can achieve a similar effect in a frypan. We cooked this for 10 people recently - it’s one of those things that is quite easy to do for many.

This recipe is enough for 6 people.

1kg fish fillets (we used Paa nyin which is farmed river fish, I think any reasonably mild white fleshed fish would do)
8 spring onions
4 garlic cloves
1 tbsp tumeric powder
2 tsp curry powder
2 tbsp plain yoghurt
125ml fish sauce
3 tbsp sugar
3 tbsp veggie oil
1 bunch dill
125g white rice noodles –preferably fresh, or dried and cooked according to directions (we used thin round fresh ones, called Khao pun noodles if you are cooking in Laos – about 2mm diameter – which were really sticky. They came in clumps so we cut them up with scissors to make more manageable)
250ml fish stock (see recipe below if you want to make your own)
1 lime or lemon
300g bean sprouts

Cut the fish into bite sized pieces and put in a bowl. Put the white parts of the spring onions (keep the stalks for later) and garlic in mortar and pestle and pound to make a paste. Add paste to fish bowl along with turmeric, curry powder, yoghurt, fish sauce, sugar, 2 tbsp of oil and a third of the dill, roughly chopped. Cover and marinate in the fridge for at least 1 hr.

Slice spring onion stalks. Reserve a small handful of them and also some dill for later. Mix bean sprouts, noodles, sliced spring onions and remaining dill. Place in individual bowls.

Heat remaining 1 tbsp oil in frypan and fry fish (do not add excess marinade or it will be too salty) on one side for 30 sec. Turn over and add fish stock and reserved handful of spring onion and dill and simmer for 3-5 min until cooked. Remove. Spoon evenly into bowls on top of the noodles and add remaining sauce. Serve with lime or lemon wedges. Yum!

Fish stock

2kg fish bones (get your fish freshly filleted and you should have these)
1 large leek or 1 onion
4 cm piece of ginger
4 garlic cloves
2 kaffir lime leaves
1 bunch coriander, stems and roots only

Put bones in large saucepan with 4L of water and bring to boil. Skim off any scum and then add remaining ingredients. Return to boil, reduce heat and then simmer for 30min. Strain through sieve and allow to cool.