KAPAOW! CHICKABAH! Healthy meal number 2!

2011 is starting off with all sorts of healthy goodness!  If that lentil salad wasn’t enough for you, this one is surely going to make you glow.

It is impossible to eat a lunch of rice paper rolls and feel anything but cleansed.  And they are really therapeutic to make – you get all the ingredients prepared and then the production line can begin, with everyone taking turns to soak their rice paper and then assemble their rolls.  You can make them as simple or as decadent as you like, but try focussing your vegetables on the crunchy type.  I like a dipping sauce of traditional Thai flavours (fish sauce, lime juice, palm sugar and chilli) or otherwise just sweet chilli sauce.  I also add avocado, fried tempeh, tofu or shredded omelette for a bit more oomph.

Rice paper rolls

Rice paper rounds (about 3 or 4 per person)

Thin rice (vermicelli) noodles

A selection of crunchy vegetables cut into batons such as carrots, cucumber, lettuce, bean sprouts (the freshest you can get)

Roasted peanuts or cashews, chopped

The rice paper can be soaked in cold water (no need for hot) until it becomes malleable.   The noodles will need to be soaked in hot water until soft, and then drained.

Arrange all ingredients on a platter and get ready to roll.  When rolling, may I suggest that you do not try to put in too much filling – your roll will simply fall apart.  And if you plonk it approximately one third from the bottom and side edges, you should have big enough flaps to fold over.  He he.  Flaps.

For this particular lunch I also made a mango salad.  It was going to be a green mango salad, but the green mangoes I bought were unexpectedly ripe inside, so it was quite sweet and mushy, rather than tart and crunchy.  It was still pretty good though.  Ooh, and the other thing I’ve started getting into here in Timor is finely sliced lime, rind and all, used in Thai-style salads and sambals with lots of chilli and salt.  It’s surprisingly good, especially if you are a big fan of limes like I am.

Mango salad

2 firm mangoes, grated/shredded

5 red shallots (the small ones), finely sliced (can substitute eschallots or red onion)

½ punnet cherry tomatoes, halved and squashed

½ a lime, very finely sliced

1 large red chilli, finely sliced

A handful of roasted peanuts, chopped

Fish sauce, to taste

Lime juice, to taste

Palm sugar, to taste (if you're using ripe mangoes you will not need much sugar, if any)

Chuck all ingredients into a big bowl.  Give it a stir, making sure the fish sauce, lime juice, chilli and sugar give a good sweet/sour/salty balance.  You know the drill.

Salad can now be part of the assembly line for THE HEALTHIEST LUNCH IN THE UNIVERSE!

A New Year’s salad to get you off to a flying start

Welcome to 2011!  Nice to see you again!

I’m back in the beach shack after a lovely xmas break in Sydney, where I managed to eat almost as many laksas as there were days in the holiday.  I was a little light on the baklavas this time – much to my utter disappointment – but managed to get my fill of sweetness by way of some homemade coconut cookies (a present from my nephew), a few too many Ferrero Rochers, and copious amounts of pudding, custard and ice-cream.

Needless to say, I have been looking forward to getting back to the simple life again – home cooking in a place with limited food resources is certainly one way to do it.  To help us along, yesterday I planted some new seeds in the garden - sweet corn, eggplant, cucumber, bok choi, basil, rocket, coriander and dill.  I'm looking forward to watching them grow and, eventually, eating them.  Hopefully we won't have to wait too long.  It's the rainy season in Timor at the moment, so we don't need to worry too much about watering the garden - we just need to hope for a little sunshine from time-to-time.

So, with all this veggie planting yesterday, I fancied a vitamin-laden dinner last night.  After a quick consultation with Stephanie* I came up with this very simple and tasty salad.  The lentils and spinach gave me the super nutrition that I was craving, the sultanas added a welcome sweet surprise to every few mouthfuls, the anchovy and feta was nice and salty, the pine nuts gave crunch and the beetroot, tomato and carrot made it look pretty.  Don’t be fooled by the long list of ingredients though – this was really quick to make and allows for much improvisation.

Lentil and Spinach Vita-Salad

1 cup brown lentils, soaked for 2 hours (reserve 1 cup liquid)

1 medium onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1 Tbsp olive oil

2 anchovy fillets (optional)

1 handful sultanas

1 bunch spinach leaves, torn

1 carrot, grated

2 medium (or a punnet of cherry) tomatoes, chopped

2-3 baby beets (fresh or canned – doesn’t really matter), chopped

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

Drizzle good olive oil

Handful pine nuts or walnuts, toasted

Black pepper and, if not using anchovies, salt

Approx 1 Tbsp goat’s feta per person, crumbled.

Fry off the onion and garlic in a frying pan over medium heat until soft but not coloured.  Place the anchovies over the top of the onion and leave for a minute or two – they will “melt”.  Chuck in the sultanas and then the lentils with the reserved liquid.  Cook, stirring occasionally, until the lentils are al dente and liquid has absorbed.  Turn off heat and allow to cool slightly.

Stir in the spinach leaves – how much they wilt will depend on how long you leave the lentil mixture to cool – this is a personal thing.  Stir in the rest of the ingredients, leaving the feta till last to crumble over the individual serves.

Can be eaten warm or cold.

* As in Stephanie Alexander’s cooking bible, The Cook’s Companion.

Ploughman’s lunch with baba ganoush @ home

I love a ploughman’s lunch.  I love its simplicity, its variety and the element of surprise when various combinations of cheeses, olives, salad ingredients, condiments and spreads are placed atop a solid foundation of wholesome bread. 

This one included some basil and rocket from the garden, cherry tomatoes, a few olives, some tuna, as well as a spoonful out of a few jars of homemade goodies that I had in the fridge, including Sichuan Pickled Cucumber and Black Shiitake, eggplant pickle and baba ghanoush, the recipe of which is right here:

Baba ghanoush

3 medium eggplants

1 Tbsp tahini

1 Tbsp yoghurt

Juice of a lemon

1 tsp cumin seeds

If you have a gas stove, place the eggplants on the open flame until the skins are completely blackened and the eggplants are soft.  If not, roast whole eggplants in the oven at around 200˚C until softened (about 30-40 minutes).  Then place in a bowl, cover with plastic wrap and leave until cool.

When eggplants have cooled, peel the skin away and discard the tops.  Put the flesh into a clean bowl, mashing with a fork if necessary.  Add the tahini, yoghurt and lemon juice and stir well.  You may need to adjust these elements, including the addition of salt, to suit your own taste.  You can puree in a blender or food processer at this point if you like, but I don’t think it’s necessary.

Dry fry the cumin seeds in a frypan until toasted and then grind in a mortar and pestle.  Add to the baba ghanoush, reserving some for a garnish if you want to get fancy.  I sprinkled mine with store-bought dukkah and drizzled with olive oil.

A visit from Miss Kylie

Our lovely teacher friend from the desert came for her second visit this year, this time bringing her boyfriend, Jarrad.  The week was pretty much spent cooking and eating, so here is one of Miss Kylie’s creations:

Miss Kylie’s Green Papaya Salad

1 medium green papaya (paw paw), shredded with a mandoline or grated

1 medium cucumber, seeds removed and julienned

1 medium carrot, grated

A handful of cherry tomatoes, halved

A handful of peanuts, crushed (she also used some macadamias and hazelnuts that we had in the cupboard)

A handful of sunflower seeds

1 large red chilli, finely sliced

1 tsp dried chilli flakes

1 tsp palm sugar, grated

2 tsp fish sauce

2 tsp rice vinegar

1 Tbsp soy sauce

For the dressing, whisk together the fish sauce, vinegar and soy sauce, then add the palm sugar and dried chilli, stirring to combine.

Put the rest of the ingredients into a large bowl, toss to combine and then drizzle over the dressing.

Leftovers for lunch #2: Coleslaw Noodle Salad

I had leftover rice noodles in the fridge from a laksa I'd made for dinner.  I also had a type of coleslaw in the fridge, with finely slice cabbage and grated carrot, but the dressing was more of a vinaigrette than a mayo.  I mixed the coleslaw in with the noodles, adding some chopped mint, chilli, leftover tinned tuna, crisped lettuce from the fridge and boiled egg.  The chopped, roasted peanuts gave it a bit of texture.  This made a fairly hearty lunch.

Leftovers for lunch #1: Fish cakes with two salads

We had some fishcakes left over one day, which I had actually made from leftovers from the fridge – some tinned salmon, boiled potatoes and a smidgen of Malaysian-style home made curry paste.

On this particular day, I had been perving at the fantastic vegan blog, Easy as (Vegan) Pie, with my mouth watering at all the yummy salads, including a delicious guacamole and the handful salad, on which I based the two salads here.

Oecusse has excellent avocados (when they’re around).  They have a slightly higher water content than the Hass variety, but are still really good eating, especially when they are perfectly ripe, like this one was.  I added some halved cherry tomatoes, finely sliced red shallots (available in abundance here, but substitute for Spanish onion at home), sprinkled over some lime juice, Tabasco, salt and pepper.  Too easy.

For the couscous salad I boiled up some peace, love and mung beans, which took about 15 minutes.  Then I added grated carrot, some chopped basil and rocket from the garden.  I toasted up some raw  peanuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds for crunch.  The dollopy goodness on top is simply a mixture of tahini and yoghurt, which is one of my new favourite things.  I sometimes eat it by the spoonful.

Home-made lunch in Dili

Wade and I have been in Dili for a couple of weeks learning Tetun at the Dili Institute of Technology (DIT). It’s good fun, and it’s a nice change to be in Dili, but the one thing I dislike about going to Dili for weeks at a time is the fact that I have to eat out for every meal. I love eating out for a few days, but then I start to crave healthy, home-cooked food.

This is one of the reasons why Wade and I decided to stay at Casa Minha this time: they have kitchen facilities. Nothing fancy, just a little electric stove to make a cup of tea and a few pots.

Here’s the kitchen in our room at Casa Minha.

As it turned out, we didn’t end up cooking much at all. We did, however, buy a few fresh veggies and some bread to make a ploughman’s lunch almost every day. I made these little “ham burgers” one day after our Tetun course, washed down with a glass of guava juice and soda:

I bought the bread rolls from the Turkish restaurant near the ANZ bank. Their bread is the best I’ve found in Dili (and you can also buy it from Tiger Fuel, but it isn’t always fresh). The Turkish restaurant also does yummy, sticky baklava, and whenever I eat it, I get syrupy goodness running down my arms because it’s so juicy.

It was so lovely to eat lunch at home every day. Especially when we were staying in such a nice place.

Cute Casa Minha.

Little Labne Salad

I made this dish for lunch one day when I wanted something light but flavoursome. The rocket and basil were straight from our garden and the potatoes were leftovers, boiled the night before, so I just fried them up in some olive oil until they were nice and crispy.

The labne was actually a yoghurt-making exercise gone wrong. I was too impatient to wait for the milk to cool down before adding the culture, and so it curdled like cottage cheese. I continued with the process, leaving it overnight to “yoghurtise”. In the morning everything smelt and tasted right, but the consistency was still a curdled mess, so I decided to make labne instead. I added a teaspoon of salt, gave it a stir and tipped it into a muslin-lined strainer to separate the whey, letting it drain for a day in the fridge. I then rolled it up into balls, put it in a plastic container, along with some garlic cloves, rosemary and pepper corns and covered it with olive oil. After a couple of days the yoghurt balls had taken on the garlicky-rosemary flavour and became very addictive.

The first thing you might have noticed in this salad is the tomato. That wouldn’t surprise me. They are very red. Oecusse has the most wonderfully fresh and sweet tomatoes, as good as you would find in the most organic, gourmet, greengrocers (and, may I also add, about ten times better than the ones you get in Dili). And they are interesting: we can find pea-sized cherries as well as large heirlooms in all sorts of strange shapes, as well as traditional romas (which I used in this salad). And they are plentiful on a Saturday morning at the market. And they are cheap – around US$1 for a pile, which you can see in the photo, which is a picture of the market where I buy them from:

Chicken Caesar Salad, Castaway Bar and Restaurant, Dili

So, this dish was a bit of a gamble: Was Castaways going to be able to pull off the chicken Caesar? In my opinion, the Caesar salad can be a wonderful adventure in both flavour and texture, combining the smoky, salty flavours of bacon and anchovy, the crunch of lettuce and croutons and the creamy eggs and dressing. Or it can be really, really crap. (We’ve all been there.)

Despite the fact that this was the second meal of my day that involved bacon, I enjoyed it immensely. The lettuce and bacon were crispy, there was a mere suggestion of anchovy every few mouthfuls and the chicken was pretty darn succulent. The dressing was nice and creamy with a good hit of zing. My only complaint about it was the croutons. They were quite stale and a bit difficult to chew. Oh, and I think perhaps a nice soft-boiled egg would have rounded out all that salt nicely. But I won’t get too fussy on the balancing of flavours thing. I got the entree size, which was enough for me, given I’d gorged myself on French toast with bacon and maple syrup just a few short hours beforehand.

Afterwards, I was close to shrivelling up with all the salty pig I’d eaten, so luckily my beverage was rehydrating. I asked for a soda water with lime, and my goodness, did they take the lime seriously!! My ice-filled glass came with a shot of fresh lime juice in the bottom to make a delightful, citrus refreshment on a sultry Dili afternoon. It was fantastic! It looked like this:

Wade ordered a Napolitana pizza, which looked like this...

...and tasted pretty darn good too. Simple yet effective: black olives, capers, anchovies and mushrooms. Nice.

His drink was a “Banana Macadamia”, taken off the Castaways’ fun and exotic juice and smoothie menu (items on which often aren’t available due to missing ingredients). It tasted as good as it looked:

Yoghurtie, banana-ie, nuttie, smoothie. Yum-ie.

Castaway Bar and Restaurant, Dili