Laksa

Chicken and Hokkien noodles

Posted by Gary

Hello readers,

I hope you’ve enjoyed your week. This week’s post is quick and easy because I don’t have much time. 

Recipe

Equipment

  • Water heater circulator
  • Water bath
  • Wok

Ingredients

  • Chicken thigh
  • Red onion
  • Shallot
  • Ginger
  • Shiitake mushrooms [1, 2]
  • Laksa paste [3]
  • Coconut milk
  • Chillies
  • Carrot
  • Fennel
  • Hokkien noodles

Instructions

Chicken thigh

  1. Seal a chicken thigh with the skin attached and seasoned with salt in a plastic bag.
  2. Heat a water bath to 76 °C and then cook the chicken in the water for 2 hours.
  3. Refrigerate the chicken after it has cooked.
  4. Pull the meat from the bones and break up the muscle bundles. Place the pulled chicken thigh aside in a bowl and gnaw the bones to avoid wasting meat.
  5. Place the cooking liquor into a small saucepan.

Mushrooms

  1. Remove the mushrooms from the packaging and place them into a bowl.
  2. Add a cup of water to the small saucepan with the cooking liquor from the chicken.
  3. Boil the contents of the saucepan and then turn off the heat.
  4. Pour the liquid over the mushrooms and let the mushrooms steep for about half an hour.
  5. Remove the mushrooms and set them aside.

Noodles

  1. Remove the noodles from the packaging and place them into a bowl.
  2. Boil the saucepan with the mushroom and chicken juices and pour over the noodles.
  3. With wooden tongs or chopsticks, break up the noodles and drain them when they feel soft.
  4. Keep the cooking liquor aside.

Soup

  1. Finely chop a shallot and red onion.
  2. Mince some ginger.
  3. Slice a chilli.
  4. Slice the fennel.
  5. Julienne the carrot.
  6. Slice the spring onion.
  7. Shake the tin of coconut cream and open it.
  8. Heat the wok and then add some oil.
  9. Sauté the onions, shallot, and ginger.
  10. Add a tablespoon of laksa paste (more or less depending on how you like it).
  11. Add the mushrooms and slowly add the cooking liquor used for the noodles, mushrooms, and chicken.
  12. Allow the liquid to reduce a little to concentrate the flavours.
  13. Toss in the chicken meat and stir it around.
  14. Pour in the coconut cream and turn down the heat.
  15. Bring the cream to a gentle simmer, and then add in the carrot and some of the firmer slices of spring onion.
  16. Add the noodles and mix everything with a pair of chopsticks or wooden tongs.
  17. Turn the heat off and mix through chilli and more spring onions.
  18. Transfer everything to a bowl and garnish with the remaining spring onions.
  19. Give thanks to the Lord.
  20. Eat with chopsticks and a spoon.

Thoughts on the meal

This meal was enough for two people, so I refrigerated half of it, and the next day I heated the remaining soup in a saucepan and served it the same way I had the night before.

I didn’t want to label this meal anything other than chicken and Hokkien noodles. You could make this with any sort of Asian style flavouring you have around. I know many people would add garlic. I didn’t have any, and I’m not fussed about garlic in my food. If I have garlic, I’ll use it, but it’s not a big deal to omit it. 

I know that I use some techniques not readily available to everyone. You can substitute different approaches.

For example, you could cook the chicken any way you like so long as you achieve the correct temperature and duration[4]. Not everyone will get sick with inadequately cooked food. However, I commonly see reports of incapacitated people because of poor attention to food safety. You could use a supermarket rotisserie chicken if time is short and your budget permits. Break down the chicken, store it safely, and use it how you want.

I like the idea of using dried foods like mushrooms. I can use a few from a packet in this soup and the rest in other meals. The steeping liquor is also suitable for flavouring other aspects of the cooking process.

Feel free to make modifications and share them.

On food safety, I now have the pleasure of working with someone on a committee I have admired for decades. When I was in my final year of speciality training, this colleague wrote a magnificent review article on the pathogenic forms of Escherichia coli. I read it and memorised it; it was so good. One of my final exam questions was to compare and contrast the pathogenic forms of Escherichia coli. This colleague is now retired but working in an emeritus capacity. 

Final thoughts

  1. How has your week been?
  2. Do you like using dried foods?

Photographs

Chicken and Hokkien noodles
Chicken and Hokkien noodles
Leftover chicken and Hokkien noodles
Leftover chicken and Hokkien noodles

References

  • 1.         Kim, S.H., et al., Ecofriendly shiitake authentication using bulk and amino acid-specific stable isotope models. Food Chem, 2022. 397: p. 133819.
  • 2.         Berger, R.G., et al., Mycelium vs. Fruiting Bodies of Edible Fungi-A Comparison of Metabolites.Microorganisms, 2022. 10(7).
  • 3.         Peng, Z.F., et al., Antioxidant flavonoids from leaves of Polygonum hydropiper L.Phytochemistry, 2003. 62(2): p. 219-28.
  • 4.         Yang, R., et al., Thermal death kinetics of Salmonella Enteritidis PT30 in peanut butter as influenced by water activity. Food Res Int, 2022. 157: p. 111288.

Laksa flavoured cauliflower and gorgonzola soup

Posted by Gary

Hello Reader,

How are you? I hope you had a brilliant week. Life for me is going splendidly. I am loving life. I couldn’t be happier, personally. Professionally, it’s excellent and exciting. The last couple of days have been exceptional at work.

Want to avoid the silly sausage story? Here’s the recipe!

Democracy sausage (roll)

Democracy sausage (roll)! Spicy corned beef fried rice rolled in puff pastry.

Today we get an opportunity to exercise our right to a free and fair vote for members of the House of Representatives and jurisdictional senators in the Australian Senate.

It’s become a ‘thing’, almost a tradition, for voters to consume a democracy sausage while lined up waiting to vote or after they’ve done the deed.

In its most basic form, a democracy sausage is a snag1 cooked on an outdoor hotplate and served in a folded slice of the cheapest white bread. There is no butter, the fat from the sausage being sufficient to lubricate the snag and offer some moisture to the dry bread. Some people will provide tomato or barbecue sauce. I’ve seen some people combine both the tomato and barbecue sauces and have it with their sausage. I will not judge them.

Democracy sausage (roll)! Spicy corned beef fried rice rolled in puff pastry.

We now see all manner of diversity in terms of the sausage sandwiches. There are vegetarian and vegan sausages. The bread can be gluten-free or sourdough or multi-grain, or any other type of bread.

Apart from the sauce, extras often include cooked onions, and we get the debate of onions under or over the sausage2. Some people have kimchi, others sauerkraut, and others also have cheese.

My democracy sausage was a sausage roll because that’s how I roll 😉

Last night, I got home late and felt like making fried rice with tinned corned beef. I made it spicy with some Bird’s-eye chillies.

Corned beef fried rice
Corned beef fried rice

My democracy sausage (roll) is leftover spicy corned beef fried rice in puff pastry.

While I’m having a little fun here, I’m conscious that there are foreign governments that do not hold free and fair elections. I respect the right of a foreign government to conduct itself sovereignly. While not a fan of the United Nations nor any of its derivative organisations, I hope that humankind will enjoy total freedom and an abundance of life.

Democracy sausage (roll)! Spicy corned beef fried rice rolled in puff pastry.

Back to the soup!

Cauliflower

Ingredients

  • Cauliflower
  • Potato
  • White onion
  • Leek
  • Bacon
  • Laksa paste (a commercial paste because life is too short)
  • White peppercorns
  • Vegetable stock
  • White wine
  • Gorgonzola

Instructions

  1. Dissect a cauliflower into florets.
  2. Roughly slice a leek. You can be rough with this leek. In the end, it’s all blended.
  3. Dice an onion.
  4. Dice the spud.
  5. Dice the bacon.
  6. Pound the white peppercorns in a mortar with a heavy hard pestle. Please give it a good pounding because you don’t want a gritty result from your pounding.
  7. Crumble the gorgonzola.
  8. Heat a saucepan on a hob.
  9. Sauté the bacon to render some fat, and then add the onion and leek to get the aromas in the air, so your kitchen area is rich with fragrance. If you like, you could add garlic too.
  10. Add the cauliflower and potato to the cooked bacon, onion, and leek.
  11. Cover everything with wine and vegetable stock and add a tablespoon of the laksa paste.
  12. Bring the soup to a boil and then simmer until the potato and cauliflower are soft.
  13. Turn off the heat and process the soup with a stick blender until smooth.
  14. Turn the heat back on to low.
  15. Add in the crumbled gorgonzola cheese and season with the pepper to taste.
  16. Ladle the soup to a bowl.
  17. Place the rest in vacuum bags and, using a vacuum chamber sealing device, seal the bags and freeze for another day.
  18. Give thanks to the Lord.
  19. Enjoy the soup and ponder life and love and how everything seems to fit together. Each part complements the other elements in life.
Vacuum sealed cauliflower soup Laksa paste Gorgonzola cheese

Thoughts on the soup

I know cauliflower soup isn’t a favourite for one of my daughters. She dislikes it intensely. For me, though, it has flavour, and the cheese gives it a thickness almost like a sauce. It’s rich and flavourful.

Combining something distinctly Asian and European seems to be a thing with me. Laksa paste and gorgonzola cheese. Who knew?

Final thoughts

  1. Is combining laksa paste and gorgonzola cheese an abomination or brilliance on my part? I liked it. You might like it too. Please give it a go and let me know.
  2. Does cauliflower give you flatus? I reckon tonight, my freshly laundered sheets will take on a new aroma 😆
  3. How do you feel about the democracy sausage? If you’re not Australian, do you have any election traditions?
  4. A workmate who saw my sausage roll asked if it counts as a democracy sausage. What do you think?

Footnotes

  1. The snag is slang for sausage
  2. A local hardware chain, viz., Bunnings, created controversy when it directed all sausage sandwiches sold at its stores not to have onions over the sausage. The management deemed the risk of slipping on dropped onions to be a safety hazard. The direction is to tuck the onion under the meat sac.
Cauliflower
Cauliflower soup Laksa paste Gorgonzola cheese
Cauliflower soup Laksa paste Gorgonzola cheese

Pressure cooker pork belly and noodles

Posted by Gary

Dear Reader,

I missed a post last week because I spent the weekend with my girlfriend, so you get two posts this weekend. Yesterday I cooked some lamb.

One of the benefits of replacing the old microwave oven is I can now use my microwave radiation pressure cooker again.

Ingredients

  • Pork belly
  • Iodised salt
  • Ground white pepper
  • Ground Chinese five-spice
  • Ground coriander seeds
  • Ground cardamom
  • Ground cinnamon
  • Ground rosemary leaves
  • Ground nutmeg
  • Star anise
  • Instant noodles
  • Peanut oil
  • Sesame oil
  • Monosodium glutamate (MSG)
  • Shallots
  • Garlic
  • Spring onions
  • Red chillies
  • Ginger
  • Laksa paste

Instructions

  1. Before cooking the dish, season the belly pork with salt, pepper, Chinese five-spice, ground cardamom, ground coriander seeds, ground rosemary leaves, ground cinnamon, and ground nutmeg, seal the meat in a vacuum bag and refrigerate overnight.
  2. On the day you cook the dish, place the pork belly into the pressure cooker.
  3. Add about a litre of water and add some laksa paste, crushed ginger, and star anise.
  4. Cook in the pressure cooker using microwave radiation for twenty minutes.
  5. Open the vessel and remove the meat when the pressure cooker has reached atmospheric pressure.
  6. Transfer the cooking liquor to a saucepan and bring it to a boil.
  7. Add the noodles and cook for a couple of minutes.
  8. Drain the noodles and use chopsticks to ensure the noodles aren’t sticking.
  9. Dice the cooked pork belly.
  10. Heat the wok.
  11. Add some peanut oil.
  12. Add chopped shallots and garlic. Stir fry until fragrant.
  13. Add in the diced pork belly pieces and stir fry.
  14. Add in some sesame oil and then the noodles.
  15. Stir through the noodles to absorb the oily garlic and shallot flavours. Get the noodles and pork entangled in each other.
  16. Sprinkle in a good pinch of MSG to enhance the flavour. Keep stir-frying.
  17. Turn off the heat and add in the spring onions and chillies.
  18. Give thanks to the Lord.
  19. Serve in a bowl and eat with chopsticks and a spoon.

Final thoughts

This post is a quickie; please let me know what you think.

Pressure cooker pork belly and noodles

Pumpkin soup with Asian flavours

Posted by Gary

Dear Reader,

Hi there, I hope you’ve had a good week. Mine has been massive. While I don’t write too much here about what I do, I’ll use the words; COVID-19, winter infection planning, Japanese encephalitis, floods, and Ukraine. One of the blessings of my job is diversity. I love my job and the people with whom I work. While there is always some work on weekends, I hope the people I work with won’t be overwhelmed with the volume of work they need to manage.

A few people who read the blog have mentioned from time to time a desire to see if I can write about a meal that doesn’t have meat (including bacon or speck).

I’m not the most imaginative cook. I like routine because it’s easy to live a life that way. Living alone also means there is no need for sophistication in my cooking. I think of myself as an elementary cook. My gadgets make cooking more manageable and exciting, but I’m a simple soul with simple tastes.

I was chatting with my girlfriend, who also suggested I consider some meat-free options on the blog. In my mind, the most leisurely and most delicious meal to make with enough to keep me going for a few meals is soup. I mentioned bacon a couple of paragraphs above because I often add some bacon to what may essentially be a vegetable soup. So the challenge for me this weekend is not to add meat to any meal.

Pestle and coffee tamper

Ingredients

  • Kent pumpkin
  • Crème gold washed potato
  • White onion
  • Root ginger (noun not verb)
  • Vegetable oil
  • Iodised salt
  • Vegetable stock
  • Coconut cream
  • Laksa paste
  • Lemongrass stalks
  • Coriander
  • Jalapeño sourdough bread
  • Lime juice
  • Olive oil based butter substitute to spread on the bread with plant sterols to allegedly lower serum cholesterol

Instructions

  1. Turn on the oven and set the temperature to 180 °C (fan forced).
  2. With a large Chinese meat cleaver, cut the pumpkin and potato into rough chunks. If your meat cleaver isn’t sharp, sharpen it first. There’s nothing like the feel of a cleaver in hand. If you don’t have one and can afford one, a Chinese meat cleaver also makes a fantastic pizza cutter, especially if it has a curved blade.
  3. Pour a little vegetable oil into the palm of your non-dominant hand and then rub your hands a little so you can rib some oil over the surfaces of the pumpkin and spud chunks, including the skin.
  4. Season the spuds and pumpkin with some salt, rubbing the salt over the surfaces.
  5. Put the pumpkin and potato onto a lubricated baking sheet and cook in the oven until the flesh is soft and if you poke the skin it breaks apart.
  6. Pour some vegetable oil into a large saucepan and turn on the heat.
  7. Cut an onion into quarters and put them into the saucepan and begin the long patient process of caramelising the onions.
  8. Keep gently sautéing the onions until the have turned the colour you lust after. Keep moving them to avoid the onions from sticking to the base of the saucepan.
  9. When the roasted and caramelised pumpkin and potato are ready add them to the saucepan over the onions and then add some vegetable stock. Use your favourite spatula to rub out the fond which has formed on the stainless steel base of the saucepan.
  10. Add a generous tablespoon of laksa paste and a couple of bruised lemongrass stalks. Add the root ginger too. If you’re at a loss for how to bruise the lemongrass, I’d suggest using a heavy stone pestle or a heavy stainless steel coffee tamper. I’ve included a photo for you to see. I basically give the lemongrass stalks a good whack up and down the shaft.
  11. Simmer the soup so the watery stock reduces.
  12. Pour in a tin of coconut cream and chopped roots, stalks, and leaves of a bunch of coriander.
  13. When everything looks like it’s been incorporated and well mixed and thickening like the consistency of thicken cream turn off the heat, remove the lemongrass stalks, and use a stick blender to process the soup. Towards the end squeeze in some lime juice for a little sourness.
  14. With a bread knife, cut a thick slice of jalapeño sourdough bread and spread some of the “fake butter” on it.
  15. Ladle some soup in a bowl and serve with the bread.
  16. Give thanks to the LORD for the food as well as all the great things in life like friends, work, and family.
  17. Enjoy the soup with a spoon and soaked up in that bread.

How was the meal?

The soup and the bread were good. I’m a happy camper. I’m also excited because my youngest child turns 21 this week.

Final thoughts

  • Do you like soup? Do you ever add Asian flavours to ingredients which traditionally aren’t Asian?
  • How has your week been? I hope it’s been fulsome and full of joy.
  • Do you like coriander? I heard a YouTube cook call coriander “Satan’s lettuce”. My Mum doesn’t like it and I have a few friends who also thinks it tastes soapy.
  • What are you planning to make next week? I’m thinking of nude wonton soup.
Pumpkin soup with jalapeño bread
Pumpkin soup with jalapeño bread
Pumpkin soup with jalapeño bread

Lamb shanks and laksa noodles

Posted by Gary

Dear Reader,

Hi there friends. I hope you’re well. Well, what a week it’s been. 

My week has been humming, with some challenges. Work, as usual, is busy, the pandemic continues to keep me, and my workmates occupied.

I’ve seen my general practitioner a couple of times in the last week. It had been more than a year since my last check-up. 

It turns out that despite losing some weight and exercising more, my blood chemistry suggests I need to make some changes to my diet. I’d be better off if I minimised mammal and bird fat, as well as having less cream and butter in my life.

For tonight’s meal, however, I’ve been inspired by a dear friend who has been enjoying lamb shanks. It’s been an age since I cooked lamb shanks. 

As I was shopping today, I thought of lamb shanks and pumpkin mash! However, as I walked down the Asian food aisle, I spied all the noodles. 

Raw lamb shanks
Udon noodles

Ingredients

  • Lamb shanks
  • Laksa paste
  • Udon noodles
  • Coriander
  • Red onion
  • Fennel
  • Spring onion

Instructions

  1. Place the lamb shanks into the pressure cooker.
  2. Cover the meat with some water and add a tablespoon of the laksa paste.
  3. Cook the lamb for one hour.
  4. When the lamb is ready, remove the bone that will likely slide out of its meat sheath and place it all into a bowl.
  5. Drain the liquor from the pressure cooker into a saucepan and bring it to a simmer.
  6. Add in the noodles and simmer until the noodles are ready.
  7. Chop the coriander, and slice the spring onion, fennel, and red onion.
  8. Drain the noodles and mix through the coriander, spring onion, red onion, and fennel.
  9. Transfer the noodles to a shallow bowl and place the lamb meat on top.
  10. Spoon some of the meat juices over the lamb and noodles.
  11. Give thanks to the Lord for the food and for friends.

How was the meal?

Okay, I confess, this is a peculiar combination of ingredients. I wrote in a file note at work yesterday an opinion on a form of words. I acknowledged I’m a peculiar person with strong views. A workmate thought it was hilarious and agreed that I am peculiar.

The meat was tender, fall off the bone tender. 

I’m not quite sure lamb shank and noodles would sell in a restaurant. That said, it was a tasty meal, and if you try it, let me know what you think.

Final thoughts

  1. Have you ever had lamb with noodles and laksa flavours?
  2. Do you think lamb is suited to Asian cuisine?
  3. Do you like lamb shanks?
  4. How has your week been?

Feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think.

Udon noodles
Cooked lamb shanks
Pressure cooker lamb shanks with laksa flavoured Udon noodles, fennel, spring onion, radish, and coriander
Pressure cooker lamb shanks with laksa flavoured Udon noodles, fennel, spring onion, radish, and coriander
Pressure cooker lamb shanks with laksa flavoured Udon noodles, fennel, spring onion, radish, and coriander