Crispy Crunchy Corn Cutlets

This has been a wonderful snack in my family as sweetness and crunch from the corn makes it nice. Moreover, it is not too difficult to make.

Ingredients
- 4 corns
- 1 chilli finely chopped
- Chinese parsley finely chopped(the whole bunch)
- 7TB corn flour
- 7TB tempura flour
- 3 cloves of garlic
- black pepper corn (crushed)
- salt

Steps
1) Remove the corn kernels from the corn

 

2) Finely chopped the Chinese parsley and chilli. Add to the corn.

3) Crush the garlic and black peppercorn as fine as possible to add in together with the corn and Chinese parsley

4) After mixing everything together, you might want to put in blender to blitz it a few times only just to crush the corn a little, but yet intentionally leaving some corn kernels behind so as to give a nice crunch to the cutlets.

5) After that, add the corn flour and tempura flour to it. Then mix it together. Leaving this nice paste. Please do not add any water. There will be water from the corn. So don't worry.

 

 

6) Then put oil enough to cover the cutlets fully in a frying pan

 

7) Use the spoon to scoop one TB and gently put in the hot oil

 

 

 

 

8) Make sure all sides end up golden brown. So you might want to turn it as and when the colour is right.

 

 

Do serve this hot as its definitely nicer!

 

 

You might want to eat this with chilli or sambal belachan. Enjoy! 



Mee Soto (Chicken Noodle Soup)

This has been one of my favourite Malay food as its light and comforting. There's something about chicken soup that is so assuring..

Anyway, my helper happens to make a wonderful bowl of mee soto which I would love to share this with you.

Ingredients

Group A (paste)
- tumeric ginger (thumbsize)
- old ginger (thumbsize)
- lemon grass (just the bottom part)
- garlic (about 4 cloves)
- shallots (about 8)
- Sup/Soto Powder Packet

Group B (chilli)
- chilli padi (4-5 small ones)
- kecap manis
- garlic (4 cloves)

Group C
- bean sprouts
- coriander (finely chopped)
- yellow noodles or vermicelli
- fried shallots (you can either fry them yourself or just buy ready made crispy ones from the supermarket)
- whole chicken
-spring onions
- top part of lemon grass
- 4 eggs


Steps:
1) Blend the ingredients in Group A with a little water, except the powder.

2) After its more or less blended, you can put in 2 TB of the powder from the packet

3) Then take the paste to fry it in a little oil in the frying pan over medium heat.

4) Then put the whole chicken, spring onions about 2 bunch, the top part of the lemon grass and the fried paste in a big pot of water to cook.

5) Let it cook for about 30-45 mins for the chicken to cook through

6) At the mean time, you can blanch your bean sprouts, cook your eggs (make it hard boiled) and noodles in boiling water.

7) Then for the mee soto chilli, you use the Group B Ingredients and pound the chilli and garlic together first. Then finally, you just add the kecap manis sauce (2-3 TB).

8) Once your chicken is cooked, bring it out to cool it so that you can shred the chicken meat

9) Put everything together to prepare to serve

10) Finally, just add the soup to your noodles. Taste the soup before serving. Season with salt if you like.

 (By the way, pictures are from 2 various times I cooked. So as you can see, the below picture is vermicelli noodles instead of the thick yellow noodles. I very much prefer that as its lighter and healthier.)

Enjoy!

Mee Goreng

This is a very comforting dish that my helper has made it to be. Though it is not very healthy, I enjoy having the various kinds of ingredients all coming together to make this dish so tasty!

Basically, this is yellow noodles cooked with sambal belachan. I have the steps to make sambal belachan in this blog.

So you basically fry this with minced garlic, onions, bean sprouts, prawns, squid, fishcake, noodles, spring onions (the top green ones) and sambal belachan. Then you can fry an egg as a side and sliced cucumber and tomatoes as well.

It is very easy. Great dish for breakfast or lunch!

Curry Puff

This has been one of my favourite snacks since young. But it has been growing increasingly expensive- from 40 cents to the present, $1.50.

Anyway, thank God my helper makes quite good curry puff and so it was a great opportunity learning from her so that in future, I can make for myself or even for parties. Definitely useful to learn!

Ingredients (for making 15)

4 potatoes
3 big red onions
7 shallots
curry leaves
3 packets of chicken thighs (can use breasts too or mixture)
5 eggs
Planta margarine
rice flour
plain flour
sugar
salt
water
meat curry powder

As you can see, the ingredients are quite straight forward and easy to get. If you cant find curry leaves, it is ok. Its just to make the filling more fragrant. And also if you are abroad and do not have the specific Planta brand margarine, it is also ok. Don't kick yourself or skip this recipe just because you cannot get those 2 items. As for the rest, I am confident you can get it!

Steps
1) Skin the potatoes and dice them. Then, put them in boiling water to cook. Drain them out after its cook

2) Then dice the shallots and big red onions

3) Put the chicken thighs in boiling water to cook them before dicing them up

4) Boil the eggs till they are hard boil. Then you cut them up in quarters, lengthwise.

5) Then pluck out the curry leaves and wash them.

Now, the tricky part is the dough. There are basically two layers of dough in curry puffs- the water dough and the oil dough.

6) Water dough - put 200g plain flour into a mixing bowl, together with 1 egg, 60ml of water, 1TB of rice flour and 1 tsp of salt. Mix and knead till its like that.

7) Oil dough- put 100g plain flour, 85g of planta margarine, 1 TB of rice flour, 1 tsp of salt. Mix and knead.

8) Then weight the water dough and roughly divide the weight to 15 portions so that you can cut it up and distribute evenly. Do the same for the oil dough and divide them into 15 equal portions. I used the weighing machine to be exact.

This will turn out to be a huge curry puff. If you prefer smaller size ones, then I suggest when splitting up the dough into equal portions, you can maybe divide them into 20-25 equal portions instead of 15.

9) Then take one water dough and flatten it with your hand, then put the oil dough in it.

10) Wrap the water dough over the oil dough before flattening both down.

11) Then use a rolling pin to flatten and roll it horizontally and vertically.Then just make it like a ball and put aside. Do for all 15 of them by placing the oil dough inside the water dough.

12) To cook the ingredients, have all this stand by

Diced onions, shallots, potatoes, chicken, curry leaves

13) With a little bit of oil in the frying pan, add the shallots first. Fry till its fragrant and then put in the red onions. Do it step by step.

14) After both shallots and onions are translucent, throw in the diced chicken and potatoes

15) Stir and mix it up before adding the curry powder. For the curry powder, put 1 TB of curry powder in a bowl first with a little water to dissolve the powder before pouring into the frying pan with the ingredients.

16) Add curry leaves, salt, sugar, white pepper to taste after stirring and mixing. If the colour looks too pale and you like spice, then add one more TB of curry powder. If you find that the potatoes is still quite sturdy looking, add a little water to the pan so that the potatoes can go mushy. Cook till the water/gravy has been absorbed by the ingredients.

potatoes still in blocks-straight edges

That is what you want to attain- mushiness with no gravy.

potatoes gone soft and edges are rounded and outcome is mushy

17) Once turned mushy, off the stove and leave it to cool for about 15 mins.

18) Then get ready to start wrapping

19) First roll the dough to a rough circle.  then place the egg and the ingredients on top before wrapping.

20) Then you just wrap them up. Twirl and pinch at the sides to seal. Do this for all your doughs.

21) I cut up plastic bags to wrap my curry puffs as I only wanted to fry these curry puffs the next day. So for storage, I wrap the curry puffs in plastic and put in the freezer.

22) The next day, when I open it up, it will look like this

23) To fry, I used peanut oil. Make sure when frying, the oil is enough to cover the curry puffs.

24) Fry till its golden brown

You can vary this recipe with whatever ingredients you like. Other variation can be sardines. You can just get the canned sardines and fry with shallots and onions. Main thing is to make the ingredients like a paste with no gravy so that it will not soak through the dough.

Enjoy this delicious snack! 

Nonya Achar

If you like spice, something sour and veggies, then you will like this dish. This dish is a great accompaniment for any meal or snack if you just want to munch on something in the afternoon.

Ingredients (look at the picture below for the quantity to make 2 bottles):
-toasted peanuts (crushed)/ just buy the cooked peanuts from the packet and crush it
- dried chilli (soaked in water first)
- normal big red chilli
- shallots
- normal ginger
- yellow ginger (tumeric)
- blue ginger (galangal)
- lemon grass (thinly sliced)
- garlic
- cucumber
- carrots
- cabbage (1/2 only)
- toasted white sesame seeds
- candle nuts (about 3-4) *not in picture
- one whole pineapple
- one bottle of white vinegar
- sugar
- salt

The ingredients (including the candle nuts and dried chilli) in the clear plastic plate on the right should be set aside to blend for the chilli paste. You will also need belachan (2 tsp) for blending. But before that, wrap the belachan in aluminium foil and throw in over together with your peanuts and white sesame seeds to toast. Do until the fragrance of the belachan is out. As for the peanuts and sesame seeds, put in over till it is lightly browned.

1) Start slicing up the vegetables. Cut it length wise in strips. Not too thin as you would like some crunch in the veggies when you eat. Remove the seeds in the cucumber. Keep the skin of the cucumber.

2) After slicing the cucumbers, carrots and cabbage, season it with a handful of salt and toss with your hands.

3) Then leave your veggies in the strainer, cover it with a cloth for an hour

4) Slice up your pineapple and big chillis

5) Pound your toasted peanuts

6) Start preparing your chilli paste by blending the ingredients found in the clear plastic plate in the first picture.

- lemon grass
- big chilli
- ginger
- yellow ginger (tumeric)
- blue ginger (galangal)
- garlic
- shallots
- belachan (slightly cooked already in oven)
- a bit of water

7) Fry the blended ingredients with a little oil in pan

Fry till you see the colour become slightly darker and the fragrance of the chilli is strong

8) Then at this stage, you add 6 TB of sugar, 100 ml of vinegar and 50ml of water to the pan

After adding sugar

After adding vinegar and water

9) Then leave it to cool for about 15 mins

10) Next, you take the rested veggies and squeeze dry all of them part by part, using a clean cloth.

11) Set up a pot of boiling water (400 ml of water), 150 ml of vinegar, 1 TB of sugar, 1 tsp of salt. Then, put the "squeeze-dried"  veggies into the pot for only about 8 seconds. Then off the fire and drain the water from veggies with a strainer. 

12) Then let the veggies cool down for 10 mins before putting the veggies into the pan with chill paste to mix

13) Throw in the cut pineapple and chilli in

14) Finally put in the chopped peanuts and white sesame seeds in as well

15) Mix it evenly and taste it! (*Tasting along the way is very important so that you can adjust the ingredients according to your liking)

16) Finally, just transfer to glass containers for storage in the fridge. You can eat this with chicken rice, for dinner, or just munch it as a snack when you are hungry!

Enjoy!