djyee100

Sometimes high-end markets will have frozen duck in stock in the back. It's not displayed in any of the meat cases, and you have to ask for it. Alternatively, you can always special-order at a good meat market. good luck!

An unusual and delicious soup, Nyonya Duck Soup with Salted Mustard Greens. The major ingredients of this soup are: duck, brandy, salted Chinese mustard greens, Chinese salted plums, whole nutmeg, fresh gingerroot, black pepper, tomatoes, lime juice, and Thai chiles. For all the strong-flavored ingredients, this soup cooks up mildly hot and sour, with sweetness from the duck meat. Two unusual ingredients are the Chinese salted mustard greens and the Chinese salted plums (optional). I found both of them at the Ranch 99 Market. The mustards greens were in the refrigerator case, and the salted plums in the snacks/candy section. One optional ingredient proved elusive--asam gelugor. It wasn't at Ranch 99 or another Asian grocer. I decided not to make a special trip to Chinatown for it. I bought the wrong kind of salted plums, BTW. These are big with seeds in them. The recipe specifies the small seedless salted plums. I used the plums I bought anyway. The recipe calls for a whole duck, but I chose to make a half recipe using duck legs. (The half recipe still yielded 3 qts of soup.) I trimmed off some excess skin and fat from the duck legs before adding them to the pot. You can be creative in how you serve this soup. I like to have the duck meat, some veg and rice in a shallow soup plate with a few spoonfuls of broth over all. A bowl of the broth, which is very delicious, and some wickedly hot Nyonya Sambal are served on the side. The duck meat tastes especially good with dabs of the sambal. This soup would be just the thing for a cold wet snowy day. Did you notice the brandy in it? I'll be away traveling for a couple weeks, starting next week. I'll catch up with this thread when I return. Happy cooking, everyone!

Bruce, that grilled coconut chicken with lemon basil looks fantastic. It's going on my (long) list of What To Cook.

A Malaysian breakfast of Kopi Tiam Eggs. These are soft-boiled eggs that are garnished with soy sauce (I like kecap manis), thin slices of Thai chiles, black pepper, and toast. The recipe calls for 2- or 3-minute eggs, but I like my eggs firmer, so these are 4-minute eggs. This dish is too strong-flavored for me the first thing in the morning, but I would eat these eggs for a tasty light lunch. Another Indonesian breakfast recipe, Sweet Spiced Mung Bean Porridge. This recipe had the most unsexy name in the book (porridge? you mean like gruel?), but I decided to try it anyway. Whole mung beans were not sold at my local Whole Foods, but they were readily available at various Asian grocers. This bean porridge is very sweet, too much so for my taste (I don't like dry breakfast cereals or granola, either). The recipe warns you to hold back on some sugar as you finish cooking, and I left out a couple tablespoons, but I wished I had left out more. When the mung beans are cooked with the spices, they have a pleasant, slightly nutty flavor, but that flavor is lost with the addition of sugar (lots of sugar) and coconut milk. This porridge could stand some more salt, too. Not to my taste, but to yours? I was cleaning out my fridge and found a small head of cabbage. What to do with it? I made Braised Cabbage with Dried Shrimp. The recipe hints to make this dish with the freshest cabbage you can find. This was the freshest cabbage I could find...in my refrigerator. The recipe says to peel off the cabbage leaves one by one and cut the leaves into 1 1/2-inch squares. I did that for the first 3 leaves. Then I said Forget It and cut up the cabbage the way I always do. This dish is the Asian equivalent of that Western standby, cabbage cooked with slivers of ham or bacon. The dried shrimp give that salty, savory flavor. This dish is simple and quite good.

Awhile back I had a conversation with an environmentalist who believed the laws supposedly regulating these catches have loopholes large enough for a giant fish trawler to go thru. Apparently the "legal" ships have permits and as long as they arrive in port with the permit the catch is considered legal. She believed that while at sea some ships transfer illegal catches to ships with the permits, which then deliver these catches to port as "legal." She said the laws surrounding these catches are ridiculously easy to avoid. The legal designation on these catches, she said, make consumers easy in their minds about eating these fish, but the permit program may be a sham. Myself, I don't touch the stuff. Some basic info about the permit program: http://www.state.gov/g/oes/rls/fs/2002/8989.htm Seafood Watch at the Monterey Bay Aquarium still has Chilean sea bass on its "avoid" list. http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/cr_s...lternatives.asp

I had no problem opening the link to the recipe. Sometimes if I do, I right-click with my mouse on the link and choose >Open. I agree with jmolinari, the difference seems to be in the sauce. Your recipe calls for oyster sauce, which is mild, salty, and sweet. Black soy sauce, which is also sweet-ish, packs more punch and color. I love this recipe for Basil Chicken. It's from my Thai cooking teacher, Kasma Loha-Unchit. I've made it a bunch of times. http://www.thaifoodandtravel.com/recipes/baschi.html

Nutmeg Tea Cookies. These are shortbread-like butter cookies, good with hot tea or coffee, or a nice cold glass of milk.

Warm Spiced Limeade. A hot drink of lemongrass and spices, sweetened with palm sugar, then spiked with lime. It is sweet, spicy, and tart at the same time. Very good, and easy to prepare. I know I'll be drinking this again on a wintry day.

Thanks for the encouragement, Bruce. I'm enjoying a little time off this week, so I'm trying out recipes from this book. Here's a street food snack: Fried Sweet Plaintains. First, start with very ripe plaintains. They look half-rotted on the outside... But on the inside the fruit is sweet and firm. Slices of plaintain are dipped in a simple batter and deep-fried. They don't brown much at all, and may even look a little unappetizing. (This opinion will change when you eat one.) These plaintains are amazing. The cooked fruit turns a bright yellow and tastes sweet like a yam and acidic like a mango. Very, very delicious. You can dust them with a little confectioners' sugar if you ever stop eating them long enough. Faced with a fresh platterful in the late afternoon, one might forego dinner to eat this hefty, sweet treat. Not that I would ever do anything like that.

A Sunday dinner of Spiced Braised Nyona Pork, South India-Style Eggplant Pickle, and Stir Fried Bean Sprouts with Scallions. The pickle is a bit of a fuss to make, but like so many other things once you start the time passes quickly and before you know it, you're done. It helps if you're a fan of Indian oil pickles (like me). This pickle is very delicious, flavored with a variety of Indian spices and chiles, and it's beautiful to serve. I wanted to play with my new clay cazuela, so instead of using a Dutch oven, I sauteed the shallots, spices, and pork cubes in a skillet, deglazed the skillet, and transferred everything to the cazuela. This is the pork at the end of the cooking time. The beansprouts are stir-fried with scallions, garlic, shallot, and chile. It introduces a light, fresh taste to this combination of foods. The pork tastes spectacular--tender, spicy and caramelized. This recipe has been a favorite on this thread, and now I know why.

Saturday's Dinner: Mien's Garlic Fried Chicken, Javanese Sambal, & Green Beans with Coconut Milk. This fried chicken recipe is simple, compared to others I've wrestled with. The chicken is marinated with crushed garlic, vinegar, and salt, and then it's shallow-fried. The meat is mildly garlicky, and the skin fries up crisp and caramelized. I had never made a sambal before, and this one is fabulously delicious. I had to stop myself from eating it by the spoonful. The green beans are also a fine complement to the chicken. Very tasty!

This is an unusual ice cream recipe, not the classic chocolate ice cream with a straightforward egg custard base. This is really a chocolate-caramel ice cream recipe. You realize that, yes? When I eyeball the recipe, I'm struck by how much sugar is in the recipe, more than I would expect for that amount of milk, cream, or even bittersweet chocolate. The large amt of sugar, plus the fact that you're stirring caramel in the base, may account for the ice cream's strange texture. The last time I made caramel ice cream, it froze on the soft side, and I had to season it in the freezer for over 24 hours before it crystallized enough into a typical ice cream texture. My honest opinion? This ice cream came out the way it's supposed to. It's just an unusual recipe. My favorite dark chocolate ice cream recipe is from Lou Seibert Pappas' Sorbets and Ice Creams. If you want the recipe, PM me with your email address and I will send you the recipe in a PDF file.

Penang-Style Stir-Fried Kuey Teow Noodles. I keep calling this dish "kuey-tuey." It's tasty, whatever you call it. The sauce has that sweet-hot thing going on. This is a straightforward noodle stirfry, doable even on a weekday night. The only fussy step is to make a flavoring paste of roasted shrimp paste and dried chiles. That doesn't take long. The recipe instructions call for using a teeny food processor to process the paste, but since that may be the only cooking tool I don't own (yet), I made do with a mortar and pestle. Given the small amount of paste, a mortar may actually be easier for this task than a processor. You can make this recipe with either fresh or dried rice noodles. I pulled some dried rice noodles out of the cupboard for this dish, the same kind of noodles that you cook for Pad Thai.

An easy and delicious meal after a long day: Chile Omelet and Stir Fried Asian Greens with Garlic. This really is a 30-minute meal. I'll add this one to my quick & easy repertoire and certainly make it again. (Just as well, my omelet-flipping technique could stand the practice.)

Nobody has tried any desserts from the book, so I decided to make a dessert. Here's Indonesian Spice Cake. This is a sweet aromatic cake, fine-textured and a little dryish, perfect with hot tea or coffee.

Those potatoes look wonderful, Bruce.

I avoid wrapping cheese in any kind of plastic wrap. The cheese "sweats" and turns moldy pretty quickly. The retailers wrap cheese in plastic because then the cheese looks attractive and sells. I was advised to wrap cheese in wax paper and keep it in a paper bag. However, I've discovered that the paper wrapping is not sufficiently airtight and then the cheese dries out. My current method, which works well for me, is to wrap the cheese in wax paper and then loosely in foil. I have far fewer problems with mold than I once did. I refrigerate my cheeses in the least cold part of my fridge, and they taste fine to me.

I'm joining the camp that thinks Honeycrisps are blah. They're popular at my local Whole Foods though. I think this is a matter of taste. My palate tends to like the acidic, tart flavors, so Honeycrisps don't do a thing for me. I'm not even that fond of the very popular Fujis. Bring on the Braeburns, Jonagolds, and McIntoshes.

I've been thinking of doing some cooking for this thread, preferably recipes that haven't been cooked yet, but first I had to figure out which recipes those are. In consultation with Robin, here's a list of recipes that have been cooked on this thread. I count over 40 recipes done from the 85 or so recipes in the book, so people have certainly made inroads here. Cradle of Flavor Home Cooking from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore by James Oseland Recipe Index: (numbers refer to post #s on this thread) CONDIMENTS: SAMBALS, DIPPING SAUCES, DRESSINGS & PICKLES Javanese Sambal Nyona Sambal Lemongrass & Shallot Sambal - 51 Green Mango Sambal Sweet Soy Sauce & Lime Dipping Sauce - 40, 74, 116 Nyona Dipping Sauce - 136, 142 Soy Sauce, Chile & Lime Dipping Sauce Sweet & Sour Chile Dipping Sauce Javanese Peanut Sauce - 124 Sweet & Sour Cucumber & Carrot Pickle w/Turmeric - 17, 40, 51, 112 Javanese Cucumber & Carrot Pickle - 74, 97, 142 South Indian-Style Eggplant Pickle Malaysian Spiced Pineapple Pickle - 100 STREET FOODS Beef Satay - 10, 40, 45, 59, 112 Chicken Satay- 74 Shrimp Satay Gado Gado - 124 Chopped Veg. Salad w/Coconut & Lime Leaf Dressing - 116 Crisp Jicama & Pineapple Salad - 45 Fried Sweet Plantains Bean Sprout & Potato Fritters RICE & NOODLES Steamed Rice - 74, 142 Lemongrass Scented Coconut Rice - 10, 40, 51, 97 Celebration Yellow Rice - 83, 112, 144 Spiced Nyona Rice Javanese Fried Rice - 10, 116 Herbal Rice Salad Stir Fried Chinese Egg Noodle w/ Shrimp & Asian Greens Penang-Style Stir-Fried Kuey Teow Noodles Chicken Curry Noodle Soup, Kuala Lumpur Style - 67 VEGETABLES Stir Fried Asian Greens w/ Garlic & Chiles- 74, 134 Stir Fried Bean Sprouts w/ Chinese Chives - 123 Sauteed Cabbage w/Ginger & Crispy Indian Lentils Braised Cabbage w/ Dried Shrimp Stir Fried Water Spinach, Nyona Style - 17, 129 Green Beans with Coconut Milk - 112, 144 Ching Lee's Braised Lemongrass Long Beans - 100, 119 Rohati's Crisp-Fried Potatoes w/Chile & Shallot Sambal Potato Rendang - 32 Fern Curry wth Shrimp Asiah's Eggplant Curry - 36 FISH & SHELLFISH Fragrant Fish Stew w/Lime & Lemon Basil Spice Braised Tuna - 10 Padang Fish Curry Hot & Sour Fish Stew w/Bamboo Shoots Indian-Style Fish Stew w/Okra Pan-Seared Mackerel w/Chiles & Garlic - 10, 134 Pan-Seared Tamarind Tuna - 51 Stir-fried Tamarind Shrimp - 130 Grilled Whole Fish w/Lemon Basil & Chiles Nyona Shrimp Curry w/Fresh Pineapple & Tomatoes Stir-Fried Shrimp Sambal - 10 Black Pepper Crab POULTRY The Soto King's Chicken Soup - 113 Javanese Chicken Curry - 120 West Sumatran Chicken Curry - 106 Chicken Rendang w/Cinnamon & Star Anise - 10 Nyona Chicken & Potato Stew - 110 Mien's Garlic Fried Chicken Nyona-Style Spiced Fried Chicken - 136, 142 Kevin's Spiced Roast Chicken w/Potatoes, Penang Style - 112 Javanese Grilled Chicken - 83, 97, 112, 144 Grilled Coconut Chicken w/Lemon Basil - 17 Nyona Duck Soup w/Salted Mustard Greens BEEF, GOAT & PORK (FOODS OF CELEBRATION) Beef Rendang - 32, 90, 125 Spiced Braised Nyona Pork - 10, 100, 105 Malaccan Beef & Vegetable Stew Javanese Spice Oxtail Stew Achenese Goat Curry TEMPEH, TOFU & EGGS Garlic-Marinated Tempeh Tempeh Sambal w/Lemon Basil Carmelized Tempeh w/Chiles Tofu & Summer Vegetables in Coconut Milk Twice-Cooked Tofu w/Coriander Fried Eggs w/Garlic, Shallots, Chiles & Ginger - 16, 123 Kopi Tiam Soft-Boiled Eggs Chile Omelet SWEETS & BEVERAGES Indonesian Spice Cake Nutmeg Tea Cookies Purple Rice Pudding w/Coconut Milk Sweet Spice Mung Bean Porridge Plantains w/Coconut Milk & Palm Sugar Sweet Rice Dumplings w/Palm Sugar & Coconut Cinnamon Tea - 134 Hawker's Tea Warm Spiced Limeade Lime-Cordial Syrup Singapore Slings

Will your classes be demo or hands-on, for the most part?

The rinds are definitely good for stock. Also, according to a dog owning friend, dogs love to chew on them.

I like to follow this rule of thumb: Substitute for the same flavor or substitute within the same family. For same flavor, for example, I'll substitute capers for pickle relish. For same family, I'll substitute butter for cream.

Try making date ice cream. Use about 1 lb fresh dates for a recipe yielding about 1 1/2 qts of ice cream. Puree half the dates and add to the ice cream base as it's cooking. Chop up the other half of the dates and add to the ice cream after it's churned in the ice cream maker but before you harden it in the freezer. You can substitute brown sugar for the granulated sugar in the ice cream base. A touch of vanilla extract is nice too.

Speaking of salt--- In the past few years I've encountered cookbooks where the author will specify an amount of salt, e.g., "1 teaspoon of salt," but the author means kosher salt or some kind of coarse sea salt. Usually that's explained at the beginning of the book. But what if you normally use table salt or fine-ground sea salt, and you don't remember this particular salt definition when you're cooking? Or what if you're cooking out of the book for the first time, and you haven't read all the material at the front of the book yet? Recently I was cooking a recipe out of a new cookbook and tossed in the amount of salt called for in the recipe without thinking. The dish was a disaster--twice as salty as it should have been. Sure enough, when I checked the front, the author said all salt meant kosher salt. (The recipe said "1 tsp salt," not "1 tsp kosher salt.") Ooops. But isn't this an easy mistake for people to make? I'm cooking, not taking the SAT exam. Once upon a time, "salt" in the recipe meant table salt and nothing else. But now with the different kinds of salt out there, "salt" may mean a variety of types and grinds. I think recipe writers should be more careful about describing what kind of salt they're giving the measure for--in the ingredients list of the recipe, not somewhere else in the book. For example, "salt" can mean any kind of fine-ground salt like table salt (the most common definition for salt). Other salts can be specified as "kosher salt," "coarse salt," or even "sea salt"--anything to make the cook realize that the salt being described is not the standard table salt.

Hi Daisy I bought the airline ticket, so I must be going. I'll be in Oaxaca at the same time, starting in the last week of October to the beginning of November. It's difficult to get information out of there. The locals who depend on the tourist industry have been creamed, because of last year's riots, and they are (of course) encouraging people to visit. My tour organizer informed me that there were a couple incidents this summer, with molotov cocktails (or some such) set off in shopping malls. But the city in general seems to be stable. My tour organizer, who cancelled the trip last year, says she feels it will go this year. We are keeping our fingers crossed. I'll PM you if I learn of anything else. Donna