My wife and I fell in love with Padang food while in Jakarta - it's really popular there. What I didn't realize was how labor intensive it was! The Padang restaurants should be charging a fortune! This weekend I had a bit of time so I decided to try to make one of my favorites, ayam balado - balado chicken. I don't know what balado means, if anything. I do know that Malaysia has something similar, they call belado. (Anything can be balado-ified - we saw potatoes balado, eggs balado, fried fish balado...) The chicken is first simmered in a watery broth of ground spices like ginger, garlic, turmeric, ground coriander, etc and then removed and drained. The chicken is then shallow fried in a lot of oil, then removed and drained. Then, in a little bit of the oil, some mashed red chillies (typically 2 or 3 kinds so it's not so spicy), shallots and tomato are stir fried in the oil, with some of the chicken simmering broth added midway through and then fried until dry at which time the chicken is then refried in the chilli mixture and then finally served!!!
Just in case there's not enough flavor there, it's commonly served with one or two more sambal - either sambal merah (red sambal) or sambal ijo (green sambal). We were addicted to the sambal ijo and since I finally found (at least temporarily) a source of green tomatoes, I decided to try to make it also, even though I didn't have the right green chillies for it - but the ones I got were ok.
