Sanctuary from The Mad World
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch. - Orson Welles

I  love okra or Lady’s Fingers but cooking it can be a pain. My husband used to hate it because, wrongly cooked (my fault), okra turns any dish into one slimy mess. 

To reduce the oozing, I’ve read numerous techniques: breading, deep-frying, sauteeing, cooking with acids (eg tomatoes) etc. The easiest easiest and most practical way is to sautee the okra pieces with little oil until the pieces turn brown and dry prior to cooking the okra with anything else. It takes a while with lots of tossing but the result is worth it. The okra is tender but not mushy. Most importantly, the dish is not gooey.

My favourite is to cook okra with lots of sambal ala Muslim stalls in Singapore’s hawker centres. This is a rendition of the dish, using whatever leftover I have in the fridge.

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No self respecting fan of Asian cuisine would say no to Rendang. It’s a classic beef curry from West Sumatra and loved by people all over the world. It’s funny. I don’t think of Rendang as special - I appreciate the sauce but not the stringy, dry, and flavourless meat - and prefer other less-known but exotic stuffs such as sambal goreng udang (prawn sambal), ayam pop (chicken boiled in coconut water, lightly fried), or even beef-brain curry, a childhood favourite. But most non-Indonesian friends I know demand Rendang instead. 

There are different variations of Rendang: from the dry, black-brown type with stringy meat to the almost-soupy kind with, often, tough cubes. The Chinese makes theirs with pork! My favourite is made of beef, with thick gravy and tender meat with additional hard-boiled eggs to stretch the meal further.

I swear by this recipe (modified to show steps using canned coconut milk) from Lita which I’ve made numerous time to great success. Rendang is actually very easy to make but it takes a long time (and a lot of energy) to achieve that perfect orange-brown colour.  The meat and spices are essentially fried gently with oil from the coconut milk.  Furthermore, boiling down that much water off the coconut milk to achieve thick gravy is not an easy feat. Once done, however, I am rewarded with economical yet delightful meal for weeks as I simply open my freezer and pop a cube of tender meat and sweet gravy into the microwave. 

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I was in a town of Speyer, Germany with a group of friends one day when we sat down for a coffee. To accompany our coffee, we picked a piece of what the waitress called ‘yoghurt cake’. It was amazingly flavourful and moist but light with fruit toppings. When I saw this recipe at Orangette, I wondered if it was the same cake.

The result is a moist sponge cake which keeps its texture for days without refrigeration. It’s very easy to make, too, with minimal amount of utensils. I used only a bowl and a wooden spoon to mix the batter.

Following the suggestion from one of the commenters, I topped the lemon juice glaze with chocolate ganache for a chocolate treat (an overkill, I know, but I can’t resist the thought of citrus and chocolate). I’ll probably try the fruit version soon, given the abundance of beautiful little berries in summer.

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This simple dish is wonderful. The beans are sweet from the butter, the fish’s skin is crisp and flesh tender and the brown butter sauce is lemony. I served them with Canary wrinkly potatoes (Papas Arrugadas) for a delicious summer dinner.

I read somewhere that the Keller’s secret to crisp fish skin is to scrape the skin with the blade of a knife. So I did - the silvery bits came off - and the fish skins were crispy and smoky. Beginner’s luck? I’m not sure.  But I’m adding that technique to my repertoire.  

The recipe is modified from Bouchon’s Trout with Haricot Verts and Almonds. I skipped the almond because I didn’t have them.

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When I encountered this dish for the first time in a Spanish restaurant, I thought they used a special kind of potatoes as the insides were soft, almost mashed, encased in salty, slightly chewy skin. Apparently, it’s a classic Canarian dish for ordinary new potatoes. It’s very easy to make, too.

I normally serve this potato plain, without the mandatory pepper sauce or Mojo, to accompany grilled or fried fish and meat. 

This recipe is not an original but a result of internet research.

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