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

Servings: for two

Nothing gives me more satisfaction that using leftovers for a good meal. Leftovers here is not only the bits and pieces of meals from the other night but it can also be a by-product of another dish. Imaginations fly and creativity flare. It’s fun.

This particular dish was ‘created’ when I had a pot of cooked barley. Asians prize barley for its cooling properties. Water from boiling barley and sweetened winter melon is a popular drink. Barley is also a common dessert, to be added into sweet mung-bean soup.

This time round, I combined the barley with grilled aubergines from the night before and canned corn. The texture really worked as soft aubergine and the crunchy corn was bridged by the chewy barley. I served it with yogurt-marinated, garam-masala flavoured, roasted chicken for a quick dinner.

 

Ingredients: (continue…)

Amid tree-wasting cookbooks strewn on the floor of Gramedia, a local Indonesian bookstore chain, this handsome and charismatic hardcover attracted me. I flipped the pages and was intrigued further when I realized the book contains a selected recipe from Ibu Kartini’s family.

Ibu Kartini is an Indonesian women-lib icon. We, especially the girls, was brain-washed to recognize that she was solely responsible for our being in that classroom but I didn’t know she cooked! Anyway, the recipes are interesting as they’re classic Indonesian with Javanese tones and Dutch influence. I hoped this book would be more substantial and well-researched than the books on the floor and coughed up the money for its steep price. (continue…)

Servings:  four

This week, I had a craving for duck ragu. I dream of their succulence within rich tomato sauce. I bought a piece of duck breast from our favourite butcher.

Apparently, it’s quite a popular dish for celebrity chefs. Gooling brought me to Emeril Lagasse and Mario Batali. My own copy of Cook with Jamie contains one too.

This recipe is a simplification of Jamie Oliver’s recipe as I want to taste the gamey flavour of the duck in rich tomato sauce (from the duck fat) instead of witnessing the fight of flavours among orange, duck, and tomato sauce. For wine, I used the fruity yet powerful Chilean red from Maipo Valley (Cab. Sauvignon and Carménère). 

Now I know why this is such a popular dish. It’s not difficult to make but the result is impressive. The meat is tender and the sauce complex making it the perfect sleep-inducing meal on a hot Sunday afternoon.  After (his) washing the dishes, we snored away.

Ingredients: (continue…)