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

Servings: 2-3 bowls

I don’t know for sure how hot and sour soup, the staple appetizer in chinese restaurants all over the world, comes about. Some said it was one of the Sichuan cuisine. I also have tried the soup, served with flour noodle shaved like young coconut slivers, in Beijing and a similar concoction in a Shantung Guo Tie seller near my home in Jakarta.

Anyway, I notice that this soup is normally part of the menu of Guo Tie (pot stickler to those of you from North America) or Jiao Zi seller as I suspect, the noodle is made of Guo Tie wrappings.

I made Guo Tie before but I’m still not happy with the skin. I tried using the same formula for the noodle. While it was OK, it disintegrated at an alarming rate in the boiling water and didn’t firm up. I wonder where I did wrong.

The soup, however, was great. I tweaked my trusty old recipe from the London Free Press (Ontario, that is). It was what Hot and Sour soup should be: spicy and sour with tinge of chicken-stock sweetness and neutral flavours from the bland tofu and bamboo shoots.

Ingredients:
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Servings: for three

Autumn is coming as the rain drops and the wind chills. I decide to welcome it by cooking Soto Ayam, a type of Indonesian chicken soup with a punch of spices. The defining spices in this soup are coriander, cumin and tumeric. Savoury and clean, sweet and sour, the soup should be extremely fragrant and deeply satisfying.

I put together this recipe from a collection found in the internet. But mostly, it comes from here.

Ingredients:
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I dislike porridge because I associate it with illnesses. My mother always made us eat plain porridge with a douse of soy-sauce to cleanse the body. The tongue, which was already numb from whatever ailment we had, had to suffer though the thick gruel spiked with sharp flavour of soy-sauce. Horrible.

Until one day. We were in KL and had dimsum at Mandarin Oriental and ordered their congee. I was surprised at the texture: it was silky and thin and delicately flavoured. I vowed to discover more congee like that back home as, at that time in Jakarta, a lot of congee still display the original grains of rice albeit swollen beyond recognition.

Of course now, they are everywhere. My favourite so far is from Congee Queen (or King or its other subsidiaries) in Toronto. When I left, there was not many of such places in Jakarta.

The good thing is, this type of congee is not at all hard to make at home as long as you own a slow cooker. The only problem is, I can’t find decent century eggs here. Otherwise, life would be perfect. Here it is.

Disclaimer: I can’t vouch for the quality of the said restaurant in KL’s Mandarin Oriental anymore because that was close to 7 years ago!

Ingredients:
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Whenever friends mention Nasi Liwet Sunda or Herbed Sundanese Steamed Rice, I can only comment with envy. "No more", I said, after I found out that the same effect can perhaps be replicated with claypots instead of the usual kastrol (metal vessels).

I was rewarded with flavourful and fragrant steamed rice with a bite. Steamed this way, the rice is more chewy than cooked in rice cooker. It is a great and trouble-free way to cook savoury rice to accompany fried tempeh (soy bean cake)  But if you don’t have claypot, feel free to utilize your rice-cooker.  Life is too short to insist on the small things.

Ingredients:
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