The Food Canon

Nasi Ulam (photo: Joyce Ho)

We love making Nasi Ulam for gatherings.

It is a favourite at the Alpha Courses held at St Andrew's Cathedral.

It always put a smile on people's faces. The explosion of indescribable flavours fills one's senses with every spoonful. It is decidedly local and yes, very cheap to make.

The meal do not sit heavily in your stomach. It is light and refreshing. These herbs have their health value, rich anti-oxidants and all. Not that anyone cared too much for that.

If you are a vegetarian, you will be very happy to have this on the dining party table.

Ulam means herbs in Malay. I have already blogged the "recipe" here. I am not sure recipe is the word I should use as each lot of this has turned out slightly different.

I have come to use these herbs more often than others:

Basil (sweetish)
Daun Keduk (Pepper leaves)
Mint Leaves (slightly bitters)
Turmeric Leaves (gingerly)
Laksa Leaves (Daun Kesum, strong flavour - us win moderation)
Torch Ginger Bud (Bunga Kantan)
Kaffir Lime leaves (leaves are hard, strong flavour, use in moderation)

You can get these herbs easily in many wet markets. Tekka Market is my favourite source.

Some of the herbs I normally use, left to right, : Turmeric leaves, lemon grass, torch bud, Daun Keduk (bottom), Mint leaves (top), Basil Leaves (right), Kaffir lime Leaves(top right) (photo: Goh Eck Kheng)

Salt, toasted and crumbly salted fish and sugar are also added to the rice. And for the refreshing crunch, garnish with thin slices of shallots, carrot strips and tiny cucumber cubes.

After you wash the leaves, it is important to ensure it is dry before you cut it. A sharp knife is needed so that the herbs are diced finely and neatly. If you use a blunt knife, you are crushing the leaves and the diced herbs will be wettish.

The rice must be cooked perfectly as mushy rice is a disaster for Nasi Ulam. We normally use the 1:1 water-rice ratio. Basmati is our favourite as it is light. After the rice has been cooked and cooled down, we mix in the herbs. If you add the herbs into steaming hot rice, the herbs will be cooked and lose it's freshness.

The beautifully pink Torch Bud Ginger (photo: Joyce Ho)

For the Nonya or Malay pairing dishes, a sambal dish goes well with it. Sambal Prawns is our usual favourite or simply, a plain Sambal Belachan. As for meat, a mildly flavoured meat dish will go well, such as Ayam Sioh or Inche Kabin (nonya friend chicken). We sometimes offer Buah Keluak flavoured meat but we will dial down the intensity of the bush Keluak paste so that its do not compete with the herbs. The rice should not be drenched in gravy either and so, soupy dishes are out.

Explosion of flavours in every spoonful

I will share our notes on dishes which we cooked to pair with Nasi Ulam: Buah Keluak flavoured "Tau You Bak" (pork belly) and sambal prawns with the crunchy four corner beans (kacang botox) in the next few posts.

Meanwhile, I hope this post will inspire you to try making this. Unless your guests are on an Atkins diet, expect them to return for multiple helpings.

Garnished with cucumber and carrot strips

If you are familiar with cooking sous vide, you would have experimented by now with slow and low SV cooking of tough but flavourful cuts like short-rib beef. If you have well-marbled cut to start with, your can be sure that the results will be spectacular after 36 or 48 hours of cooking at anywhere between 55˚C to 60˚C. Check out my previous post here.

I use it to make a Japanese Rice Bowl recently for a party of 80. I will share with you my cooking notes.

Estimating at 50gm of beef per pax, we started with about 5 kg of Angus short-rib beef, cooking it at 56˚C for 36 hours. This was of course prepared a few days before.

After it has finished cooking, cut open the vacuumed beef packs and drain the juice into a cooking pot. Heat up the pot and when the juice heats up, the scums will turn solid. Strain and keep the juice.

Fridge the beef. It will be easier to trim and cut if the meat is chilled. To prepare, trim and cut the beef into small blocks.  Some short-rib cuts have tough tendon and fats which you need to trim. And yes, keep the fats (good for "heart attack fried rice", I heard!)! Next, coat it with soy sauce before you pan sear as it will make browning easier. See photo below.


Meanwhile, prepare a the salad of cucumber, tomato, silken tofu and lettuce. Slice it into small pieces for easier eating off the bowl. Prepare a lemon and ginger dressing. Keep chilled and dressed the salads before you serve.

As for the eggs, cook it at 62˚C for 45 minutes. Keep warm till your serve it.

For the sauce, we used the remains beef juices, mirin, soy sauce and cooking sake. We added sugar to sweeten it and beef bouillon to make it more intense. Then we add the slurry of corn flour to thicken it.

Cook the Japanese rice. 6 kg will feed 80 pax nicely.

Nearing the time of the dinner, we started to pan-sear the beef blocks. Season it and then  sliced it at a thickness of about 3-4 mms.

After this, it should be easy. Plate the bowls in this order: rice, beef, egg and drizzle some of the beef sauce. Garnish with furikake - mixture of seaweed, sesame seeds and other flavouring seasonings. Some diced spring onions will be good too.

Then placed dressed salads on the side.

Lay out the bowls on a serving table. Serving dinner in a bento bowl is fast and efficient.

Cost? About $4 per bowl and it looks pretty and taste gourmet :)

Slicing the "twice-cooked" Sous vide cooked and pan-seared beef

Alpha Course is starting again and once again, we can expect some good home-cooking from the Cathedral community. More info on the Alpha Course at the Cathedral can be found here.

We made Nasi Lemak again for the 190+ -pax Alpha Intro dinner.

At the Cathedral kitchen, the facilities are more limited. For the rice, we had to cook it using the electric rice cookers instead of steamers, our usual preferred method. I am learning that you can also do some really nice Nasi Lemak Rice without going the "kukus" way.

So, how did it go?

With some care, I will say that it is possible to cook some good NL rice this way. We were pretty happy with the results and I will detail here our cooking notes of what we did.

The Rice
10 kg of Jasmine Rice
Fresh milk from 6 coconuts
Salt
Pandan Leaves

A ratio of rice:water 1:1.1 was used to cook the rice. A tablespoon of salt was used for every kilo of rice. After the rice has cooked (when the switch goes to “warm”), coconut milk and pandan leaves were added. We used freshly squeezed milk which we bought from Tekka Market. Using a spatula, we fluffed the rice. Then we kept the rice cooking on warm till it was served for dinner later.

For good Nasi Lemak rice, the rice should be fluffy, with whole unbroken grains. Too much coconut milk will make the rice greasy and keeping to this ratio is important. Salt - and enough of it - is essential.

You need to imagine how the rice will go with the rather oily sambal and the salty ikan bilis. 10 kilo was barely enough for 190 pax and we could have cooked a kilo more.

It is a joy to be able to get back to "community cooking" in this new church I am serving in. As I have said elsewhere, it is a familiar environment that I grew up with where I am very much at home.

We ran the Alpha Introductory Dinner recently and made a decision to offer "home-cooked" dinner. This article serves as cooking notes for  myself and the team and I am sure, you will find helpful as well.

As I have recently learned to prepare Nasi Ulam, I thought a Malay or Nonya themed dinner will be nice for the occasion.

This is my usual cooking notes to remind myself of what I have been cooking.

Not that I get to cook a lot these days since I took up my new assignment at a very busy church (hint - it has the largest cross in Singapore - see pic). It is a cool church.

The humble roast chicken is something that is commonly done in many households and it does seem like our kitchen ovens are conventionally designed for it.

My idea of a good roast chicken is this: the skin should be crisped, nicely browned and the meat flavourful and moist. That is the reason why putting the chicken on a stack of vegetable is a big no-no for me. It was a method I used when I was following a cookbook. The meat should be moist and flavourful and this means you should not overcook your chicken.

I always thought that it is fantastic to serve Satay at a party.

I have been to some where a "Satay Man" was hired. You can smell it in the air as you walk in. And the sight of the charcoal fire which flared occasionally in the skilful pair of hands - one holding a fan and the other a bunch of satay - was always something that added a special atmosphere to the evening.

So, what are you cooking for this coming Chinese New Year's Reunion dinner?

This is a special dinner where everyone comes back "home" and the family catches up with one another. It is very special for the older folks - our grandpas and grandmas - as each CNY Reunion dinner continues a chain of tradition that stretches back as far as they can remember.

I know many families these days find it more convenient to eat outside but we all know that it is not the same. In the home, the littles ones can run around and scream their lungs out while the senior ones beam and smile, seated in their comfortable chairs. You do not need to rush through dinner to accommodate the "next seating." And home-cooked meals, lovingly made, are always delicious and warms the heart, don't you agree?

A new year has started! A blessed new year to all.

Thanks again for your feedback that you are finding the recipes and techniques shared here helpful. This motivates me to continue blogging. If anything, the discipline of blogging also helps me to be more organised, reflective and improve on my cooking.

I thought I should take down some cooking notes for the dishes I cooked last Christmas. In posting it here, I hope it can also be helpful for you as tips for party-cooking. I am of course very busy in my work as a pastor, and so I need to plan ahead and ensure the dishes are not too complicated. You will find these quite easy to do and good to serve for parties.

One of the highlights of the year is the opportunity to cook fine dining Western cuisine for the larger family gatherings. Someone else is always sponsoring the bill. All I need to do is to plan and prepare the meal.

The chefs like what they are doing. The diners like the food. And the one who sponsors believes that he is getting a good bang for the buck. Everyone is happy.  There is nothing like the atmosphere of a home which feels like a restaurant, with food plated to each guest.

Family, food and friends. I am not sure I got the order right but these are always special and anticipated gatherings.

Editorial: I am starting a new series on recipes that are suited for cooking for a party or group of people, i.e. 30-40 

I am teaching some friends here to cook some Asian dishes for church lunches. I will make some adjustments to the recipe to cater for party-eating, striking a balance between taste and the need for simplicity when doing large quantity cooking.

I will start with Curry Chicken. Curry is a great party dish. It keeps well and the taste actually gets better hours after it is done. It is a one-pot meal and apart from rice, you only need to add veg like fresh cucumber, lettuce or tomatoes. You can prepare the paste in advance and cook the curry on the day of the event itself.

Dear Food Team

I thought we cooked a splendid dinner tonight.

I will jot down some notes here for our future remembrance, which means, please do cook this again.

Planning a meal is about matching various dishes together. If you serve a meal in a buffet spread, our guests will be piling food on their plates. The sauces are going to mix. Think of how sambal belachan will mess up delicately steamed pork ribs. Or how the pickled salad sauce will affect how a "Chai poh nung." So when you plan an Alpha meal, think of what will actually go on the diner's plate, how it will all come together.

Tonight's meal is almost a perfect combi. Food traditions are seldom wrong.

We served 160+ bowls of Penang Prawn Noodle recently. This lot was good with nice balance of flavours with sufficient prawn stock. When we did not need to add too much of the other flavourings (esp Ikan bilis and chicken stock), we knew we had a good broth coming.

My mum's version does not use pork bones which changes the flavor and is nice in its own way. And it is often used commercially because dried shrimps and ikan bilis are expensive.

I normally cook my Mum's version to give diners a unique taste of good home cooking.

I will write my cooking notes here to guide the team when they need to do this again.

I thought this sign gave the event a casual restaurant feel.

It was fun to serve almost 200 diners a plate of home-made Nasi Lemak at St James' Church last Wednesday evening. There was a nice home-restaurant atmosphere.

It is the largest group we have cooked for thus far. I am glad to observe that the team worked well together to ensure a wonderful dinner and evening for all. Earlier, we were expecting to cater to a crowd of 120-150. As it neared 200 the day before, we switched some plans to better cater for this increase.

This is a pictorial post and I will let the photos and captions speak for themselves. There are some food and party tips in the captions.