Steamed Spare-Ribs, with Sweet Turmeric Cream + Cumber, with Wasabi/Vermouth Dressing.

i love spare ribs! usually, i grill them, but this time, i tried steaming after awhile. the preparation is the same; marinated in vinegar, salt, crushed garlic, and black bean sauce (or soy, if there isn't any BBS), and sugar. then i steamed it for 10 mins. the karavila salad, has been described in another post, but i thought up a sweet turmeric sauce (1/4 cup cream, heated with two pinches of tumeric, one of salt and a tiny bit of sugar), which was very warm and comferting, a good counter point to the bitterness of the gourd.
On the side is sliced cumber, dressed with cap full of dry vermouth, into which one squeeze of wasabi paste as been mixed.
all spur of the moment ideas, which seemed to work well.

Cumber Relish

i owe the idea for this dish to murakami's norwegian wood, where the narrator eats cumbers dipped in soy sauce, wrapped in nori, while waiting on his girl friend's father, who is dieing. the old man, who isn't eating any thing up until that point, sees Taro enjoying the cumbers so much, he starts eating.

i like nori, seaweed sheets, but i can't find them in colombo (:. so I upped the flavor, by mixing tomato paste, wasabi and soy sauce, using it as a garnish for the sliced baby cumbers. with sweetened tomato slivers on top. salt, sweet and nahaya dana (as in kata dana, mouth burn/ nose burn) from the wasabi.



it was a great appetizer.

Fish and Tomato Nosauce

This is a dish in progress again. That’s a lot of stuff in progress, but it doesn’t mean its all heading for a big hurrah. Ha, ha.

Well there the main experimental part of this dish is to try to use mousses to transform/supliment flavors that we Sri Lankans, know well – so that they are recalled but not repeated in a dish. Is that a mouthful? Hopefully it’s a tasty one.

When I was a child, growing up in Colombo, we always had issahara kame (dinner eaten in the front of the house/ anglicized food) for dinner (which I guess is/was kind of common, among the middle classes) – and my sister and I would always fight over the tomato sauce. It was MD, cos that was the only one there was, I think, and you had to jam the bottle top in the door, tighten carefully, just in case you crushed the neck, holding the bottle with a kitchen towel before you got it open, and then of course, it would not want to pour out, until it was beaten soundly on its hard glass bottom, for a long time. But it was good, and we would finish our ration of a bottle a week, our mother had us on – well, for she said, its not really food, and you shouldn’t have too much of it – some times by mid week. Oh! Well, I dunno about every one else, I still love tomato sauce. Now that MD just a brand, and there are tons more, they have a ‘traditional’ line. Which is the old fashioned stuff, for people like me, who were raised in the tasty cusp of colonialism and socialism.

In this dish, which like I said before, is part of an effort to recall taste with out repeating it (Why? Why not just repeat? Well, for some thing different, is all!) I use tomato mousse to replace MD tomato sauce. The main dish is grilled seer, with garlic and olive oil, with a sweet sour tomato onion garish, with a side of pickled cumber. That much is straightforward, the tomato mousse is new. I have been working through mousses recently, with straightforward ones in the bag now. But my tomato mouse is complicate cos its got invoke the right taste, with out well, mirroring it. I opted to use tomato paste (that’s very pure, usually, taste wise, just tomatoes and salt) and chili pieces, almost in a 2:1 ratio, but it could have been hotter. I also added ½ teaspoon of geletine to ½ tablespoon of hotwater mixed well, into the paste. It was fine, taste wise, folded into cream that already sweetened (I couldn’t get the other one), but the graininess was annoying. Next time, I will try it with chili power and finally, break down and simply use a sauce.

The rest of the dish was simple; I will post a how-to on the grilled fish stuff later.

PS: In the evening, I re did the tomato mousse; with some left over sauce, tomato paste and chili powder. about a 1/3 each, and added a little less cream, about another 1/3 may be little more. Kept the geletine at the same level. It was stunning, absolutely stunning.

Dosa or Dosai or Thosai

Dosa, Fish Head and Pol Sambol
Originally uploaded by pradeep jeganathan.

SC, the kind critter who cooks my lunch and does other house keeping things in the apartment, made dosai for lunch today. Which I had with fish head curry, and coconut sambol. I was very hungry, but I stopped long enough for a photograph.

when she makes it, and generally, when Dosa is made at home in Sri Lanka, at least in the south, which includes my mother's kitchen, and she is from the north, originally, as they say -- the thing is a soft, thick pancake.

but that's quite different, in size, texture and taste, from the south Indian variety, which I love even more -- crisp, paper thin, rolled up, and eaten with a wet coconut chutney.

Here is one I got from Shanthi Vihar, the restaurant at Thunmulla, in Colombo, served on a banana leaf, with red and green coconut chutney.

Roast pork, with fruit relish

Me? I've been roasting a lot of pork lately.
Trying to really understand how to do it well -- and make a memorable dish of it. Can't say I've got there yet, but hey its fun to try.
-- this loin was marinated in red wine vinegar, pineapple juice, over night, then stuffed with fresh pineapple and roasted. The meat was subtly flavored, I wonder if I could make that stronger.
Since not even I can eat a whole loin of roast pork at a sitting, I've been having this in sliced helpings over a few days.
When I warm it, I add a little sesame oil, and that really gives it fine, nutty overlay.
The relish is diced pineapple and mango with red chilli pieces -- some thing I've done with black bean beef earlier, on the blog.

Would you like try some? Seriously, if you are into food, and like the kind of stuff I cook (meats predominate right now) -- I'd like to hear from you -- if you can offer thoughtful comments on what you taste.
Really.
Leave a note on the blog or let me know on facebook, and I'll get back to you.

Tomato soup & idly, with red chili, tomato chutney

It turned out very complimentary – and so, I’ve declared them fused!

The tomato soup, started with a chicken stock foundation, a good amount of tomatoes, flavored with lots of ginger and garlic, spiced with white pepper and black, and highlighted at the end, with a little tomato puree, and sugar. So much for that.

Soup is always good with bread of course. And I love, kade paan. But then I had a thought: well soup is to bread, as idly is to sambar, right? So why not cross fertilized. And so, I tried the Tomato soup with idly. Now idlies, which I love, can be quite bland. What makes them go is the particular coconut chutney that goes with it. And if it’s a tomato, red chili chutney, you’ve really got things singing along.
The rich, yet clean taste of tomato soup was well complimented by the hot, spicy taste and soft texture of the chutney inflected idly.

Its a tribute to the taste of tomatoes, really.

Spinach, with Ginger Confit

I been meaning to try this for some time, and today, finally, my craving for new taste over took my laziness. I got the recipe for ginger confit, from Kunz & Kaminsky whose book I can not praise enough –
but before we get there, its worth noting that there are two kinds of confit, meat ones, like duck confit, where the preservative is basically fat, and fruit ones, where its sugar. A ginger confit, uses the fruit techniques – you add honey, lime juice, lime rind, spices, chillie and vermouth to the julienned ginger and you thicken this, on a low simmer, until its really thick and treacle like. It was a tiny bit tricky, but I added a little more honey than they said one should and then a little arrack at the end, and it went on a while -- You’ve got be careful not to burn this, of course.:) -- and then it was fine.

The spinach I kept simple, just blanched in boiling water and few pieces of rock salt for less than a minute, and yes, it was marvelous with the confit.

The ginger confit has a unique taste, it doesn’t come out sweet, it’s a hot, bitter thing, with hints of sweetness, and what K&K call florals – its basically the lemon rind, the explosive taste of ginger, and of course, the dried chillie, which I added more of than they did, bound with thickened honey.
Wrapped in soft green spinach leaves, it left a taste so complex and original in my mouth, that it changed my whole day.

Mango + Chillie

Mango + Chillie
Originally uploaded by pradeep jeganathan.

It wasn't really a sour mango; even though the colour seemed a little pale.
but i added a whole heaped tea spoon of chillie pieces, anyway and a small pinch of salt.
It seems enough for lunch, eating any else for awhile will only spoil the lingering burn of pleasure, deep on my tongue.

Appetizer

Appetizer
Originally uploaded by pradeep jeganathan.

I felt my sunday lunch needed some extra. a sort of a little kick. so i sliced a bombay onion, into two very thin slices, rubbed a thin layer of wasabi paste on each side, soaked the slices with a little soya sauce, and made a little appetizer sandwich.

it was great with rice, and i had to stop eating, wash my hands and go fix another one.