Sea bass cooked in coconut milk flavoured with ginger, garlic, chilli and tamarind. To accompany the fish I made Rice Noodle with Mushrooms and a Seaweed Salad, I’ll post those recipes to follow.
For 2
2 seabass
peanut oil for frying
4 cloves of garlic – peeled and sliced
piece of fresh ginger – cut into little julienne
1 green and 1 red birds eye chilli – the green finely chopped and the red sliced
1 stick lemon grass – white core only – finely sliced
1/2 onion – sliced
50 ml thin tamarind sauce / tamarind paste in 50 ml boiling water
This pudding is in need of a name, so I would be grateful for any suggestions, or should I just stick to Oriental Rice Pudding? I was looking for a light dessert to follow the Gado Gado which I served for lunch, and remembered an Indian milky dessert called Sheer Korma. That is made with a very fine wheat vermicelli, seviyan, cooked in sweetened milk with nuts and flavoured with saffron, so I thought to make it more in tune with an Indonesian dish, and to make it vegan, to substitute the wheat vermicelli for fine rice noodles and use coconut milk instead of cows milk. I think it worked very well.
For 4 servings
80 grams rice vermicelli
160 ml can full fat coconut milk
40 grams pistachios
25 grams flaked almonds
25 grams broken pecans
75 ml agave syrup / honey
few strands saffron
For lime sherbet topping
2 tablespoons caster sugar
1 lime
Start by making the lime sherbet as you have to do this a day in advance so it can dry. This amount is more than you need for garnishing this dessert, but the sherbet keeps well for a couple of weeks in an airtight jar and is lovely on plain ice cream and fruit salad.
On a flat plate or tray sprinkle the sugar in an even layer.
Using the zester on your grater, grate the zest of the lime in an even layer over the sugar, then with your fingertips lightly mix the two together still leaving the mix spread out.
Leave in a warm dry place for several hours or overnight until dry and crunchy.
So for the rice pudding –
Soak the rice vermicelli in cold water for an hour.
Drain and cut into shortish lengths.
Put into a saucepan with the rest of the ingredients and bring slowly to a simmer.
Simmer for 5 – 10 minutes until slightly thickened. Leave to cool.
Serve at room temperature with the lime sherbet sprinkled over the top.
The tofu and bean sprout fritters recipe that I posted previously was very good and the resulting cakes very subtle and delicately flavoured. Today I wanted to make some with more punch and depth of flavour, so I fried some finely chopped shiitake mushrooms and fried them with the onion and garlic. Then, as I already had it sitting in the fridge, for the spices I used a tablespoon of the green curry paste that I made for the vegetable curry. And finally to allow for the extra moisture of the mushrooms I added extra egg and rice flour. The cakes did hold together in the pan a lot better than the previous ones with bean sprouts. I will write the whole recipe for the fritters below, followed by the recipe for the sweet spicy sauce which was a bit of a last minute throw together, but worked really well as often is the case.
SHIITAKE MUSHROOM FRITTERS
Makes 2 portions
200 grams plain tofu
1 spring onion – finely chopped
1 clove garlic- finely chopped
100 grams shiitake mushrooms – finely chopped
peanut or other light vegetable oil
1 tablespoon vegan green curry paste – see previous post for recipe
4 tablespoons – 60 ml rice flour
1 egg – lightly beaten
Fry the onions and garlic in a couple of tablespoons of oil until translucent.
Add the mushrooms and continue frying slowly for another 5 minutes.
Meanwhile break the tofu into a bowl and then mash it with a fork. Add the curry paste and mash more to mix thoroughly.
Add the mushroom and onion and again mix thoroughly.
Add the rice flour and mix, then finally the egg and mix again.
Form into six cakes squeezing the mix together with your hands so it holdS it’s shape.
Fry gently in oil until nicely light brown, about five minutes, then turn over carefully and cook the other side.
SWEET AND SPICY SAUCE
200 ml coconut milk
50 ml chilli jam – you can find the recipe on this site
juice of 1 small lime
1 tablespoon cashew cream
Heat all the ingredients in a small pan stirring them together. If the sauce seems a bit thin, coconut milk varies so much in density, add more cashew cream to thicken.
I have been experimenting with cashew cream, and in general I’m not so excited by it. It was great for thickening this sauce, but as a cream I find it works better for sweet things than savoury. I think in the next blog I will do a comparison of various vegan creamy sauces with recipes of course so you can try making whichever ones appeal.
