FreshFish and FatCat

Saturday is my cooking day. It is the day when I usually try out different recipes. One of the interesting recipes I tried was the famously hot and spicy Manado (also known as Minahasa) cuisine called Cakalang Rabe Rica which can be translated to ‘Hot Spicy Shredded Tuna’.



Why Manado?


As the chili lover, I cannot resist to try hot spicy recipes. Since I started my cooking journey, I have tried cooking many hot spicy recipes from different areas in Indonesia but so far have not tried any recipe of Manado cuisine which are known to be bloody hot and spicy.


Manado is the capital of the North Sulawesi province of Indonesia. It is located at the Bay of Manado, and is surrounded by a mountainous area and is famous for its Bunaken Sea Garden, one of the most beautiful sea gardens in the world. And this is the picture of Bunaken:

Why tuna?


Manado is famous with its cakalang fish which is also known as flying fish. Cakalang is from the same family (Scombridae) with tuna fish.

Tuna fish are truly a nutrient-dense food. An excellent source of high quality protein, tuna are rich in a variety of important nutrients including the minerals selenium, magnesium, and potassium; the B vitamins niacin, B1 and B6; and perhaps most important, the beneficial omega-3 essential fatty acids .


Speaking of tuna, guess who’s waiting faithfully in the kitchen when I was busy preparing to cook the Hot Spicy Shredded Tuna?

It was Miu Miu…our beloved FatCat (note: her weight is 6 kg).



Yeah, Miu Miu was there with me in the kitchen, waiting patiently hoping to get a little bite of her favorite fish (note: her favorite cat food is chicken and tuna).

By the way, I just found out that there’s a difference between ‘cat tuna’ and ‘people tuna’. The cat version has all the necessary ingredients added to it to make it healthy for the cat to eat it. Giving ‘people tuna’ to cat as a very rare treat will be okay, but not as part of cat’s daily diet. Why? Human-grade tuna can be high in phosphorous and other metals that could harm a cat if fed regularly.


Well, enough about Miu Miu the FatCat and let’s go back to my cooking Hot Spicy Shredded Tuna or ‘Tuna Rabe Rica’.


Here is my version of Tuna Rabe Rica



Ingredients :

• 500 gram fresh tuna fish meat (the original recipe used smoked Cakalang fish)

• Grill the tuna meat until dry, then shredded

• 10 Kaffir lime leaves, take out the hard part, thinly sliced
• 2 cm ginger, bruised
• 2 cm galangal, bruised
• 5 stalks of lemongrass, take only the white part, bruised
• 5 pandan leaves, tie into a knot
• 2 teaspoon of lime juice
• 10 tablespoons vegetable oil

Grind the following spice ingredients into a paste:

• 20 finger-length red chili peppers, chopped
• 10 red bird’s eye chilies, chopped
• 20 shallots or 3 big size onions, chopped
• salt and pepper
• 1 teaspoon brown sugar (optional)

How to make:

• Heat the oil on medium heat
• Stir fry the spice paste
• Add in the Kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass, ginger, galangal, pandan leaves and stir fry until fragrant
• Add in the shredded tuna meat, stir and mix well with the spice
• Add in the lime juice, salt, pepper and sugar (if used)
• Continue to stir fry around 10 – 15 minutes until the tuna is really mix well with the spice
• Remove from heat
• Discard the pandan leaves, galangal, ginger and lemon grass

Serve warm with rice

Cook Chili When It Rains

Rainy days are here again in the city where I live. As a person who grew up in the tropics, I adored the rain. Normally, we have two seasons: the dry and wet season. This year we had very short dry season so by now, the weather has been so wet and chilly.


We can have a bright sunshine in the morning but suddenly comes the thick dark cloud followed by lighting, thunder and heavy rain or we can have gloomy cloudy sky with the rain showers all day.

And when rain falls heavily for a few hours or showers down all day, this is what will happen in the city:

When you live in a city like Jakarta, it's either you become bitter or better.... let's choose to become better.



Rainy day holds one certainty in the realm of food – Chili. One spoonful of the spicy stew can warm the body from the inside out.

Chili is a must-have rainy-day-dish, enjoyed equally at a cook-out or dinner party – and especially as leftovers. The one great thing about Chili is the recipe is really kind of a guideline and we can change it depending on our tastes.


One of my favorite Chili dishes is Chili con Carne coz its sooo tasty, hot, healthy and easy to make! It’s best to enjoy during the rainy days like now.


You can have Chili either on its own, with rice, potatoes, pasta, nachos ….you name it!


What is Chili con Carne?


Chili con Carne (literally “Chili with meat”, often known simply as chili) is a spicy stew. The name “chili con carne” is taken from Spanish which means “peppers with meat.” Traditional versions are made, minimally, from chili peppers, garlic, onion and cumin, along with chopped or ground beef. Beans and tomatoes are frequently included. Variations, both geographic and personal, may involve different types of meat as well as a variety of other ingredients.


It can be found worldwide in local variations and also in certain American-style fast-food restaurants. The variant recipes provoke disputes among aficionados, and the dish is used as an ingredient in a number of other foods.



My Version of Chili con Carne


Ingredients:

• 500 gram ground/minced beef
• 1 Large onion chopped
• 2-3 Cloves of Garlic
• 250 ml beef stock
• 1 tin of red kidney beans, drained and rinsed. This is the kind of red kidney beans I use

• 7 fresh jalapeno chili peppers, coarsely sliced. Why seven? no special reason, I just like it (in my country jalapeno pepper is called cabe gendot)

• for the tomatoes, we can use chopped fresh tomatoes (400 gram) or canned tomato paste (around 100 gram).

For the seasoning:

• 1 teaspoon chili powder
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1 teaspoon oregano flakes
• 1 teaspoon ground allspice
• Brown sugar to taste (optional)
• Pinch of salt and pepper

notes: in the original recipe, it uses 1 teaspoon of ground cumin but in my recipe I skip the cumin.


How to make:

• Heat a small frying pan over medium heat and dry-fry the allspice, chili and paprika for 1 minute or until fragrant. Remove from pan.
• Heat the oil in large skillet over medium heat and cook the onion for 2-3 minutes or until soft.
• Add the garlic, fresh jalapeno and cook for 1 minute.
• Add the ground/ minced beef and cook over high heat for 4-5 minutes or until browned, breaking up the lumps with a fork.
• Add the tomatoes, red kidney beans, stock, oregano, sugar and spices.
• Reduce the heat and simmer, stirring occasionally for around 1 hour or until reduced and thickened
• Season with salt and pepper
• Remove from heat Serve warm in a serving bowl

• Or add the Chili on top of fried potato wedges

How do you take your chili? With beans? Without? With meat? Without? Please Share your favorites in the comments.

The Touch of Mother’s Love

All of us must have different experiences with Mother’s love. I know I have. They run like threads through my childhood. And it was my Mom’s love that made me took the first step of my cooking journey hence this blog as it was her who taught me to enjoy home meals.


Looking back to that childhood moment, feeling of warm and joy rise even now to meet me. I always felt safe and loved whenever I enjoyed my Mom’s cooking.

During my childhood, our country had for some years been struggling through economic difficulties. My father had meager salary and grocery money was scarce. We were fortunate that my Mom was excellent in managing the little money we had so that none of us, her children, felt the difficult situation. She was also a great cook. She knew how to prepare very simple dish in a way that made it seem like rare delicacy

One of the dishes my Mom often cooked for us during that difficult time was Vegetable Scramble Eggs or locally is called ‘Orak Arik’ which means scrambled. Orak Arik is a popular Javanese cooking. It was a very simple dish, the main ingredients were just vegetables and eggs. But it was the touch of my Mom’s love which made this simple dish into something special for us.

Here is the original of my Mom’s recipe of Orak Arik

Ingredients:

• 1/4 of medium size white cabbage, shredded
• 100 gram carrots, grated coarsely
• 2 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
• 4 shallots, finely sliced
• 2 eggs
• 1 chicken cube, crushed into powder form
• Pinch of salt and pepper
• Vegetable oil

How to make:

• Heat the oil in wok on medium heat
• Stir fry the onion and garlic until fragrant
• Add in the white cabbage and carrots
• Continue to stir fry until the vegetables are tender-crisp

 

• Make a well in the center of the vegetables and drizzle in a teaspoon of oil before cracking the eggs into it

• Stir to scramble the eggs and combine with the vegetables

 

• Add the crushed chicken powder, stir and mix well
• Add salt and pepper, continue stirring for a few minutes
• Remove from heat
• Serve warm

When I cook this dish, I like to add  chopped bird’s eye chilies in the vegetable mix to give a kick .


Meet the Meatballs

For quite sometimes, the noodle lover in my family has been nagging me to cook her spaghetti with meatballs. So far I have cooked different spaghetti dishes such as spaghetti Bolognese, spaghetti with tuna and chili, spaghetti with mushroom and tomato, spaghetti olio e aglio plus bacon an chili, spaghetti Carbonara and even classic lasagna but never have I tried spaghetti with meatballs.


Last night when I turned on my TV and watched one of my favorite channels the TLC (Travel Living Channel), it was showing the famous Take Home Chef program. It was already almost the end of the show and I only watched the part where Curtis Stone showed how to cook the pasta until ‘al dente’. Then he put butter on a pan, melt it on medium heat, and then add the pasta (spaghetti) into the melted butter and toss them with fork. He then showed how to serve the pasta by rolling the spaghetti with a fork and put them on a plate and add the sauce. It just so happened that Curtis was cooking spaghetti with meatballs

After watching the Take Home Chef program that night I decided to cook spaghetti with meatballs the next day. Since I missed the part where Curtis cooked the meatballs I had no idea how to cook them so I browsed through my cooking book collections and found a recipe called ‘Fusilli con Polpettine’ or Fusilli with meatballs in one of the Periplus Mini Cookbooks . At least I could try this recipe.


As always, before I try out a new recipe, I like to do a little desk research and this time I did my research on ‘Polpette’

Why Polpette?

Polpette is the Italian name for meatballs. They are in many ways a holdover from an earlier time, when refrigeration was not as dependable as it is today and trimmings and leftover meats had to be dealt with quickly or they would spoil. Polpette, are true home cooking of the sort you are unlikely to encounter in any but the most mom-and-pop type trattorias that cater to a local clientele. Nor are you likely to be served them if you are invited to someone’s house, unless you are considered family.

A pity, in some ways, because meatballs are easy to make, flavorful, and delightfully moist and tender too. One thing that may come to a surprise to people living outside the Peninsula is that in Italy they’re generally served as a second course, with a salad or vegetable; spinach and beet greens are especially popular in Tuscany.


One general note on technique: Italians often use bread — not bread crumbs — in meatballs: Take day-old Italian bread, trim away the crust, soak the bread for several minutes in milk, and squeeze most of it out. You don’t want it dribbling-soaked, just well moist. Mix the soaked bread into the ground meat.

And here is my version of Spaghetti with Meatballs or Spaghetti con Polpettine


Ingredients:

• 250 gram spaghetti
• 250 gram minced beef
• 50 gram bread crumbs
• 20 gram freshly grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 clove garlic, chopped
• Rind and juice of half lemon
• Salt and pepper
• 2 tablespoons seasoned flour
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO)
• 20 gram butter

Ingredients for the sauce:

• 100 gram tomato paste or puree
• 125 ml beef stock
• 125 ml red wine
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 1 teaspoon oregano powder
• Salt and pepper

How to make:

• Peel the onion and chop very finely
• Using your fingers combine the minced beef, bread crumbs, Parmesan cheese, chopped onion, egg, lemon rind and juice, salt and pepper in a large bowl.
• Roll tablespoonful of the mixture into balls then roll the balls in the seasoned flour
  
  

• Heat the oil in a large pan and the fry the meatballs in batches until golden
• Remove from pan, drain on paper towels and set aside.

• Drain excess oil and juices from pan

To make the sauce:

• Combine tomato paste / puree, beef stock, wine, oregano, garlic, salt and pepper in pan and bring to the boil.
• Reduce the heat and return the meatballs to the pan
• Simmer for 15-20 minutes

• Meanwhile, add the spaghetti to a large pan of rapidly boiling water and cook until ‘al dente’ then drain.
• Put the butter on another pan and melt it on medium heat
• Add the spaghetti on the melted butter and toss it with a fork
• Roll the spaghetti using the fork and place them on the serving plate
• Add the sauce with the meatballs around the spaghetti

When I serve this spaghetti with meatballs to the noodle lover, she was very happy.