Kota Bharu Breakfast Revisited

Lately I've been longing for some of the food we ate on a trip through central and northern Malaysia a few years ago... Still haven't found anything in Sydney *sigh* like the Nasi Lemak Bungkus that we had at the night Markets up in Kota Bharu on the border of Malaysia and Thailand... The other thing I've been longing for is the delicious curry breakfasts we had in cafes sprinkled throughout the country towns we visited. The first picture shows a typical breakfast meal: rice, curries, a fried egg and condiments. The second picture is my breakfast this morning, a red lentil curry on red rice with salty mango pickle, at home in Sydney Australia, dreaming of Malaysia.

Curried Red-lentil Dahl with Red Rice, Egg and Mango Pickle
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
oil
1 tablespoon mild curry powder
1 teaspoon tamarind concentrate
1 teaspoon palm sugar
1.5 cups red lentils
water

red rice, cooked
fried egg
mango pickle

Slice and fry the onion in a little oil until golden. Add chopped garlic and fry lightly. Add curry powder and fry until fragrant. Add lentils, water, palm sugar and tamarind paste and simmer until lentils are tender, approx 15-20 mins.

serve with boiled red rice, a fried egg and a spoonful of mango pickle.

Mmmmmm - Yum-oh!

Naggy's Fork

As you know from my previous posts, I've been exploring of the art of cutlery - and here's the latest results of fiddling with my fork...

Beth’s Four-Flours Gluten-Free Bread

Last Sunday morning, Beth cooked up a fabulous breakfast to celebrate Audrey handing in the final copy of her thesis - remember Audrey? She has been writing about the Sarawak cloth-weavers and she made us that delicious Laksa and the Mohinga Fish Soup.

The piece-de-resistance of Sunday’s breakfast was, in my opinion, the Four-Flours Bread that Beth made from scratch, with her own special combination of gluten-free flours. It was absolutely yum-oh: it toasted well and harmonised perfectly with poached eggs, fried mushrooms and spinach & fennel.

















Here’s Beth’s Secret Recipe:
Four-Flour Bread Ingredients for a 1 kg loaf.

Wet ingredients:
water 400 ml
olive oil 3 tbs
sea-salt 2 tsp
maple syrup or carob molasses 2 tbs
soy milk 2 tbs

Dry ingredients:

Mix these four following flours together:
- Besan (chickpea) flour 1 cup
- Buckwheat flour 1 cup
- Brown rice flour 1 cup
- Potato starch 1 cup

With:
- 2 tbs xanthan gum
- 2 tsp batatis rhizome powder (Shan Yao - Wild Mountain Yam)
- 2 tsp Tandaco yeast

Seeds/Grains to be added later:
- 2 tbs linseeds
- 2 tbs kibbled oats


Directions for Bread-maker:
Beth uses a Breville Baker's Oven: Electronic Bread Maker (model BB280) that she bought from the Breville Factory Outlet in Ultimo, near the Sydney Fish Markets. She says it was a cheap one that she bought just to see if she was really 'into' bread-making. And now that she knows she really IS into bread-making (!) she says she will probably upgrade sometime to a model with a retractable blade, as the BB280 blade leaves a hole in the bottom of the loaf.

Add ingredients in the given order above, wet ingredients followed by dry, making sure that the yeast is the last one in. Set to Basic Bake (2 hours), with preferred crust setting.

The machine will take off and start mixing all the ingredients, letting them 'rest' for the appropriate times for the yeast to rise etc. You can watch if you want through a little window in the top - great for entertaining the kids on a rainy day (or is that only pre-Nintendo kids?) - when the blade starts kneading, the dough comes together in a ball and it is like watching a fat hamster scurrying around the barrel.

After the second rising (about 20 minutes) the bread maker will beep and you add the grains, mixing them into the dough for a more even spread. Fancier model bread-makers have an auto function for adding seeds at this stage - you put them in a little chamber and they are released at the appropriate time.

Then it's a matter of putting your feet up and waiting for the house to be filled with that oh-so-delightful smell of fresh baking bread.

In a later post, we will investigate the traditional 'made by hand' bread method. My friend Stevie in Newcastle is a dab hand at bread, having made fresh, crusty loaves for his family of six for years. He knows his way around both the hand-kneading processes, as well as several bread-making-machines. Look out Steve - the bloggstudio is coming!!

Beth was saying yesterday that she is keen to try making a gluten-free Pizza base that the Breville instruction book says can be made in the bread-maker.

Mmmmmm - Yum-oh!

Mohinga – Burmese Fish & Noodle Soup.

I was Googling 'breakfast' the other day, to do a little compare-and-contrast of what the rest of the world is tucking into as the sun rises. And the strange proclivity that many modern westerners have for either cold cereal or a greasy fry-up is, it seems, mostly a marketing invention of one Harvey Kellogg, who at the turn of the last century wanted to find a way to sell corn and sugar in a more appealing way; and a hang-over from the English farmers' breakfast where a solid meat meal would keep a man hard to the plough all morning.

My own personal taste in breakfasts leans much more towards the East in general, and Asian soups, congees and dumplings in particular. It is nice to know I am not alone in this desire - 80% of the worlds population dream of this kind of thing for breakfast. So you can imagine my delight when I discovered Mohinga - Myanmar's classic breakfast meal - which could be considered the national dish of Burma. Frequently served up by mobile street-hawkers as the early rays of sun break into the day, the soup-base is cooked the previous night and is served piping hot, poured over noodles and topped with garnishing ingredients that are all carried in two baskets hanging from a bamboo pole balanced across the Mohingar’s shoulders.

Since this food photography project first began, I have been rounding up my friends to act as Food Stylists - and when I mentioned this Mohinga concept to Audrey and Howard, they were keen on collaboration. As it happens, this was one of our first shoots, but it's taken me until now to get around to posting it. As you can see, I didn't know much about my new camera then, so the depth of field is a bit 'atmospheric', but I think you can get the idea - the finished dish was delish!























A little note of editorial authenticity:
I ran into Enid, a Burmese woman I met through my friend Beck and told her we had been cooking Mohinga. She agreed the recipe was authentic (no coconut milk, please, we're Burmese!) but she corrected our use of bean-sprouts that you will see in the photo, because these aren't traditionally used in garnishing Mohinga. I guess we had been borrowing that Idea from Laksa...


Mohinga Ingredients:

1 cup yellow-split-peas
2 cups water - boil 12 minutes

500 grams dewfish (or other white fish)
cut into bite-size pieces & tossed with:
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon turmeric powder

½ cup long grained rice, dry fried for 5 min in a heavy based pan, stirring continuously until a golden colour and nutty aroma arise. Grind to a powder in a mortar and pestle.

¼ cup peanut oil or rice-bran oil
1 stalk of lemongrass, with the bulb
2 large onions, grated
6 cloves garlic, chopped
2-inch piece of ginger, peeled & grated
1 small lotus root, peeled and sliced
1 tablespoon paprika
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
¼ cup fish sauce (nam pla / ngoc mam)
4 cups water

1 packet of dried rice noodles
Boiling salted water to cook noodles - 5 min

Garnishes:
3 hard boiled eggs, quartered
a bunch of coriander leaves
1 cup sliced bamboo shoots
3 shallots/spring onions, sliced finely diagonally
2 limes, quartered
1 teaspoon cayenne powder

Cha Ca - Fried Fish:
1 fillet of Ling, cut into bite sized pieces.
1 teaspoon turmeric
¼ teaspoon salt
oil for shallow-frying


Method:
Heat the oil in a large pot and add the onions and fry over low heat until they turn golden, about 5 minutes. Pound the lemongrass stalk lightly to release flavours. Add the marinated fish, garlic, lemongrass, ginger, lotus root, paprika, black pepper and fish sauce to the onions and cook, uncovered, over medium heat for five minutes.

Add the boiled split-peas, the extra water and rice powder and stir well. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, cover and simmer for 12 minutes.

Prepare the garnishes, setting them out on platters for diners to choose from. Boil the rice noodles for 5 minutes and drain. In a separate frying pan, fry the Cha-Ca turmeric-fish pieces until crisp and golden outside and tender and juicy inside.

To Serve:
Place the fish soup stock in a serving pot in the centre of the table, along with the platters of garnishes, Cha-Ca fried fish and the cooked rice noodles. Diners should fill their soup bowls first with noodles, then with the fish curry and whatever garnishes they wish to add before tucking in.

Yum-oh!

Rising Sun Miso Soup

Something Vital to Greet the Day.

The morning sun streaming in through the kitchen window was so glorious, I just HAD to photograph something... And it had to be something quick, as la luz del sol (the light of the sun) wasn't waiting around.

A quick look in the cupboard produced a bag of dried seaweed that I'd gotten at Alfalfa House, the Wholefoods Co-Op in Enmore.
A rustle through the fridge found a block of Earth Star Organic Tofu and a jar of Shiro Miso. Perfect: Japan - The Land Of The Rising Sun - is synonymous with Miso soup and this accompaniment forms an essential part of almost every Japanese meal, almost as ubiquitous as green tea. The picture of solar goodness would be completed with the pot of sunny yellow chrysanthemums I'd bought yesterday, when out shopping with Kaitlyn, from the Vietnamese grocer in Marrickville.





















Miso Soup Ingredients:
(Serves 1 - multiply accordingly)

1 tablespoon of miso paste
1 teaspoon powdered Dashi (Bonito flakes)
1 soup-bowl of boiling water
2 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked & sliced
a few pieces of dried seaweed, soaked
silken tofu, sliced in 'Rising Sun' circles
green shallots, finely sliced
a splash of tamari, to taste

Method:

Mix Miso & Dashi with a little water to make a smooth, runny paste in the bottom of each serving bowl. Assemble other ingredients in the bowl and top with boiling water.

Serve immediately, with Temaki-Nori Hand-roll.
(Recipe to follow in a future Blog...)


A Note about Miso:

Miso pastes are made from grains & pulses that have been fermented with a live pro-biotic culture that assists digestion. To preserve the health benefits of the live culture, miso paste should never be boiled.

Miso pastes range from the palest blond Shiro-Miso made from white rice, to the red Aka-Miso made from barley, through to a dark & chunky black-soybean Hatcho-Miso.

Eggs For Breakfast

And a Visit to the PhotoShop Beauty Parlour...

It’s the terrible irony of the food photographer in-the-making: I woke up all excited about exploring my new camera and lenses, but was so hungry I didn’t feel like I could wait hours fiddling around with ingredients. That’s what a food-stylist is for, hey. But the fresh organic eggs I had picked up from the market, along with the Organic Rye loaf from the local IGA agreed to collaborate: I could have my cake (or eggs-on-toast-for-breakfast in this case) and eat it too. Or so it seemed…

You will understand my disappointment then, when my eggs didn’t exactly turn out looking like Marie Claire… They did in fact look pretty awful, full of bubbles and pock-marks and a bit green around the gills from where I had improperly set the white-balance in my camera. Not something you'd want to take home to meet your mother.

I surmised that this happened because:

a) I’m not a regular maker or consumer of fried eggs on toast,
(I like Omelets better, or Fried Rice With Egg)
and
b) because I didn’t manage the temperature of the frying pan very well – still getting to know the stove in the new studio kitchen.

Suffice it to say, they looked like they didn’t egg-xactly get out of bed sunny-side up…

















I wept quietly into my cup of tea:
“I’ll never become a food photographer, what was I thinking??”

Nevertheless, it dawned slowly on me that perhaps the food one sees pictures of in magazines may arrive at the studio in a less-than perfectly groomed state. So I decided, after eating my poor benighted eggs – at least they tasted good: the free-range chickens had held up their end of the bargain – that a trip to the Photoshop Beauty Parlour might be just the trick for my two googies.

Ten minutes on the Cloning Tool, a bit of tweaking with the Colour-Balance and voila! Behold, gorgeous eggs, sunny-side up, smiling for the camera.