 |
| My tutor May Tan (Source: Janine Emmott 2012) |
I’m proud to say that I survived my first Malay cooking experience as did all my guests and my fingers. My tutor arrived ready to guide me with my first session, on the menu was pork dumplings, steamed vegetables and fried rice. She explained that Malay cooking was quite often a lot of preparation and then a frenzied cooking sequence and boy she was right. I was put to work chopping mixing and cooking. I noticed that whilst doing all the prep work the kitchen was the place to be in the house, it got turned into the main hangout area for everyone proving that cooking can be really sociable, when it came time to prepare the dumplings everyone wanted to help out. We then all got fed as we watched the rugby together and had far too many dumplings washed down by a refreshing larger.
First we started with prepping the dumplings.
If you want to make these dumplings that are really really good, here is what you need:
700g Minced pork
1 tsp cornflour
½ tsp oyster sauce
Pepper to season
Chinese spring onion
Onion
Coriander
1 tsp Sesame oil
1 tbsp Soya sauce
1 tbsp Fish sauce
Won tong pastries
 |
| My willing participant (Source: Janine Emmott 2012 |
 |
| Mixing the ingredients (Source: Janine Emmott 2012 |
I started by adding the mince to a large bowl next chopped the spring onion, onion and coriander finely after that added all the wet mixtures and the pepper. Then it’s a case of getting your hands dirty, that or you find a willing volunteer to mix it all together. At this point I thought that this was easy, then we started to wrap the wonton, in doing this you need to make sure it’s going to stick together you can use any method to, to help do this a trick is to wet your fingers to help push down the edges. Then you can either shallow fry them in oil, boil them in an soup of ginger, garlic, chicken stock and whatever you feel like adding, you could also steam them using the same soup mixture or you can spray them with oil and bake them till golden brown. Serve them with sweet chilli or anything thing you think will go well with them.
We also made a steam vegetable stir-fry using a wok and some rice wine, oyster
sauce and fish sauce. To do this get pan really hot, add liquids get hot again
then add veggies and find a lid to cover.
Tip is to keep all veggies same size to cook evenly.
The fried rice is pretty easy, cook rice the day before and put it in an ice
cream container, refrigerate. Next day add
soy sauce, fish sauce and oyster sauce to ice cream container with rice then
add that to hot wok, keep rice moving till heated through, once done add some
spring onion and serve.
