Kuala Lumpur Chicken and Prawn Curry Laksa

I found this description for a Laksa which sums it up quite well: “Spicy curry soup with a twist. Coconut based curry; tasty, rich, concentrated curry broth. Steaming hot, noodles with garnishes thrown in. Meat, typically chicken as a non-vegetable added kick.”

Although this was supposed to have a dominant prawn/shrimp taste, I couldn’t find shrimp paste or dried shrimps anywhere and in the end I left these out of the recipe. The recipe below is my adaptation of a recipe I found on the Masterchef Australia website.

Ingredients

Laksa spice paste
20g piece ginger, chopped
3 fat garlic cloves
2 stalks lemongrass, chopped (Be sure to chop these really, really fine)
75g shallots, roughly chopped (I used small pickle onions as a replacement)
20g cashew nuts
2 teaspoons fish curry spice
20g turmeric
4 fresh long red finger chillies
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon oil (I used sunflower oil but a neutral oil is preferred)

Coconut milk, garlic, chillies, tofu, fish sauce & salt

Ginger, cashew nuts, lemon grass, tumeric, spring onion
& egg noodle

Laksa paste
Soup
3 tablespoons oil, for frying
Laksa spice paste
Prawn stock (The heads & shells of the peeled prawns are used for the prawn stock)
400ml coconut milk
1 tablespoon sugar (Couldn't find palm sugar so I used normal sugar as a substitute. The palm sugar turns into a caramel making the sauce/soup more sticky)
160g chicken breast, cut into 1cm slices
250g raw peeled prawns
200g firm tofu, cut to 1cm thick slices (A type of cheese. No real taste of its own but takes on the flavour of the sauce)
2 tablespoons fish sauce (Used in many asian dishes – similar to soya sauce, very salty)
400g fresh egg noodles, loosened

To serve
100g cooked green beans, chopped
3 spring onions, trimmed and thinly sliced on the diagonal, to serve
A handful of mixed mint and coriander leaves, to serve
Lime wedges, to serve

Method 
1. Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a wok or frying pan, add prawn heads and shells and stir-fry for a couple of minutes until they are crisp and golden.

2. Add 1 litre of water, bring to the boil, reduce heat and leave to simmer for 30 minutes. Strain liquid into a large jug and discard heads and shells.

3. Cut tofu into 1cm thick pieces and fry in hot oil until crisp, drain well on a paper towel-lined plate.
Fried Tofu
4. For laksa spice paste, place chillies into a mortar and pestle and pound into a paste. Add the remaining ingredients and pound to a smooth paste.

A messy kitchen
5. For soup, heat oil in a large frying pan or wok over a high heat, add all the spice paste and fry gently for 2-3 minutes, stirring continuously until mixture starts to smell fragrant and split. Add prawn stock, coconut milk and palm sugar and begin to reduce. Add chicken and prawns and simmer for 2-3 minutes. Pour in 1-2 tablespoons of fish sauce and stir to combine.
Laksa paste & chicken cubes
Frying the Laksa paste
Adding all the other ingredients
6. Drop in the fresh egg noodles and leave to heat through for a few minutes. Taste Laksa and season with more sugar and fish sauce if desired.

Egg Noodles

7. To serve, arrange bean sprouts, cooked green beans, fried tofu and noodles in the bottom of a serving dish. Ladle over curry soup. Garnish with spring onions, mint, coriander and a squeeze of lime juice.



Coriander, Mint and spring onion

The result...
Where to find it:
Tofu - Food Lover’s Market / Fresh Earth Food Store
Lemon Grass - Food Lover’s Market / Fresh Earth Food Store
Fish curry spice - Food Lover’s Market / Fresh Earth Food Store 
Dried Shrimp - Apparently there is a shop in Honeydew that sells this. Will need to go & find it...
Coconut milk - Food Lover’s Market / Fresh Earth Food Store / PnP
Egg Noodles - Food Lover’s Market

Time for a new challenge

In the beginning of this year I attended a part-time cooking course at a chef school. In the months to follow I’ve applied a lot of the knowledge/techniques/tricks that I picked up during the course. But recently I started to feel that it’s time to move on…so now that I have the basics covered, it’s time for the next stage in my food journey!

This time there is no formal cooking course. I’ve decided on a few topics that I want to explore and I’m going to tackle them one by one doing my own research, sourcing the ingredients myself and cooking it without the assistance of a professional chef… I’m planning to use any source of reliable info I can find (food blogs / recipe books / restaurants / food shows / boutique food supply stores and of course google)

The first area/cooking style/ food type that I am diving into is curries. Now Kerrie-en-rys at a church bazaar is not exactly what I have in mind. I want to spice things up a bit more! (I couldn’t resist a spicy pun…). I am not just looking for a good recipe which I can reproduce in future so I skipped any recipe that use a pre-mixed, off-the-shelf curry mix . I actually want to learn about the different spices and the taste that each of them contribute to the end product.

I am planning to cover a variety of curries from Thai green curries to Malaysian to Indian and even a Sri-Lankan curry.
I will try to explain as much as I possibly can about the lesser known ingredients based on the limited knowledge/experience that I’ve gained so far. Finding some of these ingredients has proven to be quite a challenge so I will include the suppliers of these ingredients in each recipe.

I hope you try some of the recipes that follow yourself! You can be sure that I won’t post a recipe if it isn’t worth it!

PS. I thought I should include the following piece of (hopefully) useful advice. If you try to follow blogs / websites but you find it frustrating because you either forget the names of the blogs or you don’t have the time to visit each of the sites you would like to follow everyday to see if there is something new or when you do have the time you see that there are a lot of new posts that you’ve missed, a simple solution might be to get a Google Reader account. If you already have a gmail account you don’t even need to create any new accounts, you simply need to tailor your Reader to follow the sites you like. Go to Google and click on the ‘More’ option on the toolbar at the top. You’ll see the Reader option there. From there simply follow the steps. You can also link your Google Reader account to various apps for phones or tablets which I find even more convenient.

Cheers

Apple crumble – the quick & dirty way.

This is the type of dessert that you can serve when you actually forgot about dessert and only thought about it for the first time half way through main course.

We found this recipe in a P'nP Taste magazine.

Ingredients:
SERVES 4
4              Granny Smith apples
80ml      brown sugar
1 tsp      cinnamon
100g       Tennis biscuits (crumbed)
80ml      melted butter
as  much Ultramel as you like


Remove the cores of the apples. Make enough space to stuff it with biscuits later.
Slice each apple into 1/2 cm to 1cm slices. (Or slice them first and then remove the cores)
Mix cinnamon and sugar and sprinkle over the apple slices (be generous!)
Rebuild the apples.
Mix the melted butter into the biscuit crumbs.
Stuff the insides of the apples with this mixture and top each apple with a pile of crumbs.
Bake for 20 minutes at 180°C – apples must be soft and crumble should’ve turned golden.
Serve with custard.