thepassionatecook

Sesame prawns with sour mango & cucumber salad

So I might struggle to find some ingredients here, but prawns are something Singapore definitely has no shortage of and the quality is absolutely amazing! There are many seafood restaurants in town and for someone coming from a country/continent where seafood is rarely available fresh (meaning that it hasn't been frozen or transported on ice somewhere along the supply chain), this country certainly is prawn heaven. No matter where you go, you can be sure to be served the plumpest and juiciest prawns - fingerlickingly good.

Our first experience of eating prawns here was on Boat Quay - now, to even the most seasoned, but still undiscerning tourist, this might look like the tourist trap par excellence... in the middle of the Financial District and close to all the sights, a row of restaurants lined up along the river, right where the cruises depart. If it wasn't for two little boys (and the two adults lugging them around and cheering them on "come on, it's only 35C in the shade!") who happened to be utterly exhausted after what really was just a short walk, it wouldn't even have crossed our minds to enter one of the eateries there on the river. Where we come from, big, fat panels of glossy photos of, well, food (but not the kind of foodporn you find on blogs these days, just poorly photographed dishes of unidentifiable food objects) don't really scream "die, die, must try" or even "decent food at reasonable prices" at you... they holler "get out of here as fast as you can, this is a complete rip-off and you'll probably be hugging the toilet for days".

Not so here. After passing by the 15th restaurant and its seafront garden and fending off many a smooth-talking waiter, I let myself finally be lured into one of them (it was the "fish and chips available" that did it, you might remember that the day before, my son had said that he hated Chinese food and that was that) - and Chris and I had the most wonderful selection of top-quality prawns we had had in a very long time. The sheer variety on offer will bowl you over, but I will have to delve into the weird (cereal prawns, anyone?) and wonderful (drunken prawns, yessir!) ways of enjoying your crustaceans on another occasion.

Now that I call a (fantabulous!) kitchen my own and have a great wet market just around the corner, I obviously want to get my hand dirty and cook again... Vietnamese being one of my favourite cuisines on this continent, I finally embarked on getting my money's worth out of Lemongrass and Lime, a cookbook I bought ages ago - I had simply been struggling to find the ingredients. And what in London would have involved a car journey to the Asian supermarket and my tried and trusted fish monger, both in different parts of town, is now available right on my doorstep... you can see why I am loving it here, right?

These prawns are deep-fried just for a minute in order to retain all their succulent juices, the crispy coating of a light batter providing a lovely contrast of textures. I love the salad they come with it, its flavours being like a summation of what Vietnamese cooking is about: fresh, crunchy ingredients bursting with flavour - sweet, sour, salty all happening in one bite in perfect unison. It actually uses the same sauce you will serve for dipping, the ubiquitous Nuoc Cham. I have made a mental note to include coriander and mint leaves when I make it again, just because I am addicted to these herbs and they feature widely in Vietnamese cooking, so I think the food police has nothing on me.

Way better than cereal prawns, but that's just my personal opinion!!!

Crabmeat fried rice

If you've ever wondered what to do with left-over rice, you've come to the right place. For some reason, despite years and years of cooking experience, including numerous catering gigs where keeping an eye on quantities in order not to overdeliver (profit!) or underdeliver (honesty!), I am still not perfect at judging how much rice or potatoes etc to cook for any given meal. And maybe I shouldn't beat myself up over it, since appetites vary just as much as my ability to make a good judgement!

I find it even harder when I cook Asian food... the challenge being that you have so many different dishes going round at the same time that you just cannot gauge whether your guest will happily polish off your food without a single grain of rice or gobble up the white stuff as if their life depended on it... So I sometimes end up with a whole lot of leftover rice and since it's hard to re-heat (steeping it in boiling water for a minute might do the job, but the result is watery and tasteless and I don't like using a microwave because it reduces every food's nutritional value to zero), a stirfry is a popular option.

This week, on an impromptu shopping spree in Holland Village, I picked up a new cookbook... no expensive affair either, just an Australian Women's Weekly, a cheap and cheerful collection of recipes for stir-fries. Do I really need this? Probably not, but it's what happens when you go shopping on an empty stomach. Everything looks irresistable, you could probably sell me stir-fried shoelaces on a grumbling tummy, especially when there's a nice picture to go with. I didn't expect much, really, but as I browsed the recipes that same afternoon (tummy happily filled with a summery salad and some toasted sourdough), I was still salivating over the photographs and lists of ingredients. There was a recipe in there for a stir-fried rice omelette, I decided to skip the omelette bit - seemed a bit much of a muchness - and just made the stir-fry. This time, I didn't actually have any leftover rice, but I had an opened tin of crabmeat (I know, how strange is that? My very first time of buying crabmeat pasteurised and in a can, me, the fiercest fiend of canned food... with a few valuable exceptions) in the fridge from making a soup I will share with you very soon.

Instead of the omelette, I served this with steamed bok choy, drizzled with 1 tbsp dark soy sauce and 1 tbsp rice vinegar - a few pinches of crisp-fried shallots or garlic on top and Bob's your uncle! This is a quick Asian trick I have adopted since living in Singapore... most Hawker stalls here (a Hawker centre, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a collection of open air stalls serving inexpensive food... one of the best, though not healthiest, and definitely the cheapest way of experiencing the local food) will "upgrade" your dish to a "menu" that's a rather healthier option than at the golden arches - the famous chicken rice will become a chicken rice menu through the addition of a small plate of kailan or bok choy and a bowl of miso soup and make your dinner healthier, not even more calorie-laden. You could do the same with pretty much any vegetable that takes your fancy, but I usually use Asian greens, asparagus or broccoli with the same simple treatment: steam for a few minutes, then drizzle with soy sauce and rice vinegar and/or fish sauce, add fresh or crispy shallots or garlic if at hand. Voila: your dinner just got that much healthier.

So here you have it, a wonderfully simple and quick stir-fry - even if you make the rice from scratch you can whip this up in under thirty minutes... perfect and satisfying weekday dinner, I should think!

Pumpkin muffins with yoghurt and pumpkin brittle

Round two of "Using up everything your pumpkin has to offer" is for all of you out there with a sweet tooth. I am normally more of a savoury person, but I had a really hard time keeping my fingers away from that glorious pumpkin seed brittle! Crunchy, nutty and caramelly... what's not to like?

In the course of making these muffins, I began to seriously doubt whether publishing recipes for an international audience is a good idea... you see, I have lived in a lot of different countries and continents over the years and of course I have been aware of the fact that flour is not flour and some things are more universally available than others. In six years of food blogging and therefore cooking more consciously, I have also learnt that there are so many variables involved (different oven strengths, different equipment used - my Thermomix is much stronger than your average food processor, a cast-iron pan behaves completely different from a cheap non-stick, just to give you two examples), even the climate makes such a difference - massively affecting rising times or how to store what you've made... and while I make every attempt to boil things down to suit the most average of kitchens and most universal of environments, I am acutely aware that people following my recipes to the T will find their creations differ from what they see on my blog. And it's not because I use hairspray or a blow-torch to pimp up my food ;-)

In this particular instance, I learnt that although pumpkins may look pretty darn similar all around the world, the flesh you scoop out couldn't show more variations if it tried... in the UK, the meat I encountered was pretty moist and juicy, staining everything no end, this year's pumpkin was a stringy and very dry affair - I was pulling out strands and strands of flesh and hardly had to scoop or cut at all. So what, you may say... well, it sure was easier to hollow out the beast this time, but of course, a drier meat results in drier muffins, so the recipe needed adapting.

All of us have learnt over the years that every country has different kinds of cream available (half and half, so extensively used in the US, is unobtainable in Europe, there is not ONE kind of cream, even if sold under the same name, milk does not equal milk, the fat content will vary (and yes, that DOES make a difference when you're trying to do certain things like achieve a nice foam), curd cheese is not exactly like ricotta and if you go to Austria, where we use curd aka Topfen or Quark a lot, we have various different kinds, differing in fat content... but that even products of the same BRAND could show such vast variations was a new lesson I learnt here. I always thought when someone said philly, they meant the philly I could buy in each and every shop in the country, no matter whether I bought it at the service station or the gourmet supermarket. Here, you have a number of products of philly, a big fat block which is very hard and dry, a spreadable version (60% fat) which is still drier and harder than the regular philly you get at home and in most European countries... so you will understand that even I, as an experienced cook, do struggle with recipes I have made a hundred times now, just because the parameters are not the same anymore.

So if you've ever struggled with a recipe (mine or someone else's) and have cursed its author, cut them some slack - it might just be due to the fact that the products you use are different from theirs. Use every recipe with caution, question it, apply your common sense and we'll all live happily ever after. And don't write hate emails, please, I'll be upset for a while, then delete it and think no more of it, but you might end up with a stomach ulcer - not worth it, right?

Anyway, back to those muffins I am trying to sell here: I'd like to describe them as moist or crumbly as they case may be, but this will really depend on what kind of pumpkin you can get - my pumpkin was so dry I decided to pre-bake it with some maple syrup to release the juices. Taste-wise, I went easy on the sugar, but added maple syrup for a fuller flavour, I toasted the pumpkin seeds to make them taste even nuttier and the icing is a no-sugar affair, cream cheese and yoghurt to cut through the sweetness and add moisture. And the addictive pumpkin brittle, well, it's not compulsory, but it does add another component of contrasting textures... but if you haven't been as self-controlled as I have and you've nibbled it all up before the muffins had cooled down, its not the end of the world. Or you might decide to just make another batch...