Letters from the Equator

My mom only ever thought me one real lesson on cooking - you can cook anything as long as you know how to improvise. By that she meant the art of knowing what, how and when an ingredient goes into place.

Tonight, I decided on yet another random creation for dinner. My wife isn’t fussy, at the least. That gives me a lot of room to experiment, at least in the kitchen.

We ran out of leafy vegetables. I decided I wasn’t going to wait for my wife to buy some back, and decided to have chinese mushrooms as a centerpiece for a dish. But with what? I decided to make some egg and flour batter for the shrooms and toss them into a pot of oil. I wasn’t exactly sure how they were going to turn out.

The batter didn’t quite cover the mushrooms as well as I thought. Adding more flour didn’t help much either. I think I needed some bread crumbs or something, as solids to mask the outside layer of the shrooms. But I was lazy. Improvisation benefits from knowing how to prepare your disposable ingredients.

I like the chewy part of chinese mushrooms, which was why I decided to put them into a batter. But I think the taste somehow doesn’t fit into the whole deep-fried thing. Unless I add in something sweet like honey. I must try that one day. I have a can of button mushrooms I bought weeks ago… maybe that might work better.

The only thing I had really planned to make was a pot of herbal soup, with some pre-packed chinese herbs I got during grocery shopping. I had bought some chicken bones for that purpose. And next time I’m definitely going to be buy chicken feet, because they’re so cheap (60 sen for a pack) and taste great with soups.

Then there was a piece of de-boned chicken breast marinating in pepper and soy sauce. I hadn’t quite figured out what to do with that.

I almost wanted to cook butter chicken, but I found out at the last minute we had run out of butter. There was some leftover egg batter left, and I tossed in some garlic into oil and marinated the chicken again with the batter and some honey.

I tossed the whole thing into the frying pan, the sight of garlic almost too welcoming - and my afterthoughts about the batter came to light as the garlic bits sort of balled up together in the mix of egg batter from the marinade… almost chewable things, they became.

But the honey did the trick - the chicken came out great, partly because it had been sitting in a pool of soy sauce and pepper for so long. It tasted good and was chewy and flavourful from the mix of garlic and honey. Compliments from the wife, of course.

The soup ended up a bit too herbally… three spoonfuls of sugar didn’t help that much. And I realize now to drain the top of any meat-based soups from animal fat. But it was still edible by far. I think pork would have been a better meat to go with the herbs. Either that or more sugar.

Any suggestions?

Categorized as discoveries/food, thoughts/malaysia