You’ve heard of Spam fried rice before…but olive fried rice? Well, not really olives but buah dabai – the indigenous “Sibu Olive”. Dabai is grown exclusively on the island of Borneo, in the Rajang River basin of central Sarawak, from the interior areas of Kapit all the way out to Sibu and Sarikei on the coast. It’s one of the unique foods of Sarawak.
Continue reading Nasi Goreng Dabai – Fried Rice with "Sibu Olive"
Today, my kids devoured their dinner.
Lately, I’ve been sticking to rice and dishes (veggie stir-fries, braised meats, soups, steamed fish, and the like) for dinner. I guess it’s been a while since I made a more Western-type meal (not counting pasta which I make often enough). Last night, however, I took a couple of pork tenderloin out of the freezer for tonight’s dinner.
I needed a recipe that I could whip up without any fuss.
I looked around for some recipes and saw one on Epicurious for this Ginger-Marinated Pork Tenderloin. The picture on the recipe showed it served with some mashed sweet potatoes. That got my attention as I had a couple of sweet potatoes lying around at home waiting to be used. And when I perused the recipe, I saw that I had all the ingredients available at home as well. Bingo! That was going to be dinner.
We aren’t always about eating meat.
Really, truly! I know that it must seem that way with the many recipes that I post that are always about meat—we have lots of chicken recipes, pork recipes, beef recipes, and not as many vegetable recipes.
The reason for this is simple. Stir fried vegetables seem boring and easy. Surely, most people know how to stir fry some vegetables and don’t need recipes for it?
Right?
Turns out that sometimes, what I take for granted isn’t as instinctive for others. For me, salad isn’t that instinctive. I like eating salads but I don’t think of it as a vegetable dish to make with my meals. For many of you, salad is probably something you find a no-brainer. Well, that’s how it is for me with vegetable stirfries.
Anyway, I decided to let you know readers that we do eat loads of veggies. As a matter of fact, every meal that I make is accompanied by a vegetable side, sometimes two. And they are mostly stirfries. Why? Because it’s fast and easy.
Here are my basic rules for stir-frying:
No, “bubur cha cha” isn’t a type of dance. It’s a sweet, coconut-based soup that we enjoy quite often here in Malaysia. But the recipe is a bit different from our Honeydew Sago Dessert recipe, our Indonesian Es Teler recipe, or the cendol that we enjoyed back in Penang. Bubur cha cha is a Nyonya dish made with different types of sweet potatoes and yam (or Chinese taro). To the sweet potatoes, you add a little pearl tapioca for a textural counterpoint.
In Hawaii, you could find something similar in Vietnamese restaurants except that their versions were more pudding-like with more tapioca pearls than sweet potatoes. And I believe in the Philippines, they add bananas to their version.