Annie wanted to make some rendang chicken and I said, you can’t have just rendang chicken without the coconut rice and dhal! So instead of a single, easy dish, I coerced her into preparing this Malaysian feast.
Start a pot of lentils (1/2 cup) going. Season with 1 tsp turmeric powder, a pinch of salt, 1 tsp ginger, garlic and shallot paste. Toss some mustard seed, fennel seed, cumin seed, a stick of cinnamon and 2 chile peppers in oil and fry until fragrant. Add in half a red onion, sliced and a tbsp of curry powder.
One of the great things about living in the San Francisco Bay Area is the close proximity to fresh seafood. Especially fresh Dungeness crab. We don’t eat much crab but at the peak of the season when prices dip and live crab can be found for a really good price, we have to splurge.
After we buy them from the Asian grocery, we put them in the freezer to chill. It makes ’em “sleepy” so they’re not so feisty before being rinsed and tossed into the steamer. I learned this trick from Alton Brown’s show on lobsters, I think.
Trying to maneuver a live crab that is fully aware it is about to be cooked is an exciting operation. Once I tried killing one by poking a chopstick between its eyes. Didn’t work. It grabbed the chopstick in both pincers and tried to pull it back out.
So now I freeze them for a few hours before they go into the pot. 18 minutes later, it’s time to remove, rinse, and feast.
Every now and then, we have a Saturday morning when we can take our time getting out of bed. I usually find myself making an omelet, using what I can scrounge up out of the fridge.
This one contained bell pepper, red onion, mushrooms, and grated mozzarella. It was only a two-egg omelet, and I took a little too much time getting it out of the pan. The browning was unintended. But it’s all good, especially with some habanero hot sauce!
Annie wanted to do a salad one night and we were looking around for ingredients. We had some smoked salmon sitting in our pantry for a while, so we thought, why not?
Romaine lettuce, orange bell pepper, red onion (sliced thinly), hard boiled egg, and capers. The salmon wasn’t the thinly sliced kind; rather, it was a whole fillet that we crumbled into chunks. The dressing was simply Annie’s Naturals brand Cilantro-lime dressing. Very easy to prepare, and lots of flavor!
Kinda nice to have these things sitting the pantry just waiting to be used. Wonder what else is in there?
