Siomay Bandung

Siomay Bandung or Baso tahu, is one of my favorite dish. It is a dish made from (usually) fish meat, steamed with tofu, and served with steamed or boiled potato, hard boiled egg, and rolled steamed/boiled cabbage. The sauce is peanut based sauce with a tint of tamarind and green lime (jeruk purut).


Last week, I was craving for something Indonesian. I had only one portion of fried baso tahu during our last holiday. It is not easy to get it here, not like the Belgian fries that I can get just around the corner. My husband would also love to enjoy it on our dinner table. I was also curious on how my children would react to this taste.

To make this dish, it is not that difficult. But, just like any other Indonesian/Asian food, this food needs a lot of preparation and work. This time, I chose to use frozen fish fillet for practicality. The equipment that we need to make this dish, are food processor and a steamer. I am using a simple steamer, which is actually an attachment of my IKEA basic pot.

Please do not give any score on how I fold and shape my siomay, because I am not yet an expert in shaping food. Luckily, my husband and children did not care for the presentation. They just kept eating. *big smile*

See below on how to produce your own Siomay Bandung.

Ingredients of Siomay Bandung and Baso Tahu Bandung
300 gram white fish fillet
200 gram chicken fillet
5 cloves garlic
3 tsp salt (or according to your liking)
1/2 tsp sugar
pepper to taste
150-200 gram chayote or kohlrabi (I used this time around half of the kohlrabi)
100 gram tapioca/sagu flour
2 eggs (some recipe uses only the white, but I find that using whole eggs is also OK)
A little cold water, if needed
Tofu
Wonton skin (ready to use - from frozen section. Use the one for soup or steam)


Method (siomay bandung and baso tahu)
1. Grind the fish fillet, chicken fillet, garlic, and chayote or kohlrabi using food processor.
2. Add the tapioca or sagu flour and the eggs. Mix well. Add a bit of water if needed to make the mixing process easier. I do not add water since I used defrost fish fillet which still contain some water.
3. Add the salt, pepper and sugar. Mix until all is well-mixed.
4. Cut the tofu into either a few triangle pieces or cubes.
5. Make a cut on the surface of the tofu (do not cut through the tofu, but only to make a pocket like cut), to enable you to insert a spoon of the fish/chicken mixture, Let the upper side of the tofu covered by the paste/mixture. Put aside.
6. To make the siomay, take 1 piece of the wonton skin, put 1 spoon of the paste in the middle and fold the corners of the wonton skin into the middle/the fish paste. Put aside.
7. Boil water in a steamer.
8. When it starts to boil, put the baso tahu and siomay in the steamer and steam for around 15 minutes or until the paste is well cooked. Put aside and steam the rest of the baso tahu and siomay.


Preparing the extras
1. Peel some potato, and boil it until it is soft enough but not entirely broken when we test it with fork. Put aside.
2. Boil some eggs. Peel and put aside.
3. Boil a few pieces of cabbage, until it is soft enough to roll. Take it out from the pot, drain, and when it is cool enough to work with, roll the cabbage. Put aside.


Ingredients of the sauce (Note: this is NOT the original recipe but a practical recipe for me)
5-6 tbsp of peanut butter (use the creamy one, without the peanut pieces. This one is less sugar and creamier).
2 cloves garlic (pressed)
1 tsp tamarind paste (without seed)
1 tbsp palm sugar
1 tbsp sweet soya sauce (to taste)
1/2 cup water (or adjust to achieve consistency like steak sauce, for example)


Method for the sauce
1. Put all ingredients in a pot, boil everything.
2. Adjust the taste with one of the ingredients, if necessary. (every peanut butter brand has different taste and sweetness)
3. When it is ready, take out the not-dissolved tamarind paste.


How to serve
Serve the Baso Tahu, Siomay, boiled potato, boiled egg, rolled cabbage on a plate. Pour the sauce on top of the served ingredients, sprinkle with lime juice and prepare as extra, cut chili, if you like.

It turned out that my children love them, especially the siomay. The texture is interesting enough for them to enjoy and the fish taste of the siomay combined with the taste of peanut sauce with a hint of lime juice is at least acceptable for their preference.

For my husband and me? Hm, it is heavenly. It is one of the food that we love to eat.
If you have never tried it, you may want to challenge yourself to try this to see if you are up for a new food adventure.

Sayur Asam/Sour Vegetable Soup

Sayur asam or also known as Jangan Asem is a simple dish that I always enjoy at home and when we eat outside. It seems simple but I have had some difficulty to duplicate the exact taste, especially here, far away from our beloved tropical country. My mother usually serves that accompanied by local fried chicken or similar to that. It is heavenly and one of my comfort food to go for.

Last year, I cooked this a lot using instant spices in packaging. Of course it contains monosodium-glutamat, or something like that. I know I should limit the intake of that particular stuff, but, it was SO EASY using those instant things. Especially if you are a working mother, with two active toddlers who 2 minutes are best friends the next 5 minutes are the worst enemy of each other but still love each other (it is confusing, really ^_^), no family where you can go for help with anything less than 15 minutes driving distance (in our case, it is at least 16 hours door-to-door, flying not driving), and a lot of different deadlines.

Growing up in a tropical country, I have been spoiled by the relatively easy access to affordable food, variety of food, friendly service, a lot of smile and love and plenty of sunshine. We were surrounded by delicious and affordable food in uncountable varieties. The food comes in both simple and intense flavors. I still think that it is the effect of getting a lot of sunshine.

I love to introduce my children to those varieties of flavors, to remind them to their parents's root and how big is the world. And since it is not easy to get original taste and food here, I cook a lot. At least according to my previous standard, I cook more than before.

Sayur asam is actually one of relatively easy to cook dish. A few weeks ago, we visited our friends in Dusseldorf. She showed me how she cooked her delicious sayur asam from scratch. It was delicious!! She inspired me to cook this not using my instant spices. I was quite afraid that the taste will not be up to my expectation. I did that last week, and it was good. Since I do not have all ingredient in hand, I replaced some with local ingredients.

The children, and also my husband enjoyed the dish. I hope you too.
Just take out your food processor or simple blender, and you are ready to prepare the "bumbu" (Indonesian word for seasoning) for this dish.



Ingredients
1 big red onion (cut)
4-5 cloves garlic (cut)
1 red paprika (cut) - (if you eat spicy food, replace this with 3 or 4 chilli, removes the seed)
3 ltr water
2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
1 tbsp tamarind (without seed)
1 tsp baked/fried shrimp paste (terasi)
1 tsp galangal powder


Cut Vegetable:
Cabbage (cut)
Long beans (cut)
Chayote (peeled and cut) - we call this Labu Siam, and here I use Kohlrabi as substitute
Sweet corn (cut)
Courgette (cut)


Method:
1. Cut the onion, garlic and paprika using food processor.
2. Boil the onion, garlic and paprika mixture in 3 lt water
3. Add tamarind paste, shrimp paste, and galangal powder.
4. Once it is boiled, remove it from the stove and strain the soup to separate the onion and paprika. Do not remove the tamarind yet.
5. Add the vegetable and boil the soup again.
6. Add the salt and sugar to taste.


It is best to serve it with warm steamed rice and fried dish you like. We love to eat this accompanied by Yellow fried chicken (or baked in the oven), or fried fish.

I will definitely make this dish again from scratch. However, when I do not have extra time, I will still use my treasure instant spices. One of the products I love, is the instant spice from the local home industry from my parents hometown. I will discuss that in my next posting.

For now, please kindly enjoy the picture of my sayur asam.

Ham and Cheese Muffin

I did plan to make Indonesian Layer Cake (Lapis Legit) for the first time, but it was always busy in the weekend. The last two weeks, I have prepared some ingredients but always had to cancel it and used some of the ingredients to cook other things. Life far from my hometown, without my parents around and my other extended family around can be very hectic. Especially, we do not have nice small eatery or food vendors here.

Last weekend, was the time for Indonesian mass. In our town, we only have once a month, mass in Indonesian. The mass is usually ended with get together, coffee and tea and snack. If I have some time to squeeze in, I tried to bring something to eat. Last week, I made ham and cheese muffin, an easy to make recipe, especially for the children. Why?

There are usually a few nice aunties who almost always bring very nice food for everybody (Thanks Aunties!). They are good cook and amazing ladies, with very kind hearts. Their food is also always amazing. I wanted to share also with the children. Because, although the food is always amazing, children have different taste. :-) I know this because my children, sometimes complain when I cook things we, adult, love so much but not so much to the little children liking (i.e. too spicy, too strong flavour, etc.).

So, I tried to make simple muffin with ham and cheese filling. It is easy to make and children love both ham and cheese filling.

Ingredients
300 grams all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
3 eggs
1 tbsp sugar
2 tsp salt
300 ml milk
ham (cut into small cubes)
grated cheese

Method
1. Mix all the ingredients in a mixing bowl, except the ham and cheese. I use my hand mixer because it is easier and require less effort to mix. Mix until all is well mixed.
2. Prepare cupcake or muffin pan. Use either cupcake liner or grease the pan.
3. Fill each with dough until 1/4 of the space, fill in the ham and cheese, cover it again with the dough until it is around 2/3 of the space. I made around 18-19 muffins with this batch of dough.

4. Sprinkle the top of the muffin with grated cheese again.
5. Preheat the oven (I use convection oven) 180Celcius.
6. Bake the muffin for around 20 minutes (the exact time depends on your oven). Change to top grill for the last 3-4 minutes if necessary to get melting cheese effect.
7. Let it cool for a few minutes before serving.

My children love this muffin, especially for the salty taste of the ham and cheese. This can also be part of the children's school lunch box. Easy to bring and not messy.

Enjoy it!

Brioche Bread

My family loves this sweet bread. We usually buy it from a local supermarket near our house. The children love this bread. It is soft and sweet. Different than the normal bread used for sandwich lunch that the children usually bring to school.

A week ago, at request of husband, I tried a recipe I found in the internet. The recipe stated that the dough would be very soft and sticky because of the amount of the butter. However, this lead me to a very big mistake. I have already suspected something was not quite correct with the steps, since based on my previous experience with bread, I need to knead the bread until the gluten develops well.

My brioche bread tasted a bit floury, despites the 24 hours proofing time. It was very disappointing. The comment of my oldest child made me almost cry. "Mummy, this tastes bah". Oh dear.

That is why, 2 days after that, I found myself baked this bread again. This time, I adjust the steps and the amount of some ingredients according to my previous experiences with some bread recipes. 
The result is a very soft brioche bread, the softness feels like cotton in the mouth. BUT it is still not as sweet as our usual store-bought brioche. 

After I search the content of the ingredients of our store-bought brioche, I realized that their brioche contents at least twice as mush sugar as  mine. 

So, despite my second effort producing the cotton soft brioche, my oldest child still says, "Mummy this one is also not delicious".

Anyway, my youngest loves it, and my husband finished a big chunk of bread, eaten with a Cookie Notti spread, cappucino flavour. The bread also reminds me to my grandfather's fave, Roti Bluder. The texture is similar and also the taste. 

If your children love sweet, you may want to double the sugar in the recipe below. The time needed to make this is quite long, but it fits well with my schedule, since I bake only at night. Please feel free to comment, especially about the sugar content. I am curious on how much sugar is sweet enough, especially for the children sweet tooth.

Ingredients
500 grams white bread flour (high gluten flour)
7 grams instant yeast (my local brand yeast, suggests 7 grams for every 500 gr flour)
1 tsp salt
6 eggs (or 5 if you use bigger size eggs)
70 grams sugar
125 ml milk
250 grams butter (soft, room temperature)
1 egg, beaten for egg wash

Method
1. Place the flour in the bowl, sugar at one side of bowl, salt at one side of bowl and the instant yeast in the middle. Mix the dry ingredients well, you can immediately use the knead (hook) extension of your mixer.
2. After the dry ingredients well mixed, add the eggs and mix it well.
3. Add the milk and mix again the dough until the milk is good incorporated.
4. Cut the butter in cubes, and add them one by one into the bowl. Knead the dough until the gluten develops well. This is when the dough does not stick anymore to the side of the bowl. It is, however, a bit greasy compared to the dough of normal sandwich loaf, due to the high content of butter and eggs.You should be able to stretch the dough easily, although it will not form a relatively thinner membrane like the dough of sweet bread with water roux method. But it should be similar to that.
5. Remove the dough to a plastic bowl and cover it with cling film (plastic wrap). Store it in the refrigerator overnight, or around 24 hours to let it proof. By then, the volume of the dough should be at least twice.
6. After the dough rise double in size, punch down the dough and divide into several pieces, around 50-60 grams each. Place each portion parallel to each other in the loaf pan (remember to brush the pan with margarine/butter before filling the pan with the dough. I use two loaf pans, but you may also use 3 loaf pans.
7. Let the dough to raise again for around 2-3 hours, outside the refrigerator, at room temperature. Brush the top of the bread with the beaten egg.
8. Heat the oven, 180Celcius. I use lower heat. Bake the bread for around 30 minute or until the skewer inserted into the bread comes clean. I change to both lower and upper heat in the last 7 minutes to get a nice golden brown colour.  Let the bread cool on the rack before serving it.

Since I usually bake more than what we can finish in one sitting, I freeze half of the bread. We have tried the frozen bread. We took out the frozen bread and leave it at room temperature for a couple of hours. The bread is still soft and the texture is still good. It is delicious and the texture is still heavenly. I really wish that my children prefer less sweet food, one day.