Roti

Eating out here is great - cheap and easy - and there are some fantastic little restaurants nearby.  One of our favourites is this unassuming looking little place:

We must have been here about once a week since we arrived in Brunei!  Called the 'House of Curry' it serves Indian dishes, but also Thai and Malay food, but the main reason we eat here are the Roti.

I had never heard of Roti before, but it is very popular in Brunei.  It's described here as a Malaysian dish, but the Roti served in House of Curry comes with a bowl of curry (chicken, beef or dhal) - I suspect it's a bit of a cultural fusion.

The Roti itself is basically a kind of fried dough.  You can rip it apart with your fingers and dip it into the curry, or you could be more couth and use the cutlery provided!  Here's Rob on our first visit, demonstrating the hands-on method of eating:

Roti can be eaten simply with the bowl of curry, or with 'condiments'.  We decided to go for this on our second visit (guessing that the condiments in question might be something Indian, perhaps mango chutney or raita?)  Imagine our amusement when the condiments were served:  pickled vegetables, corned beef and sardines!

 The Roti menu is extensive and we are working our way through the various options.

Rob usually goes for the Roti Telur Bawang - Roti with a layer of egg and fried onions in the middle which is delicious.

I usually go for the Roti Kosong which is just plain, but have also sampled a couple of the more unusual variations...

Here I am at lunchtime today sampling the Roti Pisang - which had a layer of mashed banana in the middle!  It might sound revolting, but was actually lovely alongside the chicken curry.

The most bizarre of all has been the Roti Tissue.  I had been keen to try it ever since seeing it ordered at another table - this Roti is much thinner and presented in an impressive conical shape:

What I didn't realise is that this Roti holds its shape because it is covered in caramelised SUGAR!  I snapped off a piece and dipped it into the curry... and had quite a shock when I discovered this, er, unusual combination!  Again, this was a lot nicer than it sounds and I ended up enjoying it - although it really didn't feel very healthy.

The curry that Roti is served with is possibly not what many people would recognise as a particular curry - no choice of korma, madras, vindaloo, etc, here.  I imagine it's made from one of the generic 'curry powders' that are on sale here.  This one perhaps - bought entirely for the fact that I adore its label!

Generic or not, it does have a lovely flavour.

So there you go, another insight into our new culinary life in Brunei!

Well, it is called SWEETcorn!

Not long after we arrived here I started spotting something strange on restaurant menus...

Yum, milkshakes!  Mango - sounds delicious; strawberry, chocolate, vanilla - so far, so normal; banana - OK; sweetcorn..?!  Eh?!

Then we noticed the freezer section in the supermarket.  In amongst the usual flavours was...

Really not sure about this...

But today we were in a shop, laughing about the whole concept of sweetcorn as a dessert flavour and somehow egged eachother on into buying these:

Um, and these:

The Corn Candy is, as you might expect, rather odd.  But yes, it does taste of sweetcorn!  Not entirely unpleasant, but perhaps not something I'll buy again.

Potong appears to be a traditional ice-lolly-style snack.  Last week we bought some more 'traditionally' flavoured Potong - Black Glutinous Rice and Coconut Cream flavour!  You can't say we're not adventurous...  and this gamble paid off; they are gorgeous.  So we thought a mixed pack of Red Bean, Sweetcorn and Durian flavours might be worth the risk too.  (And might be the closest we get to eating actual Durian!).

Mealtimes are never dull here!

Noodles for Supper

As I mentioned in my previous post, most of our evening meals here in Brunei consist of rice or noodles.  This is one of our favourites - and ridiculously quick and easy... and cheap too!

In the UK these packets of noodles are only a step up from the naffness of Pot Noodles...  but here they LOVE them!  Every supermarket has an entire aisle devoted to noodles in general, about half of which will be these pre-packed ones.

This is a brand we particularly like.  A pack of 5 packets costs $1.40.

We can't read the instructions, but the pictures are helpful!

What seems to make these particularly nice are the 5 sachets that come in the pack, to be stirred into the cooked drained noodles:

Seasoned oil, chili sauce and thick syrupy soy sauce...

Plus crispy fried onions and seasoning (probably full of monosodium glutamate, but very tasty!)

Just a bowl of these noodles with no accompaniments is a satisfying lunch or light supper, but last night we topped them with a fried egg, and served them with some garlicky, gingery beans and baby corn, and it was a really delicious meal.

Rojak

We love Asian food - quite fortunate really as we now find ourselves living in Asia...  and we've been really enjoying sampling various dishes since we arrived (over 3 weeks ago now - how time flies).  Eating out is cheap and easy, and Brunei is a real melting-pot of culinary cultures -  Malay, Chinese, Indian and Thai food are all easily available. 

We do occasionally hit somewhat of a food-wall...  most meals consist of noodles or rice, usually with chicken, and soy sauce.  It's lovely, but it does make you crave chips after a while!  (Which lead to the almost shameful sight of us gorging ourselves at the Yacht Club earlier this week with Rob ordering burger and chips, and me having steak 'n' kidney pie and chips!!)

However, inspired both by a dish that Paula had at a local restaurant and a cooking programme we caught on TV recently, we have discovered a Malaysian dish that contains neither noodles nor rice, but does contain loads of amazing fruit and vegetables, combined with a fantastically flavourful peanutty sauce - it's called Rojak.

Searching for Rojak recipes online I soon realised that everyone has their own recipe for it, and they're all slightly different, varying from country to country and doubtless from family to family too.  The basis of the dish though is the same - a sort of savoury fruit and vegetable salad.  It might not sounds appetising, but believe me it is, and it's also infinitely adaptable according to what fruit and veg you have.

We enjoyed a happy half hour together in the kitchen creating our own version of Rojak, which I attempted to document photographically...

We started by making the sauce.  This basically contains shrimp paste, tamarind paste (gorgeous!), chili paste (which we didn't have - we used a chopped birdseye chili instead), oyster sauce, palm sugar and lime juice - a tablespoon of each.  Blend together with about half a cup of water, and add a handful of crushed peanuts (or peanut butter apparently!)  Next time I'll add a splash of soy sauce too.

It all looks a bit brown and sinister at this point...

We'd never used palm sugar before - it comes in hard blocks which you grate.  It's delicious, with a real toffee-like sweetness.

Next came the heap of fruit and veg to chop...

We used green beans, baby corn, cucumber, apple and guava - but I found recipes that included pineapple and green (unripe) mango - which I'd like to try - too.   We also bought some beancurd to add, as we had seen this on the cooking programme and fancied trying it.

If you've never seen a guava cut open (which I hadn't!) here's one.  I peeled it and scooped out the seeds in the middle, then chopped it along with the rest of the fruit and veg.

Depending on the veg used you might blanch or cook it before adding to the Rojak, but we chose to keep it all raw as we love baby corn and beans as they are.  It gave the dish a great crunch.

Rob chopped and deep-fried the beancurd.  It went lovely and crispy - although when we do it again we'll coat it in seasoned flour before frying as it's rather bland.

Phew!  All that mixing, chopping and frying calls for a G&T...

The final step is simply to mix the fruit and veg into the sauce, stirring well to coat eat piece.  We topped it with the beancurd and some more chopped peanuts.

OK, it wouldn't win any beauty contests, but it really was delicious - healthy, fresh, crunchy, zingy and fiery (those chillies are HOT!)  Definitely a success, and one we'll certainly be making again.

I'm back - and in Brunei

It's been 8 weeks since my last blog post.  8 weeks... and about 7000 miles. 

We're now living in Brunei - and it still feels a little strange to be writing that!   Until we heard we might be moving here, I'm not sure I had heard of Brunei, and I certainly didn't know where it was.  But now we find ourselves living and working in the Far East, on the north coast of the island of Borneo, looking out over the South China Sea.

So how is it? 'Overwhelming' has been the word that I've used most.  But overwhelming in (usually) the nicest way.  It's just that everything is new and different, it's pretty hard to take in all at once. 

New house...

New critters...

New school...

New wildlife...  (I was going to say 'new neighbours' there but thought that might be misconstrued!)

New climate...  (Hot and humid with epic rainstorms).

New sights to see...

New food to try...  (This is ambuyat, a Bruneian speciality, which due to its close similarity to wallpaper paste,  I will not be sampling again!)

A beach within 5 minutes' walk of the house...

And walks in the jungle...

All that, along with some fabulous new friends and neighbours.  I think we're going to be very happy here for the next 2 years.

Elderflower Cordial

I made a batch of Elderflower Cordial last year and we still have a tub of it in the freezer so I didn't think I'd bother making another batch this Summer, seeing as we're trying to empty the freezer before we go to Brunei.  But then I noticed that there were several elder trees growing in the vicinity of the school...  I decided to indoctrinate my class into the delights of foraging!!

To reassure, we did have a long chat about the possible dangers of eating things 'from the wild' - berries, etc - and how we should always check with an adult before picking and eating anything from the hedgerows, but talk over, we set out to pick the requisite 40 heads of elderflowers needed for the cordial. 

Armed with scissors the task was soon accomplished...

And back in school we soon had ourselves a batch of cordial infusing, and a delightfully fragrant classroom!

We did shake the elderflower heads to remove as many bugs as possible, but you're not meant to rinse the flowers as you then wash all the pollen away.  As you can see, there were still plenty of teeny bugs floating around in the bowl.  You can only imagine the excitement this caused!!

The cordial has now been strained (no more bugs!) and sampled enthusiastically by the whole class.  I'd guess there was a 75% approval rating, which I didn't think was bad, considering how fussy 6-8 year-olds can be.  We still have nearly 2 litres of undiluted cordial left though...  I'm pondering making up jugs of it and selling it at the school gate after school one day this week.

Elderflower Cordial

40 heads of elderflowers
2 lemons, sliced
3 1/4 lb granulated sugar
3oz citric acid (from a chemist)
3 pints boiling water


Mix all the ingredients in a clean container, cover and leave for up to 5 days.  Strain, dilute with water and drink.

Custard Cookies

I love anything with custard.  In fact, I consider custard to be a pudding in itself!  During my first year at university when I was in catered accommodation I remember that there always used to be a large 'cauldron' of custard to accompany the hot pudding (often something utterly bizarre such as pineapple and coconut crumble).  Forget the wacky crumbles, I'd usually just have custard, greedily ladled into a bowl (thank heavens for self-service). 

And yes, I do eat the skin!

So when I saw a magazine article which included a recipe for 'Soft Custard Cookies' I felt that I had to give them a try.  The recipe is from the January 2010 edition of Good Housekeeping, and comes from TV chef Phil Vickery. The custard takes the place of egg in the recipe and the result is a soft, almost cakey cookie with a pronounced flavour of vanilla from both the custard and the white chocolate (I also used vanilla sugar and added 1/2 a tsp of vanilla extract - I love vanilla).

The recipe calls for 100g of Bird's Custard, made-up and cooled.  This obviously means that if you had custard leftover from a meal you could use that, but I made up a batch specially, putting the rest into ramekins to set solid for our pudding last night.  Hot custard is lovely, but cold set custard is gorgeous!

The recipe is as follows:

125g (4oz) unsalted butter, softened
125 (4oz) caster sugar (or vanilla sugar)
100g (3 1/2oz) white chocolate, finely chopped (and do chop it finely otherwise the dough will be hard to slice)
200g self-raising flour (I ended up using 250g)
100g (3 1/2oz) cold Bird's custard, made to packet instructions

Cream the butter and sugar until pale and creamy.

Add the custard, chocolate and flour and mix well.

Form the dough into a sausage shape, 5cm diameter, wrap in clingfilm and chill in the fridge for at least an hour.  (***Note - the dough was way too sticky for me to do this so I added an extra 50g of flour.  It was still very soft, but manageable***)

Preheat oven to 180C/350F.

Unwrap the dough and slice into 1.5cm thick cookies, and place onto a greased or lined baking tray.  Leave room between them as they will spread.  (***I got 20 cookies from this mix and used 2 baking trays***)

Bake for about 15 minutes until the cookies are beginning to turn a light golden brown around the edges.
Leave on the tray for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool fully.

I had never heard of using custard in a biscuit recipe before, and an online search showed that it is somewhat of a speciality of Phil Vickery.  I couldn't find this particular recipe online, but did find a similar one of his: White Chocolate and Cardamom Soft Custard Cookies.  I can imagine that this would be a great flavour combination and one I'm now keen to try.