A Homemaker’s Diary

I was reading the recipe from RasaMalaysia.com early this morning (I slept early last night and woke up at 6am on Saturday) and she wrote about stir fry chicken with scallions. At first I could not make it in my mind what the is scallions? huhuhu..too early for my brain to digest food name. I even have to Wikipedia what is scallions…now I know..it’s daun bawang..hahaha

When I first read the recipe, I was thinking about scallop..duh..yeah, we are talking about chinese recipe here and scallop is the famous ingredient. I think the recipe of stir fry chicken with scallions is quite common. When I worked in Cyberjaya, we used to eat at Penang House and usually I will order stir fry beef with ginger and scallions. I ate the ginger but never the scallions as I hate onion and all its relatives..

If you feel like cooking Chinese style, maybe a quick glance at this ChineseFoodDIY website will give you some tips or two. I feel like making spring rolls with whatever leftover ingredients in my fridge. I bought wonton and spring roll wrappers with the plan of making some Chinese snacks and yet they were left frozen unused for ages now.

First of all, taucu is needed in this cooking. Taucu is a fermented soy beans in salt. I tried to find pictures of taucu in the Internet but could not find get one that accurate to show how taucu looks like.

Check the tiny black, brown color beans in the picture above, well, that’s taucu. In my place, it is sold in bottles. NVM, next time when I buy a new bottle I will snap the picture. I used Tamin brand for this dish. Tamin is a quite well-known Malay family manufacturer in soy sauce related products.

So to cook this, you can choose any kind of fish you like. I use kembong and cencaru for this. Fry the fish as usual with salt and turmeric. Cut the shallot, garlic and ginger. When the oil is hot in the pan, fry those shallot, garlic and ginger till they turn fragranced. Then you put the taucu. Use about 3 tablespoons but make sure you rinse them first, or otherwise your dish will be too salty.

After a while, put 1 1/2 bowl of plain water inside, throw in everything else – the fried fish, red chili, cucumber, onion and don’t forget, the magnificent asam gelugur. Add your seasoning to it and let it simmer. Actually this dish will taste better if you cook it the day before, or if you’re serving it for lunch, cook the night before. All the herbs, the salty taucu and the sour asam gelugur will mix well and when you pour the gravy into your plate of rice, emmm..yummy! If you need more zest, eat with sambal belacan.

My mom used to say that this taucu dish is usually cooked during Malay wedding preparation days in Perak. Maybe it’s true since Tamin soy sauce products started in Perak. I’m not sure whether they still serve this to people who come and help for weddings since most of the weddings today hire caterers for the reception. No more gotong royong to slice the onion like in the olden days.

I’m running out of ideas to cook for dinner, on weekend it’s even worse because I have to think what to cook for lunch and dinner. In my attempt to have a frugal living, I intend to cook at home as much as possible and I hate it (not that I hate cooking, hate the idea of living frugally). It’s not fun to discipline yourself when you used to spend without thinking.

Well, that would be a different topic, but now I’m going to share what’s cooking on the stove last few days. Since I’m on healthy cooking regime, I thought eating fish would be nice for a change. So the usual menu would be Ikan Masak Taucu. It’s like a one complete meal where you have everything in it. Plus the fish would be fried before they were dumped into the kuah (gravy) so I can guarantee that there will be no waste…hehehe..

So for those not sure what is taucu and feel like cooking this, kindly leave a comment or email me for the recipe. Good Wednesday everybody, it’s CSI night tonite..muahaha!

This one was made with chicken sausage, mushroom and tomato fillings. I had this for late night supper and I tried to emulate how the egg chef at the 5-star resort do it..it tastes great but of course if you have someone else make the omelette for you, it will taste much better…hahaha..