Like mother, like son

Despite my best efforts, I’ve found that parenthood and exotic food don’t always go together. I’ve managed to train my family to at least try some of my more unusual offerings, but they don’t usually go for seconds.

Plain fooders Don and Rory are lost causes, and I confess to knowingly serving ethnic foods that are torture on a plate to them. But my 12-year-old son Kieran is another story.

Like me, he has always been interested in trying new things so I didn’t have to look far for a companion when I saw an Indonesian culture and food festival advertised in this morning’s paper.

I’m relatively familiar with Indonesian cuisine but it has a very low profile in New Zealand due to our miniscule Indonesian population (3261, according to the 2006 census).

Most of the Indonesian food I’ve tried has been of the satay / gado gado / beef rendang variety but I know there’s far more to the cuisine than those dishes. Needless to say, I was seeking something at the more ‘interesting’ end of the scale when Kieran and I headed off to the festival.

Like the local Indonesian population, the festival was small; four or five food stalls, a similar number of craft stalls, and a simple programme of movies and cultural performances.

True to form, I steered us towards the food stalls with the weirdest looking offerings.  Here's what we bought:





Croquettes that I think were made from
pancakes stuffed with carrot sticks and something
else, crumbed and deep fried.  Served with a very
tasty peanut sauce (and a blob of hot chilli
sauce for me!).





Croquette innards.



 

Fish cake stuffed with egg.  Served with a
slightly sweet-sour-hot liquidy sauce that had little
chunks of cucumber in it.  Nice enough but it would
have been good to have a bigger spoon so
that we could get more sauce with the fishcake. 
I love the way runny Asian food is often sold 
in little plastic bags that are tied with a
rubber band; so pragmatic!

A medley of weird things.  Clockwise from bottom
left: hot chilli sauce, fried green chilli, fried cubes
of mysterious savoury gelatinous stuff, fried tofu
cubes, fried brown stuff, tempeh (the big rectangle
of grey-white) with unidenfitied sauce, sweet
jackfruit curry, soya sauce (?) boiled egg. 
Unusual. Not a favourite with either of us but
I'm glad we tried it anyway.



Steamed coconut flavoured cakelets.  Nice.



















A sweet cold soup that was similar to
the Indian dessert, Falooda.  The Indonesian
version contained cubes of Nata de Coco (a
densely textured coconut juice jelly), bits of
avocado, finely shredded coconut flesh,
mysterious orange bits that may or may not have
been mango and/or carrot.  Tasted far nicer than
it sounds.























To be honest, none of it knocked my socks off but it was nevertheless great to try the real deal and we’ll be back for more next year.

What did knock my socks off, however, was Kieran’s willingness to try everything. He didn’t like all of it, but was still open to the experience.

I’m so proud to be his mum!



Cheap thrills

I’ve developed an obsession.

The centre of my attention has a cheerful, pert and beguiling appearance that belies an incredibly firey personality. It’s a quality I find incredibly attractive - even irresistible.

My obsession causes me lots of pain, and provides even more pleasure.

Why is it that I just can’t get enough of chillis?

While many people run a mile at the mere hint of spicy food, I’m one of the world’s fortunates who gets a real buzz out of eating it.

Apparently chilli's active ingredient capsaicin triggers an endorphin release to counteract the burning pain, resulting in something akin to a runner’s high. I used to get a gym goer’s high in my younger, blobbier days. But now I’m older and fitter, I have to resort to more extreme, Scoville unit loaded measures in order to keep it legal.

Eating strongly spiced food always makes me feel incredibly happy and content, although that’s not always the case the next morning.

I’m naturally keen to try as many of the world’s spicy cuisines as I can lay my tongue on, and have eaten my way through all of the obvious suspects.

I had, however, never heard of the Hunan cuisine until I read Fuschia Dunlop’s brilliant, hilarious book “Shark’s fin and Sichuan pepper: a sweet and sour memoir of eating in China”. The Englishwoman lived in China for a decade, being the first Westener (and I think the first woman) to serve an apprenticeship at a Sichuanese cooking school.

She also wrote Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province, a book I've put to good use. Like Sichuan food, Hunan cuisine uses liberal amounts of chilli but in greater, less diluted quantities.

Even though I’d eaten Hunan food I’d cooked myself, I hadn’t found it in any Chinese restaurants. So it was with great excitement that I recently learned of a small place in Balmoral that has Hunan options on its menu.

My brother Brodie was keen to give it a go, so off we headed to Wu Han Restaurant one evening.

Nobody in the restaurant knew us, or even cared, giving us license to be as greedy as we pleased.  So we ordered four dishes and rice between the two of us. Here’s what we ate:

Sweet potato cakes – mild fritters made of diced, boiled kumera and batter. Even my kids would like these. We spiced things up by saucing them with one of the resident condiments.

“Greedy fish” – a whole deep fried snapper smothered in a mountain of chilli: preserved (red and green), fried whole dried ones, bits of chopped fresh ones. Yum, yum, YUM!  It was not nearly as hot as one would suppose but eating it still gave me a real buzz.

Beef soup – hot and tasty but extremely oily. Apparently Hunanese use a LOT of oil in their cooking; they should be the size of houses.

Hot, sour cabbage with, you guessed it, lots of dried chilli. Crisp, crunchy, hot, acetic, salty, tasty, utterly moreish.

It all tasted so good that we ate until we almost burst. All for $52 - $28 of which was for the snapper.

At the end of the meal I was so full I could hardly stand up. I suggested that Brodie carried me out to the car but, in true brotherly fashion, he declined.