Wonders never cease

Over the past 18 months I’ve had a hankering to get my hands on some black nuts but they have eluded me until recently.

Black nut – also known as keluak – is used in Indonesian and Malaysian cooking.  I’d never heard of them until I read Debbie Teoh’s fantastic repository of Peranakan recipes, Nonya Cuisine.  

Debbie’s book is choc-full of really interesting and highly authentic recipes and I’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve cooked so far.  Her black nut chicken curry recipe caught my eye because it contained this novel ingredient and I was intrigued by her description of its chocolate/mushroom flavour.

My interest was further piqued when I discovered that they are highly poisonous in their natural state and have to undergo a treatment process over 40 days before they are edible. God only knows why I’m attracted to such weird food.  I’ve searched my psyche and conclude that it must be some kind of rebellion against growing up in Palmerston North during the 1960s and ‘70s, where chicken chop suey at one of the city’s two Chinese restaurants was about as exotic as it got.

The convoluted process of making black nut safe to eat
reminds me of the lengths pre-European Maori
went to in order to eliminate deadly toxins
from karaka berries.  Just think how desperate for
protein they must have been to have persisted with
a food that could killed them in a most grotesque
and painful manner if they got the preparation wrong.
 Click here for the fascinatingly gruesome details.

So, the hunt was on for some black nuts!

Auckland has some impressive Asian food emporiums, where you can get everything from very dodgy looking pickled things that even I’m too scared to try – through to all manner of exotic vegetables.  Although it’s possible to find a wide range of weird and wonderful fresh and frozen South East Asian ingredients, it transpired that black nuts were not among them.  In desperation I contacted www.malaysiakitchen.co.nz but they didn’t know where I could get any either.

So I’d resigned myself to being none the wiser about this mysterious ingredient for the foreseeable future.  

But fate was on my side.  One of my local Asian grocery stores isn’t big, and it doesn’t stock fruit and veges, but it’s clean, has friendly staff and has all of the basics.

Besides a wide range of Chinese goods, I often find unusual Malaysian, Indonesian and Japanese ingredients there too, so I usually browse around to check out what’s in stock on the off-chance of finding something new and different.  The strategy paid off because a couple of weeks ago I spotted – tah dah! – vacuum packed black nut meat thanks, apparently, to demand from the store’s Indonesian customers.

Fortunately the nuts had been pre-prepared, so it wasn’t necessary to start dinner preparations 40 days in advance and I didn’t have to worry about inadvertently killing off my family if I got it wrong.








So, without further ado, I got cooking and here’s the somewhat unappealing looking result:

I’m pleased to report that, in this case, its evil appearance was deceiving.  The curry was delicious and did indeed have chocolaty and mushroomy notes as promised by Debbie Teoh.  To my amazement everyone in my family – even plain foodies Don and Rory – said they liked it and would happily eat it again.  

Wonders never cease!

Where to buy black nut:

The Tofu Shop
955 New North Road
Mt Albert

Boom bang baking

Being an adventurous type has led to all sorts of cooking escapades but never until now have I needed to use a heavy stick and a hacksaw to complete the job.

What a fun way to get back into foodie cooking following a three week hiatus.

I’d burned myself out after an awful lot of cooking and baking in the lead up to Christmas and didn’t feel up to making anything more than the absolute basics over the ensuing weeks.  This was made easier by our family taking a 10 day break in the lower North Island and largely staying in motels, which generally have pretty basic cooking facilities.  

All of my culinary efforts were pedestrian at best and – according to Don – hideous at worst.  In my own defence, we’d arrived at a motel one evening armed with fairly minimal supplies that included a dozen sausages that really needed to be used, some spuds and a packet salad to discover the kitchen was only equipped with a microwave and one small glass bowl.  So I think Boiled Sausage and Spud Surprise wasn’t that bad given the circumstances.

The meals we purchased during our travels weren't much better, with the exception of the unpretentious but delicious home cooked fare served at Kapiti Island’s lodge, and the wonderful Italian food we enjoyed at Soprano in Paraparaumu.  So by the time we returned home, I was revitalised, dying for something exotic, and raring to cook.

Along the way I’d bought a couple of bags of stone ground flour from the store in Foxton’s Dutch windmill and I decided to put some of it to good use by baking ciabatta.

Ciabatta is probably my favourite bread, but only if it’s made the old-fashioned way by making a starter dough the day before, and incorporating it into the final dough mix.  Bread like this tastes divine and has a lovely texture but it requires forward planning because, resting time included, it takes the best part of 18 hours from go to whoa.

One of the challenges with ciabatta dough is that it’s extremely wet and gluggy, and impossible to knead.  So I use my trusty 18-year-old food processor to start the job, finishing with the gruelling task of mixing by hand when adding the final third of the flour.

I think you know where this story is going and, sure enough, half way through the job – just as I was wondering how much life the old gal had left in her – there was a loud bang and thick smoke started pouring out of the food processor. Impressive!

Having come this far, I wasn’t about to give up on my project, so I decided to remove the dough from the mixing bowl and continue by hand.  And that’s where things got interesting.

The food processor will (or used to) only work if a large tab on the lid is fully locked into a slot on the machine.  Trouble was the explosion’s heat had fused the plastic tab with the casing, making it impossible to release.  The machine was obviously a goner, so there was nothing to lose by taking a forceful approach.

I’d taken its smoking corpse out to the back steps by this stage because it smelled so bad and can only but wonder what the neighbours made of me squatting there bashing away at my food processor with a big stick in a futile attempt to release the stuck tab.

R.I.P.

No luck; bits started flying off the lid without releasing it, so off I trotted down to Don’s workshop for a hacksaw to do the job. It didn’t take long to liberate the dough, allowing me to continue on my merry bread making way.

I'd like to be able to report that the resulting loaves were a culinary triumph in the face of considerable adversity, but they weren't.

Until now, I’ve always made ciabatta with white flour, which produces fantastic bread.  But this time I decided to get slightly experimental and use the windmill’s whole grain bread mix to create a rustic version.

The end result was nice enough, although the bread mix was saltier than I’d have preferred.  Using whole grain flour meant the loaves were a bit drier and heavier than would normally be the case.

So, despite all the ‘boom bang’ in its creation, my ciabatta ended up being more ho-hum than va-voom.

A lunch to drool over

I've been spending an unhealthy amount of time fantasizing about eating saliva chicken after spotting it in a local shop last month.

Despite its disgusting connotations, the dish’s unconventional name utterly intrigued me so I sought enlightenment from a Chinese friend.

Apparently saliva chicken tastes so delicious that one’s mouth salivates at the mere thought, hence the name; I would have thought “mouth watering” to be a far more marketable title.

I’ve been eating out a lot lately and have felt the need to give my body a bit of a rest over the past week but today the temptation of an ecstatic food experience proved irresistible. So off I headed to buy myself a chicken saliva lunch.

It’s sold in an unprepossessing little outlet in Mt Albert’s Lim Chhour complex. Tables outside the shop display a range of fried doughy snacks, and suchlike. I’ve tried a few but they’re nothing amazing although the massive omelettey square looks like it could be worth a go one hungry day.

Beyond briefly ogling the saliva chicken, I’d never taken much notice of the contents of a chiller insider the shop. Closer inspection revealed all sorts of northern Chinese goodies, so I decided to buy myself a mini banquet.



Saliva chicken.  The
lumpy bits are peanuts,
sesame seeds and chilli
flakes.



The saliva chicken lived up to its promise and was really nice: salty, slightly acetic, savoury, chilli spiced. I suspect that today's version was probably a bit more basic than some but it was still good.

Bean curd stick salad.

Less delicious was the bean curd stick and carrot salad, served in a very light oil and slightly chillied dressing. It was okay, but smelled disconcertingly of old socks. The taste was improved by combining the coriander garnish with the bean curd stick but there was far too little garnish to lift the dish to a new level.

"Crispy" kigou.  Tasted
more like
"chewy" kigou!

As for the crispy kigou, I had no idea what it was when I bought it and, now I’ve eaten some, I still have no idea. I’m pretty sure it’s vegetal. It tastes similar to Korean kimchi and it’s really, really chewy so I didn’t eat my way through much before aborting the mission.

A crispy kigou fights
back.

Although I enjoy pushing my foodie boundaries, there are some lines I never intend cross - unlike a blogger that I recently discovered. Here’s one of the most stomach churning foodie accounts I have ever read: http://www.allyoucanteat.com/2011/05/pig-brain-and-pig-spine-soup/

Horror food

Readers of this blog often comment how adventurous I am. While it’s true that I like to push my culinary boundaries, I have my limits.

Just in case you think I recklessly eat every weird thing that comes my way, I thought I’d share a few horrors that are well down my ‘to eat’ list - such as this offering that I spotted this in a local Chinese cafe yesterday.  I suspect I may get around to trying it one day just for the hell of it.  

This product range really amuses me. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to design cheerful packaging that belies the horrors within. What’s even funnier is that it’s all labelled in English even though, apart from a few weirdos like me, most native English speakers would recoil at the thought of eating duck icky bits.



A foodie friend recently invited us over for dinner and, when I asked what he’d like us to bring, he replied “scare us”, so off I toddled to the shop selling the abovementioned duck bits.

Sauced, semi-dried duck tongue.

Given that he lived in Hong Kong for many years, and his wife is Hong Kong Chinese, I should have known better than to present them with this lame attempt at horror food.

They hoovered them up without a blink and offered to cook me some freshly prepared ones some day.

I’ve cheated a bit with this example, because I ended up eating a couple of the duck tongues. They’re ok.

Pig spine soup (spotted on the menu of a Korean restaurant in Queen Street).  As much as I admire this restaurant’s pragmatic honesty, I don’t like pork and the dish’s main ingredient is spine. What more can I say?

The other night I heard Kieran coughing and spluttering out in the kitchen, followed by the tap running hard. It transpired he’d gone to make vegemite toast and, in his rush to satisfy his hunger, had grabbed the first jar he saw with a yellow and red label. Poor lad; this sambal is seriously HOT.

The Chinese may have cornered the horror food market, but Stutz burger bar in Ohakune is giving them a run for their money.

My husband and kids reckoned their burgers are the worst they’ve ever tried. As for Stutz’s garlic chips, even my greaseaholic family was flummoxed by this soggy garlic butter topped nightmare.

They offered me some, and I was tempted to kill off my arteries and try them just so I could regale you with how ghastly they were. But my nerves failed and I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it.