Teh Tarik On Hold

I am really a rice and gulai kind of gal, the more "*desa" inspired are the dishes, the more turned on I am by them. But we know what it is like when there's rice...you need a main dish, perhaps a gulai asam pedas or cili padi ( fish or meat), then a sayur dish(maybe kerabu pucuk paku to which you would add pounded dried shrimps for that ooomph or lemak labu), then maybe ikan masin goreng or telur masin rebus, what about ulam-ulam(tenggek burung, bebuas, pegaga, fresh petai, pucuk betik, pucuk ubi), it of course will not be complete without sambal ( belacan or kelapa or tempoyak). And won't it be nice to have that fresh ikan pari that was just hauled off the Straits of Melaka grilled to perfection - cooked crispy on the skin but still moist and tender when you dig under? And who says you have to stop after satu pinggan of rice? It is always polite and customary to "tambah"....and I am very, very polite when it comes to food and eating.

So, after a lot of psyching, tossing and turning, about the changes I need to make to my dietary habits now that I have to "pantang" a few things for a couple of years until my immune system is boosted, I realised that the new "diet-style" is not that bad after all. In the bigger scheme of things they are but minor sacrifices to help myself feel and turn out "good".
All I need to do is eliminate FOR NOW (only) some food items that might sabotage my journey to wellness, change my eating habits (less eating out and be more discriminating about what I order when I do, and most important of all, make some revisions on how my food is being prepared when eating at home.

So as not to have my body feel as though it is being punished, I give myself little exceptions once in a while - like eating out only on Sundays (maybe breakfast at Nirvana or Marmalade) with friends after a good morning walk. Even then it will be thosai and dhall, and plain tea. No roti canai as the Ayur doctor says I should avoid refined white flour( I am already scheming now on how to make my own whole wheat -atta- roti canai if ever I need to succumb to a craving!). No slurpy and frothy teh tarik as I will be driven to wheezing and a semput so serious that it is not worth the Rm 1.20 if I have to be carted off to the ER of Pantai in a RM 400 ambulance.

But as they say, everything in moderation and never, ever feel deprived. There are always alternatives. We just need to be a little creative. So if I have to pantang my favourite beverage of coffee ( in it's many commercial forms) and teh tarik, there is always Ragi Malt which I discovered by chance through the internet. It is nice, and very, very nutritious. I was looking up what Ragi is in Google when I was recently introduced to Ragi Flour, Ragi Puttu, and Ragi Bihun which I have been using in my cooking. No one is able to tell me what Ragi is in English and you don't see it sold anywhere else except in Brickfields. I found out it is "Finger Millet", highly nutritious as it is always milled whole. The grains are tiny like mustard seeds. The taste is rich and nutty. I just loved it and have used it in various ways to cook, whenever I run out of ideas for complementing my rice dishes , with so many pantangs right now.

Ragi Malt is just like Horlicks, and is usually prepared with milk and brown sugar. As I am allergic to milk now, I just used water, boiling it with the ragi flour and adding Manuka honey just before drinking it. I may add a small dose of expresso in future if the craving for coffee hits, and I am sure it will tast as good as conventional cappucino.

It is very exciting, this experimenting with alternative styles of cooking and eating. Had it not been for BC, I would probably not be motivated to try out these new, healthier alternatives. I would not have discovered Sitharam's or Malliga's even though I pass that way countless times whenever I need to go to KL Sentral. So, it has been very enriching and it has really tested and stretched my creativity in the kitchen (usually guided and limited to what is found in cookbooks and what has been handed-down by my mum). I treasure the "hand-me-down" recipes from the family because they are unique and not usually found in cookbooks, and the beauty ( or is it pity?) of it all is they survive even though these hasn't really been formally recorded anywhere .
How does one capture a pinch of this and a handful of that and "sa-cukup rasa"? In any case, now that I have to, even those hand-me down recipes can be creatively modified now to suit my situation.

For Awal Muharam, to celebrate the new year I invited some friends over for tea. My friends know that I am an all-rounder when it comes to food - I am both a goreng pisang and cekodok fan as much as I am a cream tea complete with scones and clotted cream fan. So they did not really know what to expect now that I have so many pantangs, and offered to bring food that they think I can eat. I told them that the idea is for me to "jamu" them for all of their help in the past year and not the other way round. My only request to them is to bear with what I will be serving as Iam keen to introduce them to my alternative and healthier way of preparing my favourite eats. That way they will also know what I had to give up in order to build up my strength and immunity.

I cooked for 10. I was surprised that I had the energy to see through all of the cooking, and later entertaining. Of course the maid helped in the preparation of the ingredients after I showed her how. After much thought and a flurry of activities, we managed to put on the table the following goodies when the guests arrived at 4.30 - Nasi Kunyit with Organic Chicken Curry with potatoes, carrot and tomatoes; Nasi Kerabu ( 15 herbs - most home grown, serunding kelapa and serbuk ikan bilis and not ikan masin) with Sayur Asem ( Javanese dish, my maid's specialty, very nutritious with lots of vegetables); Bubur Hijau-Merah ( my creation - couldn't decide between bubur kacang hijau or bubur kacang merah, so mixed them both and it worked, very sedap!); Ubi Kayu Rebus (served steaming hot with grated fresh coconut and shredded gula melaka - very popular as the last time most had this was probably when they were teenagers!); and the piece de resistance - Wholegrain Cranberry Scones ( made with olive butter, raw sugar and grainy wholewheat flour) served with a choice of olive and real butter for the purists among my friends, with strawberry jam of course. And pink Dragon Fruit to clean the palate while sipping sen-cha (green tea). Yes, that was very brave of me not to offer coffee as at least 2 of my guests are coffee lovers and will always have their brew to make their meal complete. Quite a colourful meal.

It was a success, everyone enjoyed the food and I enjoyed watching them enjoy the food. The Ubi Rebus was a clear winner, it was so simple yet so good. I was overjoyed because I wasn't sure if they would miss the usual cake-house fare that one normally puts out with lots of pretty cupcakes and pastries and fried stuff. My guests left with a little gift I had wrapped nicely for them, a 7-Day Pillbox that they would find handy to take their supplements along when they travel. That too, is very colourful, each 3-compartment daily sub-containers in different colours. The whole thing is about the size of a 250 gram Cadbury bar, which was what I had originally planned to give but thought that the pillbox would be more useful.

A number of the dishes that day was experimental for me, and I will post them in my http://mysecretrecipes.blogspot.com/ blog so I won't forget and in case anyone else is curious to try.
The recipe for the scones is not from Nigella Lawson's or Betty Crocker's or Martha Stewart's. I have this favourite recipe for scones that I got from a tea towel I picked up while visiting Scotland many(20?) years ago. I just needed to modify it a bit to accomodate my present dietary requirements, and it worked fine. I am in the process of experimenting with wholewheat roti canai and buckwheat mee mamak - cuz I do miss my mamak food so!

Note:* I was going to write "Kampung" inspired dishes but chose to use "Desa" instead. I get a trifle annoyed when the word "kampung" had been used in a degratory sense by some ignorant people who probably had not met really nice kampung folks who do not deserved to be insulted by associating the word "kampung" with anything that is less than "cool". I need to get this off my chest and will post an entry soon in my http://lifematters2me.blogspot.com/ blog . Grrrr....