Sardines with sweet and sour dressing and jasmine rice

This calls for fresh sardines, grilled and served piping hot. The Thai dressing cuts beautifully through the oiliness of the sardines, while the rice is a delicate foil.

1 cup of jasmine rice
11/2 cups of water
2 cloves of garlic, peeled
2 red chillies, chopped, seeds left in
1 thumb galangal
1 stick of lemon grass, outer skin removed, insides chopped
5 fresh curry leaves (optional)
1 small bunch of coriander, chopped
1tbsp palm sugar
1tbsp tamarind
11/2tbsp fish sauce
8 sardines, filleted

First, cook the rice. Rinse it quickly under cool running water and place in a saucepan, add a pinch of salt and cover with the water. Bring to a bubbling boil. Turn the heat immediately to low and cover with a tight-fitting lid. If you have a simmer mat, sit the rice on that and cook on the lowest heat for 20 minutes. Uncover and allow the steam to escape, then fluff to separate the rice with a fork.

While the rice is cooking, make the dressing. Place the garlic, chillies, galangal (available from Thai supermarkets), lemon grass, curry leaves and coriander in a mortar and pound with a pestle until you have a rough paste; add the palm sugar (or use caster sugar if you can't find it) and continue to pound, than add the tamarind and fish sauce. The taste should be punchy but well-balanced, neither too hot, sour nor sweet. Set aside; this dressing is best eaten within a couple of hours of making.

Towards the end of the rice's cooking time, heat your grill to its highest setting. Lay the sardines skin-side up and cook without turning for two-and-a-half minutes or until the skin has begun to blister. Remove from grill. Divide the cooked rice among four bowls, lay the sardines on top and spoon over the dressing.

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This calls for fresh sardines, grilled and served piping hot. The Thai dressing cuts beautifully through the oiliness of the sardines, while the rice is a delicate foil.

1 cup of jasmine rice
11/2 cups of water
2 cloves of garlic, peeled
2 red chillies, chopped, seeds left in
1 thumb galangal
1 stick of lemon grass, outer skin removed, insides chopped
5 fresh curry leaves (optional)
1 small bunch of coriander, chopped
1tbsp palm sugar
1tbsp tamarind
11/2tbsp fish sauce
8 sardines, filleted

First, cook the rice. Rinse it quickly under cool running water and place in a saucepan, add a pinch of salt and cover with the water. Bring to a bubbling boil. Turn the heat immediately to low and cover with a tight-fitting lid. If you have a simmer mat, sit the rice on that and cook on the lowest heat for 20 minutes. Uncover and allow the steam to escape, then fluff to separate the rice with a fork.

While the rice is cooking, make the dressing. Place the garlic, chillies, galangal (available from Thai supermarkets), lemon grass, curry leaves and coriander in a mortar and pound with a pestle until you have a rough paste; add the palm sugar (or use caster sugar if you can't find it) and continue to pound, than add the tamarind and fish sauce. The taste should be punchy but well-balanced, neither too hot, sour nor sweet. Set aside; this dressing is best eaten within a couple of hours of making.

Towards the end of the rice's cooking time, heat your grill to its highest setting. Lay the sardines skin-side up and cook without turning for two-and-a-half minutes or until the skin has begun to blister. Remove from grill. Divide the cooked rice among four bowls, lay the sardines on top and spoon over the dressing.

Post from: www.independent.co.uk

Tristan's menu offers something for every appetite

In late fall, Tristan restaurant saw the departure of its talented Irish chef for the West Coast and sunny climes of San Diego. Quickly, chef de cuisine Aaron Deal was appointed the executive chef. This Johnson & Wales graduate has found a culinary home in the contemporary cooking at Tristan.

With his passion for ingredients and commitment to local and sustainable resources, this young chef was wise enough to leave well enough alone on the menu and carefully added his own signature dishes — such as a Butternut Squash Terrine ($10) with Split Creek Farm Goat Cheese, ginger snap toast, pepitas (pumpkin seeds) and tender arugula leaves. The popular Pomegranate Beet Salad ($12) remains, with the earthy flavors of the tiny and tender beets, endive grilled to a sweet and crispy char, and the salty crunch of pancetta lardons (think bacon bits). Strewn with fromage blanc, it is a still life with pomegranate vinaigrette.

The appetizer menu is well constructed in variety, texture and playfulness.

The she-crab soup ($8) is presented as a frothy cup of "cappuccino" with foamed parsnip cream over the top. Lamb ribs ($12) are cloaked in the house-made (and available for purchase) chocolate barbecue sauce. The sauce has all the complexity of a Mexican mole but is used in simplicity to balance the hickory smoked ribs. The Crab Cake ($14) is excellent — lumps and chunks of backfin served with roasted corn kernels and soybeans, splashed with a lobster emulsion and sprinkled with sweet sea urchin roe. Its panoply of flavors and freshness of ingredients resonated in quality and simplicity.

Mussels ($10) "speak" with an Asian accent in their preparation. They are served in a hot-and-sour broth with succulent braised pork belly, sesame-flavored vegetables and young shoots of sprightly cilantro.

Chef Deal travels the globe in ingredients and preparations: black edamame with short ribs, sauce Perigueux with sweetbreads, a squash and a quinoa risotto; pickling cherries, candying kumquats, drying grapes, perfuming broth with vanilla, and pairing white tuna with black truffle agnolotti.

Ingredients also have their pedigrees, such as Keegan-Filion Farms chicken, Harris Farms rib-eye steak, specially cultivated Tristan turnips, Paddlefish caviar and Port Reyes blue cheese, to list a few.

The Keegan-Filion Farms Chicken ($26) was delicious. An airplane-style breast (wing on) was poached to tender succulence, served with a pillow of buttered pommes puree (mashed potatoes), along with tender and sweet sugar snap peas and foraged mushrooms. Sauce Marsala spoke to its Italian heritage. This simple dish redefined the chicken and mashed potato genre.

They got us with a gimmick, the Tomahawk Rib-Eye Steak ($55). You do need to see it to believe it — a nearly foot-long rib, frenched with clinical precision, attached to a 2-inch-thick steak, being raised on a diet of corn, hay, grass, legumes, lazily eating its way to weight and flavor. You just want to pick it up by its bone handle and participate in carnivorous gluttony, Tom Jones-style, and we did. Kudos to the kitchen for crafting a sauce Perigueux — reducing a French mother sauce, stratifying with truffles and foie gras, enhancing with Port and cognac, and cooking slowly and patiently to form a culinary tempera to glaze the gargantuan beef.

The composition of the menu truly offers something for every appetite. The appetizers (hot and cold) can easily be combined for an inventive meal.

Post from : www.charleston.net

WHAT IS PALM SUGAR?

Palm sugar is a natural sweetener made from the sap of palm trees.

When the palms are from 15 to 20 years old they commence flowering and it is only then that they yield the sweet sap from which palm sugar is made.

Toddy tappers have to be extremely agile to shin up palm trees with only a circle of rope around their ankles for support. The sap flows when the inflorescence is tapped but first it must be beaten (gently) with a mallet for a couple of days. A small slice is taken off the end and a receptacle (usually an earthenware pot or gourd) hung close to the cut to collect the sap each night. The sap is known as 'sweet toddy' and for those lucky enough to be around when this is brought in, has a taste of ambrosia. The fresh sweet toddy is boiled down shortly after collection to make palm syrup and palm sugar. If this is not done, within a few hours the 'sweet toddy' ferments into a sour, potent brew called toddy, a very intoxicating drink. It is the 'cheap grog' of tropical lands and is not fit to drink the next day.

To concentrate the nectar into solid sugar, the fresh juice is boiled down and evaporated before being poured into bamboo sections to form cylindrical shapes, or into coconut shells so they emerge as large shallow hemispheres, or into small baskets woven of palm leaves. In this form, the sugar has to be scraped or chipped from the rather hard block. This gur as it is called in India, or jaggery as it is known in Sri Lanka and Burma, gula melaka in Malaysia or gula jawa in Indonesia, is used on a daily basis in these countries as a sweetener.There is no identical Western counterpart, but there are substitutes which give a reasonable flavour likeness.Palm sugar is sold in rounded cakes, cylinders, blocks or large plastic or glass jars. This sugar, even when soft, can be extremely dense and very sticky.

source : http://gulasemut.blogspot.com/

Palm Sugar

Palm sugar was originally made from the sugary sap of the Palmyra palm or the date palm. Now it is also made from the sap of the sago and coconut palms and may be sold as "coconut sugar." The sugar is a golden brown paste, sold in tubes, blocks or tin cans. It may be light-colored or dark, soft and gooey or hard. As a lightly-processed product of cottage industry, it varies greatly from batch to batch.

In Thai cuisine, palm and "coconut sugar" (nahm dtahn bpeep/buk and nahm dtahn maprao) are used interchangeably. However, it may be an important distinction for those concerned with frugivory that "coconut sugar" is in no way derived from the coconut fruit itself. Quoted in the linked thaifoodandtravel.com page below is the following clarification: "Although the names are used interchangeably, palm sugar and coconut sugar are not the same. One comes from the palmyra or sugar palm and the other from coconut palm, but both are produced from the sweet, watery sap that drips from cut flower buds."

In Indonesia, sugar made from the Borassus (Palmyra palm) is known as Gula Jawa ("Javanese sugar") or gula merah (red sugar)

Gula melaka is made by first extracting the sap from the flower bud of a coconut tree. Several slits are cut into the bud and a pot is tied underneath the bud to collect the sap. Then, the sap is boiled until it thickens after which, in the traditional way, it is poured into bamboo tubes between 3-5 inches in length, and left to solidify to form cylindrical cake blocks. Alternatively it can be poured into glass jars or plastic bags. Gula melaka is used in some savoury dishes but mainly in the local desserts and cakes of the Southeast Asian region. Gula Melaka Sago pudding, shown in the picture, is one of many desserts made with gula melaka. It is among some of the more popular gastronomic delights of Peranakan (Chinese-Malay) origin. Basically, this dish consists of a bland sago pudding served with gula melaka syrup. In some ways it resembles the international Creme Caramel and differ only in the ingredients used. It can be served either chaud or froid. To enrich the pudding, coconut milk or 'santan' its Malay name, is added to it. Santan is the South-East Asian non-dairy counterpart of the dairy cream, the latter either whipped or in liquid form, is used mainly in Western cuisines but both add richness or provide viscosity when these are required.

Bangladeshi's have two varieties of Palmyra sugar. One is unrefined and is in the form of hard blocks of dark brown sugar. This known as Karuppatti. This is used as a sweetener for making certain types of cakes and biscuits. The other is refined and is available as granules of crystalline sugar. This is known as Panam KaRkaNdu. This has medicinal value. It has the power to liquify phlegm from the lungs. It is also profusely used in treatment of sore throat when dissolved in boiled concentrated milk. Musicians use it on a regular basis in combination with other medicinal spices and herbs.

Palm sugar is often used to sweeten savoury food to balance out the salty flavour of fish. Its primary use in Thai cuisine is in sweets and desserts, and somewhat less often in curries and sauces.

take it from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_sugar