Meal 104: Maldives

If you go to the Maldives, off the southwest coast of India, for a tropical beach vacation, you're more likely to find steaks and French cheese than any of the local cuisine. I'm not entirely surprised, because the intense flavor of sun-dried and smoked tuna runs that through nearly every meal is probably a bit too intense for the holiday-package crowd. This is only the second meal for which I've ordered an ingredient online, but there's simply no way to cook Maldivian food without that uniquely prepared fish. I was able to get it from a Sri Lankan market outside of LA, which wasn't a surprise, since they've imported so-called "Maldive Fish" for nearly a millennium.

Our guests: Maxwell and his mother Leslie, Bitsy, Anne, Steve, Julie, Levi, Kal, Lauren, Karen, and Andrea.

Karaa fani | Watermelon juice | Recipe

Simple as can be: watermelon pieces, water and sugar in a blender. Delicious and refreshing.

Lonumirus | Hot sauce | Recipe

A fairly thick sauce, fairly musky from the curry leaves and cumin. A good complement to the rich umami flavors from all the dried fish.

Mas huni | Dried tuna with coconut | Recipe (scroll down)

This is apparently an extremely common dish. Although the Maldives imports much of its food, this can be made with pretty much entirely local ingredients: dried fish, coconut, onion, chilies, and lime. It's also super simple to throw together. It's a unique textural mix of semi-jerky-like flaked fish, crunchy onions, and slightly chewy coconut. It was fun to eat, and pretty tasty.

Bashi hiki riha | Eggplant dry curry | Recipe

This dish shows the dried tuna in another light, as a flavoring moreso than the main event. This was a mess of eggplant and various veggies and spices. The term "dry" in the translation doesn't mean it's not moist, but rather that it isn't a saucy curry. This was a pretty intense and aromatic dish that needed some rice to balance it out.

Kaliya birinji| Spiced rice | Recipe

As there's barely space to grow things on these small islands, the traditional means of getting rice is to trade for it with that dried tuna. This dish is hardly a daily affair, with an indulgent assortment of spices as a hefty dose of coconut milk. But it's gentle and mild in the mouth, marrying well with the other dishes, especially the eggplant.

Pirini | Rice pudding | Recipe

This rice pudding would seem familiar to Western tastes — sugar, milk, vanilla, mild spices — but for one flavor unique to the tropics, pandan leaf, which imparts a gentle yet haunting nutty flavor. Compared with the intense flavors of the rest of the meal, this made for a nice wind-down.

Meal 103: Malaysia

It turns out there's a subtle but important distinction between "Malaysian" and "Malay." The latter refers to an ethnic group and their language; the former is the name of a country composed of many ethnicities of whom the Malay are but the largest. There are large populations of both Chinese and South Asian origin, as well as indigenous groups. And naturally, all of them, plus the English and Dutch colonizers, have sprinkled their spices and poured their sauces into an extremely tasty, and surprisingly deep, melting pot. Indeed, the hardest part of this meal was choosing just a few dishes from the pantheon of dishes to represent the country.

This meal was very popular, so we tried out a two-table arrangement for the first time. We were fortunate to have two Malaysians in our midst: Robert, a forester from Borneo learning from his counterparts in Oregon, and Christina, the mom of our dear friend Laura, who was there with her husband Craig. Also present: Will, Caitlin, Laura, Jill and her husband, our realtors Scott and John, Dede and Chris, and Robyn, Miles, and Aliza.

Teh tarik | Black tea with condensed milk

Brew some black tea (the cheap crumbly kind, not the fancy leafy type; normal stuff in a teabag is fine), mix it with a lot of condensed milk, and pour it in a thin stream back and forth between heat-resistent pitchers — after all, "tarik" means "pull," which is what you're doing. The milky-sweet tea will cool off to drinking temperature as you pour it back and forth, and get all wonderfully frothy. Yum.

Nasi lemak | Coconut rice with garnishes | Recipe

This dish is hugely popular in several countries in the area, and Malaysia claims it as a national dish. It can be eaten anytime, hot or room temperature, and usually for breakfast. The name means "fat rice," referring to the rich coconut milk in which the rice is cooked, but this dish is much more than that. While there are many variations, we made the classic: a spicy sambal with tiny anchovies, and toppings of plain fried anchovies, peanuts, and cucumber to accompany. 

It made for a great appetizer, an introduction to the rich coconut and spicy sambal flavors we'd encounter throughout the meal. The crispy garnishes were fun nibbles between more substantial bites while listening to a room of sixteen people introduce themselves.

Christine’s curries

Christine made two curries: one in the style of the South Asian population, the other more of a Nyonya (Chinese) variety. She can't find the recipes. Oh well, they were tasty!

Sarawak laksa | Seafood and chicken soup | Recipe

Laksa is a hugely popular dish in Malaysia and Singapore from Peranakan cuisine, the food of the descendants of Chinese migrants. While there are dozens of varieties, based around either coconut milk or a sour broth or both, what they all have in common is being a complex, usually spicy noodle soup.

The version I cooked is from Sarawak, the most westerly state on Malaysian Borneo. Peninsular Malaysia, the part between Thailand and Singapore, gets most of the attention and has most of the population. But the majority of the country's land mass lies across the South China Sea in East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. The rich red color comes from both chilies and that near-ubiquitous shrimp paste block known as belacan, and it's a hybrid laksa in two ways: it's got both coconut and sour elements, and it features both seafood and meat.

Most Malaysians would start a laksa from a store-bought sambal paste, but given my habit I made it all from scratch. Yet despite the dozen-plus ingredients in the sambal and all herbs and meats and whatnot, I found the flavors of the soup to be fairly flat. Not bad, but just a disappointment. Was it me, or the recipe? I don't know, but I won't be making it exactly this way again.

Char kway teow | Seafood and sausage noodle stir fry

I can’t decide whether this dish is more fun to make or to eat. It’s a whole lot of work to do it from scratch, to make the sambal, prepare all the various seafood, and get all the ingredients strategically positioned. But it’s that last few minutes of a fast-moving sequence that makes this one of the most entertaining dishes I’ve ever made: start with lard, stir fry garlic and sausage, add seafood and just barely cook, throw in noodles and sauce, push the stuff to the side, add more lard, crack in eggs, roughly scramble them into the noodles, throw in that sambal you worked to hard on, and finish with bean sprouts. All that in the span of just a few minutes! It’s intense and rewarding and smells amazing.

Oh, and it tastes great too. I’m writing this as I return from two weeks in Southeast Asia, where I tried three different attempts at this dish, in Singapore and Indonesia. I’m not sure whether Malaysians just have a better style or if this recipe in particular is fantastic, but I missed the char on the noodles, the richness of the spicy-fishy sambal, the sweetness of the Chinese sausage. Maybe the difference comes down to the lard, which those halal eateries didn’t use? Dunno, but I have some sambal left over and I’m gonna make this again soon.

Agar agar gula melaka | Palm sugar and coconut jelly

You’d think I’d have learned from the Borneo starch disaster that tapioca is not an appropriate substitute for palm sago, but no. My attempt at making a boiled dessert requiring the latter turned out to be a gloppy, tasteless mess, and was useless except for fueling my backyard compost. Thankfully, I have absorbed another lesson, which is to make dessert first, especially if it needs time to chill, so I had time to change course, and desperately searched for more Malaysian desserts.

I hit upon the Southeast Asian answer to Jell-O, and by a stroke of luck I had all the ingredients. Coconut milk was no problem as I’d bought a huge can, and I happened to have palm sugar left over from a previous meal. The agar agar, like gelatin but derived from seaweed, came from a molecular gastronomy kit Laura gave me two birthdays ago. Ten minutes later and this sweet and creamy dessert was sitting in the fridge, on its way to Jiggletown.

It was a hit! In fact, it probably went over better than my original choice would have. Being fairly intense with all that sugar and richness, a small square was enough for most, a godsend after such a big meal. Except for Aliza, who couldn’t get enough of it, and after eating several portions took the leftovers home.

Meal 102: Malawi

Malawi's a landlocked country in southern Africa, hugging the lake with which it shares a name. And Laura's sister's husband just so happened to do Peace Corps there, so Scott provided some enthusiastic and thorough advice on what to cook.

Joining us for the meal were Brett, Kaely, Lisa, Audrey, Elizabeth, Amy, and Jérémy and his French companions.

Nali sauce

Probably the single food item that other Africans will recognize from Malawi is this notoriously spicy chili sauce. While there's a site in Australia that seemed to be the only way to get it shipped to the US, they were completely out of stock when I checked before the meal. So, I had no alternative but to try it on my own, and to help me with this, Scott shared the ingredients and a description:

"Ingredients: water, birds-eye chilies, fresh paprika, onions, acetic acid, garlic, salt, stabilizer (E415), antioxidant (E300), preservative (E211).

It's quite simple. It doesn't come off as vinegar based despite the acetic acid... very heavy on the paprika and onion. No oil-- that would be more of a west african Piri Piri, at least in my experience. Out of the bottle it flows but is still a bit chunky."

So into the blender I threw these ingredients, minus the preservatives, and used dried paprika instead of what was probably meant to be bell pepper. To keep things easy (and spicy!) I used a whole pack of frozen Thai chilies, seeds and all. I regret not taking down the proportions, because the result was quite tasty, spicy for sure but with some body from the onions.

Fish and chips

As Scott describes: "at all markets and bus stands you will find chippies, which are thick cut potatoes fried in low grade vegetable oil in a freestanding, flat-topped fryer. These are the best thing ever, sprinkled with caked salt, chili powder, and fresh minced cabbage with vinegar. Man I am getting hungry." I couldn't stomach getting the actually cheapest oil I could find, but I did go with good old Wesson. Armed with a really puny french-fry slicer I got for a quarter at a yard sale, a sack of Russets, and a wok, I did my best version of roadside stand chips, complete with toppings. Very tasty.

Along with that I simply fried some tilapia filets, the closest thing I could find to chambo, a popular fish from Lake Malawi. On its own, plain fried tilapia is decent, but with some Nali sauce and the potatoes, all generously doused in vinegary shredded cabbage, it was a darn good snack.

Nsima | Cornmeal mush

Again, Scott: "The key is getting the nsima just right. It is typically cooked over an open fire and takes some serious arm strength-- constant stirring for 10-20 minutes at a full boil as it thickens. It's all basic food but challenging to get right." The best cornmeal to use is masa intended for tortillas, and just like other African mushes, you start by boiling water and then adding the grain until it's the right thickness. Nsima makes for the huge proportion of most Malawian meals.

Ndiwo | Vegetable stew | Recipe

As an indication of the primacy of the nsima, the vegetables typically served with it are generally referred to as "relish" in English. That is, they're there more to give flavor to the mush than as a substantial element of the meal. It's pretty much any green you can find — pumpkin greens are apparently the most common but it seems that almost any cookable leaf would work — sauteed and simmered with onion and tomato.

Beans | Recipe

Several sources, including Scott, rave about the quality of the beans in Malawi. It's unclear whether the beans themselves are so tasty, or if it's more about how they're prepared, but I gave it my best shot, and indeed they were quite flavorful. What's most distinctive about this technique is that the beans aren't drained, but rather cooked in a relatively small amount of water which then becomes a rich sauce once vegetables are added. My only variation on the recipe was to use vegetable oil, which surely is more authentic to the region than the specified olive oil.

Sweet potato ice cream | Recipe

The only thing this has to do with Malawi is featured ingredient. Dairy is rare in Malawi and refrigeration even less common. But I'd just gotten the machine and we were in a heat wave, so I took some creative license. It tasted like Christmas with cinnamon and nutmeg, and had a bit of graininess to it which was surprisingly pleasant.

Meal 101: Madagascar

The same geographic isolation that's led to the lemurs and other unique fauna and flora for which most of us know this island, also meant that even though it's not far on an absolute basis from where humankind emerged in East Africa, it wasn't settled until around 2,000 years ago. And, improbably, those settlers were Austronesian, probably from Borneo, having crossed the Indian Ocean westward in canoes — in other words, from the same ethnic core as Hawaiians and even Easter Islanders. As they did wherever they went, those Austronesians brought rice and pork with them, too.

Madagascar is so big — the fourth-largest island in the world — that before Europeans showed up, the folks living there didn't have a name for it. So there was nobody to tell Marco Polo that he really messed up when he confused the island with Mogadishu, the port city and current capital of Somalia, and then got it really wrong. So while Madagascar is indeed an exotic-sounding name, it was accidentally invented by a Venetian.

Our guest of honor was Mimi, from Madagascar, who helped us plan the meal and also help us understand what we were eating and why. We also had his wife Kirsten, their son, and Deena, Bengt, Molly, Julie, Levi Laura, Anna, Judy, Haley, and Mary — a big enough crowd that we needed two whole tables!

Vary | Rice

The basis of virtually every Malagasy meal, it’s typically served in tremendous quantities. I’m figuring its predominance is a legacy of the Austronesians. Despite its importance, I couldn’t find any description of how they cook it; Mimy said to just do the “normal” method of bringing to a boil then steaming.

Ranovola | Rice water

The water in Madagascar isn’t safe to drink, so you need to boil it. But the big pot was just used for making a bunch of rice, and it’s a pain to scrub off the bits of rice stuck to the bottom. The Malagasy solution is brilliant: just boil the water in the pot along with the stuck-on bits! The water gets a delightful toasty flavor, and the pan is a lot easier to clean.

You can drink this rice water warm or chilled; I chilled it. The flavor was indeed nice and nutty, though Mimy suggested I could have boiled it a bit longer to make the flavor even deeper.

Ravitoto sy henakisoa | Pork with cassava leaves | Recipe

Pork from the Austronesians and cassava from the African mainland (after having been originally brought from Brazil) combine to make a national dish that’s very emblematic of Madagascar’s cultural geography. I have to admit that cassava-leaf stews just aren’t my favorite, though to be fair I’ve only had them made from rock-hard chunks of frozen leaves, which can’t be ideal. That said, this was among the better I’ve had, the pork definitely adding a richness that central African preparations have tended to lack.

Tsaramaso | Beans | Recipe

Unlike several other African bean dishes I've made, which are very straightforward preparations with just a few vegetables for flavor, this one has two features that make for more flavor. The first is cooking the vegetables first and making a broth out of that, so the flavors can be absorbed throughout cooking rather than just mixed in at the end. The second is some seasoning, in the form of curry — perhaps we can thank trading ships on the Indian Ocean for that contribution. It went extra well with some fried tilapia, which probably should have been whole filets but ended up as pieces due to a bit of kitchen miscommunication. Oh well! All tasty over the requisite pile of rice.

Ro mazava | Broth | Recipe

When there's not much money or food around, a meal may consist solely of some rice supplemented by a weak broth of greens or maybe some bits of fish or meat. In my enthusiasm to incorporate a broad variety of Malagasy foods, I kinda went overboard, and made a broth of greens and fish in addition to the whole rest of the meal. Mimy said you probably wouldn't serve such a broth if you have other stuff, but all the same, it added some nice flavor to drink it warm alongside the meal.

Sakay | Hot sauce | Recipe (in French)

What a surprisingly successful condiment, especially considering I couldn't find a single recipe that gave proportions. To translate the linked recipe interpreted by what I did: equal parts by volume of garlic and black pepper (since there seems to be nowhere in the US to get the specified Voatsiperifery pepper), and a little less of bird's eye chilies (I used frozen ones from the Asian grocery). I threw in enough vinegar and oil to make a smooth texture, dashed in a bit of dried ginger and salt, and whizzed it up in the little food processor. The abundant black pepper gives it an unusual and intense dimension, and most importantly, Mimy said he loved it! We ran out, and

Mofo akondro ou koba | Steamed banana and peanut cake | Recipe

Fried desserts are a delicious treat, but really annoying for a chef who also wants to enjoy the dinner party rather than clean up the kitchen and spend time away from the guests wrangling hot oil. So, instead of the fried bananas which seem to be Madagascar's number one dessert, I went for another that can thankfully be made ahead of time: a batter of mashed bananas and rice flour spread onto banana leaves, wrapped around ground peanuts, and poached for a long time (I used the crock pot). The texture firmed up as it was supposed to, but it was pretty bit bland, and Mimy pointed out how it should be improved: put caramelized sugar in with the peanuts! Makes sense to me.

Meal 100: Luxembourg

Food from this little Grand Duchy bordering Belgium, France, and Germany is for sure Germanic, with pork and potatoes, but also with a surprisingly strong showing from fresh beans. It’s also one of the most northerly wine-growing areas in Europe — just about all of which is white — and we Noshers bring our A-game when wine is culturally appropriate. Or preserved meats.

IMG_20150502_110939

For a relatively simple meal from a little country, Luxembourg turned out to be a big occasion! It was our first Nosh in Brooklyn since moving nine months ago, and a nice round Meal 100 to boot. Michael and China were super-generous in hosting us in (and renting a second table for!) their ample Park Slope apartment, so we had a grand crowd of 16 for really fun evening with friends old and new. And I really enjoyed heading back up to Astoria to do the shopping.

Among the attendees were our friends Jessica, Miriam, Lisa, Kirsty, Anna, Eli, and Sarah-Doe!

Wäin | Wine

The wines of Luxembourg are similar varieties to those grown in the adjacent German Mosel and French Alsace regions: Müller-Thurgau and Auxerrois (very similar to Chardonnay) top the list, along with pinot gris and riesling. Alas, we couldn’t find any wines from the Grand Duchy, so we substituted with said neighbors. Generously.

Bouneschlupp | Green bean soup | Recipe

If schlupp isn’t an onomatopoeia for the slurping of soup, I’d be shocked!

Don’t be fooled by the simple recipe and lack of a stock, or dismayed at how long the green beans are simmered. Instead, focus on how you start by sautéing bacon in butter as an indication of this being a recipe 100% devoted to flavor.This is one rich, delightful soup, where every ingredient’s flavors shine through. Accordingly, make sure you’ve got what it calls for, particularly with smoked bacon and dried savory. Maybe you could make a good soup with unsmoked bacon or some other choice of herbs, but I doubt it’d have the particular richness of flavor we enjoyed.

Judd mat Gaardebounen | Smoked pork collar with fava beans and potatoes | Recipe

While this is given as one recipe, it’s really three dishes, all held together by a common ingredient: salty, smoky, meaty stock.

It starts with a smoked pork collar/neck, soaked for a few hours and then gently simmered with a generous assortment of the sorts of vegetables that make for a rich broth. (You could perhaps substitute another body part, but it’s gotta be smoked pork.)

That’s all it takes to make the pork; the rest is just taking that broth and using it to make the other parts really yummy. Fava (aka broad) beans trade one enrobing for another: peel-blanch-peel those notoriously well-protected beans, then smother them in a velouté made of roux, white wine, and some of that pork broth.

And the potatoes are par-boiled, skillet-fried until getting crisp, and then doused with a healthy dose of more broth which they happily absorb. (I recommend making quite a bit more potatoes than the recipe calls for, because in the worst case you end up with leftover salty-pork-broth-laden potatoes. And by worst case I think I mean best case.)

Yum! Pork so tender that it succumbs to a plastic knife, potatoes at just the right texture to be speared with a plastic fork (you’re getting the idea of what we ate with!) without falling apart, and creamy-salty sauce balanced by fresh-firm favas. Luxembourg, your national dish may be oddly specific, but you figured out a darn good thing.

Quetschentaart | Plum tart | Recipe

A quetsch is a damson plum, a tart variety best cooked into jam or pie. It’s also only available in the fall, and not exactly the sort of thing that’s popular enough to be shipped fresh from the Southern Hemisphere, so I had to get creative. One market I stopped into had both regular ripe plums (thanks, Chile!) as well as the sort of sour plums used to make those weird and wonderful Japanese preserves (who knows where they came from), so I got some of both in a vague hope that the combination would resemble a quetsch.

I’m not sure if I was successful in attempting the original with that combination, but it was tasty! China played the role of pastry chef, working together a really nice and solid crust. I think the egg in there helped. It’s an extremely simple recipe, but with a little whipped cream I think it turned out just fine. If I ever see damson plums at the market, I’m now intrigued enough to try making something with them.

Big thanks again to Michael and China for being so generous in so many ways for this special occasion, our 100th Nosh and return to New York! This feast couldn’t have happened without you.