What's Cookin'...

The scalloped edge curry puff

So last week I decided to up the ante on Adventure Day a bit and join forces with 10 other expat wives for an all day cooking class at a local Malaysian bungalow led by local Malaysian chefs. It was, dare I say, very "local." On the menu for the day was Beef Rendang, Curry Puffs, and Teh Tarik (which I suppose with enough imagination and wishful thinking is the Malaysian equivalent of beef stew, pot pies, and sweet tea.). A far cry from my beloved Luby's LuAnn Platter from yesteryear, but as they say, when in Malaysia....

 So anyway, we all met up at one of the girl's houses and then caravaned our way up to this cute little cooking bungalow outside of town where we were met with the most gracious of Malaysian hostesses who seemed to be just as entertained by all of us "expats" as we were by them! Cooking with all local ingredients very common to these parts, we found ourselves drowning in a combination of our own sweat and the buckets of palm oil used for frying up all of these local "delicacies," but we had a blast diving in to all of these Asian flavors. The beef rendang is simply beef  that's been slow cooked/fried in oil with a tasty spice mixture of fresh ginger, galangal, turmeric, lemon grass, Thai chilies, and a few other ingredients I've either forgotten, can't pronounce, or decided to omit from my own personal pot of rendang. As fare as the curry puffs go, well you can just get as creative with them as you want to be. They're a lot of fun to play with. To form the "puff" part of the dish, you basically just start with a mound of butter, a couple handfuls of flour and then form the dough into nice, thin little circles. Next you saute whatever you're stuffing your puff with (we used diced onions and potatoes seasoned with....well...curry...in our class, but the puff possibilities are endless). Then you pile a spoonful of the stuffing onto the middle of the pastry rounds, flap it over, seal up the sides, and then make a lovely little scalloped edge using the part of your thumb and forefinger that I apparently have absolutely no control over because my "scalloped" edges looked more like, well, the exact opposite of scalloped edges whatever that's called. The very sweet, very patient chefs at the school noticed that I was in obvious need of some professional puff pointers because they came to my rescue and worked with me until I got it right....well, as close to right as they decided I was going to get it anyway. After shaping them into "perfect" little puffs, we dunked those little guys into the sauce pans and just let the palm oil work their magic until they were nice and crispy. Finally, it was teh tarik time....my favorite part of the glass. "Teh tarik" literally means pulled tea (and pulling tea around here is a serious art form). Workers in coffee stands all over town actually compete for bragging rights (and tarik trophies) over who can pull the best tea. It works like this: You have to pour piping hot tea from one jug into the other. The higher the pour, the thicker (and better) the froth. And tea here isn't just tea. It's 1 part tea, 1 part boiling water, and 10 parts sugar and condensed milk. Pulling the tea this way helps to bring out all the flavors in the milk and also helps cool the beverage at the same time, making it ready to drink as soon as it's served (how silly of me for serving mine over ice all this time when I could have been pulling it to cool it off instead)! I feel a competition coming on at the next family reunion!!

Beef Rendang - Before 

Beef Rendang - After

My not-so-perfect puffs 

Pulling Teh Tarik...an accident just waiting to happen