Whether it’s the fresh herb-driven dishes of southeast Asia, India’s heady spices, the diverse regional cuisines of China or Japan’s unique dishes, we’re in love with Asian flavours. Here are some of my favourite Asian recipes.
Lotus Paste Shortbread Biscuits Cheong Liew tells me that these lotus paste shortbead biscuits are typically served with jasmine tea at the end of a Chinese banquet and, while golden lotus seed paste (lin yoong) is traditional, they can be filled with red bean (hong dou sha), black sesame (hei zhi ma xian) or any […]
Chinese Red-Cooked Chicken Salad Red-cooking is a classic Cantonese technique of braising food in dark soy sauce and Shaoxing wine to give it a burgundy hue. Inspired by a recipe of Cheong Liew’s, I use those ingredients to marinate chicken before baking it. Cheong served a deep-fried version of this dish as part of Neddy’s […]
Crisp Prawn-Topped Eggplant These crisp discs of prawn-topped eggplant are one of my favourite yum cha dishes and I’m grateful to my friend Cheong Liew for teaching me how to make them. When he cooks them, he adds pork mince (and back fat) to the prawn mixture, so feel free to experiment using either or […]
Cumquat Sambal I’ve eaten Cheong Liew’s cumquat sambal many times. He served it with barbecued hogget at a barbecue for Franz’s 55th birthday and he and Franz served it with lamb cutlets to thousands of people over 2 days at a James Beard festival in New York. Cheong’s given me the recipe several times and […]
Sticky Rice with Mango I find any dish with sticky rice addictively comforting, especially a dessert. So I adore khao neow mamuang, sticky rice with mango, which is one of Thailand’s most popular desserts. Glutinous (or sticky) rice is the staple grain of north-eastern Thailand and, despite the name, doesn’t contain any gluten, making it […]
Fresh Fruit with Spicy Thai Salt I was reminded of this classic Thai dish at Viand, when Annita Potter served a simple pre-dessert of pomelo segments alongside a little mound of ground salt, sugar, chilli and kaffir lime. I’ve bought sliced pineapple from Asian grocery stores with a little pod of the salt-sugar-chilli combo, but […]
Hot & Sour Prawn Soup (Dtom Yum Gung) Hot and sour soups are a classic on Thai menus. Although the version containing prawns, dtom yam gung, is perhaps the best known in Australia, ‘dtom’ simply means to boil and ‘yam’ to mix or toss together and these soups can be as basic or as complex […]
Thai Fish Cakes In Thai cuisine, dishes such as fish cakes and spring rolls are snacks, often bought from street vendors between meals. Thai fish cakes, tod man pla, have a springy texture, achieved by repeatedly ‘slapping’ the minced fish against the side of the bowl to develop the protein. Red fish works particularly well […]
Simon’s Wagyu Kway Teow Char kway teow, the popular Malaysian and Singaporean dish of stir-fried rice noodles, literally means ‘stir-fried rice cake strips’. Flat sheets of rice dough (called ‘hor fun’ in Chinese) are folded into blocks, cut into strips and separated into noodles. Char kway teow typically includes Asian clams and lup cheong sausage. […]
Edamame, soybeans in the pod, are a popular bar snack all over Japan … a bit like beer nuts or pretzels. You can buy them frozen from Asian grocers to have on hand when friends drop by for a drink. Simply blanch them (or better still pop them in the microwave for a minute) and […]
