Cooking
fromwww.theguardian.com
4 days agoCurry puff pies and king noodles: Ranie Saidi's everyday Malaysian recipes
Malay cooking emphasizes kindness and balance, celebrating the joy of sharing food with others.
"What we didn't expect was the response - customers were coming by, messaging us, and sharing stories about what the restaurant meant to them. It made us realize this wasn't just a place to eat - it had become part of people's routines and memories."
One isn't necessarily more nutritious than the other. They're just different foods. Peanut butter comes from a legume and almond butter comes from a tree nut, but nutritionally they're fairly similar. Both provide mostly healthy fats along with a little protein and fiber.
Med Salleh, which has has one Malaysian restaurant in Bayswater and two Vietnamese ones in Westbourne Grove and Earl's Court, has just added a fourth branch in Kentish Town. The newest site is Malaysian-focused, like the original, serving a menu of street food inspired by Med's upbringing in Malaysia, including dishes from his hometown of Kampar as well as flavours from Ipoh and Penang.
Consumers continue to seek clean-label, plant-based foods that deliver both convenience and authentic flavor. Our newest innovations build on Pulmuone's heritage of fresh, high-quality ingredients, offering versatile refrigerated solutions that make it easy to create globally inspired meals in minutes.
Soaked and blended, cashews become a stand-in for heavy cream, keeping stuffed shells, soups, pasta sauces, and desserts luxuriously dairy-free. Toasted and roughly chopped, they add crunch to salads, curries, stir-fries, and more. There are so many reasons to love cooking with these seeds-that's right, "cashew nut" is technically a misnomer, since they grow outside the fruit rather than inside a hard shell like true nuts.
By using the whole chicken, my aunt maximizes the flavor of the broth while also cooking the meat that serves as the dish's protein, rather than the sliced beef, tripe, and meatballs found in aromatic beef phở recipes. Her homemade phở broth is truly a labor of love. It's rich and aromatic, full of flavor, and umami rendered from the whole chicken as it cooks. The bones give the broth depth of flavor, while the fats, cartilage, and meat bring richness.
Mapo tofu is one of Sichuan cuisine's most iconic dishes. It consists of silky tofu bathed in a fiery, aromatic sauce that balances heat, numbing spice and rich umami flavor. Mapo tofu roughly translates to "pockmarked grandma's tofu," which is named for the elderly Chengdu woman who created the dish in the 19th century. The stew is traditionally made with soft tofu, ground beef or pork.
Soft tortillas filled with crisp, colorful vegetables and drizzled with a tangy peanut sauce make this an easy, no-cook, pick-up-and-go dinner. Everything comes together in minutes, with no stove time required, making it ideal for busy evening. The creamy peanut sauce adds bold flavor while the vegetables provide crunch and color, creating a light yet filling meal that's perfect when dinner needs to move at your pace.
Stir-frying is all about wok hei, or wok's air' in English, which you can think of as the height of fire', or the level of heat. It's said that Chinese cooks have good wok hei if they have a true understanding of the heat of their wok and how to handle it in all situations, and a stir-fry's success is based on the quality of the cook's wok hei.
Christmas is lovely, but my kids think Chinese new year is by far the best holiday. I might be biased, but, unusually, I am inclined to agree with them. As my eldest puts it, New clothes, cash, booze and food what's not to love? There's the added bonus that cash is absolutely more than acceptable in fact, it's de rigueur, so there's no shopping for mundane socks and smelly candles. Chinese new year is full of rituals and, just as at Christmas, every family has its own, but they are all variations on a theme. Symbolism looms large in Chinese culture, and at new year it centres around messages of prosperity, luck and family.
These citron noodles were inspired by the Buddha's hand citron I bought at the farmers' market last week. I find it near impossible to pass them up, and love their ability to perfume my entire kitchen while I dream up their citrusy fate. The fava beans came from the next stall, and everything else you see here was already on hand at home - furikake, chili crisp, butter, and miso.
Jasmine rice gets toasted until fragrant and lightly golden, then it's cooked with coconut milk to yield a supremely nutty base for the salad. Fluffy toasted rice meets crunchy slaw and seared tofu in my gingery, toasted rice salad. When you toast grains of rice until fragrant and golden, it takes on this nutty flavor that adds complexity to whatever you're making.