Celebrating 10 years of the Sambal Lady / Auria’s Malaysian Kitchen

Today, we made the trek out to Flatbush, Brooklyn, for the 10th anniversary celebration of the Sambal Lady, also known as Auria’s Malaysian Kitchen. To optimize for families and young children, Auria and her beer partner Josh decided on two dining sessions, one at 4pm and one at 7pm. So we choose the 4pm slot to ensure Pookster got home at a semi reasonable time to sleep.

We’ve been attending Auria and Josh’s joint Malaysian food/beer events for the last three years: the first year in 2021, I was about seven months pregnant with Pookster. Last year in 2022, we came out on a very rainy September evening for “Laksapalooza” and parked Kaia in her car seat under an umbrella on Auria’s deck once she fell asleep; this year, Kaia is walking, and we brought her in a stroller. The meals are always held in Flatbush right in Auria’s massive backyard. It’s always a bit of a novelty for us to be in anyone’s backyard here in New York City, as you rarely think of New York City as a place where you’d not only see detached, multi-story homes (this one has FOUR levels if you include the basement!!), but also large backyards with decks! And feeling quite suburban, Auria’s green thumb certainly shines in her backyard: she grows massive pots of Italian and Thai basil, makrut lime, endless other herbs, and elephant ears, amongst other seasonal vegetables.

I’ve always loved cooking for small dinner parties we’ve hosted over the last 11 years of being together. But I have rarely, if ever, prepared meals for more than 10-12 people. So when I think about preparing a massive dinner party for a group of 50+ the way Auria does at these events, all I can think about is total chaos. How do you cook at scale while also ensuring high quality? Is there going to be enough food? Can we ensure that each dish will be served at the correct doneness and temperature? But Auria’s been doing this for the last 10 years, so this is one of her big joys and specialties. She outsources a lot of help, including rented furniture, front-door security, setup, and cleanup. She asks supportive friends for extra help in the kitchen and also hires additional kitchen help. And with having her beer friend Josh involved, she doesn’t have to worry about drinks or booze since he and his people will cover that. Auria also has industrial sized pots and pans to cook her massive portions of food. Tonight, the menu included spinach and chickpea fritters served with mango coulis, her signature and much loved beef rendang, white rice, Malaysian cucumber salad, and a stir-fry of fried tofu puffs and vegetables. And as a seasonal touch for dessert, she also brought back 200 white lotus seed paste and red bean moon cakes baked by a local Chinese bakery in her hometown of Seramban, Malaysia, which she visited just a few weeks ago (since yesterday was Mid-Autumn Moon Festival).

Much to my dismay since Kaia has been on a heightened level of toddler selectivity this week, Pookster ate nothing at the event other than a large chunk of red bean mooncake. That actually did make me happy, though, since that was Kaia’s very first mooncake as well as her first time having red bean. It made me feel happy that her first mooncake was made in Asia (mmmm, Chinese food in Malaysia) and made at a bakery that has Auria’s stamp of approval. I didn’t get to talk much to Auria directly since she was running around everywhere all at once to ensure everyone was happy and things were going well, but she did tell me she’s an originalist when it comes to mooncakes given her upbringing: white lotus seed paste and red bean are her favorite fillings for mooncakes, and they are also some of the OG Cantonese flavors for mooncake. These were made a little different with the addition of small watermelon seeds, which I’d never had before. What a nice and unique crunch!

In the last few years, I have seen other brands of kaya jam that are imported from various countries in Southeast Asia, but when I think about potentially trying them, the thought disappears after a second or so when I look at preservatives noted under the ingredients list, or when I think about how the flavor would compare with Auria’s pandan kaya jam. Why bother fixing what’s not broken? We named Pookster after Auria’s pandan kaya jam, after all, so it will always be close to our hearts. Auria had previously asked if I had tried another “modern” kaya jam that I’d gotten a lot of social media ads for, but I told her this same sentiment: Meh, why bother trying it when I know this one is so good? Auria even mentioned this during the short speech she gave at the event, to which Pookster started clapping and yelling “yayay!’ like crazy. It’s like Pookster inherently knows.

Bo ssam on a Monday night

One of the greatest things about working from home is the level of flexibility I have, plus the extra time I have to do things that is *not* spent on commuting. When I’m working from home, it’s easy for me to take breaks by stretching my body out, doing wrist/elbow exercises with small weights to keep my mild carpal/cubital tunnel in check, and even do meal prep for dinner. This Monday, I had only a couple meetings in the early afternoon, so before I started my work day, I popped a six-pound pork shoulder into the oven at 300 F to slow roast for the next six hours. It would be ready just in time for dinner after I’d bring Pookster home from school. I’d periodically take a peek in the oven to see how it was doing, but other than that, it was pretty hands off, as the oven does all the work: that’s the beauty of “low and slow” with the oven or the Instant Pot, my most preferred ways of preparing weeknight meals.

Yesterday, I had already brined the pork shoulder, plus prepared two sauces: one ginger scallion sauce, and one ssam sauce (a mix of dwenjang, gochuchang, oil, vinegar, and honey). So once the bo ssam was ready, I just had to let it rest and cool, cut it, and then wash lettuce leaves to wrap.

Now, we have pork and sauces to eat the rest of the week. It’s a pretty good homemade meal week for us.

September means… it’s officially autumn! BRING ON THE AUTUMN SQUASH!

Summer ending can feel sad — once Labor Day arrives and we’re in September, it feels like the warm, jacket-less days are becoming numbered. I love summer weather when all I have to do is throw on a dress or shorts, and I don’t have to worry about layers.

But like with every year I’ve been in New York, I do get excited about September coming. I always look forward to all the autumn/winter squash, like butternut, buttercup, and kabocha (!). While zucchini is fine, and I tolerated yellow squash last summer because Pookster loved it so much, I’ve never been a huge summer squash person. I also love the pumpkin flavored things that come out everywhere, especially at Trader Joe’s. I look forward to stocking up on all my cans of Trader Joe’s organic canned pumpkin, plus seeing what new pumpkin products they have (and yes, I do check to see whether they actually have pumpkin in them). This past weekend, I picked up my first butternut squash for the season. And yesterday, I asked Chris to pick up yet another one since they were on sale at Whole Foods. I am looking forward to buying even more as the month progresses, and more varieties of squash become available.

A colleague asked me, referencing the squash in the background of my apple cider donuts picture from yesterday, if my background with all that squash (seriously, there were just two!!) and apples was real, or a photo board. I told her that yes, all the food, both in the foreground and background, were real. Why would they not be…?!

“Wow! How can you have that much squash at your house!” she exclaimed.

How…? I responded, a bit confused. How… not at this time of year?

Yu xiang qiezi aka “fish fragrant” eggplant at home

When I was growing up, we enjoyed regular meals out as a wider family, with my grandma, aunt, uncle, and three cousins who lived upstairs from us. The meals were always at the latest Cantonese restaurant somewhere in the Richmond District of San Francisco that my grandma deemed “the best” at the time for Cantonese Chinese food. When I started getting into my tweens and teen years, my aunt always insisted that “the kids” have a voice when ordering. And because I loved eggplant, I would request it as soon as I was asked. So my aunt always made sure that there was some tofu dish and some eggplant dish at the table especially for me.

The thing I found funny, though, was my aunt used to say that I always wanted to eat “healthy foods.” Little did any of us know back then that the Chinese preparation for eggplant was really anything but healthy: to get that silky smooth, buttery, luscious texture in each bite of eggplant, the eggplant actually needs to be deep fried. After deep frying, it’s then lightly stir fried in a sauce that is known as “yu xiang” or “fish fragrant,” with a chili bean paste that is characteristic of Sichuanese cooking. Even the Cantonese restaurants do it this way, just with perhaps a different version of chili bean paste. Then, it’s served, glistening, silky, smooth, and with the eggplant skin nice, bright, and purple.

Both my mom and aunt tried replicating this at home by simply sauteing the eggplant. It never worked: the eggplant texture was always squishy instead of silky smooth; the eggplant skin would turn from bright purple to this sad, miserable brown color. When I moved out and started cooking on my own, I tried doing things like steaming (tasty, but again, not the same. Plus, in a stir-fry it would totally fall apart into mush) or roasting/broiling (good, but again, wouldn’t stay in tact). But finally, I decided after my corn and coconut fritters worked with some shallow frying that it was finally time to shallow fry eggplant. I wasn’t doing it totally traditionally: I wasn’t deep frying the eggplant. I was soaking the pieces in a salt water mixture to a) remove any bitterness and b) prevent the eggplant from soaking up too much oil, which I didn’t want. I shallow fried the eggplant in my Instant Pot for 4 minutes per batch, drained on a towel, and lightly stir fried. And I was totally floored… if I can even say that about something I cooked myself: it really tasted and looked restaurant quality. The eggplant pieces remained in tact and the skins were bright purple and glistening. Each bite was addictive, super luscious in the mouth. And the sauce was perfect — not too spicy but very savory. Kaia enjoyed the sauce, too, but kept smushing the eggplant itself in her hands…

For health reasons, I probably won’t be making yu xiang qiezi that often at home. I also don’t love shallow frying because even if it’s not deep frying, it’s still way more oil than I am used to cooking with. But I had a deep satisfaction in knowing I faced my fear with frying eggplant and can easily replicate this when I’d like in the future… pretty much anytime. It really was delicious and made me feel proud.

Instant Pot for shallow frying

The Instant Pot official site explicitly says that it does not recommend using the Instant Pot on “saute” mode for frying. “Frying” or “deep frying” is *not* a mode on the Instant Pot. But when you look at all the Instant Pot comments and posts in Instant Pot groups that are dominated by Asians and Asian Americans, you can see very clearly that they have found *the* solution for mess-free shallow or deep frying: IN THE INSTANT POT because the walls are so high, and so any splattering would be fully contained. It’s a win for everyone! And because the Instant Pot is so contained, you can also use less oil for shallow frying, which I think pretty much everyone would like when frying. It’s less waste, less mess, and less oil (less $$) to use.

After six years of owning an Instant Pot, I finally decided to try this out using a recipe from my Andrea Nguyen cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. I made her batter for corn and coconut fritters and shallow fried them in the Instant Pot, and WOW, was it not only quick to heat up, but it was so clean and mess free! I had virtually no splatter at all to clean up and just the Instant Pot insert to clean and wipe down. I was so satisfied with this experience that I’ve now decided to try shallow frying eggplant, which I’ve always wanted to do, but was scared of because of all the oil and mess. So tomorrow, here I come: shallow fried eggplant!

The garlicky goodness that is toum

A few years ago, Chris and I were exploring the multi-ethnic (and multi-delicious) area of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, when we walked into a tiny little shop called Karam Restaurant. At the time, Karam had about three small tables and was really meant for takeout orders. Despite being a tiny store front, they had quite the variety of foods, both ready made and made to order, ranging from freshly roasted shawarma, wraps and sandwiches, savory pies, the equivalent of Middle Eastern style “pizzas,” and different types of baklava and other Middle Eastern sweets. We ordered one shawarma wrap, which was made to order, and we ate inside. While the shawarma meat and the wrap and all the vegetables inside were delicious, what really, really stood out to me was this incredible, thick, whipped, white garlic-aioli-like sauce that the wrap was generously slathered with. I had no idea what this sauce was called, but I immediately looked it up later to find out that it was a much loved Lebanese garlic sauce called toum. Toum is a simple sauce made of just four ingredients (fresh garlic, neutral oil, salt, and fresh lemon juice), blended and emulsified to create an airy, whipped, creamy garlic sauce, thick enough to slather on your favorite Lebanese roasted meats and vegetables… or really, anything that needs a bit of extra flavor or oomph. I was sold. It seemed so simple with just four ingredients, and I knew I had to make it.

But when I looked up recipes for it, I felt a bit deterred when I found out how finicky it actually was: toum had a tendency to become very bitter if you didn’t treat the garlic properly. And what I mean by that is: you need really, really fresh garlic for toum, like the freshest possible that you can find. The reason for this is if you do not, the inner part of the garlic, which if it’s old, can impart bitterness. You usually know if your garlic is a bit older if when you cut a clove in half, you can see a little green or lighter white sprout. So if you have access to just standard supermarket garlic like I do, you will need to go through the extra step of cutting every single garlic clove in half and manually removing the inner white/green part. That sounded like too much work, especially given you need at least half a cup of garlic cloves to make a decent amount of toum to store! And given I do not have access to garden fresh garlic, I was a bit hesitant.

But today, I decided to finally just cave in and make it. I needed toum as an ingredient to make the home version of “white sauce” for the halal style chicken and rice bowls I wanted to have for dinner. So I sucked it up, cut each clove in half, removed the center, and went on my way. I blended and emulsified the toum, and…. wow. Just wow. The sauce honestly tasted just as good as I remember it from Karam. It was SO GOOD — so intense, so garlicky, so singing with flavor.

Now, I’ve got an entire jar’s worth of this whipped white glory in my fridge that will store beautifully for the next four months. I can’t wait to find other things to use it for.

shawarma

Toddler selectivity heightened – when “soup” isn’t soup

Since Kaia got sick a few weeks ago, she’s been very hit or miss with a lot of the foods I’ve made. Some days, she will eat an adult sized portion of roasted carrots. The next day, she won’t even look at them. I tried making French lentils and serving them plain to her late last week. She ate a lot of them the first day, and ever since, she refuses to eat them. I’m not sure who she learned this from, but she started gathering all the lentils and tucking them into her bib, as though I would not even notice and assume she ate them – a very sneaky baby!

I figured it would make sense to just blend them into a soup. I had made fresh stock just a couple days ago in my Instant Pot and just had to saute some onions, aromatics, vegetables, and spices with it all. She’s always loved soup and has enjoyed the matzo ball soup that Chris has gotten me twice over the last three weeks. So I made the soup and blended all the lentils so that it was just a creamy, smooth bean soup. When I told her she was having soup, her face lit up, and it was clear she was excited… and likely anticipating a clear soup like matzo ball. So when she saw her bowl, she got mad and yelled, “No! No! No!” over and over and waved the bowl away. I didn’t push. I just put my bowl of soup up on her tray and ate my soup, spoon by spoon, in front of her, emphasizing how tasty and yummy it was. Finally, I watched her as she watched me, and I saw that she was getting FOMO. So I tried again: I put a small amount of soup on a spoon and lifted it to her lips, and finally, she opened her mouth and took it. She winced a little, then swallowed, smiled, and exclaimed, “Tasty! More!”

Win win for me. And then she proceeded to eat an entire bowl, insisting that she put the spoon in her mouth herself.

Cooking hacks when you run out of bread crumbs: use flour and frozen cheese

While preparing my mise en place for my chicken tenders today, I realized that I didn’t make enough bread crumbs earlier in the week for these chicken tenders. That was annoying, but then I also realized that I didn’t have enough grated parmesan cheese, anyway, even if I really did have enough bread crumbs to triple the recipe. So instead, I breaded and baked as many chicken tenders as I could with my breadcrumb/herb/parmesan mixture, then created a workaround for my remaining chicken tenders: I coated the rest with egg, then tossed them around a mixture of seasoned flour, spices, and some shredded mozzarella that I had leftover in the freezer. Would these bake up the same as my chicken tenders with a proper breaded coating? No. But given that they were coated in shredded melty cheese and would be baked at the high temperature of 450 F, I figured they’d still turn out tasty.

Well, it looks like they all turned out well – the proper batch of chicken tenders and my hacked version. Chris even though the hacked version came out better and crispier. So maybe my kitchen skills haven’t totally fizzled during my sick time!

Lion’s Mane and Maitake (Hen of the Woods) Mushrooms from Baltimore Farmers Market

As soon as I purchased the lion’s mane and maitake mushrooms on Sunday, I was already excited about making them when we got home. I knew that given both would have delicate flavors and meaty textures that I’d want to lightly pan sear them with a little olive oil, a bit of butter, and season simply with sea salt and pepper. I remember I had also purchased a container of ricotta last week, so they’d go really well together on some crusty bread slices and a drizzle of olive oil. So that’s how I made them this morning. Unfortunately, to get the nice brown sear on both sides, I did create some smoke on my carbon steel pans, which did not sit well with Pookster’s eyes or our air purifier, even with the stove fan on high blast, but I had no choice. But at least it wouldn’t last too long. With one bite of both the maitake and the lion’s mane, and I knew that this purchase was absolutely worth it: the lion’s mane had this interesting, meaty, almost scallop like texture with a light flavor. The maitakes were a bit crunchy and had a deep, earthy flavor. I was obsessed with both and wish I had four times the amount. But if I did, I’d have spent $80, which I wasn’t really going to do with mushrooms… at least, not this time. These mushrooms looked, felt, and tasted extremely luxurious. I just love, love fungus — of the edible variety.

Oven “fried” chicken

I am pretty certain that everyone loves fried food, whether they want to admit it out loud or not. I’m also certain that everyone loves fried chicken, even vegans who are in denial. Who could really resist the crunch, the juiciness, and the delicious scent of chicken fat? However, what most people do not like is a lot of oil used for frying… in their own kitchen. It’s a LOT of oil that is required for deep frying, and potentially a lot of waste if you do not reuse the oil. There is also a fine line between re-using that oil enough times to get a good ROI vs. using it one time too many and getting a stale, greasy “fry.” But the crispy skin juxtaposed with the juicy meat quite the temptation. So many home cooks have tried to replicate “frying” with techniques used in the oven for similar results.

I’d had Amanda Hesser’s “oven fried” chicken bookmarked for years now. I always said that at some point, I’d prioritize buying bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs just to make this recipe, but I got so sucked into my usual routine of just buying boneless, skinless thighs that I’d always forget. Once I got Butcherbox, though, I decided I would slightly go out of my comfort zone and finally make this happen. And I did today! I used this recipe, brined, coated in a light flour/parmesan/smoked paprika coating, and oven “fried” with just two tablespoons of butter, for about one hour. And the result was incredible: the skin was super crackly and crunchy. And the meat was juicy and tender.

I’m looking forward to using this recipe again and again in the future, with slight tweaks here and there for seasoning, like garlic or onion powder. This was a hit!