Taste Good Malaysian Cuisine

82-18 45th Avenue, Elmhurst, Queens
$20 each for 4 people, without drinks, with tip
718/898.8001
♥ ♥

One of my favorite eating partners was in town from Chicago, so I basically forced her to eat in Queens and drag Paul, her Malaysian friend, with her so he can order for the rest of us and show us Malay food in the city.

Tastiest:
1. Kangkong belacan – Call these hollow vegetables whatever you want: swamp cabbage, water spinach, ong choy or phak bung, but they will always be Filipino kangkong to me. Belacan, the Malaysian variety of shrimp paste is deliciously salty–the perfect side vegetable to any Southeast Asian fare.

2. Rojak – This sweet and sour dish had the best combination of texture: cuttlefish (soft), prawn fritters (crisp), cucumber (tender), jicama (crunchy), pineapple (soft), mango (fleshy), sesame seeds (toasty). Named after the Malay term for “mix”, it not only refers to the seafood-fruit-vegetable combo, but also the multi-ethnic Malaysian-Singapore influence.
3. Singapore kari laksa – How can you go wrong with curry as good as this? This bowl of yellow-orange noodles brought back such good memories of my trip to Singapore I almost wept. It turns out the hot broth that burst from my quickly eating the soft tofu squares were too spicy for me in one go. Burning my throat was worth it though.

Weird:
1. Petai beans with belacan and shrimp – Petai beans look like a larger version of fava, but they had a bitter aftertaste that was, for a lack of a better word, weird. And I rarely describe food as “weird”. After some Internet research, I found out why they would taste so weird: they’re called stink bean and resemble the smell of natural gas!

Disappointment:
1. Sizzling pork with marmite sauce – I was warned that the restaurant is now under new management, but that shouldn’t be a reason as to why they would serve a dish other than how it’s advertised. This dish was in no way sizzling–it was just on a plate that resembled a sizzling platter. The pork chops were soft, but lacked that chargrilled flavor I was looking for and tasted more like a bottle of store-bought sauce was lazily poured in.

Orecchiette with Shredded Pork and Greens

This isn’t a recipe for a new dish as much as it is a recipe for leftovers. I had made the Japanese buta no kakuni, or pork belly, two weekends ago and still had leftovers that kept pretty well in the fridge. When it came time for a home-cooked meal this week, I scooped some of the meat up together with the already-coagulated soy-flavored liquid and heated it in a wok before tossing in with some pasta and kailan, or Chinese broccoli. Almost any greens will do, but I prefer the sturdy bitter type. You can substitute shorter penne for the orecchiette, too, if that’s what you have in your pantry.

The sweet soy liquid that cooked down added to the sweetness of the meat and I didn’t have to season it with salt and pepper. Sometimes, the work you put ahead of time pays off much later–and in multiple meals. It’s like orecchiette with sausage and broccoli florets, only by your Asian grandmother.

Ingredients:
4 handfuls of orecchiette pasta
cooked pork belly (see recipe for buta no kakuni below)
a handful of kailan, throughly washed, chopped
red chile flakes

1. Bring a large pot of salty water to boil and cook the pasta until al dente, or about 20 minutes. Drain while reserving some of the pasta cooking water for later.
2. Heat a skillet and reheat the cooked pork belly. Prod the meat gently with a wooden spoon to shred it. Toss in greens and season with red chile flakes. Turn off the heat and add the pasta until well-combined.

Baked Eggplant with Minced Beef

After stopping by her family’s house in Westchester unannounced, Lucy’s father was forced to gather some tomatoes and eggplants from his incredible garden to send me home with some bounty. It’s the kind of garden that I can only dream of. There are rows and rows of different shapes and colors of tomatoes, all happily dangling from pipes meticulously tied together. All shades of aubergines peek from stems covered in fuzz and peppers of all sizes dot the compact landscape. When I was invited to their upstate cabin during Memorial Day weekend, I tasted the vegetables they picked from their garden and all I’ve been wanting to do was see it for myself. How can a small plot of land yield so much love?

Back in my apartment where the second batch of mixed greens I planted are not even making any more effort to grow past an inch, I thought of what to do with all the eggplants. If my father was in town, he would tell me to grill the slender Japanese kinds over the stove and mix with scrambled egg for a Filipino breakfast. But there was one large eggplant that looked good enough to be stuffed, and so I went through my Mediterranean cookbooks to find a recipe that did just that. The original Turkish recipe called for the beef to be baked with the eggplant. I didn’t do that because I didn’t want to dry out the beef and just opted to brown it separately. It all goes down when you serve: the eggplant flesh will be soft enough to scoop up and you top each serving off with the ground beef.

Ingredients:
a large knob of butter
2 lbs ground beef
1 red onion, thinly sliced
1 tomato, sliced
a handful of parsley, roughly chopped
salt
pepper
red chile flakes
1 large eggplant
olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 350º. Cut the eggplant in half and score the insides with multiple slits, both crosswise and lengthwise. Pour and brush some olive oil on the eggplant. Bake for 25 minutes.
2. In the meantime, melt butter and brown ground beef for about 10 minutes in a frying pan. Add the onion, tomato and parsley and cook. Season with salt, pepper and chile.
3. Remove eggplant to a serving plate and soften the cooked insides with a spoon so that you can stuff it with the beef.

Lemon-Ricotta Muffins

The last few times I watched Lisa bake, I was in awe at how easily she had a dozen muffins and a pie done. I realized that it was the KitchenAid mixer that helped her move faster; I don’t know why I always insist on mixing batter by hand! I guess to me doing it without the machine left me with less utensils to wash, but now I know better. I also learned how to be patient and leave the oven alone until the baked goods rose; this helped them keep their intended shapes. Now I know why mine always collapsed in the middle! I’ve always been from the school of poking while cooking when it comes to meat, but now I know you’re not supposed to do that while baking.

I was determined to work like she did the next time I tried baking at home. When that chance came up, I looked for a muffin recipe that used ricotta cheese because I had a pint of it left after I made my own ricotta-filled raviolis. I just needed two lemons to complete the recipe below.

I highly recommend the Microplane Premium Classic zester (mine comes in a pretty turquoise handle) to make some very fine lemon zest. You see a gadget like it in the store and you immediately think, Who really needs that much zest that another tool had to be invented for it? It turns out there’s a huge difference from finely-chopping lemon peel to using a sharp zester. Again, negative points to trying to do things by hand.

My only regret is not adding slivers of fresh strawberries or almonds on top to give it a prettier presentation. Next time I will, now that I know muffins are so much easier to make with the right tools.

Ingredients:
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup plus 1 tsp sugar
1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
finely grated lemon zest from 2 lemons
1 cup whole-milk ricotta cheese
1 large egg
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/2 tsp almond extract

1. Whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl to blend. Using an electric mixer, beat 1 cup sugar, butter, and lemon zest in a large bowl until light and fluffy.
2. Beat in the ricotta. Beat in the egg, lemon juice, and almond extract. The batter should be thick and fluffy.
3. Line 12 muffin cups with paper liners. Preheat the oven to 350º. Divide the batter and fill each prepared muffin cup halfway. Bake until the muffins just become a tad golden on top, about 20 minutes.

Recommended tool/s:
Microplane Premium Classic Zester

Perla

24 Minetta Lane off Sixth Avenue
$75 each for 3 people, with drinks, with tip
212/933.1824
♥ ♥

On a steamy Monday night, we were entertained by the Everybody Loves Raymond bartender lookalike at the bar.

Tastiest:
1. Fried pig’s ears – I can only cook pig’s ears Fergus Henderson style and they’re never this crispy and delicious
2. Squash blossoms – They’re usually bland and boring with goat cheese inside, but they used Caciocavallo and anchovies
3. Pasta with chanterelles and the pasta with tripe that did not taste like tripe at all

Underwhelming:
1. Braised octopus with oven-dried tomatoes – I can’t help but order octopus every time it’s on the menu, but with all their other decadent offerings, this was pretty tame.

Notable:
1. Great service at the bar – They make good Negronis
2. Splitting the primi pastas between two people

Warning:
1. $18 for half a dozen oysters! Yikes!