We had our second South East Asian cooking class on Tuesday night; this week it had a Burmese theme. We made two recipes this week, a Burmese Style Pork Curry and Burmese Stuffed Aubergines…we absolutely loved the pork curry but to be honest…I probably won’t bother making the aubergines again. Luckily we only took one aubergine with us (the recipe was for 3!)…unfortunately for our class mates, they didn’t have our forethought so they have a LOT of stuffed aubergines to work their way through!
The class is a lot of fun although a bit manic…for some reason we are always in a rush (and then the lesson ends up finishing half an hour early!) and we are generally told to cook the dish slightly differently than the recipe which can cause some issues when you’re suddenly told…”oh…you shouldn’t have done it like that”. We learn lots of great tips though, for example our teacher uses the same curry paste recipe that we used for the pork dish to make a chili paste…she just adds extra chilies and onions and cooks it slowly in some oil before putting it in a container to use for other meals such as the stir-fried snake gourd that she cooked for us (it was yummy!).
Even with only the one aubergine it still took us two nights to get through it! We had used pork mince in the filling and still had 200g of uncooked pork mince left over in the fridge so I decided to make some Steamed Pork Buns to go with the aubergine. I used the dough recipe out of “Sachie’s Kitchen” and the filling recipe from a website I found a few years ago. This usually works really well but I made the mistake of packing my buns too closely together in my bamboo steamers which meant that they didn’t have enough room to expand…the result…a tight and chewy dough…still tasty though 🙂
So now it’s Saturday and this morning when I woke up I decided to say “no” to muesli and “yes” to some kind of delicious breakfast treat out of one of my lovely cookbooks. This wasn’t an easy decision to make because generally I wake up very hungry and I want to eat immediately! But today…I held off…and after a speedy browse through my cookbooks (with a coffee and a few almonds to keep my strength up!) I decided on a recipe called Shakshuka out of Ottolenghi’s “Plenty”. This recipe took me a very agreeable hour to cook and it was well worth the wait. It has a lot of olive oil in it which concerned me to start with (and I have to admit that I reduced the quantity slightly) but I’m glad I didn’t reduce the oil too much because it cooks the vegetables beautifully. There is something so delicious about Mediterranean vegetables that have been cooked slowly and lovingly until they are soft, sweet and shiny…add a runny egg to that and really…it is heavenly!
This experience has taught me that I need to say “no” to muesli more often and “yes” to Shakshuka!! My husband agrees… 🙂
for the love of cookbooks... 