Laksa - seafood noodle soup

Sometimes my cravings get so overwhelming that I end up spending way too much time and effort on satisfying them. Enter laksa, a deliciously fishy, rich and spicy noodle soup I first tried in an Asian food court in Markham, ON (First Markham Place, if you're wondering). I wanted it BAD, but not bad enough to drive 30 minutes to get it. Plus, the noodles they use have dairy in them and give me a tummy ache.

The laksa paste I made was based on a recipe I found online and adjusted for my own taste and the ingredients I had in the house. The laksa paste was the hard part, everything else about this recipe is dead easy.


The key to this paste is having a large and very rough mortar and pestle. You can definitely use a food processor, but I find that you won't get as smooth as a paste. That means the result will be a soup with small bits of galangal, shallots and other stuff, which is UNACCEPTABLE. I found this bad boy at Winners. It's ridges are super rough, and make short work of both dry and wet ingredients. It's about six inches wide and two inches deep. I would have preferred a bigger, deeper one, as it would be even better at keeping all the ingredients in the thing, but I couldn't find one and counter space is at a premium in my house. When you buy one, go for the granite variety and make sure it's super rough. I used to use a smoother marble one, which was great for dry spices, but terrible with grinding things like garlic. Instead of grinding it, it would just smoosh it up the sides. Very frustrating. Just spend the $40 and invest in a valuable kitchen tool that will last forever.

Laksa Paste Ingredients

• 6 dried long red chillies
• 1 tsp coriander seed
• 1/2 tsp paprika
• 1/2 tsp cumin seed
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 2 shallots
• 2 lemongrass stalks (the softer white parts, hard outer leaves removed)
• 1 inch galangal, peeled
• 1 tbsp peanuts
• 2 garlic cloves
• 2 tsp shrimp paste
• 4 dried anchovies (see note on ingredients below)
• 1 tbsp peanut oil

Let's do it!

1. Boil some water and soak the chillies in a bowl until soft. Drain the water and chop.
2. Toast the dried spices and peanuts in a hot pan. Let cool. Add to the mortar and pestle with the anchovies and grind into dust.
3. Chop the shallots, lemongrass, galangal and garlic.
4. Put everything except the peanut oil into the mortar and pestle. Pound and grind until you have a uniform paste. 
5. Mix in peanut oil.
6. At this point, I push everything into a silicone ice cube tray and freeze it. When frozen, I pop them out and put them in a freezer safe zipper bag for easy use later. This will make about 6-10 servings, depending on how strong you like your soup flavoured.

Yes, I realize you can see chunks of chilli pepper despite my rant about mortar and pestles above. Also, this is the leftover paste after I made the soup below.

Okay, let's put this all together.

Laksa Noodle Soup Ingredients

• 4 servings udon noodles (or whatever Asian noodles you prefer. I buy mine in the freezer area of the Asian grocery store)
• 1L chicken stock
• 200mL coconut milk, more if you like coconut milk a ton (see note on ingredients below)
• 2 tbsp laksa paste (or more, if you like a stronger flavour)
• 1 tilapia filet
• Peanut oil
• 1 cup of frozen, assorted seafood, rinsed well
• 1/2 cup chopped cilantro
• Sriracha

Let's do it!

1. Heat up the chicken stock, coconut milk and laksa paste in a pot and simmer for about 10 minutes, until the flavours meld.
2. Heat up a frying pan to high and add peanut oil. I used the same pan that I toasted the spices and peanuts in, which gave some added flavour. Fry up the tilapia until the outside is cooked. I do this to cook some of the water out of it, since I use frozen tilapia, which is super watery.
3. Chop up the tilapia into 1 inch squares.
4. Put the fish and other seafood into the broth and simmer until cooked, maybe another 5-10 minutes.
5. Cook the noodles in a separate pot according to package directions.
6. Put the noodles into bowls, pour soup and seafood over and top with cilantro and Sriracha to taste.
7. If you're lunching this up, pack the soup and noodles separately, as the noodles will soak up the broth and you'll get a thick, gummy mess.

A note on ingredients

Dried anchovies

I buy these at the Asian grocery store, in the dried goods section. They come in a bag. I find that these are super great for adding a seafoody, umami flavour to food without adding to the saltiness of the dish. 

I've actually made a umami powder by grinding up dried anchovies, dried seaweed and dried mushrooms. I've given it as gifts and people really enjoy it. I add it to Asian dishes that are tasting a little bland, but don't need any more salt.

Coconut milk

I've found that coconut milk comes in a variety of price points. The ones I buy are generally more expensive, and will be mostly just coconut milk and water. The cheaper ones have all sorts of preservatives and mystery ingredients in them. I can't confirm that the purer ones taste better, but why add any unneccesary ingredients?

Vegan Kimchi Fries

Please excuse the crappy cell phone photo

Every year my friends put together a vegan thanksgiving meal. Most of the people who attend aren't vegan, but we all love the challenge of making something delicious and vegan. My contribution this year was vegan kimchi fries. I had a non-vegan version at a Japanese restaurant last year and it sort of stuck with me.

This isn't a lunch thing you would take to work, but man, it was tasty.

Ingredients

• 2/3 package No Name Shoestring Fries (1kg)
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup vegan kimchi, roughly chopped
• 1 package Sol Cuisine Tangy Korean BBQ Meatless Chicken, sliced thinly, not sauced
• 3 tbsp vegan mayonnaise
• Sriracha to taste
• 4 stalks green onions, chopped

Let's Do It!

1. Heat a sauté pan on medium-high and add oil. Sauté the kimchi for about 10 minutes.
2. Add the meatless chicken and stir until heated through.
3. Add the sauce from the meatless chicken package and stir for about 5 minutes. Turn off heat and set aside to let the flavours permeate.
4. Cook the shoestring fries according to the package and put on a nice platter.
5. Reheat the kimchi/chicken mix on the stove, cover the fries.
6. Mix the vegan mayonnaise and and Sriracha to your preferred level of spiciness and flavour. Put in a ziplock bag. Cut off a small corner of the ziplock bag and drizzle over the dish.
7. Sprinkle with green onions.

This dish was a big hit. I can't wait to make it again with non-vegan options.

Penang Curry Paste

Back in one of my older posts (curry noodle soup), I linked to a recipe for Penang curry paste. It was the wrong one, which I discovered when I made it for a bunch of people.

I looked in my handwritten recipe book and found the real one. I'll be fixing the link, since that last one was no good.

Ingredients

• 5 dried chilis (I use birds eye chilis)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 large shallot, sliced
• 4 large cloves of garlic, mashed with the side of a knife and chopped
• 1 tbsp fresh ginger, chopped
• 1 tbsp lime zest
• 1 tbsp cilantro root (this can be hard to find, as most grocers cut the root off fresh cilantro)
• 1 tsp white pepper
• 2 tsp coriander seeds
• 2 tbsp peanuts
• 1 tbsp shrimp paste

Let's do it!

1. In a dry saucepan, toast the coriander seeds and peanuts until fragrant. Don't let them burn! Let cool.
2. Using a spice grinder, or a mortar and pestle, grind up the dry ingredients: chilis, salt, pepper, coriander seeds and peanuts.
3. Using a mortar and pestle, crush all the other ingredients. Depending on the size of your mortar and pestle, you may have to do them one at a time, and mix them together in another bowl. 
4. Mix everything together.
5. At this point, you can either cook with it, or put it all in a zipper freezer bag, flatten it and put it in the freezer. I'll break off chunks of this and let it simmer in coconut milk when I'm ready to make curry. This makes at least 6 servings of curry, depending on how spicy you like your curry to be. 

Note: I was gifted a spice grinder at our wedding and it is INCREDIBLE. I like to buy my spices unground, because I heard that they keep better that way, and it also makes it much easier to toast them, which a lot of Asian recipes call for. A spice grinder makes this recipe way easier to make.

Vietnamese Vermicelli with Chicken and Green Papaya Salad

It's hot. It's been about 40ºC with the humidex for over a week and not surprisingly, a heavy, hearty meal isn't what I'm looking for nowadays. I still love love love noodles, though, so here is a recipe for something I get pretty often in Vietnamese restaurants.

Vietnamese Chicken and Vermicelli

• 2 Chicken thighs
• 1/2 tsp five spice powder
• 1 1/2 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 servings vermicelli (I buy the kind that comes knotted in single servings. Easier that way)
• 1 large lemon
• 1/4 cup fish sauce
• 1/2 tbsp honey
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• fresh chilis
• bit of water
• Optional: shredded lettuce, cucumber, or other raw veggies

Let's Do It!

1. For the chicken, simply marinate in the five spice powder and soy sauce for a little while. Then fry it on the stove (or grill it on the bbq) until it's done. Maybe 4 minutes a side. I'm not the best at cooking things to completion and have on more than a few occasions eaten raw chicken. But my stomach can take it. Don't risk salmonella. If you're not sure if a chicken is cooked, pierce it with a knife and see if the juices run clear. If they do, you're good.
2. Let the chicken cool then rip the meat off with your hands. Save the bones in the freezer for soup. This makes it easier to eat at work.
3. For the nước chấm (sauce), juice and seed 1 whole lemon and mix with the fish sauce, honey, garlic, chopped chilis (as much or as little as you want) and a bit of water. I didn't really measure it anything, but rather added stuff and tasted often until I got the flavour balance as I like it (just a little sweet, very sour, a little salty, very spicy).
4. Cook the vermicelli according to the package directions, making sure to rinse well in cold water and strain after.
5. Whenever I go to the restaurants, they also serve the dish with shredded veggies to mix with the noodles. I made a salad instead.

Lunch it up!
I had the fish sauce in a little screw top jar, the chicken in its own container and the vermicelli in its own container. To eat, heat the chicken up (if you want), swish the vermicelli in some boiling water and drain well. Put the noodles and chicken together and pour the sauce over it all.

Green Papaya Salad

My friend Keith once said "lettuce isn't a vegetable. It's a carrier for salad dressing." That's how I feel about this salad. I love fish sauce and limes. I could drink nước chấm instead of water. The first time I had this was in Thailand, and it was the spiciest thing I had ever had. You.. you don't need to do that.

• 1 green papaya
• fish sauce
• limes
• 1 clove garlic, finely minced
• fresh chilis

Let's do it!

1. Cut the papaya in half and scoop out the seeds and soft pith with a spoon. Careful, the little white seeds will get EVERYWHERE. Maybe do it in a bag or something.
2. Peel the papaya.
3. If you have a food processor with a grater, use it. If not... happy grating.
4. At this point, I squeezed the grated papaya with my hands just to soften it a bit. Don't know if that helps.
5. Add fish sauce and the juice of a lime (or two) to your taste preference. Mix in the garlic.
6. Add fresh chilis to your taste.

Just realized that although I couldn't find any recipes for this online yesterday, I'm seeing a bunch now and they call for all sorts of fun stuff like sugar and cilantro. You could put those in, I guess. 

Fancy Fish Curry

Sorry for the iPhone photo. I don't always bring the good camera to work

This recipe is based on one for Gulai Ikan from Charmaine Solomon's "The Complete Asian Cookbook." I was in the mood for an East Asian green curry fish dish (yes, my cravings are just that specific) but I didn't have all the ingredients, namely curry leaves. Plus, I was working with Grace brand Pure Creamed Coconut, which comes in a box and is basically super concentrated coconut. It's pretty good, but I find the texture a bit mealy. Thus, the straining, and thus the most silky, delicious curry sauce I've ever made in my life. Just a warning, you will end up with a whole pile of dirty dishes and this isn't really the quickest thing to make.

Ingredients:

• 1 lb basa fillets, cut into manageable chunks
• 1/2 package of Grace Pure Creamed Coconut (cut it lengthwise so you get the oil as well as the meaty part) 
• 1 medium onion, roughly chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• 2 tsp fresh ginger, roughly chopped
• 1 jalapeño, deseeded and roughly chopped (less if you want, but these aren't really that spicy)
• 1 tbsp coriander
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp fennel
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 2 strips lime rind
• splash of fish sauce to taste
• chives, chopped

Let's do it!

1. Simmer the creamed coconut in 1.5 cups of water until it's completely dissolved.
2. If you're using ground spices, great. If not, buzz all the spices in a spice grinder (I almost exclusively use whole spices. I hear they keep longer.)
3. Simmer the coconut milk, onions, garlic, ginger, jalapeño spices and lime rind for about 10-15 minutes to cook the vegetables and let the flavours meld.
4. Add fish sauce to taste.
5. When the flavours are to your taste, run the mixture through a very very thin drum sieve. This is an annoying, laborious process. It requires using a ladle to stir and push as much of the sauce as you can through the sieve. The sieve I have has holes just about big enough for baking powder, but not granulated sugar. I don't know where my mom got it from. Possibly an Asian housewares store.
6. Lay the fish fillets on a heated saute pan and pour the sauce over it. 
7. Simmer until the fish is cooked, about 4 minutes per side.
8. Top with chives.

Lunch it up!
I served this with sauteed kale and cabbage and brown rice. And it was INCREDIBLE. I packed the rice with the veggies and the separately so that the rice wouldn't soak up all the sauce. I heated them together.

Korean Seafood Pancake

All my pics at work sucked, so here is a pic of four pancakes I took at home.

I tried one of these at a fantastic Korean restaurant in Toronto and immediately fell in love. This recipe is a mangling of two recipes, one from Maangchi (my usual go-to for all Korean recipes and quite possibly the most comprehensive recipe/how-to site in the universe) and the Kitchn, but I basically just used their sauce recipe. I'm not going to pretend that this is at all authentic. I'm Chinese and struggle to make authentic Chinese food as it is. This is just my version of the dish with what I had in my house.

Ingredients
Pancake

• 1 cup flour (I use whole wheat flour because it's healthy. I think.)
• 1 1/3 cup water
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 egg
• 2 green onions, chopped (you should probably use more, but I only had 2 left)
• 1 cup mixed seafood, chopped roughly
• 1 jalapeño, seeds discarded and chopped. Make sure you wash your hands RIGHT after handling these or else your hands will buuuuurrrnnn!!!
• cooking oil

Sauce (in ratio)

• Mostly soy sauce
• Almost the same amount of rice wine vinegar, to taste
• A bit of sesame oil
• 1 smashed and minced garlic clove

Let's do it!

1. Put the flour, water, salt and egg in a large mixing bowl. Whisk until it forms a thin batter. Mix as little as possible.
2. Add green onions, seafood (I used the ready-mixed frozen kind and defrosted it in the fridge overnight), and jalapeno. Mix until combined.
3. Coat the bottom of a non-stick pan with cooking oil and heat it to medium low. Put in two ladles of the mixture and spread so that the veggies and seafood are evenly distributed. Mine came up to about 8 inches in diameter. Any bigger and I'm pretty positive I wouldn't be able to flip them.
4. Cook until  the sides are cooked and the bottom is golden. At this point, the pancake should move around on it's own if you shove the pan around. 
5. If you can do that awesome pancake flip thing, do so. If you're like me, use a spatula to help you along.
6. Cook for another couple of minutes, until the bottom is golden.
7. Repeat until the batter is gone. Mine made about 4 servings, good for two lunches and two dinners. Or two big lunches, more likely.
8. To make the dipping sauce, just mix all that stuff together.

Lunch it up!

I put this on some rice and had kale as a side. I put the dipping sauce in a small screw-top jar. Here's the pic I took at work. You don't even know what's going on. I'm just happy to have found my nice lens, so here it is.

Fried Vermicelli with Canned Corned Beef

Canned corned beef. The food of my childhood. It's comforting, easy, and cheap. If I see it on sale, I usually buy a couple of tins because I really like having it around.

Ingredients
1/2 pack thin vermicelli, cooked according to directions, drained and rinsed with cold water
1/2 can corned beef, cubed
1 large shallot, sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 small carrot, grated

1/8 cup fish sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp turmeric
squirt of Sriracha (a mild hot pepper sauce with a rooster on it. Found in Asian grocery stores, or in the International aisle of conventional grocery stores)
2 drops sesame oil

A handful of chopped, fresh Thai basil


Let's do it!

Cook and rinse the vermicelli. I used Y&Y brand, the green one. Let it drain in the sink while you do everything else. You want it to be pretty dry. Take some kitchen scissors (or regular, clean scissors) and snip the noodles until they're all roughly 2 inches long at the maximum.

Mix all the sauces, turmeric and sugar together until the sugar is dissolved. Set aside.

Heat some oil in a wok to medium heat. Fry the garlic for about 30 seconds, then add the shallots. When things start to turn colour, add the corned beef and carrots. Stir fry until the corned beef is soft and comes apart easily.

Dump in the noodles and turn up the heat to high. Stir quickly until everything is mixed well. Add the sauce mixture and keep frying. If the noodles are drained enough, it shouldn't stick. Keep frying until it's all dry and you hear a crackling noise. Stir in basil. Taste test, and adjust the flavour to your liking.

You can stop stirring every once in a bit if you want crunchy parts, but this is where I get lazy and just throw it into a lunch container.

Diagnosis... delicious! I've never made this before and I looooooved it. I might put some more turmeric so the colour is brighter, and add some chopped up chili peppers in it, since I like things hot, but I'm definitely making this again. Here's hoping the husband likes it, too.