It is the Hari Raya Puasa weekend and I thought, “why not make some Sayur Lodeh, Chicken Rendang and Sambal Telur from scratch?” Here in Singapore, these are some of the dishes you’d find in a Malay home during this time. Off I went grocery shopping and failing to find galangal and fresh turmeric, but I figured I’d just add more ginger…yes, I know ginger’s not a good substitute for galangal, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Not that desperate, but you know what I mean. I did also stand in front of the display for ketuput for quite a while trying to decide if I really needed to go that route, but I decided to make things easy for myself and just stick to rice.

All in all, I slaved away in the kitchen for slightly more than 3 hours, but I’m pretty pleased with the results. Despite the lack of some ingredients, the dishes still tasted pretty authentic and I got a thumbs up from my dad, so that’s always a win.

Sayur Lodeh is a light vegetable curry that is always found in any Malay food stall and when you add ketuput (boiled, cubed rice), you get Longtong, which is an awesome breakfast dish. Rendang typically is made with mutton or beef, but because we try not to eat beef at home, I went for the chicken version. If you can’t really take spicy food, either substitute the bird’s eye chilli with the normal big ones or remove the seeds from the chilli. Sorted Food has a pretty good version of Beef Rendang (pronounced with an “ah”, rather than “a”, btw) that you could check out. Sambal Telur is basically boiled egg in sambal, which is one of my absolute favourites! It’s spicy, it’s savoury, perfect with a plate of rice. Some people like to fry their boiled egg, but I prefer it just boiled.

Word of advice, as clumsy as it gets, wearing gloves is good because it prevents chilli burns and turmeric stains on your nails. There is a lot of chilli chopping involved in these dishes. I’m going to end this and try and get the stains out of my fingers!