Combining cultures
In 2011, Julie Lin made a note to self on Facebook: "New mission in life," she wrote in a status update: "be Nigella Lawson." At the time, she was working in retail in Glasgow and teaching piano and violin while channelling most of her creative energies into cooking dinner parties for friends. Flash forward 13 years and while Lin may not have fulfilled her mission exactly as stated, she's been making all the right moves in that direction.
First she went on MasterChef in 2014 and made it to the quarter finals. Then she quit her job and became a chef, before setting up her own street-food stall in Glasgow. She graduated to a "proper"restaurant on the city's south side in 2017, then a larger one called GaGa which is still going strong today.
Now she's written a cookbook, which unites the two parts of her heritage — Malaysian and Scottish — in unexpected and delicious ways.
"My mum's from Malaysia, and I go there every year," she says. Her father is Scottish and she grew up in Glasgow "with an abundance of amazing Scottish produce. So it feels like I'm from both places." Chinese sausage bucatini carbonara
Carbonara will forever be one of my favourite dishes. The Chinese sausage (lap cheong) I use is an ambient food, so I always tend to have it in the cupboard. It's truly one of the finest ingredients — its smoky sweetness makes it taste like maple-cured bacon and it works perfectly with the rich egg yolks. Allowing the fat to render a little releases the oils into the dish and creates the most moreish flavour.
Serves 2
200g dried bucatini (or another long pasta)
40g Chinese sausage (lap cheong), thinly sliced at an angle
1 Tbsp olive oil
4 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
3 egg yolks
50g parmesan, grated, plus extra to serve
1 tsp light soy sauce
½ tsp kecap manis (sweet soy sauce)
salt and black pepper
Method
Bring a large saucepan of well-salted water to the boil. Add the bucatini to the pan and cook for 8 minutes (or according to the packet instructions).
Meanwhile, in a dry frying pan, gently fry the sausage over a low heat until the oils are released, allowing it to get a bit crisp. Remove the sausage from the pan and set aside. Add the olive oil to the pan and fry the chopped garlic until fragrant but not browned.
Using a fork, whisk together the egg yolks, grated parmesan, soy sauce, kecap manis and a pinch of salt in a bowl.
Once cooked, drain the bucatini, reserving some of the pasta cooking water. Add the sausage back into the pan along with the drained bucatini and toss in the garlic oil. Slowly add a little of the pasta cooking water to the egg yolk mixture until glossy and combined. Pour this over the hot pasta and sausage and mix together. Serve immediately with black pepper and the extra parmesan grated on top. Chinese-style spicy garlic celery
Celery divides people. I think that's because most of us are introduced to it in the form of batons dipped into hummus. But I adore celery in its cooked form, especially with soy and garlic. This is a version of a common wok-fried celery dish we eat at large banquets in Malaysia.
Serves 1
2 Tbsp Shaoxing rice wine
3 Tbsp light soy sauce
1 tsp white sugar
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 bunch, celery sliced on an angle
5 cloves garlic, peeled and finely diced
1 tsp cornflour, plus
3 Tbsp water to make a paste
1 tsp Malaysian crispy prawn chilli
or crispy chilli oil
salt and ground white pepper
Method
In a small bowl, mix together the Shaoxing rice wine, soy sauce and sugar.
Heat the vegetable oil in a wok over a high heat.
Add the celery to the hot oil and stir-fry for 1 minute, or until a little translucent. Next, add the garlic and stir-fry for 2-3 minutes, or until fragrant.
Add the rice wine, soy and sugar mixture, then add the cornflour paste and stir-fry until everything thickens slightly. Allow all of the flavours to come together, then taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and white pepper.
Finally, add the crispy prawn chilli or crispy chilli oil and make a few last tosses.
Serve immediately while piping hot. Nasi goreng with smoked mackerel
Nasi goreng is probably one of the most recognisable dishes in Indonesian and Malaysian cuisines. Nasi means rice and goreng means fried, so it translates simply as fried rice. Full of flavour, this dish can be adapted to use up any ingredients you have in the fridge. I adore adding mackerel to this; the smokiness makes it extra punchy. It's important to cook out the paste (rempah) here so that all of the roundness of the flavours can coat the rice. All of the day-old rice grains should absorb maximum flavour. Remember, nasi goreng is a simple dish to cook, but it's all about making sure it's not still wet at the end of the frying process.
Serves 2
vegetable oil for frying
2 spring onions, chopped into 4cm chunks
150g fine green beans, trimmed
50g smoked mackerel, flaked
300g cooked and cooled jasmine rice (preferably a day old)
1 ½ tsp kecap manis (sweet soy sauce)
1 ½ Tbsp fish sauce, or to taste
4 eggs
150g beansprouts
For the rempah
1 long shallot, peeled and roughly chopped
5 cloves garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
2 fresh long red chillies, deseeded and roughly chopped
4 dried red chillies, soaked in warm water for
20 minutes, drained, deseeded
2 Tbsp dried anchovies (ikan billis)
Seasoning station (optional)
sambal belacan, chilli crisp oil, fish sauce, light soy sauce, lime juice, salt
Method
First, make the rempah. Place all the ingredients in a food processor or blender and blitz to a paste. Heat plenty of oil in a wok over a medium-high heat. (You need lots of oil to make the paste oily enough that it coats the rice.) Once the wok is hot, add the rempah, spring onion chunks, trimmed green beans and flaked mackerel. Fry everything for 1-2 minutes, stirring continuously so that the paste doesn't catch and burn. Turn the heat down, then add the cooled rice to the wok with a few tablespoons of water. Add the kecap manis and fish sauce, stirring furiously until everything is mixed together.
Create a well in the centre of the rice. Keeping the heat on medium-low, crack two of the eggs into the centre of the well and allow them to scramble. Once fully cooked through, mix the scrambled egg through the rice with the beansprouts.
Heat enough oil to cover the base in a separate pan over a very high heat. Once the oil is very hot, crack the remaining two eggs into the pan. Fry until the skirts of the eggs are golden and crispy.
When ready to serve, spoon the rice into two bowls and top with the crispy fried eggs. Add whichever of the ingredients you fancy from the seasoning station. — The Observer
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
2 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Wānaka ‘little bit like home' for musician
Sean Tinker arrived in Wānaka ago seven years ago and expected to stay six months. PHOTO: SUPPLIED Irish luck would have it that Sean Tinker was in the right place at the right time when he arrived for his first night in Wānaka seven years ago. Having driven down from the North Island, he arrived in Wānaka the day before St Patrick's Day and decided to celebrate leading into the Irish celebration. At about 2am, a helpful New Zealander offered him a job and the rest is history. "I was in the smoking area in Lalaland, someone offered me a job and sponsorship making aluminum doors. "He said 'are you Irish? Do you want a job? I have worked with Irish people before, you are really good'. "He then asked 'can you do aluminum architecture and joinery?' and I was like 'no', he then says 'can you use a power tool?' and I am like 'yes', and he says, 'you will be fine'." Tinker, who is now a fulltime musician between Wānaka and Queenstown, had planned on staying about six months, but the job in joinery kept him here and gave him stability. "I didn't really get much better at it, but he kept me on." The 33-year-old is a familiar face around Wānaka's nightlife, playing live gigs at Cork Bar or Water Bar and dabbling in comedy too. Having been brought up in Wicklow, Ireland, he said Wānaka reminded him a little of home. "It is a nice seaside town, a lot like Wānaka. With a lot of wealthy people having holiday homes there. We weren't on the rich side of it." Having never dreamed of being a fulltime musician, his musical journey started humbly back home. His father brought him a drum set when he was 12, which he became pretty good at, but it was short lived. "I was in a band at school doing Blink 182 covers and my neighbours had a baby so I couldn't play the drums any more. I think my mum was silently happy about that." She gave him an old Spanish guitar and he became a little addicted. "Like anyone, your music taste is very narrow as a kid. You just like what you hear on the radio and then I branched out. I like Bob Dylan, I like Bruce Springsteen. When I was going out, the bars were always playing electronics so that has had its influence as well." Tinker said his older fans likened him to Ronan Keating. "There was this older Scottish lady who was trying to set me up and in doing so said 'don't you think he looks like Ronan Keating?' The woman didn't see the likeness." As all struggling musicians and artists do, he has worked in some colourful industries — a gym instructor, an English teacher in China, aluminum, and last year he was testing out old PlayStation games. "I met a guy who is selling retro video games through Trade Me. I would look at it and make sure it worked. I would be playing Mario Kart and yeah, for a year." Tinker's sound is upbeat and usually rock, but he does throw in some of his own songs when the mood suits. "If it is a relaxed Sunday afternoon gig I will. But if they are jumping up and down I won't slow down the mood. "I never thought it was anything I could make money from. Sometimes I would play at a bar and they would give me free beers and I thought that's amazing. I never thought I could get actual money out of it. "Playing music wasn't even an idea in my head. I thought that's something other people do, I can't do that." Working between music gigs and trades, he became burnt out. He said something had to give. When he picked up four gigs a week, Tinker took the plunge and began fulltime playing between Queenstown and Wānaka late last year. "Sometimes I would get home at 2-3am from Queenstown and then I'd have to be up at 6am the next day. I just couldn't do it." He said the culture for live music in New Zealand was a lot safer for musicians than back home, because it was not as saturated. "Bars can afford to shortchange people back home because if you don't want to do it, there are 50 guys who will." He plans on getting his citizenship and eventually buying a home somewhere in Central Otago. "It has always kind of felt a little bit like home. "I went to see the Lord Of The Rings with my grandma and so there is all that nostalgia for me. It has always felt a little bit like home."
Newsroom
4 days ago
- Newsroom
Book of the Week: How to kill everyone in Scotland
It just so happens that the two best New Zealand novels of the year so far are both set in Britain, with Cambridge writer Catherine Chidgey imagining sinister goings-on in a village in England in her novel The Book of Guilt, and now Dunedin writer Liam McIlvanney happily killing off characters in a pretty seaside town in Scotland in his very, very good crime thriller, The Good Father. I suppose the accumulated bodycount in Chidgey's book is greater than in McIlvanney's novel but she sets her novel over 40 years, giving her a long time to send her characters to their deaths, and The Good Father is restricted to seven years. Even so, he gives it a good lash. You want murders, you've come to the right place. McIlvanney is chair of Scottish studies at the University of Otago. Right now he is on a book tour of Scotland, celebrating the very welcome news last week that The Good Father will be made into a TV drama series in Britain. Aye, I'll be wanting to watch that. I may already know how the story develops and what happens in the bloody end but I'll want to see the ways actors take on their roles—particularly Rory, a little boy who goes missing—and I'll really want to see what the town looks like. The book is set in Fairlie. Not our Fairlie, in the Mackenzie Basin of the South Island, which I am guessing is named after Fairlie in Scotland. It's got a beach. It's got peculiar houses lining the shore. McIlvanney describes it with a kind of atmospheric dread in The Good Father. It's a book of two halves. Almost nothing happens in the first half which is to say a family is left with nothing after their son, Rory, goes missing. There are very few clues. There are even fewer suspects. The story is narrated by Rory's dad, Gordon, an English professor. He and his wife Sarah are shattered and helpless and inert. 'People talk of grief as a numbness. With me it was more like vertigo. I felt permanently dizzy…Who took him? Where has he gone? Is he safe? Is he still alive? The questions wheeled like vultures in the sun.' Grief is like a sickness, and McIlvanney leans close towards the suffering. He writes of Rory's disappearance without sentiment, and it's heartbreaking. I suppose it makes sense that Gordon, because of his academic profession, would connect with great literature as he tries to make sense of Rory being there one minute and spirited away the next. 'Of all things, I thought about 'The Purloined Letter', Poe's short story where the massed ranks of the gendarme dismantle the minister's Paris apartment, searching for the stolen letter…Maybe, I thought, the police haven't exhausted every angle, chased down every lead.' That was fair, and I also accepted Gordon telling his university class, 'The challenge, then, for crime writers is to represent the gravity – in both senses of the word – of murder. The seriousness. The weight. What it really means to kill someone.' But McIlvanney doesn't leave it at that, and things get kind of meta as he expands on the tricks and methods of crime fiction. The Good Father is about the story of a missing boy. You want the tension and awfulness of the situation as it unfolds in Fairlie; you don't want the author intruding, and getting in the way. You want to read about Fairlie. 'White triangles of sail on the darkening firth.' McIlvanney is so good at place; the setting is visible, you can feel it and smell it. His dialogue is sharp and well-formed, and he's alert to patterns of speech. 'Hell mend him,' says one character; another describes a hard drinker, 'He was putting it away like a man with three arms.' There's a visit to Aberdeen and a visit to a town in Cork. But the plot doesn't actually thicken; McIlvanney keeps a tight rein on things, never overplays his hand. There is no body, and a strong possibility that Rory was abducted, but his continued absence means the plot keeps thinning out, leaves Gordon and Sarah empty-handed, chasing shadows and phantoms. All of Part 1 of The Good Father is expertly told. Part 2 is where the violence finally erupts. Something amazing happens, and things get even worse. The book takes on a darker tone and Gordon faces a stern moral test. He fails that test. There are four deaths. The first two are a misfortune but the others are more like a carelessness. Crime fiction depends on a final hurdle, and I'm not sure whether The Good Father takes it in its stride or crashes into it. McIlvanney seems to share the same credo as Eleanor Catton, when she approached the final hurdle of her novel Birnam Wood: kill everyone in sight. Still, the deaths are efficient, and skilful, especially the last murder: 'The knife slithered crisply through the meat of him. The hilt clipped a rib…His mouth yawed open; blood poured brilliantly out.' The victim died 'like a dog'. I'd feel sorry for a dog. I didn't feel much for this guy but neither did I obtain any kind of satisfaction from his death. Things had gone too far. McIlvanney is adept at killing the most precious thing in our lives—hope—but perhaps got a bit too enthusiastic at the prospect of an all-out slaughter. It gave improbability to The Good Father. It's one thing to build the tension but it's another challenge to release it. But the heart of the novel beats strong and clear. 'You think that families are held together by love,' Gordon tells us. 'That's not true. They're held together by secrets.' There is actually a fifth death in The Good Father. It's not a violent death. It takes place almost at the edges of this very good read, with its captivating scenery of Fairlie and its little note to the author's adopted country (New Zealand is pointed out on a globe as a 'long, slim country, italic-shaped'). It sends a message: good riddance to bad fathers. The Good Father by Liam McIlvanney (Zaffre, $36.99) is available in bookstores nationwide
Otago Daily Times
5 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Society a chance to learn of arts
Giving everyday people the chance to learn about the fine arts is the focus of Dunedin group the Otago Decorative and Fine Arts Society. The organisations is one of eight societies throughout New Zealand which join together to bring expert speakers from across the country, Australia and the United Kingdom here to share their knowledge. Otago Decorative and Fine Arts Society (ODAFS) chairwoman Maggie Hanton said since the Otago branch of the society was formed in 2016, members had enjoyed dozens of excellent speakers on a broad variety of topics. "Our speakers cover a wide range of subject — from the art of 1935, to architecture, to Van Gogh, to the world of pearls," Ms Hanton said. "And our speakers are professionals, giving top-notch lectures that are entertaining and informative." Ms Hanton said the ODAFS had a membership of 100 people, who meet every five or six weeks on a Wednesday evening at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery to listen to a speaker. "Ideally, we would really like to grow our membership to about 120, so we would love to welcome some more local people to join us and learn about the arts," she said. "Many of our members are also part of the Friends of DPAG, U3A and various music groups, and they are a very friendly bunch." The eight New Zealand groups operate under the umbrella of the United Kingdom-based The Arts Society, selecting preferred lecturers from a list and working together to bring them to New Zealand. Most then tour around the various societies. Annual membership fees of $120 per individual or $260 per couple go towards covering the cost of lecturers and venues. So far this year, the ODFAS has heard lectures about painter Edgar Degas, South African artist Irma Stern, the Chinese porcelain trade, and the history of the Silk Road. The July lecture, to be held next Wednesday, July 30, from 7.30pm at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery will feature speaker Alice Foster sharing insights into how to read portraits to understand more about the sitter and the artist. The lecture will be open to ODFAS members, and guests are also welcome to come along this month for free and learn more about the group. For more information, email otagodfas@ visit the website or find them on facebook.
