Friday, September 05, 2008

Making An Urab Salad

I harvested tapioca leaves and my Indonesian helper turned the leaves into a yummy urab salad. She got another helper to give her a coconut from her garden, which was grated by hand into snowy white shreds.Add to it kaffir lime leaves, chili, garlic, and kencur (lesser galangal) that were fried till fragrant, you get urab.She also deep fried tempeh (fermented soy bean) that we ate with the salad. Once the urab was fried up. The tapioca leave and long beans were blenched.She then mixed the blenched vegetables with the urab and we tucked in to lunch.Footnote: I am now trying to grow the lesser galangal in the garden as I finally found out that the girls have been ferrying them to Singapore when they go back for home leave as they don't know where to buy them. There's a heap of dried ginger roots in my backyard which I know they use for cooking but I just don't know what they are.

2 comments:

Elyani said...

Lesser galangal (lengkuas) is one of the most important ingredients in most Indonesian cooking. We have several dishes with extra lengkuas as in Ayam Goreng Lengkuas or in Pork Satay.

Urap Sayuran is my other favorite salad dishes. Normally my maid adds in a bit of ground chilis and lime leaves on the grated coconut mixture. We also used coconut sugar (gula merah/gula melaka) a bit on the mixture so you will have a combo of salty, sweet and spicy taste in your urap.

Elyani said...

ooops..the lesser galangal used in Urap Sayuran is not 'lengkuas' but 'kencur'. It is about a finger size and has a sharper flavour. Kencur is widely used in Javanese herbal medicines (jamu) or make them as herbal drink called "beras kencur". They are also good to cure coughing.