Dish from childhood updated

Now is the season of the sting bean, locally known as petai and this is a special ingredient for many reasons: 

1. it is definitely an acquired taste with its strong pungent flavour;

2. it makes your toilet unusable for the next whole week because the after effects from consumming this bean (it is a diuretic and cleanses the kidneys but resulting in very stinky urine);

3. it is seasonal, mostly collected wild from trees growing in villages' edge or the forest by indigenous people, meaning it is a bio product;

4. it can be consumed both cooked and raw as a salad (which makes it even stinkier)

The good thing is, it does go well with certain ingredients, and the most unassuming ones for most people:

here's a recipe from my childhood days...

 can of sardines, curry powder(or cut chillies), garlic, tomato puree if your using sardines in oil (against sardines in tomato sauce in the original recipe), onions, dried chillis, stems of an edible yam known as 'lambok', the star - sting beans

 The stems of the yam needs to be peeled and thoroughly scrubbed with coarse sea salt to prevent any incident of itchiness due to residual oxalic acid. Then, the spongy cut stems need to be crushed with the hand, thoroughly washed and drained. They can be lightly blanched too...

In a heated frying pan, sear the dried chillis, diced onions and garlic. Add the curry powder, stir and cook until fragrant. Add the blanched yam stems, cover and cook for a few minutes. Add the sardines and tomato puree, season and simmer until the sauce thickens. Add the sting beans, stir and cook for a further 2 minutes. Serve at once with steamed rice.

first dinner party of the month

First dinner of the month of September...I had some friends over for a post-Merdeka Day celebration...

Capellini with tuna bits and garlic chilli oil

upside down parmentier of twice-roasted lamb with herbs...

 Salad to wash things down...

Tiramisu, because it was easy to make, even easier to eat...

Victoria! Victoria!

I 'visited' one well kept secret in the Raub district - Casabrina in Sang Lee village...it is a beautiful Balinese villa perched on top of the hill with a commanding view of the rolling hills with total privacy. What actually interests me was the collection of waterlilies (nymphea) which is uncommon in this part of the world and of course, the magnificent Victoria reginae from the Amazon, right here, 20 minutes from my house (and I didn't know it existed!)...

a green frog on the lily pad

huge leaves on the pond

spiny undersides

perfect pink bloom, not the Victoria

another

and another

a tropical variant

 Heart-shaped young leaf - allusion to a bleeding heart? Nature has its own ways...

another young leaf 

 a blue dragonfly resting