Monday 21 July 2014

Rendang Minang

I've run out of excuses for neglecting my blog. Anyway today I'm posting Rendang Minang as requested by Fara, my daughter. Fara is now in Los Angeles following her husband. So now there's only five of us including Ammar my nephew. Ammar is also leaving us to further his studies in Newcastle in September. Luckily my son's Zaid's posting to Laos did'nt go through. If not there'll be just the three of us. ( Ezza my daughter came back to Malaysia and is now working in a bank). But enough about the family. Ramadan is almost over and Hari Raya is but a week away. So there'll be a lot of rendangs being cooked. For the house, usually I'll cook three types of rendang. There's our favourite, rendang campur, rendang tok and rendang ayam pencen. More on the two other rendangs since I've posted rendang tok a while back. For this recipe I'm doing it with chicken. You can substitute chicken with beef, make it a kg of beef, cut into medium sized pieces.



Ingredients

1.8-2 kg chicken. (cut into 12 pieces )
1kg of coconut milk or for those overseas, you can use 2 tins of coconut milk
2 lemon grass (get rid of the outer stalks and the hard bottom part then crush the lemon grass)
turmeric leaf
2tblsp of kerisek or pounded coconut

to be pounded or blended
1 medium onion (cut roughly)
2 garlic
10 dry chillies (cut and soak in hot water, more if you want the heat)
powdered turmeric or is fresh turmeric is available jus 1/2 a thumb-size
1 thumb-size lengkuas
10 chilly padi (optional)

Method

1. Mix the chicken with the pounded/blended ingredients.Cook it on medium heat.
2.When the water from the chicken comes out and the chicken is half cooked, take out the chicken and let the mixture boil further while adding in the coconut milk.
3.Cook until all the water is dried up, then put in the kerisek.
4. Put the chicken back in and over low heat let the rendang simmer until dry.
5. While you have to scrape the bottom of the wok to prevent the mixture from being burnt, be careful of the chicken. We don't want break it into unrecognizable pieces.
6. Lastly season with salt and put in the cut turmeric leaves
7. If using beef, it will take a longer time. Leave the beef in the mixture until the end.
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