Do it myself…

I have been cooking my own version of meat, usually beef, with satay/sate sauce for a long long time now, probably since the late 70s or 80s, ever since we discovered wee’s sate sauce…

This is actually the peanut sauce for people to dip their satay in while eating those pieces of meat on skewers barbecued over a charcoal fire. At one time, it was not available in the shops, so I had to use another brand – Ayam, which tasted good but the colour was kind of yellowish like it had a lot of kunyit (tumeric) in it. My mum said I could add a bit of tomato sauce to give it the desired reddish colour but I never tried that.

Whenever my missus cooked this same thing, she would be pounding/blending a whole lot of extra onions, chillies and whatever ingredients to make it taste nicer but being basically lazy, I would do no such thing.

Well, the other day, I decided to cook the dish for dinner…

I added one Bombay onion – chopped till really fine, and two stalks of serai (lemon grass) crushed at the ends. After cutting the meat into thin slices – I used pork as there was no beef in the freezer and I did not feel like using chicken, I mixed the sate sauce with it to marinate it. To cook it, I fried the chopped onions in a little bit of oil till brown before  I added the serai…and after a while, the meat. I kept stirring till the meat was cooked and then I added half a cup of water to let the meat simmer in the gravy for a while. Once the gravy had thickened, the dish was ready to be served…

So, there you have it – my sate pork…with no salt or msg added. It actually tastes very nice – nice enough to serve on special occasions like birthday, Christmas or Chinese New Year dinners…but personally, I prefer beef.

Come, tell me what you think – if you see this in the menu at a restaurant, do you think you would want to order it?