Jungle love…

I guess Annie will not like this as she’s not into belacan (dried fermented prawn paste) and hot and spicy stuff but I love it!

These are sour brinjals or what we call terung Dayak here and terung asam in the peninsula…

To cook it kampung-style, you will have to cut them into slices like these…

I will try and remove all the seeds as usually, in the process of cooking, they will come off and sink to the bottom making the soup quite messy.

These are all the ingredients that you need…

a chunk of belacan, serai (lemon grass) and chillies.

Fill half of the pot with water and boil till the fragrance of the ingredients come out and the belacan has melted in the boiling water. Then, you put in the brinjal slices and keep on simmering till they are cooked in which case, they will be soft and you may see that the edges of the skin have started to peel off.

Then you put in the fish to cook and once cooked, it is ready to be served…

As you can see, no salt or msg is needed. Usually, the belacan contains some salt, so it will be salty enough and all the ingredients will make the soup real sweet, so there is no need to add msg either.

I added the fish last so that it will not disintegrate in the extended boiling to bring out the flavour of all the ingredients. It is also nice to use udang galah (freshwater prawns) in which case you can throw everything in right from the start as there is no danger of the crustaceans falling apart.

With the sourish taste from the brinjals and the sweetness and fragrance of all the other ingredients, this goes extremely well with rice. I bet you will want to have seconds… LOL!!!