I think everyone must be getting tired of reading about how I recycle leftover food so as to take the easy way out. Well, this post is not going to be about that but instead, it will be on another of my hassle-free easy-to-cook dish starting from scratch, right from the very beginning.
Nope! This isn’t the exotic meat that I featured in a post not too long ago – this one’s beef. In the past, I would usually use fresh beef but since it is virtually impossible to get hold of any these days, I settled for the frozen meat imported from New Zealand for this soup dish…
You just cut the beef across the grain into thin slices…and throw it into the pot of water, with 1-2 whole Bombay onions, peeled and a handful of peppercorn and bring that to boil. Throw in some potatoes, cut into chunks and simmer until the potatoes are cooked and the beef has become tender and then, add salt and msg according to taste. Normally, I would garnish with daun sup (Chinese celery) and serve but that day, there wasn’t any at the supermarket near my house…so I settled for some chopped daun bawang (spring onion) instead….
I also added some wolfberries that day, but that is optional.
In the past, the old folks would put in a porcelain spoon or one of those small porcelain soy sauce saucer. According to them, the porcelain would “fight” with the beef and the beef, being not as hard, would lose and turn tender more quickly. Well, there wasn’t any porcelain crockery in the house that was small enough to go into the cooking pot, so I threw in a stainless steel teaspoon instead…and true enough, I did not have to simmer very long before the beef became nice and tender, believe it or not. LOL!!!
Note that I did not add any ginger, and I also did not put any of those spices that you would usually find in the Malays’ sup tulang (bone soup) or sup ekor lembu (oxtail soup)…or the Indians’ sup kambing (mutton soup) as I do not like their overpowering smell.
There wasn’t any garlic in the house that day, so I smsed my missus asking her to buy some on her way home from work. Unfortunately, she is one of those who hardly ever check whether they have any messages…and more often than not, she would fail to hear the handphone whenever I tried calling. So, she only saw the message after she had got back to the house and there being no garlic for me to use, I had to use shallots instead to fry these sweet peas for our vegetable dish…
It turned out all right…but I still think it would have been nicer with garlic.
As a matter of fact, I always fry vegetables with garlic, or most of them, at least. What about you?
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 