Slippery…

My missus went and bought a kilogram of jellyfish and dumped the bag in the fridge…

Omigawd!!! I did not have the slightest inkling what to do with it, so I quickly googled for the recipe…and guess what! I stumbled upon Elin’s recipe for jellyfish – good ol’ Elin to the rescue! I followed her instructions and soaked the jellyfish in water for three days, changing the water twice a day.

I’ve eaten pickled jellyfish at the restaurants before but I never bothered to try and figure out how they prepared it. I remember when I was young, my mum would buy some from the market and she just cut it into slices, blanched it in hot water and served it with her own special sambal. I loved the sambal but all of a sudden, we never had that anymore. So I went and asked her why…and she said that when my father started losing his teeth, he could not bite and chew the jellyfish anymore, so that was it! She stopped buying and we never had jellyfish again after that. I found out from her that in the sambal, she had pounded chillies and garlic…plus calamansi lime juice, sugar and soy sauce.

Then, at the wedding dinner the other night, they had jellyfish with Bombay onions – umai-style in the Four Seasons’ dish…and I actually liked it a lot. Thus, in the end, I decided to do something like that with the jellyfish…instead of following Elin’s recipe or my mum’s way of serving it.

I sliced the jellyfish VERY thinly so there would not be any problem chewing it when eating…

After that, I boiled some water and blanched the jellyfish in it…before adding thinly-sliced Bombay onions, a bit of ginger and some sugar and squeezing lots of calamansi lime juice into it and tossing everything together. My missus had some blended chillies and garlic stored in bottles in the fridge for her own consumption, so I just added that – saved me the trouble of having to pound chillies and garlic…and finally, I added sliced chillies, more for the colour than anything else…

After all that had been done, I stored it in a container and put it in the fridge, tossing it periodically, to allow the jellyfish to soak in all the ingredients.

We had it for dinner that night…and my missus said it was very nice! Of course!!! I made it! LOL!!!