Slow an’ easy…

Ok, time for another one of my mum’s simple recipes!

I spotted a bit of beef in the freezer, not much of it, so I decided to cook some beef soup the way my mum would cook it a long time ago. Thankfully. the meat had been thinly sliced by the people at the shop so I did not have to do that. All I needed to do was to cut them into smaller slices and put them in a pot to cook over a very very small fire…

A big flame would probably dry up the juices very fast and get everything in the pot burnt. This was just enough for two big bowls of soup – one for lunch and one for dinner but of course, you can add more meat or even some bones if you want a stronger beef flavour in your soup.

Once the juices had come out of the meat, I added one Bombay onion, skin removed and a handful of peppercorn…

…and I added water to it and brought it back to boil. Actually, once you’ve added the water, you can increase the heat but I wanted to do it slow and easy.

When it had started boiling again, I threw in the potatoes, skinned removed and cut into wedges…

…and then I turned up the flame and waited for it to boil again.

I let it simmer for a while before adding around half a beef cube, Knorr brand (my mum would add salt and msg when she cooked this in the past) and some chopped spring onions from my garden…

Actually for beef soup, Chinese celery or daun sup should be used but there wasn’t any in the house.

The soup was ready…

No, I did not add any spices – no star anise, no cinnamon, nothing. My mum never did. I know the Malays and Indians at their stalls or shops would do that and I do not like the strong smell of the spices in their beef soup (and more often than not, I can hardly detect the fragrance and flavour of the beef in theirs)…and no, I did not add any salted vegetable either. I think they do that at the beef noodle shops (and lobak putih/white radish too) so much so that sometimes, what they dish out tastes like salted vegetable soup.

For the meat, you would probably need to pound some fresh chili with ginger added plus a squeeze of calamansi lime but I still have my bottle for the chili sauce from the beef noodle place in town so I did not need to do that.

The durian trees have started flowering in some parts of the state and for our vegetable dish, I was able to fry some that was given to us by my sister-in-law…

It had been really very hot lately and I had no intention of sweating out. That was why the idea of pounding some hay bee or udang kering (dried prawns) did not appeal to me.

Instead, I just fried one shallot and two cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced, one stalk of serai (lemon grass) and a handful of ikan bilis (dried anchovies) in a little bit of oil till golden brown before putting in the durian flowers. I took the sauce from the bottle of nyonya acar timun (pickled cucumber) that we had sitting in the fridge since God knows when and added that along with a spoonful of my pounded chili, mixing everything together thoroughly. Everything was ready to be served in no time at all…

When it comes to cooking, that’s how I like it best – easy…and yet, very very appetising and nice!