All gone…

I received a lot of those Khadijah’s Kitchen instant pastes from my cousins in Kuching and I have tried most, if not all of them. I remember we enjoyed the chicken kapitan and the rendang tok was nice too though it was more like curry and nothing like rendang as I know it. We did not think the pajeri nenas was good though and there was a box of satay peanut paste but I can’t remember who I gave it to…and I do not seem to remember if/when I cooked another one of the lot, the asam pedas. There was just this one…

…left in the pantry – the sambal tumis.

I do recall that there was this one time when I was torn between using this one or one of another brand that we had, a product of Malaysia made for sale in Singapore, and I chose the latter only to regret it as it was not nice at all and the other morning, finally, I decided to give it a try.

It said on the box that I should add one big onion – that would be a Bombay onion, I guess so I took one, peeled it and sliced it very thinly…

…and I decided to go a step further and added a few stalks of my skinny serai (lemon grass) and a sprig of curry leaves from my garden and I just could not resist throwing in two cili padi for that extra kick!

Hmmm…it certainly looks like Ms Khadijah needs a good editor to check the language use in what she has on the boxes…

…of her products. I am sure they mean sliced onion, not slices onion…and bawang hiris, not hilis…and mix should go with with and not to…and other than those slips, I do think it should be mixture and not mixtures and KITHCEN is kitchen wrongly spelt, obviously. Oh dear! Forgive me, for I digressed a bit there but I guess that is an occupational hazard and as they say, old habits die hard. LOL!!!

I did not measure the water but I just poured a bit into the wok and added the paste in a sachet inside the box after pouring away the oil. Gee!!! Some of these things can be really oily. Then I threw in the other extra ingredients and the prawns and boiled the lot till the prawns were cooked. After letting it simmer for a while, I dished everything out…

Oh dear! That sure looked watery! Perhaps I should let it simmer longer to let the sauce thicken a little bit but I did not want to do so as I was sure the sauce would go absolutely well with rice…and I was right!

Yes, it was very nice…

…but no, it wasn’t anything like the sambal that we would get with our nasi lemak. That one would be on the sweet side but this was slightly sourish, like asam prawns or fish and it was extra spicy, so very very hot – the cili padi must be behind that as on the box, the level of spiciness was indicated as medium only.

I would say we enjoyed it very much, the last of the lot that I had at hand – they’re all gone now and please, if anyone is thinking of getting me some more, no, thank you very much. For one thing, I do know that they are not all that cheap and for another, I still have a lot of other stuff at hand that I have yet to try.