Preserve…

I had just blogged about the very nice salted vegetables I bought from one lady at the Sibu Central Market here when I saw this photograph being shared on Facebook…

…of some ladies working, waist-deep in water, washing the vegetables to make those salted ones. Needless to say, I was horrified and I told my missus that I would never ever buy the ones sold outside anymore.

I did read in one of the comments that the photograph was taken some 10 years ago in Thailand and somebody did mention to me that our local ones are made at home on a very small scale so one would not see anything like that.

In the meantime, my dear friend, Mary, gave me a whole lot of vegetables…

…when she sent over the very lovely chocolate cake that her daughter made.

We ate the kangkong and the bayam and I decided to use the sawi to make salted vegetables. I browsed through some videos on youtube and many looked like a lot of work so of course, they did not tickle my fancy. Finally, I chanced upon this one that sure looked easy.

I told my missus about my plan and she said she would do it so I asked her to take a look at that video clip. In the end, she decided to follow it so firstly, she blanched the vegetables in hot water till the colour became a bit greener after which she soaked it in salt water with chunks of lengkuas (galangal) added to it…

For one thing, it must be stored in an airtight glass container and kept till it started fermenting and changed colour…

I don’t know why she did it but over a week later, she transferred it to this coffee bottle. Maybe it was because it was ready and she removed the lengkuas but kept in vegetables in the salted water till she was ready to cook it.

When she finally took it and cooked it with pork belly…

…that day, all of us loved it so much! Yes, it was very nice and had that special fragrance of salted vegetables and no, it was not too salty, just nice.

I think the next time around, I would buy kua chai (mustard greens) for this – when we bought those at the market, we would prefer the ones made from this type of vegetable more than sawi.