Good and healthy recipes are meant to be shared, and Rosaline remembers fondly the many happy gatherings in her big family of 14 brothers and sisters with countless nieces and nephews when they gathered for a happy occasion and one of her brothers, a great cook, would cook big pots of the family’s favourite dishes. They would eat in relays at the family’s ‘tok panjang’ table in the kitchen...Peranakan style!

The same 'tok panjang' table would be found at her in-laws' home in Kedah when she and family went up every year for the family’s Chinese New Year reunion dinners. Inevitably there would be feasts of Peranakan/Nonya food served over the days of Chinese New Year as relatives visited.

Featured here are two recipes from both sides of her families, found in her book and shared here. These recipes are chosen for their simplicity in method and easily available ingredients.  All her recipes do not use msg.

She invites feed-back and contributions from like-minded food lovers of Singaporean/Peranakan food who believe that good recipes should be shared and tried and tweaked to suit one’s own personal tastebuds. Email: rosalinesh.soon@yahoo.co.uk

Kerabu Chicken/Prawns (serves 6-8)

A delicious spicy, rich and interesting salad from Penang

Ingredients

• 1 chicken drumstick / chicken breast
• 500gm medium sized prawns
• 30gm (one large piece) black fungus (wood ear-big variety)
• 1 rojak flower (bungah gantan or torch ginger bud)
• 500gm shallots
• 2 tbsp lime juice (kek lar or calamansi)
• Pounded chilli belacan - fermented dried shrimp. Use 5gm to pound with 5 chillies (to your taste, about 2 tbsp is hot)
• Fish sauce or salt (to your taste)
• ½ tsp sugar or to taste (optional)
• milk from ½ a coconut or about 4 tbsp
• coriander leaves

Method

1. Boil chicken drumstick, cool and peel the meat in strips
2. De-vein prawns, boil, shell and slice in half, breadthwise
3. Soak fungus, clean and cut into ½ cm strips
4. Cut rojak flower finely in rings
5. Cut shallots finely, in rings
6. Toast belacan, pound with chilli. Use 2 tbsp to mix with lime juice and shallots well.
7. Add in chicken, fungus, prawns and bungah gantan, mixing well with 1 tbsp of fish sauce. Taste and adjust to taste with sugar
8. Add coconut milk. Mix and garnish with plenty of coriander leaves before serving.