Brunei: Pulut Panggang, Nasi Lemak and Kuih Dadar
Nasi Lemak: coconut rice with sambal, roasted peanuts and anchovies, cucumbers and boiled eggs.
If you’re like me and had NO CLUE where Brunei was, it’s a tiny Southeast Asian country on the island of Borneo. It has beaches and rainforests and is the 5th richest country in the world (per capita)!! But if you’re thinking about going there and drinking a piña colada on the beach, you’ll have to adjust your plan since alcohol is illegal there.
Y’all, I was super nervous/excited to make this meal- there were SO many ingredients I’d never heard of or had never cooked with! PLUS, I got to go to H-Mart for a lot of it, which is always a good time! Ingredients like dried shrimp and anchovies had me a little worried my guests wouldn’t like the dishes, but it actually turned out really really good! Some of the other ingredients I’d never used before were pandan leaves, sweet rice, tamarind and banana leaves.
You guys should have seen my kitchen while I was cooking- it was SO hard to keep everything straight since ALL the dishes used coconut milk, 2 of the dishes had rice and there were banana leaves EVERYWHERE. Who knew they were so big?? (I mean, I knew they were, but just assumed they’d come cut up or something lol.)
For an appetizer I made pulut panggang, a snack made of sweet rice stuffed with a spicy dried shrimp purée and coconut filling, then wrapped in banana leaves and grilled. They may not have looked pretty because the banana leaves kept cracking when I tried to wrap the rice with them, but they were realllly good!
*Side note: I found out later that if you heat the banana leaves they are much more pliable and easier to use. Hold them over an open flame or burner and watch the color change to a darker green.
Dinner was Nasi Lemak, which is a coconut rice based dish topped with roasted peanuts and anchovies, cucumbers, boiled eggs and sambal (chili and tamarind sauce). The anchovies I got may have been slightly to big, but they still worked fine and the dish as a whole was really tasty! I especially loved the sambal- the sweet and sour tamarind juice combined with spicy chilies, garlic and onions was so unique and delicious! Now I’m excited to use the rest of the tamarind juice in other recipes!
Lastly, for dessert I made kuih dadar, which are pandan flavored crepes filled with palm sugar and shredded coconut. They were soo yummy and the perfect ending to the meal. My only complaint with these was that the color was super pale- the pandan leaf was supposed to give the crepes a greenish hue, but unfortunately they looked more tan to me. But it’s the taste that really matters, right??
