Still Feeling Peckish

I’ve been traveling. And one thing about getting older and more confident is that I’ve become more articulate about what I prefer to do on holiday and how we get to travel. I always thought that hubs was a thwarted secret tour guide and he used to take control of all our holidays and bookings, but this year with revenge traveling I seem to be channeling an inner wanderlust and have been organizing road trips to different places.

I don’t do well traveling with other people but with my own family we are familiar with each others’ rhythms and we seem to like the same things. So our trip to Tasmania was a blast! It was one long road trip where we stayed in a different town every night, some locations being rather remote and in the middle of nowhere. The surprising highlight was a glamping experience – I couldn’t find decent accommodation around Cradle Mountain over Boxing Day but it turned out to be a magical experience as we saw amazing night skies and glow worms at night as there was almost no light pollution at all.

So one of the best things about family holidays is that I get to cook through the holidays. I know it’s weird but I got such a kick from planning meals and cooking in unfamiliar kitchens. This time I even baked a chocolate cake and made bagels and sausage rolls…these baked goods kept us well fed on the road as we were mostly visiting way out places without many good food options. The other thing I had great fun with was the challenge of cooking up leftovers and adapting recipes to whatever produce we had on hand. We did move to a new AirBnB every day and it was always a little unpredictable how well the kitchens were set up. I must say that the wonderful thing is that most of the kitchens came with an oven and good stove top and except for out last stop, all had real cooking utensils to work with. I remember our road trip in California was a little annoying as every stop had no vegetable peelers and so I’ve taken to traveling with a vegetable peeler in addition to my favorite knife on holiday!

So it’s a very Asian thing to cook from nose to tail and to never throw away leftovers. I suppose it’s a long history of poverty and prudence so that it’s ingrained in our entire cultural consciousness never to throw anything potentially useful away. Sustainability was always in our DNA before climate change made it fashionable. So on our recent trip I was pretty proud of myself that I used up the whole bag of onions and the garlic and every thing I had bought to cook with. I did leave behind half a bottle each of soy sauce and oyster sauce at our last stop – I had already anticipated this from the beginning because nowhere can you find travel size bottles of these and I already had bought smaller bottles to start with.

So getting back to Singapore the very next day I had to host a bunch of hubs’ relatives from the UK. I ended up doing Chinese steamboat because it was the easiest thing to do as I didn’t have any help that Sunday as it was D’s day off. I set up 3 steamboat pots for 15 people and in keeping with the other cultural imperative in Asian hosting, we had to have an abundance of food! So needless to say I ended up with a good amount of leftovers like octopus balls, tofu, Shabu beef and mushrooms. We had had laksa steamboat which was a lovely spicy twist on the usual Chinese steamboat and I didn’t feel like having the same again (I think we had enough of laksa after the gargantuan mea).

So dealing with the leftovers was a little bit daunting but I suddenly had a craving for Japanese curry. Japanese curry is pretty different from the South East Asian curries that we are used to. The curry is sweeter and the gravy is thick as it uses a flour roux for thickening. I’ve always used xanthan gum as a thickener in low carb cooking but I did discover a new keto hack (thank you Google) which uses whey protein powder as a substitute for flour in the roux. It’s a little grainier and you have to be careful not to let the protein powder burn, but the results were quite decent and I think made this Japanese curry close to the real thing.

I confess I was surprised at how well this Japanese curry turned out. The steamboat ingredients were quick and easy to cook in this curry and I believe you can throw anything into this Japanese curry. If I weren’t throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the curry, I think some boneless chicken thighs or beef cubes would make a wonderful chicken or beef curry, but you would have to simmer the meat for longer than in this recipe.