Peranakan Food Challenge: Ayam Sambal

To ease myself into cooking food that I've essentially not tried cooking before, I flipped through the books to find something that wasn't too difficult to start with. The introduction to the Ayam Sambal recipe gave me what I was looking for: "This is a very easy dish to prepare although it does require the preparation of a rempah. Voila. Ayam Sambal it was.

I ran into a few hitches along the way, as you would expect. The first problem was the fact that I couldn't find any fresh red chillis at the NTUC that day. The recipe called for 10. You wouldn't have expected them to run out of chilli, would you? I decided against getting chilli padi as a substitute (that would have totally killed my taste buds) and got a packet of dried chillis instead.

The prep was, as promised, pretty easy. Even easier when you've got a helper to do all the chopping and peeling! The chicken was chopped, the galangal and lemon grass peeled and bruised and I took out a packet of UHT coconut milk. Then we set about preparing the rempah. Because I had decided to half the recipe for just the three of us, I was struggling to get the rather small amount of rempah ingredients in finely chopped. I complained about the puny dried chillis thinking that was the reason the quantity seemed so small. I only realised what was wrong after we'd thrown everything into the pot to cook and my helper turned and asked me quizzically what I wanted to do with the 10 shallots she had peeled -- shallots that were supposed to be in the rempah. Right.

So I did the next best thing: I whizzed them up in the blender, quickly chucked them into the pot and stirred everything together, hoping for the best. Since the method for cooking this dish said "mix all the ingredients in a wok or pot", I figured it was technically the same, no?

Anyway, this was the end result:

The colour is nowhere as red as depicted in the book but was instead a barely curry-like yellow. Fortunately it tasted great. This dish met with the husband's approval and is on the re-do list. Hopefully without the hiccups the next time!