in the spirit of chinese new year…i present to you the ubiquitious straits chinese must-have on all happy occasions of wedding, new years and birthdays:

kiam chye ark(Hok.) /ham choy ngap(Can.) /salted vegetable with duck soup(Eng.)

Everytime I refused to follow my parents back to my maternal grandmother’s apartment, she(grandma) would try to seduce me by offering to make my favourite soup of kiam chye ark. It is basically a simple concotion of duck, pig’s trotters and salted mustard leaves but it produces the most wonderfully complex flavours known to men, infusing the kitchen with the signature aroma that had seduced me for so many years. Not many non-straits chinese would know about this dish, I have never seen it sold anywhere other than in Penang. It is one of the traditional dishes to originate from the gourmet central of Malaysia and the island of my birth – other specialties include hokkien(prawn) mee,lam mee (birthday mee), lorh mee (noodle with thick eggy sauce, diff from KL’s) and of course many,many more. To be born in Penang is akin to being born an automatic glutton and I tend to think I make quite a good glutton.

My mom has tried making it but sort of failed miserably because she is healthy – no fatty meats and minimal saltiness. I would wolf down 3 bowls easy of this soup everytime I am at my grandma’s – it would sorta be like MY soup because I love it so much.I had always thought of it as a really hard dish to adjust flavours to because it is a complex mix of sweetness,sourness and saltiness.

As I lurked over a newly discovered blog, I realized its not so hard after all. Initially, I was going to follow her recipie note-for-note; but in the end I rang home and got grandma’s recipie,which has slight variations.

Inggredients:
1 duck (mine was 1.95kg)
1 pig trotter (my butcher did not have any,so mine was without)
2 nutmeg seeds
dried chinese/shitaake mushrooms (soaked and sliced)
3 packs salted mustard leaves (kiam chye/ham choy) – make sure its washed and soaked;i found a dried worm in mine.
3 good sized tomatoes
2 big onions

chop your duck up into 8 pieces; trying to remove as much of the skin and fat as you can. If you can’t seem to de-skin your duck, it’s ok, let it be, but you would need to skim the fat off your soup later

Using a huge pot, boil around 3 liters of water and throw in your duck when it starts to boil. If you are very hard working, let the duck boil for around 5 mins to remove the scum from it, throw the scummy water away, and reboil it again in fresh water. Otherwise, spend time skimming the scum off later when your soup is cooked

soak your salted vegetable for around 5-10 minutes, taking care to clean it properly
chop the vegetable into pieces of around 5cm in length, and boil it together with the duck.

Include the rest of the inggredients and let it boil away merrily for at least 2 hours.

ta-da!Ok, not much to look at, but IT DOES LOOK LIKE THAT! Honest.I did not come up with some fugly looking dish and pass it off as nice.

I am like so proud of myself. if you are new to this masak masak series or you do not know me in real, you should know that I am a relatively inexperienced novice cook – when I choose to cook I do really simple pastas, curries and stirfrys.So to produce a soup on the same level as my grandma is – an achievement even my mommy is proud of.

*sniff*sniff*

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