Satay and Gado-Gado

It would be hard for me to identify my favourite meal. It just depends on what sort of mood I'm in. However, this one would definitely be on the shortlist! It is a meal that we often had when we lived in the Far East.  This time Jane made the meal, and I can only claim credit for the photos...

This is the star performer: chicken satay, cooked to perfection on our electric tabletop grill. Kept nice and juicy by their marinade, but with some well-done stripes too! Naturally, beef or pork would work just as well.

In our house, satay is always accompanied by a thick dipping sauce made predominantly of peanut butter, soy sauce and water. And is always served in this beautiful scallop-shaped pottery bowl which we bought many years ago in Penang, Malaysia. (We're creatures of habit, you know!)

There's obviously more sauce there than you would need for 18 satay, so these will come in handy for dipping up the remainder- prawn crackers:

You perhaps know that I don't eat fish or seafood, so you're probably wondering about what I think of prawn crackers. Well, I find that they usually don't taste of prawns - just a sort of salty savouriness, so I'm fine with them.

Then there is the Gado-Gado (literally just "vegetables"). This is what a Westerner would call a salad. Our version is made with some raw ingredients and some cooked ones. We use carrots, green beans, beansprouts, cucumber and watercress, topped with fried beancurd (tofu), cashew nuts and sliced boiled eggs, but of course you can use pretty much anything you fancy.

On the day we ate this meal we had been to our local Chinese supermarket and we couldn't resist buying these: Char Siu Bau:

 These are steamed buns filled with red-cooked pork. As it happened they were rather ordinary, and were completely overshadowed by the home-cooked elements of the meal.

This meal wouldn't be complete (or authentic) without rice so we had some fluffy fragrant steamed Basmati too.

Finally then, the obligatory arty shot!

That just reminds me how nice the fried tofu was. Lovely and golden on the outside but soft and fluffy on the inside.

I think you can see why this meal is a favourite of ours. Interesting, good-looking, healthy and nutritious. We've had it many times before, but I'm sure we'll have it many more times in the future too.