You don't just get family feasts out in restaurants. Cooking at home is really joyful and get the
whole family involved. I'm Jeremy Pang from School of Wok and this series is all about
staying in to eat out. I'm going to show you how to make extravagant yet healthy meals
at home for your family and friends. The recipe for this episode is a wild rice nasi lemak.
We're going to start with the wild rice and wild rice has all that husk around it and
so it takes a little bit longer to cook but it keeps all the goodness in. So, it's going
to take about 30-40 minutes to cook this rice up, but it also needs soaking. The longer
you soak it the better, for at least an hour though. So once your rice has been soaked,
then you can start cooking it. The rice is in, I've got some chicken stock and some coconut
water here, which we're going to flavour the rice with. So you want to bring that to a
boil on a high heat first. Make sure it's covered with a lid and then right down to
a low heat and it's going to simmer away for at least 30 minutes. Possibly, up to 40 minutes.
So, right onto the curry, I'm going to start with the spices and I've got some whole spices
over here. That's cumin seeds, coriander seeds, some little cloves here, just a couple of
cloves is enough and then some cinnamon bark and some chilli. The chilli powder we'll leave
until later. The spices always must be tempered and tempering means that you sort of sear
the spices nicely first. Avocado oil, keeping it nice and healthy and you don't want your
heat to be too high, it's on a medium heat to start off with. All the whole spices are
going in, that's the cumin seeds, the whole coriander seeds, and then your clove. You
do have to be careful with your spices so that they don't burn straight away. So just
look after them before you do anything else. It takes about 1-2 minutes of just sort of
cooking this up before we add you onions, ginger, garlic, any other things like that.
So my chillies, if you don't want it over spicy but you want the flavour of the chilli
then the little trick is just to open them up like so and you'll get that flavour into
there, and they can go straight in with your whole spices. And then I've got some kaffir
lime leaf, which I'm going to pop in there too along with my finely diced up onion. Now
that those spices are tempered, when your onions go in, they are going to collect all
that flavour off the bottom of the pan. So you want to let those onions sweat down for
at least sort of 4-5 minutes before you add your chilli powder and your garlic and ginger.
Whilst that's cooking, my rice is simmering away nicely so i'm going to just pop 1 folded
pandan leaf into there and that will add this nice sort of natural, almost vanillary flavour
to the rice. My chicken; I've got chicken thigh here off the bone without the skin to
keep it as healthy as possible but still have enough fat in it to keep that flavour going.
And I want it quite nice and chunky, nothing too small. Classically, you would have chicken
on the bone with all the skin on, so I don't want to short change anyone for flavour. Next
up, we've got some garlic and ginger, everything finely chopped for this. You want all this
flavour to almost melt into the curry. It's all really fresh ingredients and simple cooking.
Some chilli powder. Still on a medium heat and I want that chilli powder to go around
the onions and almost catch a little and for a little bit of colour, a teaspoon of turmeric,
not too much more. Those onions are browning nicely , time for the chicken. Of course,
if you're on a sort of low fat diet this is a great recipe for it, just swap out the chicken
thigh for chicken breast and it'll have really nice lean meat in there. Still on a medium
to high heat, tomatoes in. Give that a stir around, a good pinch of salt, and then you
want to cover that to allow all the juices to come out of the tomatoes and the chicken
and then lift all that flavour off the bottom of the pan. After a few minutes, the juices
will all come out, time for a good scrape through, get all that flavour from the bottom
of the pan. And then add some chicken stock and coconut water. With the curry, you do
want to let it sit with the lid on for about 5 or 10 minute before you then take it off.
What I'm looking for is a nice sort of almost thicker sauce, so a thick curry sauce. So
the last 10 minutes of cooking, lid off and just thicken up and reduce right down. So
whilst that's cooking away, I'm going to blitz up a whole load of ingredients for a very
quick and simple sambal. Some dried chillies they've been soaked in hot water, pop the
soaked chillies into a blender and then you've got some onions and some shallots, some tamarind,
avocado oil, a little bit of palm sugar, and a pinch of salt. So blitzing up all these
ingredients makes it really quick and easy to make. All we need to do is fry those blitzed
up chillies and flavour together. The palm sugar in here should start to caramelise everything
up quite quickly. But it still needs a good sort of 5 to 10 minutes of cooking through
to bring out all the rawness of the chilli. And much like the curry, it might start to
stick a litte, but then you just want to scrape it off as it's sticking. Meanwhile, let's
lift that lid off and let that curry start to reduce nicely. That chicken's definitely
cooked now. You just want all that curry sauce to wrap around the chicken. The sambal is
starting to stick nicely on the bottom there. Palm sugar over time will start to caramelise
this and deepen the red colour. Now the traditional setup of a nasi lemak with less traditional
rice. But flavour wise we're not going to miss anything. We've got all that goodness
of the wild rice, just much healthier for you. So wild rice, and then your sambal, my
chicken curry, which has got that nice sort of medium to dry texture. Perfect for a dish
like this because you don't want it too saucy or wet that it's just going to drip all over
the plate. But you want enough sauce to go with each mouthful of wild rice. Very traditionally,
your cucumber slices. And I've actually got some of our home spiced nut mix in place of
the ikan bilis or the deep fried small fish and peanuts. So everything here has been baked
and super healthy with a good bit of spice. Last but not least not just for traditions
sake, your boiled egg. Nasi lemak, for the whole family, but nice and healthy! Taking
a really traditional dish like nasi lemak, swapping out simple things like white rice
for healthier wild rice and then simple coconut milks and the fattier ingredients with coconut
waters. Now it's time to dig in! Mmm, all of this without missing out on any of the
extravagance from a proper family feast. Guys, stay in to eat out for healthier, longer,
better, lives.