Boontjes met vlees

Kids and vegetables, always a tricky combination. It is not that long ago that Linde looked at me, head cocked, stating with a weary voice: Mama, you know I don’t eat vegetables. She did not say it, but I could read the why do you keep serving them in her eyes. 

Yet a few months ago when I asked what she wanted to eat on her birthday, she summed up, without hesitating: green beans, broccoli, pink fish (salmon steak) and rice. In that sequence. I am still  recovering from the shock. 

Green beans especially have been a firm favourite in our household for a while. We have had fights over who could get the last ones, and those were fierce fights too. The other day we served two large packets of beans, and I had naively assumed that after three of my kids would have feasted on those, enough would be left for Indah’s dinner. No. They ate them all. 

I remember how much I hated green beans growing up, especially those served at my grandmother’s house. Memories of green beans boiled to death in the classic Dutch way still make me shudder. We never have those. I have not boiled a vegetable since I-can’t-remember-when. We stir-fry. 

Credits for the popularity of green beans can be granted to a dish we call, very prosaically, ‘boontjes met vlees’. This translates into, well, ‘beans and meat.’ The dish is as simple as it is yummy, consisting of stir fried, ehm, beans and beef. 

Roel claims to be the inventor of this famous dish, the recipe of which has been further perfected by Indah (and we will tactfully ignore the fact that it is in fact a classic Asian disc). Last Monday when we (we meaning Indah) cooked this dish I brought it out to five children, ready at the table, chanting ‘boontjes met vlees’, while banging their knives and forks on the table to the rhythm. Our little guests (who had had it before and had requested it) complained that when their aunty made it for them, it was just not as good. 

And since I know that all you parents out there are now dying to get this famous recipe that will get your kids to gorge on green beans, without further ado I present Indah’s version of: 

Boontjes met vlees 

(stir fried beef with green beans)

500 g stir-fry beef, in thin strips

2 or 3 (~200g) packets of green beans, cleaned and in 3-5cm pieces

1 onion, finely chopped

1-2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

kechap Manis (Indonesian sweet soy sauce) 

for the marinade:

3-4 tablespoons light soy sauce

2-3 tablespoons oyster sauce

1 tablespoon sesame oil

1 tablespoon corn starch

pepper and salt

I have given indicative quantities for most of the ingredients because we don’t really do exact measuring in our kitchen, and also because it depends on your personal preference. You can’t really go wrong much, and you can always add more soy sauce or oyster sauce later. Mix all the ingredients for the marinade, and add it to the beef. Let it sit for a while, at least half an hour. 

Heat a wok with a generous glug of oil and fry the garlic and onion for a few minutes. Add the beans, and stir-fry these for a few minutes as well until they are almost done, before you add the beef. Make sure your wok is hot and you stir well. When everything is cooked, add a generous glug of kechap manis to taste. Serve with plain rice, and sambal for those who like some added bite.

Singapore Girl

‘Jasmijn, do you want a sandwich?’ 
‘No,’ she shakes firmly, ‘chickice’ 
Chickice? What does she want now? 
Angrily she shouts it again, and again. 
Luckily Indah gets it. Jasmijn wants chicken rice. 

Our Jasmijn is turning into a real Singapore Girl. Chicken rice might well be the most popular dish in Singapore, and is loved by all our children. Whenever we eat in hawker centres, where mama and papa gorge on exotic goodies, this is one of their favourite choices, alongside Malay sateh and Indian thosai.

Chicken rice has all those properties that make it attractive to young children. It is white. Mild flavoured. All components are easily identifiable. And it does not contain any vegetables apart from some pieces of cucumber.

For precisely those reasons I used to think chicken rice boring. But, the more I eat it, the more I start to appreciate it. The soft, yet fragrant flavours. The creamy, crumbly rice. The spicy, fresh chilli sauce with ginger and lemon. It was about time to try this at home.

Boiling chicken is not something we traditionally do in Europe, unless we make soup. But when you think about it, it has many advantages. The chicken will turn out juicy and plump every time, you cannot cook it too long, no risk of dryness. And there is a lovely chicken soup the next day.

As with all famous dishes there are as many recipes as cooks. Google showed particularly helpful, and after some surfing the dish started to unravel its secrets. So I had a plan, a chicken, and a sick Jasmijn in need of some broth.

Unfortunately that same, sick, Jasmijn decided to be stuck to me like glue, so handling of boiling liquids proofed possible. Again, Indah saved the day. It turned out she had cooked the dish many, many times before, after her former Chinese employer thought her the family recipe. Indah could cook chicken rice with her eyes closed. And so she did, while I hovered around, clutched by a moaning toddler, making notes and pictures.

The quantities in the recipe are not precise, feel free to adapt them to your personal taste or the size of your chicken. Not all the stock is needed for boiling the rice, the remainder can be used for chicken soup. To make it stronger you can add the bones after you have cut up the chicken and boil it a little while longer.

Chicken rice 

Step 1: the chicken
1 chicken (preferably free-range, if you can get one)
5 cm ginger
3 cloves garlic
1 stalk lemongrass

Wash the chicken and rub it with salt. Boil a large pot of water, enough to just cover the chicken, not more.

Peel the garlic, lemongrass and ginger and pound them to release the flavour. Stuff half in the chest cavity of the chicken. When the water boils, put the chicken and the remainder of the spices in the water, put the lid on, and bring back to the boil.

Turn off the heat and leave for about 45 minutes. If you want to you can turn the chicken halfway, and bring the water back to the boil. You can check the chicken by sticking in a chopstick, if the juices run clear it is cooked. Take it out of the stock and leave to cool.

Step 2: the rice
2 cloves of garlic
2 leaves of pandan (leave if hard to get)
3 cm ginger
2 cups of rice
4 cups of chicken stock (see step 1)

Heat some oil in a wok and fry the finely chopped garlic. Add the dry, uncooked rice and fry till it is coated with garlicky oil. Transfer to a rice cooker or casserole together with the stock, ginger and pandan.

Boil until all the stock is absorbed and the rice cooked.

Step 3: the chilli sauce 

3-6 chilli’s of choice
3 cm ginger
2 cloves garlic
a few spoons of lime juice
a few spoons of chicken stock/ fat

For the sauce you can use a mixture of large, milder chilli’s that give a nice colour, and the hotter chilli padi, depending on how hot you like it. I like to use 3 each

Puree, chop or pound all the ingredients to a smooth sauce. Add a few spoons of the top layer of the chicken stock, trying to scoop as much floating fat as possible. You can adjust quantities of each ingredient according to taste.

To serve you rub a mixture of one tablespoon of sesame oil and one of light soy sauce over the chicken. Then chop it into small pieces. Sprinkle some fried onions on the rice, and serve with pieces of cucumber.

The help

Life in Singapore comes with benefits. Help. Cheap, all day, domestic help. The comfortable-off Singaporean housewife does not have to get distracted by laundry, mopping floors or getting groceries. She has time for the more important things in life. Like having coffee, with friends.

Whilst the kids relieve the small wooden shop in the corner of the living room of its wares, drive around the baby pram, or push over stacks of Duplo bricks, I pour another round of ice tea for their mothers. One of my friends wipes the sweat of her forehead. It is hot today. I hand around my homemade Dutch ‘ontbijtkoek,’ and my Australian, British and Indian friends taste and approve. We talk about baking. Cooking. And, before long, the help.

My Australian friend is looking for a new one. Her third. Why is she so unlucky? Either they cannot clean, don’t listen, or can’t control the kids. My other, Indian, friend, tells about her new helper, who worked for another Indian family for six years and promised to know all the ins and outs of complex Indian food. When my friend asked her to roll chapatti’s, the Philippina girl rolled her eyes. Where was the electric chapatti maker? The girl had no idea how to cook the vegetarian dishes my friend favoured, and she was considering a cooking course.
Cooking courses for helpers abound in Singapore, to teach Chinese, Western, Korean or Japanese food, to any employer’s fancy.

My British friend sighs. There won’t be a course in the world to help my helper, she says with a shake of her head, she managed to burn boiled eggs. We all nod, ready to carry on, share more stories, but my friend cries, no, really, literally. The girl let the eggs boil for hours, until the water was gone and the pot black with soot. 
But, my friend shrugs, she is great with the kids.

Complaining about the help. I have heard worse, far worse. These conversations can make me feel uncomfortable, but are also just so human, showing clearly the old, colonial inequalities in this otherwise so modern city. The girls, usually from poor and remote villages in the Philippines or Indonesia, don’t always have much in common with their Chinese, Indian and Western employers.

I try not to, not to complain. But I am only human too, the weather is hot and the ice tea cool. My complaint? My Indah is too good a cook. And she enjoys it too. I had resolved to do this myself, really I had. But the tropical heat makes lazy and tired. The afternoons are full of football, ballet and swimming lessons, and cooking time for dinner inconveniently coincides with bath and bedtime. So when Indah asks, with hope in her keen eyes, what she can cook tonight I let her, save in the knowledge that it will be good and tasty and requires no effort on my side. Not even the dishes after.

Every recipe I give her she will copy, faultlessly, better than I, who can stick to no command, ever could. Even my ‘why not something with aubergine and ginger’ gets tasty results.

We are best when we work and learn together, combining her Asian experience and excellent chopping skills with my western and technical food knowledge. She chops, she suggests, I google and I mix, all the flavours of the globe. Together we create real fusion food. We are a good team, my Indonesian helper and me. 

Indah's fish in kechap

2 large white, soft fish fillets (we use Pangasius)

5 cm ginger

2 cloves garlic

1 large onion

red chilli to taste

sweet Kechap Manis (indonesian soy sauce)

Slice the onion in thin rings and chop the ginger and garlic fine. For heat you can use either the larger, milder red chilli's, which add both flavour and colour, but if you like a bit more of a punch you can also add some of the smaller, but hotter, thai chilli's. 

Heat some oil in a wok, and fry the onion, garlic, ginger and chili for a minute or so.  Then add the fish, and fry briefly. Add the soy sauce generously, around 3 to 4 table spoons should do it. Fry until the fish is tender, and add a few tablespoons of water if the dish threatens to get too dry.