September 26, 2007

Karedok

Last Sunday afternoon I craved a salad with lots of veggies. The weather was scorching hot outside, I was so lazy to go anywhere and I still had many fresh veggies on the refrigerator, so I decided to make "karedok". Karedok is basically a raw vegetable salad consists of kacang panjang (green long beans), cucumber, bean sprouts, cabbage, kemangi leaf and round eggplant. This was not only highly nutritious dishes and good for my endo diet, it was easier on the wallet too.

What makes "karedok" stand out is the peanut dressing with quite a strong aroma of kencur and garlic. Kencur is a ginger-like root that has a unique and champor flavor and often used in Indonesian traditional medicine to relieve cough and cold. Kencur must be washed and scraped off its skin before using. Because I was so lazy to make the dressing from scratch, I used the ready to use peanut paste and adding only the kencur, garlic, red hot chilies, a bit of fresh lime juice and a bit coconut sugar to taste. Not bad for a Sunday afternoon side dish.




4 comments:

Anonymous said...

it looks good Elyani. i didn't know that you can eat raw eggplant. what are those brown flat round thing right before the salad? coconut sugar?

i am learning so much from your cooking. i have recently cooked the prawns in red chili sauce and will post it in my blog shortly.

Elyani said...

yes Belle, that's the coconut sugar. They are widely use in Indonesian cooking and desserts.

Anonymous said...

which one is the round eggplant? is that the small green one?

so you mix the coconut sugar in the veggies?

Elyani said...

Yes, Fe ... the small green one is the round eggplant. We always eat them raw with shrimp paste chilies sauce or for this salad. The coconut sugar is only used a little bit to mix with the peanut paste to individual taste. Some like it very hot, some like it a bit sweet.