Making Chicken Rice

I generally shy away from cooking Southeast Asian food because they require so many different types of spices and so much effort, not to mention the fact that a very good rendition is probably available a hop and a skip away from wherever I am and can be purchased for a song.

However, ever since I tried making Tom Yam soup and Pho Bo, and realized how easy those were, I've learnt to question these assumptions and have been more open to cooking (or at least attempting to) Southeast Asian food. In some ways, you can say Ed's soft spot for food from around the region has been a key motivating factor as well.

That is not to say that I've been particularly successful at my attempts though. In my previous entry I mentioned how the Assam Laksa took a painful two and a half hours to complete. Mind you, there were three, sometimes four, persons working on the dish at any one time.

Today, I was inspired by Adam Liaw's cookbook with a recipe for Chicken Rice - possibly one of Ed's top five favorite dishes, ever. It sounded simple enough and the ingredient list was not too long nor diverse. All was well - forty minutes into the cooking and I was almost done. Minimal washing up seemed to be required (I cheated and used the rice cooker to fry the rice first) and the smell in the kitchen was promising.

And then I had to chop the chicken.

Even with a sharp cleaver and all the determination I could muster, I could not make clean, decisive chops at the chicken. Worse still, I wasn't prepared for all the juices to spill out of the chicken's cavity, onto the chopping board, countertop and down the kitchen cupboards before finally reaching the kitchen floor in all it's greasy goodness.

But after some (more) struggle and compromises (drumsticks and wings left whole), I managed to get the chicken onto a plate of sliced cucumbers. With newfound respect for those uncles (and the occasional aunty) who chop chicken in the shops, I tucked into the chicken rice with Ed. After all that effort, would I make it again? Maybe!

Adam Liaw's recipe worked quite well and on the whole it was tasty. I liked the fact that I had very little chopping to do, apart from the chicken. Mainly whole cloves of garlic or thick slices of unpeeled ginger were used. I made chicken rice before, using other recipes and Adam's unusual step of wrapping the cooked chicken in cling wrap after brushing it with sesame oil might have lent itself to the silky smooth skin. While I wasn't too sure about the chilli sauce recipe - I doubled the recipe and used a whopping 11 bird's eye chillies - they turned out well in the end. The bright tang of the lemon juice freshened up the dish, and for some reason the sauce was not as spicy as I thought it would turn out to be.

Can't wait to try his other recipes!

Mid-week meals

Whenever I lack the motivation to cook, there are a couple of sure-fire ways I usually seek to get inspired all over again.

1. Travel to an exotic country with a national cuisine vastly different from what I'm used to.
2. Read incredibly food blogs like The Travelors Lunchbox, Orangette, Kuidaore, Delicious Days, and Chubby Hubby just to name a few. One day, if I don't get inspired by the stunning photos or the delicious writing, I'd know I'm a gone case.
3. Equally peppered with beautifully inspiring photos and prose is Donna Hay, a magazine I'd almost kill myself if I somehow miss out on buying the last season's copy.

The latest issue has plenty of recipes for special days - tiny morsels of food as part of a larger grazing menu, or a more elaborate sit-down dinner comprising main courses that you can choose to spend anywhere between an hour to 3 days laboring over .

My favourite section though, is one for the everyday. They gave a recipe for osso buco and 3 accompanying quick recipes that uses osso buco in different ways. Great as a weekend project for sure. They also have a number of recipes for mid-week dinners meant to be casual and put together almost in a flash. There, I found the perfect getting-back-into-the-kitchen recipe.

Thai-style sweet and sour barramundi. It looked like all I had to do was clean and boil (the vegetables), fry (the fish), and mix (the dressing for the fish). The only laborious part was the cleaning and chopping of the vegetables (snow peas, but I added french beans and baby corn). After that, everything was a breeze. This iss presentable and satisfying enough to be served during mid-week casual dinners at home with close friends, but easy enough as a tasty mid-week dinner for yuppie-couples.

I made this for my brother and I this weekend, and substituted the barramundi with salmon. I enjoyed how the tartness of the thai-style dressing cut through the usually rich flavour of salmon. Simply blanched snow peas, french beans and baby corn were drizzled with some Japanese Roasted Cashew Salad Dressing that I bought at the Japanese fair recently. Okay, I cheated, but it is meant for a mid-week meal you know.

It is great getting back into the kitchen!

Thai-style Sweet and Sour Salmon
Recipe adapted from Donna Hay
Serves 4

Ingredients
1 tsp chiili flakes
1 tbspn sea salt flakes
4x200g salmon fillets, skin on
1 tbsp vegetable oil
300g snow peas, blanced and thinly sliced (or 100g snow peas, 100g french beans and 100g baby corn)
1/4 cup (60ml) lime juice
2 tsp brown sugar
1 tsp fish sauce

Method
To make the sweet and sour dressing, place the lime juice, sugar and fish sauce in a non-metallic bowl and stir to combine. Set aside
Combine the chilli flakes and sea salt and rub onto the fish skin.
Heat the oil in a large non-stick fying pan over high heat.
Cook the fish skin-side down for 3-4 minutes or until skin is crisp, turn and cook for a further 1-2 minutes then turn off the flame.
Serve with the dressing spooned over, and the side of snow peas, french beans and baby corn - blanched, drained and tossed in your favourite salad dressing (preferably not something tart like the sweet and sour dressing).

Kim Bak Soon

If not for my younger cousin who has a liking for all things Korean, and has just returned from an exchange programme in Seoul, I would never have thought of preparing kimchi (Korean appetisers usually served in tiny portions at the beginning of every meal) or anything from that land of abusive girlfriends and chauvinistic men.


Like a fish out of water, I scrutinised every item on the shelves in the Korean mini-mart baffled by the unfamiliar strokes, trying to find for Jajangmyeon noodles and other things like Shin Kimchi or the hot, red pepper powder that I'm certain has another tongue-twisting Korean name for it.

Surprisingly however, the preparation in the kitchen is not as complicating as shopping for the ingredients. It was terribly easy once all the ingredients were at hand. To make Bak Choi Kimchi it was just a matter of soaking the vegetables in brine and rinsing it before mixing it with the homemade Kimchi paste that was put together in a flash the blender. Other Kimchi-s such as the Poggi Kimchi (Napa cabbage) or the Kaktugi (Radish) followed almost the same steps.


Making the Kimchi Jeon (Kimchi pancake) or Pa Jeon (Seafood pancake) was even more brainless. Flour, egg, water, whisk, add filling, fry! According to my little cousin, only the most sour type of Kimchi that is generally used for cooking and not eating (very much like cooking chocolate vs. eating chocolate) should be used for the Kimchi Jeon. Unfortunately there was no Shin Kimchi in the mini-mart, but I settled for what the store owner pointed to as the more sour version of all the kimchi-s she had.


Our Kimchi Jeon turning out hilariously thick as I had poured too much batter into the tiny frying pan, resulting in it having nowhere else to run but upwards. But it was still incredibly tasty and satisfying. The kimchi provided enough saltiness to allow it to subsist without the usual accompaniment of light soy sauce.










Being adventurous and perhaps overly ambitious, we also made JaJangMyeon (Zha Jiang Mian, Black Bean Paste Noodles) and rice balls using recipes from my latest cookbook purchase: 'Discovering Korean Cuisine - Recipes from the Best Korean Restaurants in LA'. We also made pork nuggets using a recipe my cousin picked up from Seoul.


The following morning I decided I'd use some leftover cooked crabmeat to make a Pa Jeon. I added sliced squid rings and fresh prawns and attained a more delicate tasting pancake whose flavours were accentuated with a touch of light soy sauce.


If I had known it'd be so easy, I would have started much, much earlier. Of course, now the problem would be figuring out which of the 20 varieties of roasted, seasoned seaweed staring at me blankly in the mini-mart the recipe is asking for! And if I can single-handedly finish all the kimchi my cousin and I made that is now sitting pretty in huge containers in the fridge, I will turn into what my brother calls 'Kim Bak Soon'. Very bak (meaty) indeed. If anyone would like to challenge how one can get bak purely on vegetables alone, one look at my perfectly rotund bunny who eats hay, hay and more hay, should put an end to that conversation.

Cooking from Europe

Mozzarella and Prosciutto

The joy of meeting people who are just as crazy about cooking as you are (though I think I am pretty mild) is just impossible to describe. Most of the times, I try to hold my tongue when in fact I wish I could share my excitement at having perfected Creme Brulee (which by the way I haven't, but have to by Sunday), or at having discovered this fantastic waffle recipe that beats any waffle I've ever eaten. That is because I would then very uncontrollably launch into a high-pitched speech on the technicalities of cooking or how I so feliticiously decided on giving the recipe a go.

But to meet someone who doesn't only indulge me by listening intently to my every word, but also tell me that he has been trying various egg tart recipes for the past five days? Now that's seriously insane. Insanely wonderful.

To meet another who gets just about as excited as I am about cooking, and mulls over the potluck theme as long as I do just adds to my happiness. Then bringing these two individuals, GM and P, together and inviting a spunky old friend, SY, at a tiny potluck made for such an enjoyable dinner. This is the precise dinner I referred to in my previous post. The one that was so long, but too short. That knocked me out till the next day when I was meant to shave.

SY and I looking really blur, literally. Courtesy of P.

After much ding-donging back and forth through emails and sms-es (did I mention we were all a little crazy about cooking?), we finally settled on cooking from a single continent. This would give us plenty of leeway to get creative. I decided that SY would do the starter since she is possibly nowhere near as manic about cooking as the other three of us are, though always game to try the latest kid on the block.

It was incredibly heartening to know that since SY returned from US, she had not stepped into the kitchen. And that her first time handling real food, was for us! As she stepped through the door, she bore luscious balls of buffalo mozzarella (alliteration on the wrong words!) and paper thin prosciutto. The combination of which brought back beautiful memories of Rome where I had tucked into a platter of prosciutto wrapped mozzarella. If I'm not wrong, it was drizzled with some olive oil and sprinkled with a special combination of herbs her mom had.

Glorious Moussaka

P decided on a Moussaka, most closely associated with the Greeks or Turks. Moussaka always has eggplant but may contain almost anything else imaginable. The Moussaka P concocted by bringing two recipes together had pork mince, egg plant, onions (all the crying was worth it), tomatoes, yogurt, eggs and cheese. As the sauce bubbled away and spilled over the deep dish in the oven, I couldn't wait to work through the crisp top layer to the soft and oozy mince at the bottom.

Paella with Prawns, Chorizo , Red Peppers and Peas

I'm sure GM hummed and hawed as long as I did to choose what to cook for the dinner. He finally settled on Paella (Spain), for which he used a recipe from America's Test Kitchen (the irony!). This website is pretty cool though, and suits GM's style of cooking to the T. Like a science experiment, he would go through the recipes and stick to the recipe as closely as is humanly and financially possible. So even though I had a paella-like pan that would have passed off almost perfectly as a paella pan, he chose to use my Staub cast-iron dutch oven instead simply because the recipe said so.

Perhaps it was because he used the Dutch Oven or perhaps it was just the recipe. A crunchy layer of paella formed at the bottom of the cocotte, just like what you would find at the bottom of your traditional claypot rice. I really enjoyed that part the best, and found out that GM had to put it over the stove for a little just before serving in order to achieve that effect. So having the patience to allow your food as much time it needs to blossom definitely pays off.

Pour, close till golden brown and serve.

As for my little contribution, I took the easy way out and prepared all the ingredients one would need for some DIY Belgian Waffles. Waffle batter, check. Salted Caramel Sauce, check. Strawberries and Balsamic Vinegar, check. Vanilla Ice Cream, check. And I am not tooting my own horn, but I've really never tasted any waffle as good as that. It was so crisp on the outside (partly because it was eaten straight out of the waffle pan), and incredibly light and airy inside.

Drizzle Salted Caramel, top with ice cream and tuck in.

Certainly helped that the caramel was smooth and not too sweet, that the strawberry sauce was chunky with a slight tang, and that the vanilla ice cream was rich, smooth and delicious. The accompaniments just had to be prepared a day in advance, and the waffle batter in the morning. This would leave you plenty of time to go for a leisurely swim, shine your silverware, set the table and enjoy the rest of the evening.

While scanning the web for waffle recipes, I could not find one that would promise light, crisp waffles. That is until I decided to google yeasted waffles. Deeply embedded in one of the nooks of my brain sat 'yeasted waffles = crisp waffles'. So when I read this article, I couldn't wait to jump straight into it. Though it is a little time consuming, I swear it is worth it. At this time, I am not inclined to attempt any other waffle recipes but this one, over and over and over again.

For Yeasted Waffles click here.

Dinner Munching (Part II) - Fish and Spinach

Sorry for the bad photograph, I'm still learning how to take photos in low-lighting with my camera without it appearing grainy or blur. It certainly doesn't help that no matter how I try, spinach puree cannot be made to look appetising.

However, it was the spinach puree recipe that I spotted first in Damien Pignolet's French. Instead of being enriched with cream and plenty of butter, transforming spinach into something absolutely heavenly but unbelievably unhealthy, it simply required pear puree.

Damien Pignolet recommended eating this with steamed or pan-friend fish, a piece of advice I took up but looked to Jane Lawson's Cocina Nueva for. Her Almond Crusted Hake piqued my interest, but was tweaked to include ground hazelnut instead of ground almond. It was breaded in the afternoon and chilled until just before serving where it needed 3 minutes (and then some) on each side, depending on the thickness of the fish. Even the spinach puree could be made in the afternoon and reheated just before serving.

This was especially useful because it left me plenty of time to prepare dessert, which required much more time, patience and effort.

I quite like the spinach puree and agree that it goes well with fish. Being a little fruity, it was definitely different and possibly a great way to get children to eat their greens by actually making spinach tasty, without negating its health benefits with cream or butter. The fish had the most wonderful aroma while being fried, and a delightfully earthy hazelnut taste.

Unfortunately I have learnt to be a little smarter and informed about my choice of fish for future use. As all the fish were labelled in Chinese, I had no idea what kind of fish I was purchasing and relied only on price to differentiate quality. I would have preferred a more tender, flaky fish to go with the puree. Embarassingly, I still don't know what I had served my girlfriends!

Spinach and Pear Puree

From Damien Pignolet's French

Serves 2-4

Ingredients

100g pear, such as Beurre Bosc or Packham, peeled and cored

400g spinach, well-washed and coarse stalks discarded

salt and freshly ground pepper

a few gratings of nutmeg

2-3 teaspoons of extra virgin olive oil

a few drops of lemon juice

Method

Boil pear until soft (10-20 minutes) then drain.

Boil spinach in plenty of quite salty water for 5 minutes until very soft.

Drain well and press out most of the moisture with the back of a spoon- the spinach should not be too dry.

For the smoothest result, puree the pear and spinach in a blender rather than a food processor.

Add the oil and season to taste, adding the lemon juice to freshen (do this only just before serving if you're preparing this in advance).

This very special recipe is adapted from Michel Guerard's Cuisine Minceur, a book dedicated to 'lean cuisine', as we would call it today. I like to serve it with steamed or pan-fried fish, and it is also excellent with roast partridge or guinea fowl.

Tres Simple Chicken

Ever since my graduation from Warwick, I've been in and out of jobs, that is until last Monday. It was the first day of the rest of my life (or at least the next 6 years), and while a little nerve-wrecking, it turns out that I had absolutely nothing to worry about. I haven't done much so far, but I can just sense that it is going to be really fulfilling. There's so much I want to be involved in and so much I want to help change, that I'm actually really excited to get down to work proper.

Anyway, the great thing about this job, compared to all the previous jobs, is that I have normal fixed working hours. While working in the service industry, my working hours had been totally social life unfriendly, and had screwed up my body clock. Now, back to the 9-to-5 (or rather 830-to-6) work-day, I've had plenty of work-life balance and time to meet up with friends after work.

Determined to do even better than that, I planned a small little teeny weeny gathering for my Warwick friends, that I planned to host at my place together with Fel. The menu was simple. Just four courses, of which the dessert was to be prepared the day before.

But who would have known that I would forget to bring my key that day, have to wait for my brother to reach home after work, leaving us only an hour to prepare the other three courses?

What really saved the day was the fact that I had chosen one of Jamie Oliver's recipes for the main course. Anyone who has cooked from Jamie's Cookbook would know that his recipes are mostly fuss-free. Just toss together and bake. Or just saute all ingredients in a pan and serve.

His Roasted Chicken Breast with Cherry Tomatoes and Asparagus was precisely one of these recipes that was just toss-and-bake. I switched the breasts for thighs and drumsticks and added some thyme to the dish as well. And while Jamie's proportions or timings might be a little off at times, I'm proud to announce that his timing for the dish worked. As the chicken was roasted on top of the bed of tomatoes and asparagus, the flavours of the vegetables were able to permeate the juicy chicken. It had an understated simplicity that everyone cleaned off their plates.

Jamie saved my day by leaving Fel and I plenty of time to cook the other two courses, so keep this recipe in case you find yourself in a similarly sticky situation one day. Meanwhile, I'm going to keep an extra housekey in my wallet from now on!

Roasted Chicken with Cherry Tomatoes and Asparagus

Serves 6 as a main course.

Adapted from Jamie Oliver's Cook with Jamie

Ingredients

12 pieces of chicken drumsticks and thighs

24 trimmed sticks (cut into any length you desire) of asparagus

36 halved cherry tomatoes

Leaves from 3 sprigs of thyme

2 tsps dried rosemary

2 tsps sea salt

2 tsps freshly ground black pepper

Drizzle of olive oil

Balsamic vinegar (optional)

Method

Preheat oven to 200 degrees celcius.

Toss everything together in a bowl.

Put the vegetables onto a tray lined with aluminium foil and place the chicken on top.

Season well and cook in the middle of the oven for 25-35 minutes.

Serve drizzled with balsamic vinegar.

Second Course From Cocina Nueva - Steaks and Butter

With just 2 hours to spare before my guests arrived and no groceries at home, I decided to do the simplest sounding , but not unsubstantial, main course in the cookbook - grilled steaks. It took just about half an hour of prep work and 10 minutes of cooking ala minute, which was quite fun to do with friends around chatting and contemplating the doneness of the rib-eye steaks. The little preparation required left me plenty of time to spend on making a great dessert.

The grilled steaks were to be moistened with a very simple reduction of veal stock, water leftover from soaking a handful of porcini mushrooms, and garlic; then served with a pat of pre-made flavour packed butter. It was meant to be a manchego, ceps (porcini) and olive butter, but since I didn't like manchego nor olives, I made a simplified ceps and caper butter instead. This really understated steak was served with steamed veggies, and while asparagus was recommended, I went with snow peas and baby corn instead because asparagus was sold out where I shopped.

Steak is great enjoyed neat - in its barest form with just a simple seasoning of salt and pepper. But with a light, earthy sauce and some flavoured butter softened by the heat of the steak, it is brought to a much higher (and sinful) level. Cafe de Paris butter, a similar home-made butter flavoured with mustard, parsley, shallots, garlic, herbs and spices, to be served with steak is perhaps the inspiration for Jane Lawson's rendition of grilled steaks with butter. It is really delicious and the possibilities for other versions are infinite. But I have a whole roll of ceps and caper butter left to use and that makes me glad that I decided to double the recipe.

Cep and Caper Butter

Adapted from Jane Lawson's Cocina Nueva

For 8 steaks

Ingredients

1 handful of dried porcini mushrooms, soaked in hot water for 15 minutes, drained and chopped

15 small capers, drained and chopped

1 clove of garlic, minced

100g softened butter

salt and pepper to taste

Method

Mash butter with mushrooms and capers until well incorporated then season with salt and pepper.

Scoop onto a piece of cling film and roll it into a log, ensuring that it is fully wrapped then twist the ends to enclose the butter.

Chill it in the fridge (or freezer, if you're rushing for time) until firm.

A Colourful Life

I can't remember when I first chanced upon a recipe that called for ribbons of zucchini and carrot to be added to noodles to add colour and crunch to an otherwise ordinary dish. Ever since, if I felt the need to bring a little colour to a meal, I'd grab my vegetable peeler and get working.

The great thing about making carrot ribbons is that it is twice (or even thrice) as quick as trying to julienne carrots into little matchsticks, and takes only a few seconds to cook through. This brings back fond memories of how Stella and I used to agonise over those idiotic chunks of carrots that would take ages to even start to soften, torturing us ravenous souls. Over time of course, we got smarter and our carrots were sliced thinner. Sometimes I even resorted to microwaving (oh the sin!) them before dumping them into our wok/frying pan to stir-fry.

Of course, other than creating strips of faux noodles, I could also buy those tricolor dried pasta readily available in supermarkets. Or even some jet-black dried squid-ink pasta to toss around in some olive oil and capers for an almost-instant-noodle-dish.

But if you, like me, have recently purchased a pasta machine from your friendly local kitchenware store, then you should probably try creating your own coloured fresh pasta. It is uber-satisfying and almost like working with clay, except that in the end, you can eat your work of art. How cool is that!

Though not at all a fan of beetroot, I ventured into making beetroot pasta because of the beautiful pink it would impart to the pasta. Perhaps an alternative would be to use red dragonfruit, which always manage to stain my fingers a dark pink. A lesson to be learnt for future pasta-making sessions would be to always stain the pasta just a shade darker than is expected since the colour fades a little after being cooked.

Now if only I could find some pesticide-free flowers that can help me attain some deep purple pasta. Wouldn't that be interesting?

The Ultimate Meat Platter

I remember a time not so very long ago, when I abstained from meat in my obsession to lose a little weight. Sure, I might not be in ideal shape now, but I'm never going back to avoiding meat ever again. How could I resist something as divine as a simple piece of grilled steak?

Last night, after dinner plans with a friend were cancelled at the eleventh hour, I decided to head home straight from town and cook a proper meal for my family. Somehow, we seldom dine together because of their irregular working hours and much less dine together at home unless I make the effort to get everyone together. By some stroke of luck, every single one of them (I make it sound like I have an army of a family when there are actually only four of us) was at home.

I needed something quick since I was expecting to arrive home a little tardy, but it had to be greatly satisfying. And I badly wanted to break in my cast-iron grillpan with a foldable handle (poke me and I can even give you the reference number of the item). I knew that if I created a dinner of meat, meat and more meat, I would not only make my father and brother happy (not to say that my mum doesn't have her carnivorous side as well), I would also be able to get my brother in on the action without a problem. I saw how his face lit up when I showed him the grillpan and remember how he talked endlessly about creating the perfect piece of grilled steak.

So a huge Meat Platter it was. Four pieces of Pork Loin (marinated in homemade barbeque sauce and grilled), 2 pieces of Beef Striploin (grilled neat, just salt and pepper), 4 Chicken Drumsticks (marinated with island spice, honey and olive oil, seared and roasted) and 2 thick 'Chorizo Sausages' (just sizzled on a pan and sliced up into chunks). Our dinner was huge, especially if you count the cold egg tofu with red lumpfish caviar, and baked mini portobello mushrooms with black truffles, that my brother and I prepared as appetisers. Plus, the slices of multi-grain bread with tomato chilli jam, and my mum's yearly (leftover) Turkey Vegetable Soup.

But the night's gorging was all worth it. The barbeque sauce with cocoa, made using a recipe that I had gotten from one of my long forgotten cookbooks, was well received. As a marinade or as a dip, it is intense and assaults every single one of your tastebuds mercilessly, and is (yet again) amazingly easy to put together. The whole chunks of garlic that were crushed and added to the sauce were delicious straight out of the sauce, and even more so after a little caramelising on a pan until it has attained an almost crispy exterior that gives way to tender flesh.

My brother was in charge of the grilling of the beef and pork loins, naturally. And he treated his meats with utmost gravity. The striploins were dutifully rotated forty five degrees at a quarter of the cooking time, flipped at half-time and rotated again just over 1 minute before they were done (total cooking time was 5 minutes for medium rare, the way my entire family likes it). The pork loins required a slightly longer cooking time and were done to perfection, even though it was his first time. With just a slight blush of pink on the inside, the loins were still moist - better than what I've tried at some restaurants.

Needless to say, my brother was a picture of pride at the dinner table as he sliced into the beef and revealed the textbook example of what medium rare beef should look like. And to my horror, we finished every last piece of meat there was to have on the platters. But to hear my father, the picky eater of the family, sing nothing but praises of the meal, now that was rare. Alas, the way to a man's heart is actually through the Ultimate Meat Platter.

Barbeque Sauce with Cocoa

Enough for 2 kg of meat

Ingredients

4 tbsp cocoa powder, 200ml red wine vinegar, 200 g tomato puree, 8 tbspn honey, 2 tbspn olive oil, 10 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed, chilli powder to taste, 1 tbspn dried oregano, 2 tbspn soy sauce, salt and sugar to taste

Method

Dissolve the cocoa in the vinegar and place in a pan with the rest of the ingredients. Bring to boil, then reduce the heat and simmer, stirring, for 20 minutes.

Use it to marinate (marinating time = 2- 24 hours), as a baste for barbecueing or simply as a dipping sauce for barbecued meat or vegetables.