Khau Jam for lunch

Was back at my kampung and rather than succumb to the usual fare for lunch, we decide to make Khau Jam- which is a version of  nasi kerabu. To describe it in 3 words : healthy, yummy and green !

We asked our Thai friend Malee to ‘order’ the leaves/herbs for our khau jam meal. It cost RM5 for a plastic bag full of leaves, barks and roots. I tried to separate the herbs and  failed miserably at taxonomy. There were more than 20 different kind of leaves:  leaves of different shapes and sizes, leaves with smooth surface, some hairy, some thorny and some waxy. The familiars leaves that I can identify were : pandan , limau purut, serai wangi and err..that was all. There were some barks and roots too…below picture only show part of the herbs from the plastic bag

Rinse the herbs, where applicable cut into smaller pieces and then put them into a juicer/fruit processor , add some water and let the machine do it’s job to obtain the vegetable  juice. Don’t add too much water as this will dilute the taste. Run the juice through a sieve. Instead of water, use the vegetable juice to boil rice. 

Cut the following into shreds or rings  : Bunga Kantan ( ginger flower), cucumber, daun kelsom (Kelsom leaves) , onions and lemongrass ( you can include long beans too)Preparation of fried grated coconut  : in a wok , fry the kelapa parut (grated coconut ) over low fire until they turned brown. Remove from wok and pound them to get finer texture, add some granulated sugar to taste.

Preparation of deep fried fish and fish meat puree  :  In a pot, boil ikan selar aye ( sardine) with  asam glugor pieces and salt. Boil until fish is cooked, leave to cool ( the boiling could be done earlier so that the fish can soak/ marinate in the asam solution for a longer period). For fried fish : Coat the fish with batter and deep fry.   For fish meat puree : Remove the fish bones and pound the fish meat with a mortar. For fish meat with add on : add some coconut thingy to the pounded fish meat, add sugar, salt and pepper to taste and fry over low fire.

This is the spread :

 This was my lunch with 2 pieces of keropok on the side  ! ( first helping) , Absolutely Yummylicious !

 If  the preparation work puts you off, there is an easy way out…head on to Kampung Terbak in Tumpat , proceed to Wat Pikulthong and locate the Khau Jam Makcik, please click here .

 I found that Kuali has a recipe for khau jam, please click here  .