Hey guys,
This is my first blog and I've taken ages to start this because I'm not too sure about my written English. However Matt has encouraged me to create my own blog for my nature of loving food, styling my clothes and finding fun in my little world as much as I can. So here I come with my little silly things!!!
My love of my fashion will be posted occasionally as I need new clothes for those posts :). Joking!
Food and cooking will go under "Pickled Tea Leaf" as I love pickled tea leaf salad from my bones as a Burmese. Burmese and pickled tea leaves are always together from the birth to death. We offer it from birthday parties to funerals traditionally. They look gross for someone from a different culture but I guarantee that the taste is perfectly good. The salad is called "Laphet Thoke" in Burmese. The recipe is really easy to make. You just need to mix the tea leaves, bean fritters, fish sauce, bean powder, ground dry shrimp powder (optional), groundnut oil, chopped green chillies, thinly sliced garlic, finely sliced cabbage (optional), sliced tomatoes and a good squeeze of lime. The biggest problem is you cannot find tea leaves and bean fritters easily outside Burma.
In Burma you can get this salad from roadside sellers to restaurants. When I was a teen, my elder cousin and her friend used to take me to the salads shop which is around the corner from Aphwar (grandma's) house. I remember that those two girls are pretty enough to get teasing from boys from tea shop which is next door of salads shop. I was only a skinny shy girl by then and they kept telling me not to care about the teasing. We ordered different vegetarian salads and pickled tea leaves salad is the main one although we can make and eat it nearly everyday at home. We went there with a box of rice so we didn't need to buy boiled rice to eat with salads. The shopkeeper never rejected our naughtiness as I guess there must be a lot of people like us.
When I started interesting in cooking, my Dad showed me how to preserve the tea leaves to get my favorite taste - spicy and sour. In Burma, you can buy the fermented tea leaves from local markets. Then you can preserve these by adding groundnut oil, salt, fresh green chillies, lime juice and garlic. Then you can eat and even keep these in the fridge for a few months. Most people buy the ready made pickled tea leaves from famous brands which are also good but those have too much MSG for me. Since I now live abroad, mum occasionally sends the fermented tea leaves for her daughter who always misses local food. I'm happy to make my own pickled tea leaves by mixing the raw leaves with hands harshly, squeezing the green bitter liquid out and trying to find the authentic smell of tea leaves which came from the other side of the world.
Su Su
