Recipes to Rival: Beef Rendang

This month's Recipes to Rival post is probably going to be my last blog post for a while. I have a lot going on right now and just need to focus on other things. I still plan to cook great dishes, just not take the time to blog about it. I'll miss Recipes to Rival and The Daring Bakers.

Anyway, this month I co-hosted with Rayrena of Happy Cows. It was her birthday month, so very fitting for her to be able to host.

I was glad to be making a curry dish for Lee. He loves it so much. I had a bit of difficulty finding all of the ingredients. I went to a local Asian market and a local Indian market (just in case the Indian one had some ingredients) and couldn't find the galangal, kaffir lime leaves, or duan salam leaves. I ended up finding ground galangal at Penzeys (regular ginger could be a substitute), used some lime zest for the kaffir lime leaves, and some regular bay leaves for the duan salam leaves.

This is definitely a dish for a day when you're sitting around the house. After three hours, all the liquid hadn't yet reduced, but we ate it anyway because we were hungry and we like saucy curries anyway. We probably didn't get the full experience, but it was pretty good and Lee loved it. Other people had to reduce their rendang for about 5 hours!

Make sure you are careful about where you serve this! The tumeric stains like a @%^#$@! Lee was eating some leftovers as lunch the next day at his computer, spilled it on the floor, and the tumeric looks like it's all out until you look at it in sunlight. I think that's strange that we can now only see the tumeric if the sun hits it... I learned that hydrogen peroxide can help. We also used a Woolite Rug Stick to help out. I think we got as much as possible, but if anyone has any more suggestions for getting turmeric out of the rug, I'd love more ideas!




Look at all the fat I strained out!!