A plate of celebration (finale): Stir-fried fish and potato with sambal

Here it comes, as I promised, the final sequel from our celebration last Monday. This time, I`m showing you the red hot spicy sambal dish. Oh yes, with the rice and the chicken, sambal is totally a must. I simply have no idea why some people (including me) love to burn their (and my) tongues.

So, because this is a sambal dish, naturally we need chili for the spice paste. Two reasons: to make it spicy and red. But, if you`re not into hot spicy dish, just remove the chili seeds (where most of the heat comes from) before adding the chili.

For the paste, I used garlic, onion, ginger, chili, and Korean chili powder gochugaru to enhance the redness. Gorgeous.

Heat a pan with a bit of oil and saute the spice paste. Add shrimp paste, fish sauce, and kaffir lime leaves and keep stirring. 

Throw in chopped tomatoes and mash`em with the spatula. I actually intended to puree the tomato first like I always do for making sambal, but I forgot and washed up my food processor already. Anyway, using the chopped tomatoes is actually just fine as they will get pretty much mashed up eventually.

When the tomato chunks melted and are barely visible, throw in julienned potatoes. Now I need to let you know that traditionally, the potatoes should be fried first. But you know me, always want to get things done quicker. So I just use the raw potatoes and let it cook for a while until it get wilted and softened enough.

Same way goes for the fish. I didn`t fry it. I used Japanese dried sand eels called ikanago and I think the ones I got from the store are the dried version (not fried). So I just baked them for a while to crisp them up a bit before finally dumping them into the sambal.

And you can use different types of tiny fish you have there (small anchovies will do great), although I recommend you to either fry or bake them first so they won`t get too mushy during the cooking.

Stir and stir. Don`t forget to season with salt, a pinch of sugar, and pepper. 

Last item to add: roasted peanuts. Keep stirring until everything gets evenly coated with the sambal. Hot!!

And done!

Oh, what a relieve! Now I can smile before I go to bed and thanks for bearing with me with all these marathon posts.

Happy eating!

Ingredients:

Spice paste

Garlic

Onion

Chili

Chili powder

Ginger

Kaffir lime leaves

Shrimp paste

Tomato

Potato

Sand eels

Roasted peanuts
Fish sauce
Salt
Sugar
Pepper