Sudden cravings and makeshift cooking: Salty mango sticky rice & sambal belacan without belacan

Last week after listening to Shaz describe the delicious mango sticky rice she had in Bangkok I suddenly was hit with a desire to eat white rice with tom yum, telur dadar and sambal belacan (which is more Malay-Thai than actual Thai). And for dessert, I wanted mango sticky rice of course.

I told Matt and he suggested looking up Thai restaurants. We settled on one 'King and I' that had tom yum and mango sticky rice on the menu but later I realized it wasn't run by Thais. (It's not a bad place but I just have a biased preference for Thai establishments run by Thais.) 

Luckily, the tom yum was good and hot even if it wasn't per se very Thai tom yum to me. We asked for level 4 spicy, the highest order of spicy which first shocked the waitress but then she proceeded to return to our table a few times with an array of spicy condiments 'just in case'. Sadly, they didn't have the omelet nor sambal nor the mango sticky rice.

Not to be thwarted, my kind husband offered to drive around to various Asian specialty stores to look for ingredients so that we could try and make mango sticky rice and sambal belacan. I couldn't find sambal belacan, and didn't find keffir lime leaves for the tom yum. The glutinous/sweet rice turned out to be the most expensive ingredient-- $10 for a 2lb bag!!, and the only mango available was the Kent variety which from memory was never very sweet.

I tried to follow Azie Kitchen's recipe for mango sticky rice and she had stated to make sure the santan sauce was sufficiently salty to contrast the sweetness of the mango. 

Sadly, the mango was barely sweet. 

So what we had was tart mango with sticky rice bathed in salty coconut milk. Needless to say, twas not a success. 

I managed to still salvage it for my own palate by adding generous amounts of sugar, and then used up the remaining sticky rice to make fried rice which was better received.

Today, because I realized I had a packet of Adabi tom yam paste courtesy of my thoughtful mama, I attempted to make the original thing I craved for. But this is only because I also figured out how to make sambal belacan WITHOUT the belacan. (And no, it wasn't that I just made non-belacan sambal)

Matt tried it and commented it tasted different from the previous sambals I made (i.e. sambal jantan, sambal kicap, sambal tumis), and I was like "I know right! Doesn't it taste funky?!" he agreed with the adjective. Because as anyone who knows sambal belacan, funky is the word.

So how was this achieved you ask?

Well *rubs hands*..

First I cooked off two tbs of dried chilli paste in a bit of oil, then I added a quarter of a Knorr chicken cube and a tbs of sugar. Once that was done and the kitchen had smoked up enough, I added the paste to a mix of birds eye chilli (25 to be exact), a large long hot green pepper, zest from one lime, juice from half a lime, about half a cup of thick tamarind water (basically a tablespoon of tamarind paste in warm water), and about a tbs of Lee Kum Kee salty soy sauce. I blitzed all of that, then seasoned with sugar and salt to taste. 

I tasted the result and did a little dance. And there it was, sambal belacan looking and tasting sambal WITHOUT the belacan. 

From left to right: Belacan-less sambal belacan (if you squint just so), telur dadar, tom yam, white rice & garlic bokchoy