 fry for 5 minutes or until soft. Stir through the garlic and ginger for a minute then add the mushrooms and allow them to cook until softened. Add the garam masala, cayenne pepper, turmeric and salt and stir for a minute. Stir through the cooked lentils and the water and allow to cook on low heat for 5 minutes. Turn off the heat and mix the the tofu through. Allow the filling to cool down prior to assembling the murtabaks.
Take a dough ball in your hands and flatten it between your palms. Place it on your bench and carefully stretch out the dough with your hands until it is a rectangular shape and your benchtop can be seen through the dough. Place 1/6 of the filling in the centre of the dough and smooth it into a small rectangle. Wrap the ends of the roti over the filling so it is enclosed like a parcel. Place the roti on a plate seam side down and repeat the steps five more times.
Pour a couple of tablespoons of peanut oil in a frying pan and place on medium-high heat. Fry the rotis in batches for a couple of minutes on each side or until browned. Top up with additional oil in between batches as necessary.
Serve with the following curry dipping sauce.
Heat the peanut oil in a small saucepan over medium heat and fry the garlic for 30 seconds, or until softened but not browned. Add the curry powder, cayenne pepper and turmeric and stir for 30 seconds. Pour in the Thai thin soy sauce and coconut milk and bring to the boil then turn off the heat and allow to cool. Transfer to a bowl for dipping.
Although Singapore is one of the smallest countries in the world, it's population density is the second highest.
Burmese cuisine draws it's influences from the neighbouring countries of India, China and Thailand. Burmese food is not entirely new to me as we used to eat at a Thai/Burmese restaurant years ago. Our favourite dishes were always Burmese curries (I posted a recipe for one earlier this year) which tastes like a combination of Thai and Indian food. Although Burmese curries are lovely, I wanted to try something different which wasn't difficult as I found plenty of dishes that sounded really good.
After I posted about making tofu a few weeks ago, Mandee commented that she wanted to try making chickpea tofu. Up until then I hadn't heard of chickpea tofu and discovered that it was a traditional Burmese recipe which originated from a fusion of Chinese styled tofu with Indian chickpea flour (besan). When Burma was drawn next I had to give it a try!
I looked up a few recipes, one of them seemed just as involved as the soy-based tofu making process and another on BestOodles sounded quick and easy so I referred to the latter. It was simply a matter of bringing water to the boil with some margarine and whisking through a slurry made with chickpea flour, water, turmeric, salt and sugar. About 5 minutes later, the mixture becomes incredibly thick and difficult to stir. After spooning it into a greased dish/tin the chickpea tofu is refrigerated for 4 hours, then it is ready to use.
BestOodles also listed a recipe for a Burmese tofu salad which contained a couple of fishy ingredients so I made a few changes to the dressing and the garnish. The recipe also included tamarind juice which sounded like a bit of a process to make from scratch so I subbed in tamarind puree in it's place. This was another simple dish which required a bit of chopping, mixing the dressing and putting it all together at the end. The dressing was very spicy although it really makes the dish and if you choose to serve it individually, you can go as crazy (or not) with the dressing as you like.
World Vegan Feast by Bryanna Clark Grogan contained one Burmese recipe which was a dal with roasted cauliflower. I adore dals especially when they have an added vegetable so I had to give it a go. This also came together pretty easily, while the lentils were simmering, the onion, garlic and spices were fried and the cauliflower was roasted in the oven. The dal was lovely, it contained a decent amount of spices and I enjoyed the addition of roasted cauliflower.
I'm not usually the biggest salad lover but the Burmese salad was the stand-out dish of the night. The texture of the chickpea tofu was fairly soft and probably fell somewhere in between silken and firm tofu. Chickpea tofu is also commonly fried so I'm planning to put this to the test with the remaining half of the batch.
Bring a pot containing 2 ½ cups of water and the margarine to the boil. Whisk together the chickpea flour, 1 ½ cups water, salt, sugar and turmeric in a bowl. Whisk the chickpea flour slurry through the boiling water, reduce the heat to low and continue to stir for about 5 minutes or until the mixture becomes very thick.
Pour the mixture into a 20 x 20cm greased glass dish or baking tray. Tap the dish on the surface of your bench to remove air bubbles and smooth out the top with a knife or the back of a spoon. Cover with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for 4 hours. Use within one week of making.
Whisk together chilli oil, sesame oil, Thai thin soy sauce, tamarind puree and garlic in a small bowl. In a large bowl, combine the cabbage and spring onions together.
Arrange the cabbage and spring onions on serving plates followed by a couple of sprigs of coriander and some slices of Burmese tofu. Drizzle some of the chilli, sesame, soy sauce and tamarind dressing over the top. Garnish with fried shallots and nori or dulse flakes if desired.
Burma is technologically behind the rest of the developed nations. Up until two months ago there were no ATMs, there is a limited mobile phone network, internet access is scarce, and people commonly use a horse and cart for transportation.
The vast majority of product deliveries in government follow the Discovery, Alpha, Beta, Live stages. This works perfectly with a product-based approach as it encourages you to first focus on the articulation of problems and then progressively ideate and refine solutions.
There are key questions you should be asking yourselves at each of those stages. If you can articulate clear answers to those questions, you’ve thought about the right things related to the users, organisation and technology.
User centred and co-creative; deepen your understanding of your users’ needs and motivations, creating solutions with them to help achieve their goals.
Holistic and sequenced; know the big picture but break it down into chunks that you can tie back to a measurable impact on a problem.
Pragmatic and sustainable; have an eye on the next step and end goal so that you don’t fall into inertia.
Evidenced and prioritised: act on any new information that arises, however attached you were to a hypothesis.
Be efficient and save money. By understanding and taking into equal consideration user needs, organisational objectives and technology, you’re less likely to take time-wasting detours and make costly mistakes. If you solve the wrong thing, cause you don’t understand the actual problem, you waste a lot of money and time.
Create better products in the short, medium, long term. Taking into consideration the three elements (organisation, user, technology) from the start means nasty surprises are less likely to emerge in the future. There’s also a clear alignment between the vision of the organisation and the user's needs.
Shift focus from solutions to finding out problems. Often work happens because someone ‘needs to do/have’ something. The product management approach ensures you ask the ‘why.’ It means you move away from just implementing solutions someone’s requested to really teasing out the exact problem you’re looking to solve. There’s a focus on outcomes, not output. Focusing on problems and being agnostic about solutions means you reach an outcome that addresses a problem for the user quicker.
Naturally joins up teams. With individuals from business, user research and tech involved, it means you naturally see a breaking down of silos and a more cohesive team. The product approach aligns teams and that helps with overall confidence of the team and management.
Be open to challenge yourself on the ‘what’ and ‘why’. Are you clear on visions/goals and the measurement of those things?
Are you willing to slow down to speed up? Invest more in upfront activity. Albert Einstein said: If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.” Gathering evidence takes time but it challenges or affirms perception. You don’t want to start off on a wrong, costly track.
Embrace not knowing and experimenting. Don't assume solutions. Find out through research and experimentation what the correct solution is.
The next blog will look at how a product approach will help you get more out of the discovery stage.Chuckwalla Valley Speedway is located about three hours southeast of Los Angeles and is near Desert Center, CA. So, when people complain about Buttonwillow or Willow Springs being out “in the middle of nowhere,” they haven’t been to Chuckwalla yet. While that is a pretty big hit against the track that shouldn’t take anything away from the track itself. Not only is the track fast, it features elevation changes and tighter sections; for the track day enthusiast, that