We recently had our first Quarterly meeting. A new company needs a strong first quarter – and we certainly did: we’ve fed thousands of people, hosted hundreds of events and seeded a network of Foodships and individual clusters of home cooks all around the country. The movement is moving, we are finding food, we are meeting fine folk.
But there needs to be a moment of pause, some space to to reflect on what we have achieved, where we have fallen short, what we are aiming for next. Our movement needs to sprout as well as seed, needs to burgeon as well as bake. Remember WeFiFo is all about the small, the local, it’s about the everyday cook finding a new audience for their food. We are a star twinkling in the glorious food firmament – a star that on closer inspection is made up of multitude of individual points of light. Those points of light needed looking at and, as it turns out, that’s hungry work.
We drew a range of people together for this first big meeting – our partners that help build the site, our founders, designers, marketing people and digital gurus, some advisors and most importantly some of our hosts. One of our hosts had the extra special job of cooking for all of us.
That honour (nerve-wracking challenge?!) fell to Karen, founder of a brilliant Malaysian street food empire, Ibu. We had high hopes and weren’t disappointed.
Karen travelled down to the farm (WeFiFo work from a smallholding in West Sussex) and while we all struggled with metrics, bold new schemes and wonky wifi she cooked up a storm.
We descended on the kitchen and were faced with:
To start:
Beef Rendang / Cauliflower Rendang (V) Both served with cucumber salad
Main:
Chicken Laksa / Tofu Laksa (V)
All served with home-made Sambal and plenty of fizz (both celebratory but also soothing – there was heart and heat to that laksa!). Needless to say it was delicious. Bowls were ladled high, licked clean, filled again. If anyone had been wearing a tie it would have been loosened. We finished eating and made our way back to our meeting with that special combination of regret and pride that comes with overeating something good.
Vegan Laksa
Print RecipeIngredients
- 1 jar Mother ibu Laksa paste
- 2 400ml tins of coconut milk (I use Chaokah)
- 4 400ml water (use the tins to get all the coconut out!)
- 5 tbsp Mother ibu Sambal (or to taste depending how hot you like it.)
- 100g of dry thin vermicelli, soaked and drained
- 200g shredded roast chicken
- 100g spinach or Asian leafy greens
- 100g blanched green beans
- 8 pieces of fried tofu, halved
- 80g blanched bean sprouts
- 1 tbsp vegetable oil
- Salt to taste
- Garnish
- 2 boiled eggs, halved
- 12 sprigs of coriander
- 1 long red chilli, sliced at angle
- 1 spring onion, finely chopped and use green only
Instructions
Heat oil in 5 litre capacity pot and fry off the laksa paste until fragrant, approximately 5-10 minutes
Add coconut milk and water, stir and bring to the boil
Reduce heat to simmer and add 1-2 tbsp ibu Sambal and salt to taste
Add tofu to soup, give it a good stir making sure they soak up the spicy yummy goodness, taste and salt again if necessary - only 2/3 minutes
Set noodle bowls up in this order, noodles, spinach, bean sprouts, chicken
Pour at least 2 soup ladles of soup over each bowl.
Place half and egg in the centre of each dish, a good dollop of Mother ibu Sambal on top, followed by a couple of pieces of fresh chill, a few sprigs of coriander and a scattering of spring onion.
This blog was brought to from the WeFiFo team, Karen from IBU (Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @motheribu) and a large appetite.
[Photographs by Timothy Tyndale and Jon Stefani]
