plate 45: indonesia

It was the challenge that saw series two MasterChef favourite, Marion, bow out of the competition: sambal kacang - Indonesian peanut sauce. Would it eliminate me from my own kitchen? I vowed to find out.

Sambal kacang - pronounced "sum-baal kuh-chang" - is made from ground peanuts, fresh chillies, spices, sauces, salt and sugar. A delicious mingling of spicy and salty flavours. It's most famously used to smother chargrilled skewered meat and spoon over gado gado, which is how I served it.

Gado gado, which apparently means "mixed mixed" is a, you guessed it, mixed vegetable salad topped with hard-boiled egg and sometimes prawn crackers. I never knew what prawn crackers looked like pre-frying. They're like little plastic discs (in the pack we bought they were multicoloured - the blue ones freaked me out a bit) - that become puffy and airy when they connect with bubbling oil. They only have 5% prawn meat, though. Tapioca starch and wheat starch make up the majority of the ingredients. As for cooking them, exercise caution when deep-frying, and heed your mother's warning: it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye - seriously, AJ almost did as the smoking-hot oil splashed into his eye.

Sri Owen - Indonesian foodie and cookbook author - labels gado gado as classic Javanese food and one of the country's national dishes. It was super fresh, colourful and had a fantastic mixture of textures from the different vegetables.

Easy to make, but lots on the go at once. In her recipe, Sri instructs to boil each vegetable, separately, for about 4 minutes each. I really should've done my mise en place because I was madly tailing beans while the cabbage was boiling and peeling carrots while cooking the cauliflower, all the while watching my single potato and egg boil in separate saucepans, and occasionally stirring the sambal that was simmering away - with its plumes of delicious spice-scented smoke circling me.

Dipping my finger in the sauce every now and then for a cheeky taste confirmed that this sauce was gooood. No "clegginess" (said with George Colombaris' strong Melburnian accent) that led to Marion's eviction. But then again I was judging my own work, not a professional chef, so I'm sure there were problems with my peanut sauce that I wouldn't have even been able to detect. What I did notice, in my humble amateurness, was a lovely thick texture and generous hit of heat that wasn't too overpowering. I left the peanuts quite coarse, which gave a nice extra nuttiness and crunch.

It was addictive, too. I couldn't stop drizzling more of it over the vegies and, when they were all gone, licking the spoon as I scooped the leftovers into a container. Yum. Hopefully I've secured my place in the Kenso kitchen.