Popiah

Made Popiah over the weekend..my mum's recipe....really isn't hard to make...but a lot a lot of work..all the chopping and cutting..sheesh..woke up at 6am to do..and only completed making at around 12ish...the taste....simply divine..if I may say so myself..hee

Ingredients for Popiah:
7 big turnips (bang guang), peeled and shredded
8 medium carrots, peeled and shredded
2kg prawns
1 1/5 cups of dried shrimps, soaked and chopped up
4 tbsp of heaped garlic
1 cup oil
12 chinese sausages (lap cheong), steamed and cut into small thin strips
1 dozen eggs, hard boiled and chopped into small pieces
1 iceburg lettuce, peeled and washed
half kg bean sprouts, tail removed and blanched in hot water
ground roasted peanuts
sweet Popiah sauce
Popiah chilli (see below for recipe)
60 Popiah wrappers
dark soy sauce
light soy sauce

1. Add prawns to pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and once prawns are cooked, off the fire. Shell prawns and remove vein. Chop into small pieces. Put liquid through strainer, retaining the liquid.
   
2. Add oil and garlic to wok. Fry till fragrant.
3. Add dried shrimps. Fry till fragrant.
4. Alternate between adding the turnips, carrots and liquid from the prawns. Keep frying until vegetables are tender.
5. Add dark soy sauce and light soy sauce to taste.
6. Using the Popiah wrappers, add lettuce, bean sprouts, ground peanuts, chinese sausages, prawns, eggs, sweet Popiah sauce, Popiah chilli and turnip and carrot mixture (don't forget to drain the mixture) to it and roll it up as you would a spring roll.

Popiah chilli Ingredients:
10 red chilli
4 chilli padi
8 cloves of garlic
sugar to taste
oil

1. Put chilli, chilli padi and garlic in food processor and blend. Add sugar to taste and oil to make a smooth paste.
   

The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad

I like the way this book is written. It's easy to read and the characters are interesting. The main character in the book - Sultan...despite all the knowledge he gained by reading, I feel that he learned nothing from them. He rules his household with an iron fist and yet it seems that everything is still out of his control. A good view of how the Afghan people live. A society caught in between the modern world and it's tradition is how I feel.

From Publishers Weekly
After living for three months with the Kabul bookseller Sultan Khan in the spring of 2002, Norwegian journalist Seierstad penned this astounding portrait of a nation recovering from war, undergoing political flux and mired in misogyny and poverty. As a Westerner, she has the privilege of traveling between the worlds of men and women, and though the book is ostensibly a portrait of Khan, its real strength is the intimacy and brutal honesty with which it portrays the lives of Afghani living under fundamentalist Islam. Seierstad also expertly outlines Sultan's fight to preserve whatever he can of the literary life of the capital during its numerous decades of warfare (he stashed some 10,000 books in attics around town). Seierstad, though only 31, is a veteran war reporter and a skilled observer; as she hides behind her burqa, the men in the Sultan's family become so comfortable with her presence that she accompanies one of Sultan's sons on a religious pilgrimage and witnesses another buy sex from a beggar girl-then offer her to his brother. This is only one of many equally shocking stories Seierstad uncovers. In another, an adulteress is suffocated by her three brothers as ordered by their mother. Seierstad's visceral account is equally seductive and repulsive and resembles the work of Martha Gellhorn. An international bestseller, it will likely stand as one of the best books of reportage of Afghan life after the fall of the Taliban.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.