Jew Who Char?

Potluck. A social meal where everyone brings something to the table. Literally.

I'm normally all for potlucks. I get to polish my *ahem* culinary skills without having the headache of catering the entire meal, plus it's a way to experiment with new recipes and unleash them on unsuspecting friends.

But, wow. THREE potlucks in two weekends? I can't really do that wide a repertoire in so short a time frame.

Bringing my standard fruit salad to one party (for like, the nth time already) and buying my way out of another (someone's buying cake and needs some financial assistance? Count me in!), I still had to dish out another... dish. And boy, had I some serious competition to contend with.

The menu was already sounding like a lineup of traditional favourites - Kitty Satay, Spotty Pong Teh, Cubitt Wine Chicken and Twin Style Prawns... even a continental dessert in the form of a lovely Snowy Bread & Butter Pudding! And oh, starters as well, painstakingly put together into a platter of Jaymaki Rolls.

What with all that food already, I figured I'd go low profile and serve the vegetables. Not wanting to do a generic chop suey though, I drew inspiration from the Straights Chinese (but not necessarily straight Chinese) and decided on ju hu char - literally, cuttlefish fry, even though it's really shredded turnip fried with dried cuttlefish and not the other way round. Simple enough. Or so I thought.

Three supermarkets later, I finally found dried cuttlefish in Giant. And realised that turnip, known to us as bang kuang or mengkuang, is actually called sengkuang in supermarket speak. The drama-ness.

I tweaked the recipe I found from Audrey and measured my ingredients by sight. Dangerous, cause my eyes are rather greedy and always hungry. So I ended up with two large turnips, four carrots, a few handfuls of soaked dried chinese mushrooms, two dried cuttlefish (all julienned) and several cloves of garlic (chopped coarsely), fried in olive oil and light soy sauce in a small wok that barely contained everything (in fact it didn't cause I threw away about a quarter of the turnip). I was ready to feed a small platoon of hot, starving soldiers.

You know, potlucks are also about popularity. As in, "I brought this dish so you're gonna keep eating it if you're my friend. Even if it kills you" kind of thing. A clean plate would indicate a succesful socialite. Fine, it could really just mean the food was very delish but we're polite society, and in polite society, there's always the issue of giving face.

So how did my ju hu char fare? I ashamedly admit that only half the plate was eaten. Yes, I have bitches for friends. But then again, I served enough for two dozen when there were only eight of us to eat it.

I guess my friends don't hate me, after all. At least, not that much.