Sweet & Sour Sauce

Over the past year, I have discovered that the passion for cooking that runs in the veins of most of my family, surprisingly flows in mine too. I find the whole process extremely enjoyable, especially when it involves dishes off the typical home-cooking menu.

I follow in the footsteps of my mother, who believes that once you get the hang of cooking, you should feel free to experiment. She's the type of cook who feels that rigidly sticking to recipes and measurements takes all the fun out of cooking. Of course, if you're not careful, what should've been delicious can easily turn disastrous (as we've both found out!)

But nonetheless, experimenting with food is still real fun, and what I like best are dishes that are simple, scrumptious and can be tweaked to suit individual tastes. I had posted one such recipe earlier, and here's another one:

Sweet & Sour Sauce
Inspired by Kylie Kwong.

Ingredients:
1/2 inch piece of ginger
3-4 cloves of garlic
1 piece of jaggery (or a tablespoon of brown sugar, white will also do)
1 chilli - deseeded if you don't want it too hot (red chillies are better visually)
2 tbsp chopped spring onions (regular ones could work too)
1 tbsp chopped coriander
1 tbsp soy sauces (either dark or light or ideally a mix of both: dark for colour & light for flavour) 1 tbsp vinegar (I use apple cider vinegar)
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tbsp oil (olive, peanut or sesame preferably)
Dash of any other related sauces that you may have at home: eg - fish sauce, oyster sauce, Worcestershire sauce.
Stock (veg or non-veg) to increase quantity.
(I don't use salt because the soy and other sauces are salty enough; however this depends on your taste)

Method:
1. Mince the ginger, garlic, chilli and jaggery finely.
2. Mix all the ingredients together, except the oil.
3. Heat the oil separately and when hot (smoking hot according to Kylie Kwong, but not really necessary), pour over the sauce ..... it'll sizzle and crackle deliciously!

You can serve this sauce with steamed white meat or fish (chicken in the picture), or with momos or with pretty much anything you fancy. For a vegetarian version, simply omit the fish and oyster sauces.

What I love about this sauce is that you can't really go wrong making it. Just keep tasting as you go along till you get it the way you like. Also, these measurements aren't written in stone; you can easily add more or less of the ingredients according to your taste. You don't even need every one of them: the essentials are jaggery for the sweetness and soy for the saltiness, and ginger and garlic. The rest of what goes in is limited only by your imagination!