Strictly Bare-handed - Fried Salted Fish & Tomato Chilli Paste

No utensils allowed.
Get your forks, knives, spoons and chopsticks off the table.
Prepare to do a lot of finger licking.

Buy some salted fish from a Chinese/Asian food vendor from the market, it could be pricey here in Hong Kong, so choose something to suit your budget. Fry until golden brown.

For my enjoyment, we consumed it the Indonesian way, which is...with some kind of chilli sauce. We chose a simple tomato chilli paste (sambal tomat) to go with our fish.

Recipe
- 1 large tomatoes, quartered
- 2 large red chillies, remove seeds if you can't handle the heat, add smaller red chillies if you want it hotter
- 1 clove of garlic
- 2 cloves of shallot
- salt, pepper, sugar, vegetable oil

In a food processor, pulse tomatoes, chillies, garlic and shallot. It's up to you how fine you want your paste to be, I prefer mine to be a little chunky but I went overboard and pulsed the mixture for too long. Oppps. Or you can use mortar and pestle and get a bit of exercise to tone your arms. Prepare a bit of hot oil in a frying pan, add the mixture, season with salt, pepper and sugar, taste and adjust seasoning to achieve the perfect balance between savory, sweet and tart.

Serve with a lot of steamed rice.

Be a bit of a barbarian for once. Dig in & enjoy. I wanna hear lip smackin' and finger lickin' :)