Family flavours a rich heritage

Nina Sudiono's kitchen is filled with the divine, sweet smell of basil. She's at her bench, chopping and slicing and mixing heavenly ingredients; sweet soy sauce, thick and rich as melted chocolate; glossy red chillis, shiny as patent leather.

She's making ikan bakar colo colo. The dish is from Maluku, one of the eastern islands in the Indonesian archipelago, and comprises fish barbecued in banana leaves and dressed with a tomato-salsa-like condiment called sambal colo colo.

She stirs the sambal, mixing in the soy sauce until it coats the tomato, the basil, the slices of red, green and yellow chillis and the shallots.

It doesn't look much different from a salsa you might slather on bruschetta or the top of a taco, but the flavour is unmistakably Asian, with chilli and a spicy aroma.

She cuts into and juices a lime; the fragrant juice splashing all over the whole tarakihi she's preparing to grill in her oven.

The dish is one of her late mother's specialities, Nina says. "I didn't really like fish, and the only way she could persuade me to eat it was this way. She knew I loved tomatoes."

Nina's cooking, from her native Indonesia, is on show this afternoon and evening at the Southeast Asian Night Market, along with morsels and meals from Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Nina grew up in Jakarta, in a house full of foodies. "We lived to eat. My grandmothers on both sides were fantastic cooks. As soon as you opened your eyes in the morning, breakfast was there, and before you'd even finished your breakfast, the first question was 'what do you want to eat for lunch?'. My brother was not a great food person, he didn't like food. He only ate rice. We used to say 'people are going to think you're not part of our family because our family loves food'.

"My parents were always surrounded by children, cousins hanging out with us, or our friends from school. The house was always full of children and food. My mother was known as the food mother, because anyone who walked in the door, the first question

Leg 2 would be 'have you eaten?'. She could basically make anything out of nothing. She'd say, 'As long as there's a little bit of rice, you can do something'."

Both her parents had quite adventurous palates, Nina says, so she ate food from a wide range of cultures. "We grew up eating not just the traditional Indonesian dishes but also European food. I loved it.

"While rice is the staple diet in most families, we didn't stick to rice. We ate potatoes, we ate noodles, we ate pasta. It wasn't normal. So whenever my friends say, 'How can you not eat rice?', I say, 'Why not'?"

Nina came to New Zealand 15 years ago with her late husband, diplomat Mac Price. They met when he was posted to Jakarta, and lived in New Caledonia before coming back to Wellington to settle. She admits that back then, she didn't know how to cook. She'd call her mother for recipes, but could never quite get them to taste the same.

Growing up in Jakarta, there was always a stream of street vendors selling food and that made Nina wonder why people bothered having kitchens in their homes.

"I was never in the kitchen with my mother. She used to say to me 'you need to learn, one day you are going to live so far away from me'. I would say, 'You cook, dad cooks, gran cooks - somebody's got to enjoy the food, it may as well be me!' "

Back in those days, Asian food wasn't as readily available in Wellington as it is now, and she had to substitute ingredients all over the place.

One vegetable she's pleased she can now get her hands on is kangkung, which is also known as water convolvulus or Chinese spinach. It has long stalks with thin, spindly leaves. She stands at her sink and snaps the leaves off to make tumis kangkung, a simple stir-fry. It's another of her mother's recipes.

She slices up a chilli, a garlic clove, and two shallots, and fries them in a wok with hot oil and a bunch of her trimmed kangkung. A tomato cut into wedges goes in next, and then she pours over about a teaspoon of fish sauce, lime juice and some sugar. The dish is cooked in no time flat, with the kangkung wilted but still crunchy.

Like her parents, she enjoys cooking from all sorts of places, and is quite keen on a good old-fashioned roast. "I also eat a lot of pasta. I just love food."

* More Southeast Asian Night Market, today from 4pm to 10pm, Frank Kitts Park, Wellington waterfront.

- © Fairfax NZ News