Back in the old days, when I was a teenager, My cousins and I used to help families preparing their wedding feast. Back then, "caterers" didn't exist except maybe for royalties or for the Hot shots. So, a week before the big day, usually families will be already busy with the ingredients preparation including peeling the onion skins etc. And the aftermath? even worse... washing dishes including the pots and pans. You don't even want to look at your skin or nails.. they were simply "terribly unattractive" . Acar /Achar was one of the common menu . I remembered we had to slice about 300 -500 cucumbers about 100-200 carrots and open around 100 cans of pineapples for the dish. Simply exhausting... ... I don't think many teeagers nowadays have the experience the ones that we had. Anyway, at the age of 15, I made my first Acar. From then onwards, it's one of the "must have" dish that I prepared whenever I cooked Nasi Briyani or Nasi Minyak.
Ingredients
6 cucumbers
2 carrots
1 can pineapple/ slices of fresh pineapple
6 dried chinese " lobak" ( turnip??not sure)
2 cloves garlic
1 inch old ginger
2 shallots
1 red chili
salt and sugar to taste
lime ( limau kesturi)- usually people use white vinegar, but I prefer lime juice... it's stomach friendly :)
steps:
cucumbers & carrots to be cut lengthwise
pineapple and lobak cut into small pieces
ginger , shallots, garlic to be sliced thinly
chilli julienned
juice the lime - you can also slice the lime to be included in the dish.
- mix all the prepared ingredients, add in salt and sugar ( usually the ratio is 1 tsp salt to 1 dsp sugar) and leave for 30 minutes before serving. If you want to prepare this ahead to time keep this in the fridge to slow down the osmosis rate.
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