Venison Rendang breadballs

[igenlode]

I bought some desiccated coconut in order to make the beef rendang meatballs recipe, with which I've had success in the past (I had a very little of the coconut milk powder left that I got as a bargain in the market). But when I came to defrost the bag of venison mince that I had separated out into several portions when I originally bought it, I discovered that it really was exceptionally tiny even by my standards; probably only a couple of ounces, as opposed to the "500g beef" expected by the recipe -- although I had definitely never used that much in the past! But I had already gone through all the labour of grinding up my own curry paste in the pestle and mortar from whole cloves and star anise and pounding chopped nuts, onion and garlic to a pulp, so switching recipes at this point wasn't really an option. I improvised by padding out the small quantity of meat with a couple of slices of rather crusty bread and a whole grated turnip, on the grounds that the meat was basically just a vehicle for the spices anyhow.

And the result, once I managed to get it to hang together (another fifteen minutes or so of mashing with a fork to get the crusts to soften and break down thoroughly when mixed with the meat and egg -- normally one would pre-soak them overnight!) was actually extremely successful; probably one of my best attempts at this dish, although I'm not sure that was necesarily on account of the unorthodox ingredients. It may have had more to do with the fact that, taught by prior experience, I fished out the largest bits of soaked tamarind during the simmering of the sauce (I *always* end up making too much, because it is very hard to judge how much of a dried block is needed to create a tablespoon of paste...), and so it wasn't over-sour for once :-p

I didn't have lime leaves, but I did manage 'coconut rice' by simply cooking white rice with desiccated coconut...