Sambal Belachan Stir Fried Vegetables

Adding some oomph to your healthy veggie dish. Sambal Belachan Stir Fried Vegetables is a simple vegetable dish stir fried with aromatics in a rich sauce made with chillies and shrimp paste.

Sometimes stir-fried vegetable dishes can be monotonous, it’s always the usual stir fry that is flavoured by reduced stock, oyster sauce, soy sauce and sometimes with sesame oil leaving you that feeling you have after eating Chinese dishes many times in a row. It should not always be like that because there are many ways to stir fry vegetables and give it a different twist every time. One of those wonderful twists is what I learned when I used to live in Malaysia where they cook many of their stir fries with a chilli sauce called sambal combined with a pungent yet very tasty block of dried fermented shrimps called belacan.

Usually, vegetables used on this concoction are tropical vegetables like okra, eggplants, string beans, winged beans and stink beans to name some, which is just logical since Malaysia is a tropical country and abundant with these native vegetables. Today we are making something similar to that Malaysian dish but instead of using tropical vegetables, we will be using the usual vegetables used in Chinese stir fries, making this dish the best of both worlds.