Here’s a Beef Rendang I cooked in my shiny new pressure cooker a few weeks back. Admittedly, it’s got a lot more sauce than you’d usually find in rendang, which is normally a sem -dry dish. This is because I added a good whack of coconut milk to bring it all up to the minimum cooking level in my cooker, so the result was, in texture, something akin to a Vietnamese curry.

I’m all for cooking from scratch and I normally either avoid packets of sauces and stocks, or find them highly disappointing, but I was recently sent a rendang sauce and a peanut sauce by Wellington-based company Rempah (www.rempah.co.nz). I gave them a try and can report the peanut sauce was excellent served with chicken thighs, and their rendang sauce formed the base of this dish I made in my slow cooker, with beef shin and big chunks of carrot, potato and onion. The result was rich, warming and full of both earthy and zingy flavours. Eaten with plenty of steamed jasmine rice and a simple cabbage, carrot and coriander slaw dressed with a nam pla-like mix of lime juice, fish sauce, fresh chilli and palm sugar. Oh so good on a wintery night.