Cooking The Books

A Trip Down Memory Lane

There seems to be a definite oriental bias to my blog. Then again it is my blog and my diet has a definite oriental bias so I suppose it’s how it should be. This post is going to exacerbate that bias too. The first Chinese cookbook I remember reading was Chinese Cookery by Ken Hom. I must’ve only been about 12 when my mum got a copy but I used to read it loads and was fascinated by the recipes inside. Anglicised they may be but they were still quite out the ordinary compared to anything I ate at home at the time.

As I’ve probably mentioned before I was lucky as a child in that my parents bought a wide variety of foreign food, either abroad (no Spanish fish and chips for us), for the dining table or during a trip to the Chinese or Indian restaurant or the local kebab shop. One favourite dish of the time was crispy aromatic duck and I used to love reading the recipe in the Ken Hom book. Two things that stick in my mind are the blowing up of the duck with a bicycle pump to separate the skin from the flesh, Heston’s 20 years too late, and the oiling and pressing together of two lumps of dough before rolling out the pancakes so you could then separate them and have something half the thickness. Genius.

Well last night I finally got around to trying one of them when I made Muu Shu Pork. Yep, sorry folks, I’m talking about rolling out pancakes and not making Peking Duck.

I got some pork out the freezer on Sunday but then changed my mind and cooked that tofu dish of the previous post. I thought about what I had at home that could do with using up and the nearly full bag of lily buds sprang to mind. I’d bought these weird yellow things for hot and sour soup but using them maybe 10 at a time meant the bag went down rather slowly. Googling around I came across a recipe for Muu Shu pork that, rather helpfully, called for a whole ¼ cup of them along with some cloud ear mushrooms that I also had lying around. Muu Shu pork is something that folk on American TV shows seem to order all the time but I’ve never actually seen it in the UK, the perfect reason to give it a go.

The recipe I used is here  and the recipe for the pancakes here.

For the pancakes I used Dove's Organic white bread flour and took note of the tortilla press tip and gave the Christmas present from my mum its first use. It worked OK but I did give each a final roll with a rolling pin just to get them a little thinner. I won’t say they were the roundest pancakes I’ve ever eaten but they did the job and tasted great. Like light and soft tortillas. After frying I wasn’t sure they were properly cooked so I gave them a steaming to finish off whilst I was cooking the pork. Taking a tip from the duck and pancakes you see over here I added a little hoisin to each and to get some of my 5 a day I had some Chinese greens (not sure which ones they were) with oyster sauce.

This was another definite keeper too - so two in two days.

The wonders of Dalston (Hackney)

For a while now the girlfriend and I have been talking about moving in with each other and finally we’ve done it. Initially we were going to buy a place but I work in credit and you’ve probably noticed there’s a great big credit crunch/sub-prime (although you’d probably never heard these terms before a month or two ago) crisis going on. As such my job isn’t the most secure at the minute so combined with the faltering housing market renting somewhere seemed a good option. One advantage of renting is you get to have a place a bit more expensive than you could afford to buy and so we’ve ended up in a great Victorian school conversion. It’s all double height ceilings, huge windows, wooden floors and a mezzanine level bedroom. In my eyes very cool. Before I start to sound a bit too Nigella enough of the lifestyle chatter and let’s get back on to food.

For years I’ve lived in Islington (a very respectable postcode) but although I’ve only moved three roads away from my old abode I now live in Hackney, a borough that holds the most impressive accolade as the Guardian’s worst place in the UK to live. But what do they know? It’s far from that bad though and one thing it does excel at is food. Hackney is as multi-cultural as anywhere in this country and within a few hundred metres of my home I have Turkish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cameroonian, West Indian, Nigerian and Ethiopian restaurants along with a fantastic Polish store, a pretty impressive (if you like chickens with their heads on and cow’s feet) market and, finally, an Oriental supermarket. Not bad if you’re a fan of interesting food really.

Last week I decided to have a look through the cookbooks and was surprised to find a book full exclusively of tofu recipes, I’m going through a bit of a tofu phase at the minute – fried, boiled, silken/smooth/fermented, however – so this seemed perfect for the blog. I picked up a whole series, well pork ribs, hot and spicy and tofu, of these books when I was in Singapore last year and they're full of very interesting recipes.  I thought I’d go for something with an out the ordinary ingredient so I settled on a recipe including Chinese chives (I think, we had a bit of trouble determining exactly what these were), fried tofu and king prawns. The Chinese chives I bought looked a lot like a bunch of grass, being about 18 inches long and made up of many green blades, similar to water spinach/kang kong. Actually the more I think about it the more I think these weren’t Chinese chives so if anyone  wants to correct me please crack on.  Not sure what they were though.  The lady in the shop said they were but her English wasn't the best. 

Happy Birthday To Me

Whilst everyone else has to make do with a measly two celebrations in the last week of the year I get to have three with my birthday falling on the penultimate day of the year.  Admittedly I know no different but it doesn't seem the ideal day for a birthday as everyone is looking forward to the New Year's Eve celebration and there I am trying to drag them out a day early to set them up with a nice hangover.  Still every year folk come out though and this was no exception.

As mentioned previously I love my Sichuan food, well that I've cooked from recipes, but have never eaten it in a restaurant.  I took my birthday as the ideal opportunity to remedy this situation though and so booked up a table at the reasonably new Snazz Sichuan over in Euston.  It's a pretty strange place to have a restaurant being down a bland road near the station and sitting two doors down from a brothel.  It's an easy distance from my flat though and when it comes down to it I was there for the food anyway.

The twelve of us met in a pub in Kings Cross for a couple of drinks beforehand so by the time we got there at least half the party were looking very scared from all the stories of offal heavy Sichuan dishes I had regaled them with.  I assured them that there would be lots of "normal" food too though and that the offal lovers could sit together and keep our internals eating to ourselves.

At the restaurant there's the option to have a hot pot, a Sichuan fondue of sorts, where a vat of bubbling, heavily spiced stock is placed in the middle of table and you buy plates of raw meat, seafood, veg and offal which you cook for yourselves in this bubbling liquid.  We decided this would be an effort with such a big party though so agreed to give it a miss and pencil in a future date with a more select group.  Instead we opted for a dish each with the birthday boy getting to order any more dishes if the waitress deemed we needed any.  I was looking forward to grabbing another six offal filled delights of mine own choosing but alas she was very honest and said the 12 the guests chose were pretty much enough.

The menu (which can be seen here) had loads of great sounding dishes on and ours included: chengdu style twice cooked pork, fragrant and spicy pig tail and shank, fire exploded kidney flowers, special cooked pig blood casserole (my choice), special chili chicken, drifting fragrant chili, guan gong beef, zhong crescent dumplings, bei dumplings, king prawns with hot peppers and cashew nuts, pomfret braised with tofu, mapo dofu, strange-flavoured rabbit, fish fragrant aubergines, aubergines with black beans, stir fried bitter melon and tofu with garlic all topped off with boiled rice for all.  A veritable banquet by all accounts.  We had a vegetarian and a no pork eater with us and the waitress was great offering to cook, within reason, veg only or pork free versions of all dishes.

If folk had entered fearing offal this fear was soon replaced with a fear of chilies.  I like my food hot but I've never seen so many dried chilies in dishes before.  This dish of special cooked pig blood casserole probably had the most but it was far from being alone, in fact on the menu it's shown as 3 on the heat scale compared to the guan gong beef's 4.

On the topic of this dish what a magnificent dish it was.  A big mound of shredded bible tripe and beansprouts with slices of firmed pig's blood (think black pudding without the oats and fat) and Spam in a spicy broth topped with about an inch deep of chili infused oil and maybe 50 dried chilies.  Quite unlike anything I've ever been served before.

Home Alone on a Saturday Night

First off a belated Happy Christmas and New Year.  With all the time off work you'd think one would have a lot of time to blog but it just doesn't work that way, we're here now though.

I've been known to frequent the occasional food chat forum and over time you notice that the same threads pop up again and again.  One such thread, well type of thread anyway, is the discussion of the correct way to cook something.  When a thread such as this pops up you tend to get two distinct camps (no middle of the road here), the traditional is the right and only way crowd and the folk should be free to stick what they want in it and still call it carbonara crowd.  I'm generally in the first camp, carbonara has no cream in it, if you want to make an egg, cream, pancetta and parmesan sauce so be it but don't call it carbonara.  As well as being a carbonara purist I'm also no fan of hypocrisy and think if you have a belief then you go the whole hog with it and don't exhibit contradictory behaviour somewhere along the line.

Herein lies the problem.  Tonight my better half is off with her female friends and so my Saturday night is free but I don't want to get drunk or spend money.  As such I'm stuck at home and have decided to cook.  A friend mentioned seafood with rice earlier on and so I was going to go with that but then the thought of some seafood on a pizza popped into my mind and no pilaf, paella or risotto was ever going to budge it.  Off I went to Sainsbury and started to fill the trolley: I got some king prawns and some squid; some tomatoes and some basil; and then, even though I know that the proper way to eat your seafood pizza allows no cheese, I headed to the cheese aisle and grabbed a ball of mozzarella. 

I know it goes against everything I've ever thought or said about carbonara and hypocrisy but I just needed the stringiness and chew from the melted cheese and a base of nothing but bread and tomato just wasn't going to suffice.  Maybe I should calm down on the cream in their carbonara brigade from now on.

Anyway, on to the recipe, this isn't from a book and I just made it up as I went along tonight, it looked good and, more importantly, tasted great though.  Result.