Cooking The Books

Hot Cross Buns

Before I started writing this I was wondering why I made hot cross buns.  Obviously Easter played a huge part in it but there was another reason, a lot of involved cooking I do is always destined for the blog and the blog played a big part in my decision to make these.  Easter aside the reason I wanted to make these was so I had something sweet to photograph on top of the lovely antique cake stand my girlfriend got for her birthday recently.  Alas it's only just dawned on me that that was the reason and so the photographs are without the lovely cake stand.

Looking around at recipes they went from the very plain to the quite rich looking.  I settled upon one from the richer end of the spectrum - from Nigella's Feast book.  This differed from most by using a combination of milk and melted butter for the liquid along with the addition of some cardamom and ginger.

Fuchsia Returns

My current most used cook book, and so the one that's appeared on the pages of this blog the most, is Fuchsia Dunlop's Sichuan Cookery.  Never before have I been so blown away by the recipes in a book, they're just so different from anything I've cooked before, so full of flavour, colour and texture.  Well she's written another book too, not recently but until recently I've not had it.  It's called The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook and where the first opened my eyes to the Sichuan cooking I'm hoping this will do the same for Hunanese cuisine.

I don't know a lot, well anything really, about the Hunan region and it's food but if the first recipe I've cooked is anything to go by I looking forward to learning more.  One of the only dishes I'd heard of from Hunan, well heard of in relation to the region anyway, is called Beef with Cumin.  I remember the first time I bought cumin, it must have been as a teenager, and with my first taste it suddenly dawned on me what the unmistakable taste was in so many curries.  Up until now it's not a flavour I've associated with Chinese food though - if that's not the perfect reason to try it I don't know what is.

Dongpo Pork

Pork is my favourite meat.  Whether it's minced in dumplings, cured into bacon, sausage or ham, griddled in chop form or slow roast till it melts in the mouth I think there's no meat more versatile.  It may not be as glamourous as a fillet steak but the variety of flavours and texture it offers are second to none.  The Chinese know this with them consuming something like 70% of the pork eaten on this planet and they were the first to domesticate this animal a good few thousand years ago, in fact if a chinaman says meat then what they mean is pork.

For melt in the mouth succulence the cut of choice for me has to be belly.  With slow cooking the layers of fat melt away, redering out and through the surrounding meat keeping it moist and breaking it down into its individual striations.  The aim always being to gain the succulence the fat gives you but cooking it out enough that the fat isn't offputting in its chewiness.  I've roast it on the bone, deboned it and rolled it around a stuffing of herbs and confitted it and all have been a success so when I read about Dongpo Pork on this website I knew it was for me.  3 1/2 hours of various cooking methods, all low and slow, had to leave an amazing final texture.

Last weekend was a really busy one - 2 gigs, one meal for the girlfriend's parents, a musical and a museum visit with my parents -  so this weekend gone was to be spent at home, the perfect opportunity to cook a time intensive dish.  I only got as far as the supermarket so it wasn't the best bit of pork belly around and looked a little less fatty than the one on the recipe page.  It was only £4 odd for just over a kilo though so I can't grumble too much.

As far as the recipe goes the main issues were getting a uniform browning on it during the frying stage, the serious hot oil spitting at that point and the finding something to steam a kilo lump of meat in.  The curved bit of pork belly just did not want to sit right in the frying pan and holding it down whilst it popped and spat has left a series of burns all over my hands.  To steam I used a big flat saucepan, creating to big boulders out of crushed up tin foil to rest the pork on above the water level.  Outside of these the recipe went very smoothly and once cooked and the sauce drizzled over I couldn't wait to get stuck in and find out if you really could pull the meat away with chopsticks.

 

The simple answer to this is, yes, you could.  I thought the photo at the top of the page summed the texture up perfectly.  The skin was so soft you could push chopsticks through it yet it still retained a nice, gelationous chew.  The fat was delicate and melt in the mouth, no unpleasant greasiness, and the meat was the most tender pig (well adult pig anyway - the 3 week old suckling piglet in Peru still had it beat) I've ever eaten.  I can't recommend it enough. 

Here it is in all its glory too, not quite the uniform colour of the original but still quite a nice looking centrepiece for a meal I think.

Pork and Vegetable Dumplings

I love dim sum, whether it's early in the day as it should be or in the evening English style I don't care.  The mass of textures and flavours, all wrapped up in little bite-size morsels is perfect for a man that can never decide exactly what he wants to eat.

A while back I photographed a dinner of kangkong belacan which contained a few shop bought  pork dumplings.  Although I do tend to buy them frozen they are reasonably simple (if not a tad time consuming - hence the buying frozen) to make at home using supermarket ingredients.  This weekend I decided to give them a go again to see if I still had it in me.  The recipe I chose to adapt came from a Keith Floyd book which has graced this blog before.

British Delights

Making the assumption that folk visit this site, have a read and then come back again to read newer posts you may have noticed that I’ve not written about any food from England. This is for the simple fact that I don’t really cook a lot of recipes from England. I’ll always buy British produce, if the option is available, but the food will tend to end up in a foreign dish. It’s not that I have anything against the traditional food of this country, it’s just a love of variety and with near 200 countries’ worth of recipes to choose from English dishes aren’t going to pop up too frequently. Toad in the hole gets cooked occasionally and I adore a fried breakfast but outside of that we’re talking the occasional stew or roast really. Maybe I should up the amount of local recipes I cook and stick them on here, for the moment though I shall break from the norm once and cook something from these shores.

Every now and again I hear of Staffordshire Oatcakes and every time I do I think ‘I must give those a go’. I never do though. Last week I was reading this post on the UK Food Blogger’s Association and it was enough to make me finally give them a go, I imagine this author’s success was due to this being the first time I’d actually seen a photo of them.

 

I grabbed a recipe from a lady called Rose and stocked up on the ingredients ready for the weekend.