Cooking The Books

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.

Boiled Water Beef

I’ve been learning Mandarin for a while now.  Because of my love for Chinese food I’ve planned to go there in 2009 so a few months back I started on the language knowing that a lack of knowledge of it will severely impair any time there.  I’m not one for organised holidays so if I want to look after myself I need to be able to speak the lingo.  From a Westerner’s point of view the language is fairly daunting mainly because it’s written in symbols and tone plays such an important part.  Once you get beyond this though the grammar is actually really simple and, lacking the masses of verb conjugation you get with, say, Spanish, you can spend your time learning vocabulary.  As such you find yourself learning loads, even if your pronunciation would leave any Chinese speaker completely unable to understand what you’re saying.

Getting to the reason why I brought my Mandarin learning up and that’s the name of this dish.  In Mandarin (well pinyin anyway) the name of this dish is written shui zhu niu rou – water boiled beef – and it’s the first dish whose name I’ve actually understood in Chinese.  If you’re looking for some plain tasting you couldn’t be further off the track though and so it tends to be translated into English as Boiled Beef Slices in a Fiery Sauce.  This dish is from Sichuan and typically for a lot of the dishes in the region it has lots of heat both from the chili and the Sichuan peppercorn.  It’s from the same book the Mapo Dofu was, Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop, and is perfect if you’ve made that recipe as it utilises the same chili bean paste you use for that.

Shui Zhu Niu Rou - Boiled Beef Slices in a Fiery Sauce, for 2 people.

The Ingredients

1 Head Celery

4 Spring Onions

8-10 Dried Chillies

400gr Rump Steak

1 Tablespoon Rice Wine

2 Teaspoons Sichuan Peppercorns

3  Tablespoons Chili Bean Paste

750ml Chicken Stock

2 Tablespoons Dark Soy Sauce

4 Tablespoons Cornflour Mixed With 4 Tablespoons of Water

The Method

1. Chop the celery into 4cm by 1cm batons and cut the spring onions into similar length pieces.
2. Slice the beef thinly against the grain and marinate in the rice wine, the cornflour and water mixture and a little salt.
3. Heat some oil in a wok and add the chillies and the peppercorns frying until beginning to brown.  When they start to colour remove to a plate.  Once cool chop up into small pieces (see photo).
4. Heat more oil and stir fry the celery and spring onions until starting to go translucent.  Once it’s at this stage remove the vegetables to your serving bowl.
5. Add the chili bean paste to the wok and fry till fragrant and the oil has taken on the red colour.
6. Add the stock and soy and as soon as it’s boiling give the beef mixture a quick stir and pour it all into the wok.  Separate the pieces of beef and as soon as the stocks started to thicken from the cornflour pour it all over the celery and spring onions.
7. Quickly wash the wok then heat up again.  Once hot add some oil, maybe 3 tablespoons, and add the chopped up chillies and peppercorns.  Briefly fry then pour it, oil and all, over the top of your beef, it will spit a bit but that’s part of the fun.

Serve this dish with some boiled rice as there’s loads of liquid and the rice soaks it up beautifully.  This dish is spicy but no over the top and large amount of celery gives it a very earthy quality.

I made it!

The odds were heavily against me but I think I've made it.  Admittedly the 14 days free of trial weren't particularly exciting for anyone that surfed here but if this is the sign of things to come I may actually get this blog up and running.

With the theme being the cooking of recipes from the cookbook collection the first job was to choose a book.  Being the first post too I wanted it to be something special and so initial thoughts were my first ever cookbook.  I'm 30 now but at age 12, at a time when all my friends' idea of reading material was the lingerie section of whatever catalogue their mum had (OK, so I was pretty partial to that too), I was stood in the souvenir shop in Orlando asking my dad to buy me Mickey Cooks Disneyworld.  This fine tome contained various recipes from the said theme park's restaurants and although I don't actually remember choosing it it obviously appealed at the time.  I removed it from the shelf and started flicking through but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't find something I wanted to cook with it being full of heavy roux based sauces, strange meat and fruit concoctions from one of the many countries featured in the Epcot Centre and generally dated and unappealing recipes.  My mind was finally made up when my just-back-from-Peru eyes caught site of a ceviche recipe that suggested leaving the fish flesh in the citrus marinade for 24 hours.  I'm no ceviche expert but I have a couple of Peruvian cookbooks and you're looking at 20 minutes for some of the recipes in there, I can't imagine what 24 hours must do to the delicate white flesh.  This was the final straw and although the book will always be my first I'm not in a hurry to cook anything from it just yet.

Once any attempts at finding a book with a story attached were scrapped there was only one choice and that was my current favourite cookbook - Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop. Ever since buying this book a month or two back I've been singing the praises of it to anyone who will listen.  I'd never eaten proper Sichuan food before (the Kung Po chicken in most British Chinese restaurants doesn't count) so only bought this after reading a review of a new Sichuan restaurant in London.  Liking the sound of the dishes mentioned a quick search on Amazon for 'Sichuan' showed this book had received a lot of praise so I cracked on and have probably read it cover to cover twice now.  I think, for a Westerner, my knowledge of oriental food is OK but this book was full of recipes I'd never seen anything like with some of the best names ever - Pock Marked  Mother Chen's Beancurd, Fire Exploding Kidney Flowers, Fish Fragrant Pork Slivers and so on.  Although not limited to this the dishes I've tried have combined salty and spicy flavours, using chilli bean paste, black beans, Sichuan peppercorns and dried chilli, to create dishes with huge depth of flavour and interesting texture. 

For the my first recipe on here I chose one that I think shows off the flavours well and also has a quality name, the aforementioned Pockmarked Mother Chen's Beancurd.  This dish is supposedly named after the smallpox-scarred wife of a restaurateur who served this dish to the poor labourers of the town.

On to the recipe, this dishes uses a couple of Chinese supermarket only ingredients but they last indefinitely once purchased and I think are well worth getting.  Outside of this dish they open up the possibility of quite a few more recipes from the book (which you're obviously going to buy after reading this).

Due to what ingredients I had in the fridge this recipe differs from the book slightly although it is very similar. That's probably pretty convenient for copyright reasons too.

Mapo Doufu - Pock Marked Mother Chen's Beancurd, for 2 people.

The Ingredients

1 350gr block firm tofu 

125gr minced beef

3 spring onions, sliced on the diagonal

50 ml of oil (a lot but it's a purposefully oily dish)

200ml chicken stock

1 1/2 TB chilli bean paste

1 TB black beans

3/4 ts sugar

1 ts dark soy sauce

2 TB cornflour mixed with 3 TB of cold water

1/4 ts roasted then ground Sichuan peppercorns

The Method

1.  When stir frying anything I like to be prepared, things cook quickly in a hot wok and the last thing you want to be doing is struggling to undo a jar and measure out a couple of tablespoons of something.  I tend to measure everything out onto a plate ready to scrape in at the correct time.  For this dish I also mix the cornflour and water, along with the soy and sugar, into the stock.

2. Cut the tofu into 2cm cubes and put in simmering water.

3. Get the oil hot and add the beef aiming to crisp it up and get a bit of texture.  This can take a few minutes depending on beef and wok temperature.

4. Once browning add the chilli bean paste and black beans and allow them to mix into the oily beef.

5. After a minute gently empty in the drained tofu and pour in the stock mixture.

6. Turn the heat down, allowing the mixture to come to a simmer and thicken.  Carefully shake, rather than stir, to distribute as the tofu can be pretty lightweight stuff.

7. Throw in the spring onions, shake again then serve, sprinkling with the ground Sichuan pepper.

And here's the result.

It's a bit heavy on beef compared to my first attempt - mainly as there's about 50% more than the recipe stated - as there happened to be a 125gr bag of minced beef in my freezer.  Outside of that I think it's a pretty good representation.  This dish has a bit of everything - it's oily, hot and aromatic in flavour and  the soft texture of the tofu contrasts well with the firmer bite of the beef. I challenge anyone to try it and not be converted.

Now I need to start thinking about the next installment, current thoughts are something from The Exotic Kitchens of Peru as it will allow me to show off a few of my recent Peru photos while staying on the theme of my cookbooks.