brassica heaven (with anchovies!)

Oh my word. We made a version of baked cauliflower and broccoli cannelloni last night, from a recipe by Jamie Oliver. OK, so we didn't use cannelloni tubes and made it like a lasagne instead, and I didn't use nearly as much crème fraîche, nor any mozzarella (we used a tiny sprinkle of grated half fat cheddar instead), just to keep the fat levels down! But it was amazing. Like it-might-kill-you-with-the-salt-content amazing, but wonderful nonetheless, especially if you like your brassicas. I guess you could leave out the anchovies (with which no extra salt is required in my opinion!) and just season with a bit of salt for a veggie version. Not as fussy looking as the length of the recipe makes it look - I'd definitely make it again. Takes 1 hour 10 mins including about 35 minutes in the oven.

Again I took no photos because I'm greedy and useless, but the one above is one from Food Network.

a time for everything

It's never too late to try something new, right? Well, the other night I had my first experience of blancmange. Yup, that weirdy, wibbly, pastel-coloured stuff that most other people who grew up in the 80s or earlier have experience of, but I haven't, or at least not until Sunday night. Did I like it? Yeah, I guess so - I have a weird fondness for fake strawberry flavouring (used to HATE it as a kid, but it's grown on me), but I dislike milk (although I like ice-cream, cream and yoghurt), so it was a fine balance of good and bad. Thanks to the husband for this, uh, introduction! Best thing about it was that I got to use my vintage pressed glass jelly mould - bring on more blancmange!


What it made me think of was that there were plenty of things that I never ate as a Chinese child growing up in England, and things that I tried only at other people's houses and birthday parties. I remember my first taste of proper English (ha!) spaghetti bolognese at my friend Susan's house. I liked the 1980s dried Parmesan cheese - it was feety and different. I thought Angel's Delight was disgusting (still find it a bit of a retro oddity if faced with it). I hated cheese and pineapple at parties.

But mostly English food was almost a treat, a luxury. I remember sharing special roast dinners with my sister on Sunday trips to Makro and thinking how great it was, even though it was canteen food. We grew up with a very different slant on food, where cheapo chicken and mushroom pies from the bakery five doors down were magical rather than humdrum, but steamed whole fish with ginger and spring onions was gaggingly boring.

On the other hand I didn't know that a lot of English people don't like and can't deal with bones in their food - we grew up de-boning fish and chicken in our mouths from toddlerhood and learned the anatomy of a duck not through a book but by looking at it on the plate.

Most of all, I remember the cringingly odd lunches we would sometimes take to school. Usually lunch was boring ham sandwiches, but sometimes my Dad would make the lunch and we would get crimson-edged Chinese roast pork and lettuce in our bread, which would bring choruses of 'urgh! what's that?' at the lunch table. I would love sandwiches like that now, but at the time I wanted to disappear into the floor. Not great for a shy little girl. I looked at my friend's pâtė sandwiches and wondered what they tasted like. No-one picked on her. Susan's daily Marmite sandwiches didn't appeal so much, and I don't think I tried the wonderful stuff until I was about eleven years old. It's amazing how much I missed out on, good and bad.

the things we ate...

You know how I waffled on for days about the things we ate in New York? Now, it's not like there's nowhere good in London, only we don't go there very often since I moved away and had kind of forgotten how great it can be. We went there on an indulgent shopping trip yesterday and discovered a few things that I'd never gotten round to doing whilst there, or had not come across in my limited explorations. It's a common affliction of the London-dweller - this blindness that keeps you going to the places that are most familiar, whilst making you forget to go out and have a good rummage somewhere else.


Now, I'd been down Brick Lane and environs before, but never on the best day - Sunday. Luck had it that just as lunchtime arrived, we passed by the legendary Beigel Bake at the top of Brick Lane, where they serve the most incredible salt beef in sweet home-made bagels with a slick of mustard for added punch. I swear I nearly died, it was so good. (Image from londontown.com)

Onwards down Brick Lane, we stopped to look at shops, we spent money down Cheshire Street, but as we drew towards the Sunday UpMarket at the Old Truman Brewery, we were ambushed by the smells of cooking. Inside the market there were dozens of stalls selling wonderful-looking food - mostly not the trashy, sweet-and-sour stuff that is pervasive in such markets, but instead lots of home-style, honest food cooked by people with an obvious passion for their cuisine. There were (praise the lord!) bánh mì, dumplings, Moroccan, Sri Lankan, you name it. The choice was so huge I nearly wept with excitement. Yeah, that's how sad I am. No photos, I'm afraid - I never remember to bring the camera with me.

So of course we had to have a second lunch. What did we go for? A vegetarian 'three-sauces wrap' from the Ethiopian stall. I don't quite know what was in it - green lentils, some familiar curry-like flavours, plenty of heat, a great cabbage salad, a pillowy, thin pancake... it was spectacular, like oh-my-god-why-can't-we-eat-this-all-the-time? We couldn't SPEAK, it was so bloody good.

We proceeded, via a juice bar, into central London for shopping. And when that was over, we headed over to a Chinese supermarket in Chinatown where I bought salt-laden, MSG-pumped instant noodles that are my secret indulgence, and buns to steam for breakfast. Then I led the husband into a tea shop where I had iced Hong-Kong style coffee with tea which is much like Hong Kong milk tea, but with coffee in it too. Had we not been heading straight for dinner afterwards, I definitely would have had tapioca 'bubbles' in it for fun. I used to love the milk tea when I first tasted it as a seven-year-old in HK - it's probably a bit sweet for my taste these days, but it was an amazingly nostalgic experience yesterday and quite a treat.

And could we fit in dinner after all that? Of course we could! At Busaba on Wardour Street, where the food is to die for, especially the violently garlicky goong tohd prawns. Needless to say I'd eaten too much by the time we went to bed and spent the night having weird itchy episodes intermingled with peculiar dreams about pink, man-eating cockatoos and a bear that ate my finger. No, I'm not lying about the dreams - that's what a surfeit of sugar and shellfish can do to you!

squash

It's been a while, I know... been busy, tired.

The other day I cooked two squash that we picked up in a back-alley farmer's market in our local town. I had no idea what they were or what they tasted like, so it was a pretty fun experiment. I think one was a kabocha squash and the other was like an all-green carnival squash. Now I don't love butternut squash - cooked badly it tastes like sick, so I approached these tentatively. I halved and roasted them with olive oil and a bit of seasoning for about half an hour. Whilst that was going on, I sauteed onions, garlic and celery until soft, added bacon, mushrooms, thyme, black pepper, a tiny bit of dried chilli, then stirred in some long-grain rice and covered it all with water to cook the rice for about 20 minutes. Then I scooped out most of the squash flesh, keeping the two squashes separate so we could taste the difference, mixed it into the rice and stuffed it back into the squash shells. Then it went back in the oven for about 10 minutes just so the rice was starting to catch on top. Was it good? Oh yes. Especially the Kabocha type squash which was like a nutty, sweet pease-pudding textured thing - gorgeous. The saltiness of the bacon balanced the sweetness nicely. No photos I'm afraid. I was too busy stuffing my face.

it's been a while

Profuse and profound apologies for my absence. Things have been getting a bit too crazy for me lately to even think about things other than working, and then being asked to make changes to that work again and again... I don't mean to moan - the client comes first, right? I have had enough of working now, though. I could do with a week off, but no, it keeps pouring in.

Have I done anything interesting in the last week or so? Nope. Not a sausage. Most interesting thing? Uh... a man in a red top hat outside Beyond Retro in London - I love love love how you can do anything you like, be anyone you want to be in that city - if I'm going to wear the weird patterned Norwegian cardigan I picked up on eBay last week, London will be the city. Out here in the countryside people will think I'm the village idiot.

hong kong curry

My dad used to make curry on Sundays for the take-away. The whole town was addicted to his curry - you could smell it cooking all the way down the main street and it was glorious. I have asked him for his recipe but, like most instinctively good cooks, he is vague vague vague. He goes to a cupboard and ferrets around, coming back to the table with a box full of spices that he doesn't know the English name for. He presents them to us to smell and we recognise them in this way - cloves, cassia bark, star anise we know, but there's something like fennel seeds in there, and a curious little pod like a shrivelled fruit. What it is called I have no idea - I guess a trip to the Chinese supermarket would probably enlighten us. As for quantities of everything, well, only he knows and he can't be arsed to tell me. One day I'll force him to cook some in front of me. I must know this. This is the one thing that I would kill small mammals to be able to cook and the stuff you get ready made to water down is simply not the same.

Curry and chips! Oh my god. I need to lie down.

We ate our first pumpkin the other day, our tiniest one, roasted and added to a salad. The skin was thick and leathery, the flesh bright orange and delicious. It's the time of year now that I start dreaming of soup, cassoulet, lentils. Beef stew I made the other day was warming and just right for the weather. I just wish I had thought to make some herby dumplings to simmer to pillowy perfection in it too. Well, there's a portion left, so all is not lost.

Someone has too much time on their hands...

Thanks to Barry for this morning's link - The Brick Testament - Bible stories illustrated with Lego. It's quite funny, especially the nudey scenes... :-P

I'm sorry I've not had much to say recently. I'm so tired. This morning I woke up, then kind of had what I call a 'mini-dream' where I was ostensibly awake and communicating with the husband, but during a small lull I had a clear vision of Boris Johnson with his hair all wet and slicked back, which I thought made him look much older. And no, it wasn't a sex dream.

this and that...

Urgh. I am swamped with work right now. I sound resentful, but really, it's amazing and I'm horribly, snivellingly grateful for it all - it keeps me from going mad, it gives me something to moan about, it could possibly be the best work I've ever done! Well... the last sentiment is only accurate when the brief drops like a shiny new penny into my inbox, but it rapidly fades into dull fantasy when I realize that I'm drawing a load of crap. I don't feel like that right now, but it happens quite a lot.

The cabbages are being attacked by slugs. The weather has finally broken and we have been deluged with miserable, drippy rain today, which means I really should go out and set some beer traps or something to keep the little bastards away from my veg before tonight. Can I be bothered?

I really haven't got much to say for myself this week. I think it's a seasonal disorder. Just when I want a break so I can curl up on the sofa in ugly knitwear, suddenly I have to sit at this machine and draw pictures of trees...

mournful

I'm having a slow and sorry week. Lots of unpaid work, lots of anxiety, poor sleep, no husband to cheer me up, bad diet... I'm all maudlin today and will be until the weekend when hopefully things will cheer up. I think I need to get out of the house more - things are a bit monotonous and grey indoors.


That said, happily I have new cabbage plants to shove into the ground for next spring. The thought of home-grown cabbage is all that's keeping me going. The potatoes I grew this year were honestly some of the best I've ever tasted.