Chicken with coriander and spinach rice

I love rice. I grew up eating it and occasionally hating it, but I never knew as a fussy five-year-old that so many wonderful and exciting things could be made with it, nor even that rices other than jasmine rice existed. We ate it every day, with steamed fish and vegetables, the occasional bit of poached chicken and various other things. We didn't eat a lot else and I fought against it sometimes, especially when the tough old pak choi leaves would get stuck in my throat and make me gag. If we were ill and didn't feel like eating, we would have plain rice sprinkled with sesame oil and soy sauce, which was a wonderful, comforting thing. Even to this day I love the smell of it. But in general I was a terrible eater up until the age of six or seven, and mealtimes could be difficult, especially if it only involved boring fish and Chinese greens.

These days we carry five types of rice in our house at the same time and cook regularly with each of them. There is a whole world of things you can make to eat with it. But what I like best, especially when I want something wholesome, is a gently cooked rice dish with lots of vegetables in it. When I see pictures of rice with things in it, especially green things, I am sucked in every time. I like it flecked with bits of spinach and herbs, or as a mixed vegetable risotto or paella style with any old veg from the fridge thrown in and served with a wedge of lemon. So when I saw the photo of this dish (much better than mine above), I was instantly taken. I had to make it. This is the second time I've made it and it was even better this time. I don't know why. It is just lightly spicy but fragrant, and utterly moreish with the spiced yoghurt on the side. You could try making this without the chicken - maybe add half a diced onion to the vegetables for a bit more flavour instead.

This is a dish from 'Falling Cloudberries' by Tessa Kiros, taught to her by her Peruvian friend. I have adapted the recipe to serve roughly 2 people. I have used a small amount (only three thighs between two people) of boned chicken thighs without skin instead of pieces of chicken with bones in (if you want to use the latter, which would be nice, use pieces of a chicken cut into eighths and serve one or two pieces per person).

chicken (I used three boned thighs for two people. You might want more.)
1 carrot, finely diced
1/3 red pepper finely diced
a big handful of peas, fresh or frozen
1 garlic clove, chopped
50g spinach (I used frozen, and I always use more than this. I probably used nearly 100g! :-))
a handful of fresh coriander
170g long grain rice (Tessa uses short grain rice)
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (or if you don't have any, use half and half chilli powder and paprika)
olive oil
salt and pepper

for the yoghurt:
50ml yoghurt (that's a guess, I used three big dollops without measuring)
1/2 tsp ground cumin
salt and pepper

Brown the chicken pieces in light olive oil over a moderate-high heat until they are golden on the outside and nearly cooked through (this is especially important if they are on the bone or they won't cook through later). You have a choice here and it depends on your pan. I'd recommend browning it in a non-stick pan rather than a regular saucepan or something - makes your life a bit easier not to be anxious about things sticking! If the chicken has skin on you might be OK with just a regular pan. Set the chicken aside.

Meanwhile, either roughly chop the spinach and coriander in a food processor with a splash of water, or if you are using frozen spinach, defrost it, chop lightly and add the chopped coriander to it.

Now put some new oil into the pan you want to cook the rice in - a deep saucepan is good - or if you were already using the saucepan, discard the oil and add a splash of fresh oil. Add the garlic, and as soon as you can smell it add the carrots, peas and red pepper and cook gently for about 5 minutes to soften. Stir in the cayenne pepper and season well, then add the spinach and coriander mixture and stir for another minute or so. Now return the chicken to the pan, add one and a half cups of water and bring it to the boil, then simmer for about 15 minutes (you can do it for 10 if there are no bones) until the chicken is cooked. Take the chicken pieces out again and keep them warm. Add the rice to the pan, give it a stir, add one more cup of hot water and bring to a simmer. Cook, uncovered, for 5-10 minutes until it looks like the rice has absorbed most of the water. Turn the heat down to the lowest point, cover the pan and continue to cook for up to 15 minutes. Stir it only occasionally to check that it isn't sticking to the pan. If it looks dry but the rice isn't cooked yet, add a splash of water from a kettle. Check and adjust the seasoning towards the end.

Whilst the rice is cooking, mix the yoghurt, cumin and some salt and pepper in a bowl ready to serve.

Because I like my food hot, I like to put the chicken back into the pan to steam over the rice for the last few minutes. It's up to you! Once the rice is cooked and there is no liquid left in the pan, serve it with the chicken pieces on top and a big dollop of the spiced yoghurt on the side. If you like things hot, add a drizzle of chilli oil to finish.

today I'm craving...

the taste of home. My parents and sister visited us last weekend. It was lovely to see them - we don't see each other often enough. My parents made Chinese dumplings and brought a big bag of them for the freezer - whilst I will love eating them, they will mostly serve to make me jealous of my Dad's cooking and access to things like Chinese (garlic) chives, and his superior seasoning skills. He is one of those chefs who will actually taste, by licking, his pork mince mixture whilst the meat is still raw. I haven't crossed that boundary yet, nor do I think I will soon.

They love to bring me food, as if I live in some backwater where things like fish and oranges are a rare sight. My mother has a way of slipping odd things into my cupboards whilst I'm not watching, so as well as a papaya the size of a house (presented to me with much pride by my sweet Dad), we have ended up with all the chocolate and biscuits that no-one at my parent's house will eat, two random boxes of cereal and some Chinese herbal junk that I will never consume (I think it's ginseng).

What I really want, though, is a big batch of zongzi. Even better, I would love to learn how to make them. Sure, I've wrapped them at home with my parents before, but I was never taught how to make all the bits that go in the filling. Zongzi are glutinous rice parcels stuffed with wondrous things like mung beans, chicken, pork belly, dried sausage, salted duck eggs... all manner of things. You wrap the parcels in fragrant banana leaves and boil them in batches, then stick them in the freezer for those important times when you want a huge lump of stodge that will make you (or me at least) weep with nostalgia and homesickness. Eaten with a good slug of both dark and light soy sauce, they are the perfect comfort food, if a little on the heavy side. Have one of these and you'll not want to eat again for a week. (Image from Wikipedia)

Again, I am delighted by the food parallels that can be drawn right across the globe: one of the foods that I would love to try, but simply can't be found easily in England, is Mexican tamales. I have watched and drooled over Jamie Oliver (the food, not the man!) in Los Angeles being taught how to wrap them by some Mexican immigrants, but they have never passed my lips. One day!

Posting has been light here - we've not been particularly interesting people, nor cooked anything mind-blowing. Just the usual assortment of pasta and rice things, and a bit of junk too.

Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year (OK, OK, a few days late, I know. Forgive me). Since we had a guest (my wonderful brother in law) on Sunday night, we decided to initiate him to the delights of the Chinese dumpling. I have said this before, and I'll say it again - I will write up a recipe one day. I'm just lax and because I improvise, they turn out differently every time. You might be better acquainted with the Japanese version, gyoza, which for some reason have made it into trendier eateries whereas the Chinese type remain largely the preserve of little backstreet places and of course the home.

Normally, and for the sake of our health, we just boil them and eat them with a dip made with vinegar and raw garlic (I like to make a Thai style sweet-hot-sour-salty dip too). The next day, though, because I made heaps and there were leftovers, I fried them for lunch (picture above - don't mind the weird shape of some of them). I cannot describe to you how great that was. Probably the best lunch I've had in months.

More pork!

We are having a porky week here. I don't really know why. We don't normally eat a lot of pork. Nevertheless, at the supermarket last weekend we were dithering near the meat counter and I spotted some pork shin or, as they called it, pork 'ossobuco' which is a name usually used for braised Milanese veal shin. Now I had seen a recipe for ossobuco in gremolata in Twelve, the Tuscan cookbook by Tessa Kiros so I thought I'd have a go at that.

Sorry, no photo. I was too greedy. There is a good picture here.

Part of the appeal of this dish is apparently the bone marrow that you can suck out of the bone shank. I used to love bone marrow, poked out with a chopstick from the bits of bone my parents used to flavour congee or soups with. It has been many years since I've eaten bone marrow. It has a very particular taste that I can't describe and a texture that some people might find offputting. I will eat, and like, nearly anything so this is just great. Sadly our pork bones didn't bear much edible marrow, but I managed to tease a little out of mine. I am such a carnivore sometimes, it's sick. Sorry if you're vegetarian or squeamish.

Here is my version of the recipe, with thanks.

Serves 2
2 thick slices of pork ossobuco (Mine were about an inch thick, but maybe a larger quantity of thinner slices would work better because I had to keep turning the meat in the casserole dish so it wouldn't dry out)
white flour for dusting
1 medium carrot
1 medium onion
1 stick celery
125ml red wine
water
salt and pepper
zest of 1/2 lemon
one small clove of garlic (or 1/2 a regular clove)
a small bunch of parsley

Pre-heat the oven to 150°C. In a food processor, pulse the carrot, celery and onion until finely chopped. You can do this by hand if you haven't got a food processor. Heat a little oil in a sauté pan and cook the vegetables over a medium heat until softened.

Dust the pork all over with flour. In an ovenproof casserole dish, heat some more oil over a high heat, then add the pork and brown on all sides. Season with salt and black pepper. When the meat is brown, add the red wine and reduce until almost all of the wine has evaporated. Then add the sautéed vegetables and enough water to generously cover the vegetables.

Put a tight lid or aluminium foil over the dish and place in the oven. As I said above, my bits of shin were poking out of the top of the sauce so I turned them over every half hour or so. Top up the water if it is looking like it will dry out. You want it to have plenty of sauce. Cook in the oven for 2 1/2 hours, checking regularly. Check and adjust the seasoning during cooking. Remove the lid for the last half hour, but watch the sauce and make sure it doesn't dry out.

Towards the end of cooking, make your gremolata. Finely chop the garlic, chop the parsley and mix with the grated zest of half a lemon. Set aside.

Once the cooking time is over, serve the slices of meat with the sauce spooned over and liberally sprinkled with the gremolata. We ate ours with potatoes and kale. It is more usually served with a Milanese (saffron) risotto but I didn't know that at the time.

It was perfect, especially with the gremolata, and just the thing for a very cold and snowy day.

Buns!

I have many weaknesses. Mostly for food. One of my greatest loves is the steamed bun, Chinese style. Generically speaking, we just call them 'bao', meaning buns, but they have lots of different names, including baozi, salapao in Thailand, or mantou if they are unfilled. The bread casing is always a little bit sweet and is especially good, in my opinion, combined with savoury fillings.

I've had some amazing baozi in restaurants and in Hong Kong. They remind me of eating breakfast with my paternal grandmother and family when I was seven years old, in a Tai Po restaurant that she still visits to this day to meet her friends and gossip. They remind me of the best home breakfast surprises (I had a pretty weird breakfast upbringing, sometimes even involving beefburgers or pie! Pizza featured once at breakfast too!). My favourites are filled with char siu (roast pork), meat and vegetables, or sweet things like lotus seed paste or yellow custard.

On Saturday, armed with a package of 'Tippy salapao mix' (buy it online here) from the Chinese supermarket, I attemped my first home-made baozi. OK, so I haven't got a clue how to make the bread casing - it involves wheat flour, raising agents of various types, sugar and some kind of magic. I think some other mixes include yeast, but this one did not. One day maybe I'll try making my own!

I filled them with chicken breast minced in a food processor, finely chopped spring onion, Chinese leaf, garlic, ginger, salt, soy sauce, sesame oil, coriander a tiny pinch of Chinese five spice and a dash of white pepper. The quantities, as with most of my 'made-up' cooking, were arbitrary. Basically, a mix of two chicken breasts, three leaves of Chinese leaf, two spring onions, three cloves of garlic, a 5mm slice of ginger, chopped finely, a small bunch of fresh coriander and the other ingredients to taste, was more than enough to generously fill the twelve buns that one package of flour mix can make.

If I were to make them again I would add some pre-soaked dried shiitake mushrooms or some chopped water chestnuts to the mix. You could also try making them with pork, adding chinese chives, or try a vegetarian version.


They were surprisingly easy to make - this flour mix only takes a few minutes to make up. Filling them without leaks is harder, but I think we were trying to cram too much into each bun! All the instructions are on the packet and they take only 15 minutes to steam, even with raw meat inside.

These are pictures of the ones we made and I was jolly proud of them for a first attempt. True fluffiness will probably always elude me, but they were tasty nonetheless.

EDIT: I just found a recipe for baozi dough here. I will try it some time, when I have a few hours to spare!

Shiny and new

Happy new year! Well, I would be happier if I didn't have to work and could go somewhere with a sledge instead. With all this snow around, working should be banned. Sadly, the snow seems to have mostly missed our little patch here in Essex. We have only had about an inch, when everywhere else in the country seems to have had many more! Plus there are no slopes around our area for quality sledging.

What has been happening here? Not much. Christmas was lovely, but by the end I couldn't wait to be alone at home again. I like company but I get tired of having to be sociable after more than a week of it and just want to hide away not having to talk any more. Sounds awful, but that's how I am.

Food-wise, Christmas was pretty good - my first, proper, traditional turkey meal on Christmas day with my in-laws, then we had a wonderful Chinese steamboat or hot pot at my parents' house on Boxing Day. We ate out with family a lot in Birmingham so I'm craving normal food terribly. We haven't quite settled back into our normal routine, though.

I will try and be better at posting here. I keep making nice food and forgetting to photograph it! We made a spicy aubergine stew served with roast sweet potatoes the other day. Last night we were experimenting with the incredibly fatty Hungarian sausage that was part of the special Christmas hamper I compiled for the husband. We ate a traditional Ukrainian meal for Ukrainian Christmas last Saturday, and there was a lamb and green bean stew at some other point. Any photos? Any recipes? Not from me, sorry! I'll try to be better next time.

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!

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.

more...

The congee I made the other day was pretty good. I was really quite impressed with myself. The reason why I have started to make it was because of a wonderful congee experience we had in New York. Now, it's not rocket science making this stuff, it's not clever or difficult. I grew up on the stuff - with meatballs and crispy vermicelli, chicken, dried scallops, salt pork, thousand-year egg, pork liver, whatever... It's the ultimate comfort food. It smells like home. Eaten with hot pickled turnips and pickled tofu, it is the food of the gods. I'm not kidding - rice boiled to within an inch of its life is one of the best things in the world.

So for breakfast we headed out to Chinatown and Big Wong in particular, looking for congee. The restaurant is simple and cheap-looking, just like places in Hong Kong, with water served in plastic tumblers and a bottle of soy sauce on the side - you'd never know from looking at it that it would be worth going inside but with this place it's all about the food. We had one bowl with salt pork and thousand year egg and another with pork meatballs. It was creamy and well seasoned but didn't have the horrid taste of MSG or anything odd. It was like home, where I like my congee with white pepper and soy sauce. It was like balm to a stomach that had been overfed on weird shit the day before.


After that we went in search of bubble tea, a very popular drink in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia. In HK I like what they call 'yin yang' - a mix of tea and coffee, and unsweetened if possible. We didn't get that - I had a sweet milk tea that tasted a bit odd, but it was fun nevertheless to sit in a little candy-coloured shop and suck up the chewy tapioca balls through fat straws.

the things we ate...

Most of the things we did in New York pale in comparison to some of the joyful eats we had. Actually, most of the things we did in New York were acts of joyful eating. We didn't bother to do the touristy things - I've seen the Empire State Building from the street - who wants to pay $21 dollars to go 84% of the way up (it costs $15 more to go from the 86th to the 102nd floor!)? We went to the awe-inspiring Met, and I made pilgrimage to the American Museum of Natural History, but that's about all we did that was standard. Nay, we had better things to do.

I won't bore you with a long list of everything we ate, but the highlights were many. Before we left, I'd determined that I would eat bánh mì. I don't make promises like that to myself and then break them, so for our first lunch we went to Saigon Vietnamese Sandwich near Chinatown and satisfied that urge. And my lord was it satisfying. There's something about the combination of meat and pickles, hot sauce and coriander that really makes this really special. We ate it sitting in a park and washed it down with mangosteen juice. I know it's vulgar to put up pictures of half-eaten food but really I couldn't wait to eat at least some of it before I took a photo. Be grateful, I nearly couldn't stop eating to pick up the camera at all :-)


Next up was dinner that night - Jewish. We ended up in a seedy-looking diner that, from the outside looked like any other greasy burger joint in London: all neon signs and laminated menus in the window, glass counter with days-old food in plastic tubs and take-away boxes on the side. It looked empty. I wasn't sure. But Fine and Schapiro is one of the bastions of the New York Jewish deli scene having been in business since 1927 and is not to be sniffed at nor feared. Sure the interior is shabby and dated but that is part of the character and joy of this place. The night we went it was populated with two lone male diners. One of them looked like he went there all the time, so I ordered what he had - a pastrami sandwich. It was fabulous. An enormous, meaty, fatty, caraway-seed-peppered thing of beauty. Everything here is served with a big bowl of pickled gherkins and home-made coleslaw. It was cheap and tasty - what more can a girl ask for? Here are another couple of vulgar pictures under bad lighting for you:




Enough for today. I have to go and tend the congee I'm attempting to cook. More next time!

a little note

Whilst reading about bánh mì yesterday, I came across this foodstuff amusingly called 'head cheese'. I mean, REALLY? Head cheese? That makes it sound like some kind of discharge from a man's unmentionables, or at least something fungal and bodily. Wow. It's chopped up bits of pig head and other things like scrotal sacs, all bound in a tasty jelly.

Somewhere down that page is a little note about a foodstuff that is familiar to me, called 'yaorou' (肴肉), which is a kind of cold pickled pork dish that I used to watch my dad make for special occasions like Christmas (imagine it instead of your turkey!). My sister didn't like it too much. I loved it. I don't know if my dad used trotters or some other cut of pork, but the skin kind of goes jelly-like and crunchy, and the pickling vinegar and punchy spices are wonderful. Sounds gross, huh? Well, I am a bit gross.

Getting excited

On Monday, the husband and I are off on holiday. We are spending four days in New York, followed by six days in the US Virgin Islands. I can't bloody wait - we've not had a proper holiday all year. For poor Mark, the Caribbean bit is actually a work conference, but I'm tagging along to take advantage of the free room in this magnificent resort. I have a feeling I won't belong in such a swanky, super-rich place. I will most likely be surrounded by people who don't carry a little pouch of fat below their belly buttons or have issues with the wibbly bits on their haunches... I have so many hang-ups, but I try not to care too much these days - it's no fun being self-conscious. It's not as if anyone's looking anyway. Or we could be hit by a hurricane, in which case I'll be stuck indoors alone with my problems.

Caribbean, schmaribbean! Who cares what I'll look like in a bikini? What I care most about is FOOD in New York. Yeah, there are loads of flea markets in NY but they are all open on weekends only, and we are there only weekdays this time, so where should I turn to but my next love? I am looking forward to every meal. I want to eat Vietnamese bánh mì, which sound like great lunch food. I even read about congee in Chinatown, which of course you can get in England or make yourself, but they make it sound better over there. Available in 13 varieties in one restaurant! But of course there is proper American food to try too - I wonder whether my little paunch will grow a bit before I get to the beach? Will I even give it a second thought whilst I'm stuffing my face? (Image below from battleofthebanhmi.com)

green green vegetables and a thing called pickled tofu

My lovely friend Kat suggested grating courgettes and sautéeing them in butter with a bit of seasoning. We tried that last night, only I used light olive oil instead of butter and slightly overdid it with the pepper. Oh my lord! I could eat a whole plateful of that stuff - the mouthfeel, the bite and the taste were all perfect. Sometimes I love to eat a big pile of green veg that has been gently messed with in some way or other, served with nothing else to detract or distract from its singular moreishness - I love stir-fried green cabbage with a load of oriental chilli sauce and a fried egg, thanks to Orangette; I love old spinach, like the Chinese eat, steamed and stirred through with preserved bean curd (which Wikipedia rather charmingly calls 'pickled tofu' - I've never really given much thought to what it might be called in English. Chinese cheese is another rather delightful name it takes). The latter is something I used to fight over as a child. Thankfully my sister wasn't as fussed about it as I was - for a kid who wasn't too keen on slimy green things that got stuck in your throat halfway down, this was the vegetable dish of the gods and I could eat a tonne of it.

When we were last in Hong Kong we ate a few times at the magnificent Tai Po Market. In the evenings, when the rest of the market is shut, one of the upstairs floors comes alive with cheap and cheerful restaurants serving the most stunningly delicious food. Forget going to more expensive places outside - this is where the locals go. We had, most memorably, poached chicken in chilli oil and spinach done the way I love it. I was fighting my young cousins for the stuff. The place is happily also open for breakfast - what on earth could be better than silky ho fun noodle soup with fish balls and - wait for this - the most earth-shatteringly, mouth-wateringly beautiful fried fish skins. Oh yes, fried fish skins. Served with the ubiquitous and indispensable chilli oil, of course. I am salivating. Why can't English breakfasts be as good as this? I mean, noodles and congee - unbeatable.

Image from Wikipedia

Dumplings and sausages

I spent a good fifteen minutes reading about dumplings on Wikipedia the other day. I guess the things one can do with food are limited, but that knowledge never stops me from finding it remarkable that there are so many dishes that seem to have evolved in parallel within different cuisines, as it were. For example, noodles and pasta have similarities, there's calzone and the Cornish pasty, and of course there are dumplings and wontons from China to Eastern European pierogi/vareniki to Italian tortellini. I suppose the dumpling/pasty thing is simply a neat way of serving lots of different fillings, but it's still interesting. My husband is half Ukrainian, so imagine our delight when we discovered that whilst I can make jiaozi filled with pork and vegetables, he makes vareniki filled with cheese and potato, both of which are cased in a flour and water dough and shaped like stuffed half-moons. Of course I prefer mine, though - I mean, what's the deal with the Ukrainian stodge pie? To be fair, vareniki can have other fillings, but this is the recipe that has been passed down to him.

Then there are variations on salami. The Chinese have one called lap cheong or lap cheung (yeah, no, my surname doesn't mean 'sausage' - that would be too funny. Sorry, different word) that (I think) literally translates as 'wax sausage'. It is often eaten steamed, sliced and doused in soy sauce, which balances its inherent sweetness and fattiness. Oh lord, I could do with some now! But it's so bad for you... There are certain foodstuffs that take you to a particular experience in your life - this sausage reminds me of the first meal we would have at home in England having arrived back that day from Hong Kong. Because the quality of imported products such as these in England isn't as great as in its native land, my parents would smuggle (well, I don't know how legal it was) things like dried oysters, dried sausage, preserved duck and salted fish back in these enormous blue-striped canvas sacks back from HK any time we went there. My god, did we exceed our baggage limit! It was embarrassing - and I guess it must have been allowed because the pungent reek emanating from our luggage would surely give its contents away. Anyway, after we had got home from the airport and had a rest, when it came to food there was nothing in the house, so what better to do than crack open the preserved goodies and re-live the HK experience? You'd think that after weeks of being away from home we would want something not Chinese, but this stuff is something else entirely. You might hate it if you didn't grow up eating it - it's kinda weird, but I still like it now.

Dumplings

I am getting to grips with Chinese-style dumplings, the ones filled with vegetables and minced pork and then steamed, boiled or fried. I think I have them pretty good now. I always seem to be lacking one ingredient or another when I'm making these, but somehow they always turn out OK. But maybe I'm kidding myself and my Dad would wrinkle his nose at them or laugh at me. I'll maybe write up a recipe one day, but that might be telling...

The ritual of chopping, mixing, making dough, rolling and filling is something best shared with other people. It's something I remember doing at home as a teenager with my parents teaching us how to make these little purses over the kitchen table. I never had the patience in those days to do very many, so I'd wander off after a while. It is the kind of thing, though, that brings with it that marvellous feeling of tradition and familial closeness, like pasta making, or the kneading of bread. And then you all sit down to eat it together, which surely is the best thing in the world.

So it is that with my surrogate family of university friends, some of my best memories are of the dumpling 'parties' we used to throw, sometimes with just my flatmates, other times with friends too. We used to gather in the kitchen whilst I made the mix for the filling and kneaded the dough for the cases, and then they would all have a go at filling them and striving to make the perfect shape, curved and pleated like a pair of plump horns. It would take so long that we wouldn't sit down to eat until late, slightly delirious with hunger, but it was always, always worth the wait. I would make a whole load of different dipping sauces and we'd steam piles of baby pak choi to eat with it. Even when we were all full up, if there were any left over there would always be room for a couple more.

Cheese Fridays

Nah, I'm just kidding. I can't remember what we ate on Fridays, only that as children my sister and I were left to our own devices on Friday and Saturday nights. Both of my parents worked incredibly hard in the take-away when we were young. I never really appreciated how much they did for us - they sent us to private schools from infancy because they cared for us much more than themselves, and we lived quite an impoverished early existence, sleeping all in one bedroom and sharing the upper floors of the take-away with our employees and other friends. My childhood was filled with their many different faces, most of whom have gone away, but some who remain very dear to me - my aunt and my cousins especially. Most of the people who worked for us always had time for my sister and I - I don't think as an adult I am quite as patient or indulgent with children as they all were.

So on Friday nights, when everyone was busy downstairs with the orders of chicken chow mein and chips with curry sauce, we would run amok, making tents and pretending to be tramps, creating trains of cardboard boxes, trying to brew our own perfume. Our upbringing was crazy - the antithesis of careful parenting. We watched the TV adaptation of Susan Hill's 'The Woman in Black' far too young and I'm still scarred by that experience many years later. I still remember the terror of having to go to bed that night. I'm sitting here in the middle of one of those almighty June thunderstorms and watching clips like this. This bit nearly killed me as a child of eight years old.

Duck Thursdays

When I was very young and we lived above my parents' take-away, Thursdays were always duck days. My dad would be preparing and roasting ducks all day in his enormous oven, hanging them up on big hooks as they became ready. On those evenings we would each have a leg of duck for dinner accompanied by pak choi or Chinese broccoli and plain rice, with plum sauce for the duck and lots of soy sauce over the whole plate. It was divine, one of the greatest pleasures of my early life.

My dad is probably the best cook I have ever known; his knowledge and skill are so instinctive. I really need to get him to show me how to make some of the things he used to feed us, things that to me are still the purest taste of home. It would be tragic if he didn't tell me the secret of braised belly pork or his unparallelled Hong Kong curry, how to make that weird steamed pork patty or what on earth fish he uses to make homemade fish balls. These are things I must know.

The best Duck Thursday I remember was when one day after school, instead of being brought home, we were taken to the local forest for an impromptu Chinese-style picnic. It was just normal food, which to us was our roast duck dinner, eaten out of foil trays whilst sitting on the water tanks that are dotted around that bit of woodland. I can still recall the way my food looked, all crammed into the tray with the dollop of plum sauce starting to seep and disappear into the rice. I still recall climbing with my sister on those water tanks. My parents were full of surprises, making the ordinary just that little bit extraordinary.

Tonight should be Duck Thursday, but I watch my waistline these days :-).