One of my favourite newly-discovered ingredients is Lurpak garlic butter. It's butter with crushed garlic - not garlic-flavoured butter, as so many garlic butters are.
I used it to make a really easy meal - lemon garlic sea bass, smashed roast new potatoes and a salad.
The sea bass will be pan fried which will take very little time, so first wash and boil some new potatoes and smash them slightly with a potato masher. They should be a little crushed but not totally smashed to little bits and definitely not smushed like mash potatoes.
Put them in a roasting pan with freshly ground black pepper, cayenne pepper and canola oil and put that in the oven.
Then prepare the vegetables for the salad. I used gem lettuce, radishes, tomatoes and spring onions, but use whatever you like.
Dried and ready to dress:
Now it is fish time.
Place two boneless sea bass fillets skin side down. Grind black pepper on the meaty bit.
Slice two garlic cloves.
Make slits down the length of the fish and insert the garlic slices.
Melt the garlic butter in a pan. Fry sea bass fillets on each side until done and flaky.
Lift the fillets onto serving dishes.
Add a good sized knob of garlic butter to the pan. Cut a lemon in half, squeeze the lemon juice into the pan. Stir, and reduce.
Remove the potatoes from the oven. They should have crispy bits. Crispy bits are the key.
When the sauce is the consistency you like, pour sauce on the fish fillets. It will taste very sour in the pan but tastes great over the fish.
At this point dress your salad - I didn't want it to be soggy so it's the last thing I did. I used a simple balsamic vinegar type dressing.
It was very tasty. The yellow sauce on my fish is the lemon garlic butter sauce, and the darker brownier sauce is a creole honey mustard sauce:
It makes a simple and delicious weeknight meal that requires minimal involvement and is something I would make again.
When I was younger, there used to be an American fast food chain called A&W in Singapore. As far as I can recall they mainly sold three things: a) hot dogs called 'coney dogs', waffles, and root beer. I liked my root beer in float form. One day they packed up and disappeared, leaving canned root beer in their wake, and left me with a hankering for hot dogs.
On Saturdays, there's a little market thing on North Cross Road in East Dulwich.
You walk past the hog roast, past the clothes, past the fair trade coffee van (the coffee is lovely, and you can get bags of beans), past baked goods, somerset fudge, caribbean food, stews and pies, and towards the end you'll get to a stand called the Dogfather Diner.
They have light up cactuses, hot sauce, jalapenos, a dog, and a long queue.
We like their hot dogs. They're hot dogs that remind me, very much, of
the A&W coney dog but much, much better. The hot dog (sausage) bit of the hot dog is 100% beef, kosher Shechita, halal, and there's even vegetarian options - a hot dog for everyone. I'm not sure what the vegetarian option is because the regular hot dog is so awesome.
We like the Mexican Elvis.
It's got beans, cheese, guacamole, jalapenos, and onions. I'm not sure how it's Elvis, but there you go. All that's missing is root beer.
Please, you need to go to this place.
Today me and James cooked chilli.
Here is the recipe:
My tasty and easy Chilli Recipe
I have an inauthentic but easy and great-tasting chilli recipe. I read lots of differet chilli recipes and tried a few different ones before assembling this, maximising simplicity and taste, and minimising time spent on cooking and skills required.
Cook your rice. I cook mine in a rice cooker that can keep the rice warm for some time, so I put some rice in the rice cooker and press the button before I start everything else.
First boil some water.
Next choose your dried chillies and steep them in the hot water. This is important, because you'll need to steep it for at least 20 minutes. We chose a mixture of de Arbol chillies, chilpotle, ancho, half a naga jolokia, and some others from my dried chilli collection. You can have what you like or what you have. I usually use the types that I want and as many as I want. You will make a chilli paste with these. The more chillies, the thicker the paste. The dried chillies also provide the bulk of the flavour for the chilli dish itself. I like adding smoky-tasting chillies in. If you're looking for dried chillies in the UK, I got many of mine from the South Devon Chilli Farm website.
I realise I'm meant to dry-roast the chillies first in a heavy-bottomed pan or skillet, but I don't. I kind of fear dry-roasting, it sounds like something that requires common sense or a specialist dry-roasting skill. Without dry-roasting the chillies, the end result might be inaccurate but tastes well enough to me.
Meanwhile dice 1 red onion and mince 6 garlic cloves. We used a garlic press. James is good at dicing onions and diced it.
Also use the time to assemble the following items: mince, 1tsbp ground cumin, 1tbsp chilli powder, 1tbsp dried oregano, 1 can kidney beans (drain) and 1 can tomatoes (I used canned plum tomatoes, but have used other things like canned cherry tomatoes, crushed tomatoes, etc.)
At this point the chillies should be ready. Put the chillies and a bit of the chilli soaking water in your blender (I used my mini chopper), and blend it to a paste.
Heat up some oil in your pot of choice. I used my Zojirushi electric thing that I've talked about earlier, the one with the adjustable heat slider.
The method is easy:
Fry the onion and garlic.
Fry mince until browned.
Add cumin, chilli powder, oregano. Continue to fry.
Add drained kidney beans. Continue mixing and frying.
Add chilli slush and can of tomatoes. If too thick add some chilli soaking water.
Add salt to taste.
Mix.
Put lid on and simmer until done to the consistency you like.
Tomorrow is strike day, but I've just started my new permanent job and haven't joined the union yet. I only received my pensions information pack in the mail a short while ago. There's lots of PCS application forms all over work and I've picked one up and filled it in, but that means that I'm now too late to join the strike. I'll have to go into work instead of march with the people.
I will have to bring some chilli for lunch so I won't have to walk through the picket twice.
And I will unionise and not be a scab in the next strike.
We're going to Holland for a holiday tomorrow, so today I wanted to cook something using up stuff in the fridge and with as few pans as possible. I decided to fry some noodles.
I peeled a large piece of ginger, six garlic cloves and five chillies. I used bird's eye chillies.
We had a tuna loin steak and I cut that up into chunks
I wanted a change from yellow egg noodles and got some 'lo mian' from the Chinese grocery shop in Peckham.
Chopped up the ginger-garlic-chilli base, and fried them in some oil.
Tuna chunks went in.
Then added drained noodles and lots of white pepper and some black pepper.
I then added a mixture of oyster sauce, dark soy sauce, and kicap manis, distributing the sauce evenly. Then I added some pea shoots and fried until wilted.
I served with a side of pea shoots.
Pea shoots are a versatile vegetable you sometimes see in a bag, in the salad section at the supermarket. They're good for salads and stir fries and have high levels of vitamins A and C. They taste good even on their own, just kind of crisp and fresh and we've eaten them straight out of the bag before. I like varying the food we eat, and since I don't see pea shoots around that, when I do I like to get them to have a different type of green leafy vegetable.
One of the foods I like is meatballs. There's some form of a meat-related ball, eg. potato balls with meat, eaten different ways in what seems like almost every type of cuisine. Meatballs are easy to make successfully and all kinds of flavours can be achieved with different additions to the meatball. I've made Swedish meatballs and kofta, but on Wednesday I made my carrot meatball spaghetti, using everyday larder items and some of the multi-coloured carrots we got with the veg box delivery.
To make the meatballs, I mixed:
400g ground beef
1 tsp dried Italian herbs
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp allspice
1tsp ground black pepper
60ml milk
1 egg
50g breadcrumbs (I used boxed breadcrumbs)
Shape into small balls and placed them in an oiled baking tin. They will need to firm up a bit or they'll fall apart during cooking. I clingfilmed them and put them in the fridge while I continued my preparations.
The carrots came in different colours: purple, white and regular. When peeled the purple carrots were a rich deep purple, almost black, with a bright orange core.
Peeled purple carrot on left
I peeled four carrots and sliced them with my mini food processor.
Quartered two onions and ran them through the food processor again.
Lovely machine-sliced onions. I lack knife skills, but fortunately gadgets exist. Cooking dinner is not Masterchef, lack of knife skills shouldn't deter one from attempting to cook.
I took the meatballs out of the fridge and started frying them in my handy little electrical frying pan. I like it because of the sliding temperature adjuster, which makes me feel safer when cooking things like meatballs. I always worry a bit about cooking them all the way through.
Then put the sliced onions on and fry those together.
While frying and ensuring that the beef is cooked through, I started boiling the spaghetti and washed and quartered four tomatoes. I chucked those on top.
Opened a can of tomatoes and put that in too. I stood over it mixing for some time, making sure everything was cooked and adding pepper. Then I put the lid on, turned the heat down and let it simmer for a while.
Carrot meatball spaghetti.
The purple carrots are better and have more of a sweet carroty taste than regular carrots. I am now a fan of the purple carrot. I could try to grow them despite this year's carrot failure. My carrots looked like little, malformed people.
Harumi Kurihara is a Japanese TV chef and homemaker, known as Japan's Martha Stewart. I've recently bought her second book in English, Everyday Harumi.
She lived in London for a few months when researching her book and the result is doable recipes, with ingredients you can get in London (albeit in Japanese or East Asian supermarkets in London). That means no difficult seafood ingredients (she uses mackerel and sea bream), she gives instructions to fix things that are different (eg. English vs Japanese cucumbers), and provides a recipe that uses those tiny prawn cocktail prawns. I find the best thing about the book is the inclusion of easy, quick pickle recipes ('tsukemono'). I like pickles but haven't got the dedication to make a harvestload of pickles in sterilised jam jars - I would slice some cucumbers and shake them with some liquid in a ziploc bag though.
I tried out one of her recipes I found on the internet before buying Everyday Harumi, as a sort of test. It's an easy chicken recipe using mostly storecupboard ingredients: Chicken with soy and balsamic dressing.
I combined two tablespoons soy sauce (Kikkoman) and two tablespoons balsamic vinegar instead of 1tbsp recommended in the recipe, mixed with 1 sliced garlic clove and ground pepper (I didn't use salt), and marinated the diced chicken breast for half an hour.
Fried that chicken.
I'm using a lovely contraption my mother gave me, a Zojirushi electric frying pan thingy. It has a sliding thing to control the temperature, from simmer to high temperatures, and I don't have to faff about with a flame. When the pan gets hot enough, it stops heating and the little light turns off, so the temperature's kept fairly consistent as well.
I served it on a plate of rocket with a decorative border of cherry tomatoes and we had it with rice, it tasted good and was pretty effortless, except for dicing the chicken. If you bought ready-diced chicken, this recipe's pretty much no work at all.
Result: Tasty chicken, not too strong flavoured. It was really good considering the effort invested in it.
Bonus point: I was able to mix the leftover chicken and 'dressing' with a salad to take to work the next day.
I've been cooking more often and better, so I should be updating this blog more often with things I cook and things. There's a book sale every month or so at the building where I work, and I often get cookbooks from there and have been trying out different recipes. In a bout of excitement I got a pastry book by Michel Roux - I'm very excited about trying to make good pastry. There's a recipe for pizza dough as well but it looks very involved, and instructions include measuring the temperature of the room and the dough and other different things and adding them all up to a specific temperature - and so looks a bit scarier and more exact than I'd trust myself to do, but the pastry ones look a bit more doable.
First, boil some water and put in the dried chillies. I have a little dried chilli collection.
I used: 1 naga jolokia, 1 ancho poblano, 1 guajillo, 2 chipotle, 1 pasilla. As long as you use a few smoky type chillies it should be fine. Dried chipotle is smoky, and easy to find. I got many of my chillies from South Devon Chilli Farm, which has descriptions.
Turn the heat off and let the chillies soak in hot water while you do other things.
Chicken strip stage
Prepare a bowl of milk and a bowl of flour. Add salt, ground black pepper, and garlic powder to the flour and mix.
I used skinless boneless chicken breast, but I think it would be better with skin-on. Then you'll get the crispy skin. It's the best bit!
Cut the chicken into strips.
Dip the strips into the milk bowl followed by the flour bowl, then fry until crispy and cooked through. Drain chicken strips on a plate lined with kitchen roll.
Carb stage
We had rice, so at this stage I cooked the rice in the rice cooker. Prepare the carb of your choice.
Sauce stage
Blend the soaked chillies (stems removed, and de-seeded if you want) with a little bit of the chilli water and three cloves of garlic.
Heat some oil in a pan.
Add chilli mixture to the pan.
Add your seasonings: oregano, ground cumin, and ground coriander. I shook the bottles until I was satisfied. I used about a teaspoon of each, but I put more oregano in because I like it.
Fry until fragrant.
Add a tin of chopped tomatoes.
Add salt and sugar. I used sea salt and demerara sugar.
Mix thoroughly. Simmer for a while. Taste. Adjust seasonings.
At this point, the rice/etc. should be ready as well.
Rice + Chicken + Chilli sauce.
Leftovers. I will have them in a sandwich for lunch tomorrow. So many things can be done with it! Like potato waffles!
I'm very pleased with my attempt at chicken strips, and I'll do them again, with different sauces. I'll do skin-on chicken next time, with potato waffles/
The anti-cuts march at Hyde Park, we were there. I went because I believe that some things are important but ultimately not profitable, like universal healthcare and education. I wish I'd brought my phone/camera along but I was minimising baggage and brought nothing.
Went for food at Piccadilly Circus after, passing paint-splattered Topshop en route, and after food we accidentally entered the 'violent' breakaway protest group and stayed to watch with the rest of the onlookers, tourists, and official observers. We were on the little memorial thingy near the station so had a relatively good view of what was going on. Yes, there was a little heap of things burning, but it looks a lot bigger zoomed in on TV. Riot police marching back and forth.
The demands of the protesters (at Hyde Park) seemed simple enough. Don't destroy the NHS, get money from outstanding tax still owed by wealthy tax evaders. A common question I heard was: But why did they get Topshop? The answer is: He evades tax, tax enough for you and me. Let's not buy bullshit clothes from the Topshop-Arcadia empire, they're not that good anyway. The big Topshop on Oxford Circus also sells ridiculously overpriced old clothes in their vintage section - get the same from your local charity shops, or if you're in London, the East End Thrift Store is amazing.
Of course, that's not the point. It's not really about whether there's enough money from the public to serve the public (and to put things in perspective, surely the money that goes to commercial profits mostly come from average people, people buying Panadol, people buying Topshop clothes, for example, and this somehow accumulates in the offshore accounts of a few people. It would make a huge difference if this money was funnelled back into salaries for workers, or actually put into research.), it's about their free market fantasy. Some stuff, just isn't profitable.
Happier matters: the week before that I'd gone to the Stitch & Craft show at Olympia and got some lovely cowboy fabric with which I made a little clutch. I'm also going to make a tote. Let's rebel against capitalism and make our own accessories! I have pictures from it I need to put up.
I also successfully cooked black pepper crab but with stingray instead of crab. Black pepper crab is a food of Singapore, where I'm from. I got my version from my mother's amazing cookbook. It is tasty and most importantly tastes authentic. I haven't tried any black pepper crabs or whatever in London but I'm sure this recipe is better and more authentic than them. If they even exist. Truth.
I mostly followed the recipe, but simplified it into two major steps: blend and fry.
Singapore Black Pepper Crab Sauce (with ray wing)
Blend with a little water into a paste: 1) one onion chopped into quarters, 2) about 10 garlic cloves, 3) 10 dried bird's eye chillies (I use dried piri piri from the African shop because I can get that on my way home). I used my handy mini chopper. I like very very spicy food so I don't recommend you use 10 dried piri piri, unless that's how you roll.
Blend together the sauce: 2 tbsp of each of these (pictured): soy sauce (I used light soy sauce), thick soy sauce (I used Ayam Brand kicap manis instead but Waitrose has a version, I think called ketjap manis), ketchup, oyster sauce, ground black pepper. You're meant to use 1 tbsp fish sauce but I have the little bottle of Bart's fish sauce with a very small opening, so I used a few tiny shakes. This bottle of fish sauce is not sensible if you use fish sauce frequently.
You're also meant to use spicy sesame oil but I don't have any. Blend the ground black pepper
I used a ray wing and pre-fried it. It's soft and white and flakes, so I imagine you can cook a can of tuna in this sauce and the effect would be similar.
After frying, remove the ray wing to drain onto a plate, and fried the paste until fragrant and not moist.
Return the ray wing to the wok and mixed it in with the paste, fry quickly for a few seconds.
Add blended sauce and half a cup of water, and cook through. Sauce should be thick.
I added little tomatoes before serving, like the picture in the book, although the recipe calls for quartering regular tomatoes. Serve with plain boiled rice or fried buns/mantou. Rice is easier.
