I spent a week camping in the woods as part of a course in survival skills recently, which found me crawling through the forest, blindfolded, at night. Along the way I lost my glasses.
Yup that’s right. That woody, twiggy, leafy woods swallowed my spectacles whole. We were doing an exercise in which we were to find our way back to the campfire at night navigating by the sound of a drum. I took my glasses off in order to tie my blindfold tighter round my head. It was only when I got back to the fire and that I realised my glasses were no longer in my pocket.
The next day a bunch of us returned to our starting spot and rewalked the route, scanning the ground for my glasses. (Thankfully I had some contact lenses with me which I wore instead). It was difficult to know where to look, because I didn’t know which way I had walked/crawled when I was blindfolded and disoriented. The one potential clue to location was that I was probably doubled over at the time, since if I’d been standing up straight they couldn’t have fallen out of my deep pockets. So we looked around areas where there were low level branches and twigs. That didn’t narrow it down much.
It also didn’t help that my glasses are brown and blue and silver. Kind of like the colour of the birch tree twigs littering the woodland floor. After a couple of unsuccessful day time searches, Dan – also a glasses wearer, who made it his mission to help me find mine – joined me on a night time search.
We hoped that perhaps I could manage to retrace the path I took by recreating the disorientation I felt at the time and that the torch light might reflect off the glass/metal parts. As Dan paced behind me shining the torch about, I stumbled, half crawling, through the woods. And look what we found.
They were a couple feet away from a spot we had stood in earlier in the day, where Dan had noticed a small branch that was broken in 2 places – indicating that this path had been trodden more than once. Luckily, no one trod on my glasses.
(Thanks Dan – I couldn’t have done it without you!)
Here is my favourite Sichuan dish posted now in response to a call from the London food blogger, Helen Graves, of the Food Stories blog. Helen has just started on a Sichuan food kick and recently shared her first adventures in Sichuan cooking in which she tried out the brilliantly titled “Pock marked woman” Bean-curd dish (I’ve made a variation of this which I wrote about here) and a rather enticing sounding Rabbit in peanuts with hot bean sauce which I must try.
I’m afraid this blog post isn’t strictly a food pictorial like this one (the inspiration for which I explain here), because I didn’t document every single step. I only decided to make the dish at the last minute, I didn’t have all the ingredients, and I was hungry! But since Helen has asked for other things to try, and I need to respond to this while she still has the wok on the hob, this will just have to suffice!
This recipe is from my Chinese Regional Cooking book by Deh-Ta Hsiung which I talked about more here. This dish actually comes from the Hunan province which borders Sichuan to the south-east, but their cuisine is closely affiliated, since they share a passion for hot chilli. The photo above is of the illustration for the recipe from Deh-Ta’s book.
You can see right away, it is one of those seventies cookbooks. Sexy food photography had not yet been born. But it is also one of those recipes that doesn’t match the illustration. Green pepper isn’t mentioned in the recipe (though I’m pretty sure it’s in that photo unless he had access to mega sized chillis!) but I think it looks better like that and tastes right too. In fact it is usually having got a green pepper-or a leek-in my veg bag that inspires me to make this recipe.
Ingredients
300g pork fillet (you don’t really get pork labelled ‘fillet’ in the shops here so I tend to use pork chops)
3-4 chinese dried mushrooms, soaked
1 tbsp chinese pickled cabbage (look for a little packet, may be labelled ‘preserved vegetables’)
2 tbsp bamboo shoots (you can freeze the rest of the tin for next time)
50g hot green chillis (no idea how many that is, I use 2 long thin green ones which-coupled with the HOT chilli paste-seems enough heat for us)
1 leek
1 green pepper (this wasn’t in the recipe, but is in the photo, and I think goes very nicely!)
For the pork coating:
1 tbsp cornstarch
1 tsp salt
1 egg
For the sauce:
2 tbsp chilli paste (see notes, below)
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame seed oil
One detail of this recipe I haven’t quite got yet – though it doesn’t seem to hurt, is that Deh-Ta says you should “cut the pork into thick slices [and] score the surface with a criss-cross pattern” before cutting it into small squares and marinating in salt, egg and cornflour. The idea here being, that when you deep fry the pork “each piece opens up like a flower”. This never happens for me. However, I still score the meat each time like a good student. I guess I feel that at least it gives more surface for the egg to cling onto, and more places for the sauce to get a grip. I suppose I should try not doing this one time to see what the difference is. (I’ll add the results to the comments if/when I do this!)
The other tricky thing here I suppose is the chilli paste. You may find it difficult to locate. I was lucky the first time and found this squat little jar in my local Chinese supermarket that seemed perfect. Then they stopped selling that and the next best thing I’ve found is a much taller jar, whose English language label is titled with “Black beans” but the first ingredient is actually chilli (then soybeans). This stuff I find I need to chop or grind by hand (it appears to be predominantly black beans) to make it into a paste – the other jar was more a paste to start with. See how you do, and good luck!
Oh one more thing: can I just emphasize that the leek and preserved vegetables are crucial. Okay, so you can probably get away with out the latter-incase you struggle to find them too-but I just tried this with onion instead of leek and it was definitely missing something. So please use leek if you can.
Method
You know what to do with the pork already (as decribed above: score/chop – add to egg, salt and cornflour). The vegetables: chop them all up finely; I find the green pepper should be roughly 1.5cm cubed, same with leek; the other can be chopped smaller, in proportion to their size. Grind the chilli paste if what you’ve found isn’t much of a paste. Get a colander/plate-with-paper-towels on it ready. Put some rice on.
Then heat a couple inches of oil up in your wok (a wooden skewer or chopstick left in the oil will indicate the appropriate temperature when it starts to fizz) and drop the pork cubes in, possibly in 2 batches so you don’t overcrowd it or cool down the oil too much. You’ll need to give it all a good poke to stop it sticking together. I have an enormous holey spoon that helps with both this task and the fishing out of the pieces later. It doesn’t take long. If the pork pieces open up like flowers please tell me how you did it. If not just take them out before they start to brown. Drain them in a colander and/or on some paper towel. Tip the oil into a saucepan to cool (I then put in a jar for reuse another time).
Add 1-2 tbsp of the aforementioned oil to stir fry the vegetables. They only need a few minutes on a hot heat, stirring ALL THE TIME. Then add the chilli paste and pork, stir well. Then add the soy. Take off the heat, stir in the sesame oil, and serve with rice.
Enjoy.
P.S. Deh-Ta’s recipe suggests you add some cornflour slurry at the end to ‘thicken the sauce’. I don’t find I have much of a sauce when I make this dish – just all the flavours which are clinging to the ingredients. There is no liquid left in the pan for the cornflour to thicken. However, if you would like to try making this more saucy, I guess you want to add more water (or maybe chicken stock) and then the cornflour slurry (cornflour/cornstarch mixed with equal parts water) will have something to thicken and you will have a wet sauce. But I am pretty convinced you don’t need this.
This video is brilliant to watch because of the journey that you get to see a glimpse of as the background to this guy’s walk across China. But the reason I like this video so much -given that the self portrait timelapse video has been done many times before, the best one by Noah which was even parodied on The Simpsons- is that it uses video and not camera, and so each shot that makes up the timelapse has a little movement in it. Not always, but occasionally. From just a blink of the eye, through hair blowing in the gail force winds, to a brother or lover dancing around in the background. It gives the whole concept a new texture which I haven’t seen before, and I love it.
There is little bit of magic in the moment when you see a photo of your corner shop or local dry cleaners’ published on the web. No, really! I suppose in a small way it is like those rare times when you see your local neighbourhood in the background of a mainstream movie. At least it is rare if you live in Hackney – I’m sure those living in Notting Hill are used to their streets being used as a film set. I can pretty much guarantee* the streets documented in www.londonshopfronts.com haven’t been used as mainstream film sets, but they are no less fascinating for it.
The last couple years I have dedicated a lot of time in the kitchen to learning how to cook Chinese food. I’ve posted about this a couple times already, first here and then here. In this post I’d like to introduce you to my inspiration and my teachers.
Ingredients for Chicken with Cashew Nuts in Bean/Hoisin Sauce posted by hzrt8w on EGullet
I was initially inspired by a user of the EGullet forums known as hzrt8w (aka Ah Leung) who posted a series of Chinese food pictorials. Ah Leung is a Chinese American (born in Hong Kong) living in California and as well as being a computer geek he writes these fantastic step by step guides on how to cook his favourite Chinese dishes, illustrated with photos. The photos are obviously just taken on the fly as he makes his dinner, totally anti-food-porn, but they still make me think YUM! I want to make that! So I have gradually been learning to make a handful of his dishes. Admittedly I haven’t been so adventurous as to try the more obscure (to the Western eye) dishes like Stir-Fried Lotus Roots with Dry Conpoy and Hairy Moss Fungi but I’ve tried a lot of the chicken based stir-fries. What is particularly useful about Ah Leung’s pictorials, is the photo he takes at the start of all the ingredients. Sometimes it is hard to find the ingredients you need in the Chinese shop because you don’t know what you are looking for – these photos show you what the containers look like.
Cover of Chinese Regional Cooking by Deh-Ta Hsiung
I have 2 other sources for recipes, one I already mentioned on this blog, is a book published in 1979 by Deh-Ta Hsiung called Chinese Regional Cooking. I’m guessing this book was one of the earlier books to try to present Chinese cooking to a western audience. One thing it didn’t get quite right was that it translated the names of dishes into English, so intead of a recipe for Ma Po Tofu (funky!) that recipe is called ‘Pock marked woman’ bean-curd (yuck!). Still, I went ahead and tried making that recipe anyway (it’s one of the easier ones) and it is OK, but I prefer Ah Leung’s version. The other shortfall of this book – not surprising for its time – is that the recipes tend to use a lot of oil – but once you learn this, it is easy to adjust. The photography in this book is classic seventies food photography: not that appetising, but it gives you the idea! What I like about this recipe book is that it includes an introduction to Chinese cuisine: the fundamentals (history and the elements of taste), techniques and how Chinese meals are served. Then there is also an introductory background to each region that the book covers. A random fun fact for you which I just learnt from his website: Deh-Ta went to the Slade School of Fine Art here in London (in 1960)!
Photo of Zesty Chilli Tiger Prawns from Chinese Food Made Easy website
The other Chinese cook I’ve been learning a little more from is the star of the recent BBC TV series Chinese Food Made Easy, called Ching-He Huang. As Deh-Ta’s book was a reflection of his time, so Ching-He’s program is a reflection of the current fashion in cooking – beautiful looking food made by an attractive presenter that doesn’t take long to make. Ching-He Huang’s main aim in this series was to show us, a nation consuming vast quantities of take-away Chinese every day, that you can easily make the same food at home and it will taste better and be much healthier. I watched her series out of curiosity: comparing my experience following Ah Leung’s pictorials and Deh-Ta Hsiung recipes, to her methods. She didn’t marinate her meat, whereas the others would always marinate for at least 20 mins (I find this fits in while I’m preparing the other bits and it makes the meat noticeably more tender), but Ching-He Huang is much lighter in the use of oil, and finds a good way of including vegetables in her dishes. She also demonstrated various preparation techniques – you can still watch the videos on the BBC website.
Chinese shop called Great Wall in Lower Clapton taken by Dave Hill
Finally, I was also inspired by the fact that a Chinese shop called Great Wall opened at the end of my road – this was perfectly timed with my discovery of EGullet and my new recipe book. I find Chinese grocery shops fascinating (well to be honest I find most grocery stores fascinating, especially those selling ‘ethnic’ ingredients) and I can never go in to pick up some noodles/tofu/dried mushrooms without spending some time browsing the peculiar cans, jars, packets, vegetables and live animals they stock their shelves with. It was also just super handy to have this shop so close (107 Lower Clapton Road, Hackney), and open ’til late (10pm) – so I could not even think about dinner until 7pm and still end up making something new and exciting! I say this in the past tense because I’ve now moved 1 mile away (towards Upper Clapton) so I have to get on my bike to go to this shop, but its still better than having to go all the way down to Mare Street or worse still, to Chinatown in central London!
Last week I received an email attachment from a friend in Vancouver of this stunning photo. (Click the image to get the full WOW! effect.) This is a view of downtown Vancouver skyscrapers shrouded in fog at sunrise, taken from Cypress mountain, one of the mountains (with ski slopes) which loom over the city.
The story of the Warsaw uprising in the summer of 1944 is fascinating, horrifying, and moving – but I cannot do the story justice re-telling it here (though I will give you a quick summary). Instead, I want to share photos of the museum exhibits because I feel that it really does do the story justice. The design of the museum was thoughtful, evocative, and even at times immersive, and it employed a diverse range of exhibition techniques in sensitive and tactile ways.
The botanical gardens in west London, Kew Gardens, has a opened new attraction this summer – a treetop walkway. I went with some friends to picnic in the gardens and explore this new perspective on the natural world – treetop vistas are no longer exclusive to David Attenborough!
This is just brilliant. I took this photo last year at the Tesco’s in Hackney central, which (since moving this summer) I gladly don’t have to see on my way home anymore. Every time I cycled passed this sign I couldn’t help have an inward rant about the sheer nonesense of its message. It clearly says, “We’re open 24 hours”, which I knew was a lie because I’d seen them closed of a Sunday evening. And sure enough, in the small print, it gives their opening hours – they close early Saturdays and Sundays. So OK, they don’t say “We’re open 24 – 7” but that’s what they’re leading us to believe right?
A friend of mine is going to be visiting Montreal on her honeymoon soon, so I thought it was a good excuse to get my recommendations for where to eat there out in the open. Though I moved back to the UK in 2003 so I’m afraid they might not all still be there, but from what I’ve seen online, they mostly seem to still be going. (Please add comments with any corrections or further recommendations you have!)
There are many wonderful things about Montreal, that would require several posts here, but what I tend to focus on most is the food. Eating out in Montreal is cheap, easy and absolutely delicious. I think it is quite impressive that I only went up one clothes size in the 3 years I lived there, because the food is irresistable!
On “the Main” or St. Laurent, just south of Duluth is Schwartz‘s Smoked Meat Deli. I’m afraid my friend’s vegetarian husband is going to have to close his eyes and nose while she indulges in this most delightful sandwich. Mounds of steaming tender smoked beef quivering between two slices of sour dough bread. STUNNING.
Just next door, at Mondo Fritz, is something for meat eaters and veggies alike. If you like chips and gravy, you will just adore this Quebec speciality, Poutine. Poutine is chips served with gravy and melted cheese curds, which are like lumps of cheese. You get this dish at all fast food joints in francophone Canada but Mondo Fritz has a gourmet version which I’d say is unbeatable. You might want to go for the Gardinier version which has some green vegetables like peas or brocolli in it. Their gravy is vegetarian, but they also do Poutine au Steak and other meaty delights. Or you can just go for their chips straight up with a choice of about 6 different mayos. All this washed down with a nice big pitcher of beer! YUM!
