Month: October 2012

pork dumplings

| kahmen
Bundles of joy

When my bestie and I want to get really cute, we call each other dumplings.

Is it an insult to be compared to something soft and squidgy, with delicate pudgy folds of goodness? Not at all. Because we love everything about dumplings, from the humble siu mai to the slightly dangerous xiao long bao (it’s like extreme eating). It’s a sign of our affection for each other.

But sadly, a lot of the commercially-produced dumplings in London are filled to the brim with MSG. I’ve got a real beef (boom tish!) with MSG, mainly because I consider it to be a chemical form of cheating, but also because I get headaches when I eat it. Chinese have almost no tolerance for hippie predilections, so the only alternative is to make my own.

I’d never tried making dumplings before, but it’s actually quite simple to do in a tiny kitchen. You make the filling in one bowl, then you just need a small flat surface to make the dumplings and a plate to hold the finished product. It’s a little time-consuming, but it’s compact and easy enough to do.

Now whenever I make these, I think of my bestie, my little dumpling, half a world away.

Pork Dumplings
Makes 48
Dumpling wrappers
500g pork mince (reduced fat if you can get it)
2 cups shredded cabbage (this translates to about 4 full leaves)
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp Chinese wine, white wine or dry sherry
6 tbsp sesame oil
½ teaspoon white pepper
2cm ginger, grated
1 shallot, finely diced
1 clove garlic, finely diced
Salt
Cornflour

Whoah, does that look like a scary lot of ingredients? It really isn’t – and it’s really easy to make the mix. Start by taking the shredded cabbage and salting it with 2 tablespoons of salt. Leave it for 5 minutes and you’ll see the leaves have become shiny and wet.

Meanwhile, combine the soy sauce, wine, sesame oil, pepper, ginger, shallot and garlic – basically all of the seasonings for the mix.

Take your shredded cabbage and squeeze very hard to get all the moisture out, then place it in a large bowl and shake it to loosen.

Add the mince. At this stage I always find it a bit easier to shake the mince a bit so it’s nice and loose, which helps the seasoning to go in evenly.

Ok, not that photogenic. But you just know it’s going to be good.

Add the seasoning and mix well, trying not to overwork the mix. That bit is done!

To make the dumplings, take a wrapper and lay it flat on a board. They should be lightly floured so they won’t stick. Mix the cornflour with a little water (room temperature) so it forms a white liquid.

We’re ready to roll.

Place about a teaspoon of mixture into the centre of the dumpling wrapper. If you can be bothered to get fancy, quenelling helps to form the right shape, but otherwise just lightly roll a little meatball. Dab the cornflour water all around the edges, and fold into a semicircle. Pinch the edges hard. You can leave them like that if you want, but I like to try to make mine stand up, so I crinkle and schmoosh a little so they stand up properly.

Dumplings, ready for the steamer!

To serve: steam for 8 minutes and serve with the classic dumpling sauce (vinegar, soy sauce and chilli).

pasta e broccoli

| kahmen
First cauliflower, now broccoli. What is going on here?

YOU DON’T HAVE TO GO OUT ON A SATURDAY NIGHT.

This is something I only learned in my mid-twenties, and what a revelation it is. Sometimes, after a long week at work, the best medicine is to meet up with the girls and have a good natter over a few cocktails. Let your hair down, dance the night away, cavort and frolic into the wee hours of the morn and then grab a much-regretted kebab on the way home.

Sometimes, however, you just want to stay in and have a quiet night with a book and a glass of wine.

A quick, easy supper is in order, something crafted of cupboard ingredients with a minimal amount of fuss. That way you can go from stove to table in fifteen minutes and be happy as a clam for the rest of the evening (leave the washing up until tomorrow. Go on, I won’t tell.)

Pasta e broccoli
1 cup pasta (you’re looking for something that cooks in about 9 minutes)
1 small head broccoli
3-4 anchovies
3 garlic cloves
Small handful pine nuts
Olive oil

Start with the pasta. Put a pot of water on to boil while you finely slice the garlic cloves, and turn the head of broccoli into small, bite-size florets. If you can be bothered, making them even sizes will mean that they cook at the same time.

In a pan, drizzle some olive oil and add the garlic cloves over a low heat. Don’t let them brown, as this will lend a sharp, bitter taste to the dish.

‘Scuse the scorch marks. A bacon experiment that went slightly awry.

Once they’ve gone translucent, add the anchovies. If you’re a vegetarian or just don’t like anchovies, leave them out and add parmesan cheese at the end.

Cook until the anchovies have begun to break up, then add the broccoli. Add a dash of the pasta water to the pan to help the broccoli cook.

Once the pasta is done, drain and add to the pan. Mix well, and serve with the pine nuts sprinkled on top.

Quick, easy and simple.

A note about pasta: this is probably obvious enough, but it’s worth mentioning that when you’re adding cooked pasta to a hot pan, if you’re planning to keep the thing on the stove for any length of time you’ll need to underdo the pasta when you boil it. Otherwise, it keeps cooking along merrily in the pan when you don’t really want it to, and you end up with soggy pasta. Eurgh.

no-bake cottage pie

| kahmen

When the temperature begins to drop and the first frost is felt in the air, warm, comforting food becomes almost irresistible; rich, meaty stews brimming with wine and herbs, a fat roast chicken with crispy potatoes, simmering pots of thick, spicy soup, lasagne served in steaming, heaped mountains of starchy goodness. Oh, my.

Who am I to resist the call of winter goodies, even if it is only September? Without an oven it can be difficult to embrace winter food in all of its glory, but it’s not impossible. You just need to be a little open-minded and relax some of those stringent aesthetic standards you have. Take courage. Have faith. Trust me, the finished product might look a little strange, but it’s going to taste just wonderful.

The no-bake cottage pie
500g extra lean beef mince
1 onion, finely sliced
4 garlic cloves, chopped
1 cup vegetables (optional)
1 beef stock cube
A few sprigs of thyme
2 bay leaves
Mashed potato, to serve

Brown the mince in a pan with the onion and garlic. If you’ve bought extra lean beef mince, you won’t need to worry about draining it, but if you’re concerned about fat content or if you’ve bought a mince with a fat percentage of 12% or higher, you can drain it and return it to the pan.

Add the thyme and bay leaves to the pan and crumble in the stock cube.

Cube the vegetables and add to the pan. Cover with a lid and allow to cook for ten minutes. Make sure you have a little taste before you turn off the heat. It should be full of meaty flavour, rounded off by herbs and vegetables.

This would ordinarily be the point at which you would scoop it into a baking dish, cover with mashed potato and drag a fork across the top to create beautiful designs. Instead, the no-bake cottage pie is assembled as follows: scoop it onto a plate, freeform, and top with piping hot mashed potato. If you’re worried about how it looks, try using small individual dishes and cover the meat with the potato. If you’re game, try topping it with cauliflower mash instead.

I know, I know, I know that it doesn’t really look like your traditional cottage pie. But at the end of a long day and a freezing trudge home in the rain, this is simply a plateful of warm, loving goodness that reassures you that everything will be all right.

It might not win any beauty contests, but to me this pie is just gorgeous.

A note about vegetables: One of the nicest things about cottage pie is that it’s very forgiving in terms of ingredients. Traditionally, it was made with leftover roasted meat and sometimes appeared with no vegetables at all. These days you often see it with cubed carrot and potato, which you can absolutely use if you prefer, but for me it generally depends on what I have left in the fridge at the end of a week. Be adventurous! Mince can take almost anything you throw at it!

barley soup

| kahmen
One of the many tastes of my childhood.

When I was growing up, one of my very favourite stories in the world was Stone Soup.

If you’re not familiar with the tale, it’s about a poor and tired traveller who convinces a rather cranky old bat to shelter him for the night. She agrees to let him stay, but tells him that she has no food to give him. He offers to feed her instead.

‘You – feed me? With what?’ she scornfully asks. ‘Stone soup,’ says he, and places a stone into a pot of water over the fire. He then proceeds to coax all sorts of things out of her – barley, carrots, celery, a bit of meat, potatoes – by telling her the stone is old, and might need a bit of help with flavour. That night they dine like kings in the little cottage, and in the morning she gives him a good breakfast, coffee and some coins to help him on his way, her crotchety old heart having been touched by the restorative powers of sharing food.

The story always got to the bit about barley and I would shiver – for it seemed, to my young ears, to be the transformative substance that took the water and stone and finally made it a soup. I had no idea what barley was, or even what it looked like. I just knew that it had to be magical.

This soup is a remembrance of how much I loved that story and everything it stands for. It reminds me of my childhood, of somehow feeling but not yet understanding that cooking and sharing a meal with someone can be a deeply healing experience. The heartwarming feeling I get when I make this soup is the same feeling I had when I got to the end of the story.

Barley Soup
1/2 cup barley
Yellow rock sugar
Handful gingko nuts
Dried bean curd sticks, roughly broken
Boiled eggs

Wash the barley and check for any pebbles that might have made it in.

Place the barley in a large pot of water – you’re looking for a ratio of about 1:5, but you can start with a litre of water and add as the soup boils.

Bring to a boil and add a large lump of yellow rock sugar, plus the gingko nuts.

Turn to a low boil and simmer for 1 hour. Barley has a tendency to bubble up, so make sure you’re around to watch or hear the pot. You might need to top up with water as it boils away.

Add the dried bean curd sticks and simmer for an additional 30 minutes. Again, you might need to top up the pot with water as the bean curd rehydrates. You might also need to add additional sugar to taste.

The end result is a light, translucent soup that is sweet and perfectly toothsome, thanks to the barley. It is traditionally served with a boiled egg, which enhances the sweetness.

A small note about gingko nuts: they are funny things. Widely used in Chinese cooking, I hated them when I was young and would pick them out of my soup, piling them in large heaps to be tossed back into the pot – or my parents’ bowls. They seemed to me to have a vaguely oniony taste, and I thought they had no place in my soup.

These days, I appreciate the slight pungent tang they lend the soup; it cuts through the sweetness and adds depth. I am, perhaps, not quite reformed – my parents would possibly use quite a lot more than a handful of nuts to make their soup, but I would never go beyond a handful and occasionally I leave them out altogether.

They are, however, said to be extremely good for you, helping cognitive function, memory and blood flow and fighting free radicals.