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Hainanese chicken rice

Mr Weasel and I are still feeling rather jet-lagged and delicate. It’s also the cold season, and my office, which I share with six people, has a horrible miasma of runny nose.

If I were a New York grandmother, I might have prescribed chicken soup with matzoh balls for what ails us. As it is, I’m the product of Malaysian Chinese and British families. As we all know that the English are bred to maximise upper lips and minimise tastebuds, I decided that what we needed was a nice bit of soothing Malaysian cookery – Hainanese chicken rice.

Hainan is a southern island province of China. Many of the Chinese living in Malaysia and Singapore originated in Hainan, and they brought their recipes with them. This chicken rice is probably the best known of these recipes, and it’s a wonderfully soothing, clean-tasting dish. The chicken in this dish is poached, and its cooking liquid is used to cook the rice, flavour the chili sauce that accompanies the meat, and to make a clear broth.

Chicken and broth
One chicken, without giblets
Four pints water
Chicken stock cube
One teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon MSG (go on – you can leave it out if you absolutely must, but it won’t kill you)
Wine glass of Shaoxing rice wine
Two tablespoons of light soya sauce
Thumb-sized piece of ginger, sliced
Ten cloves of garlic, squashed lightly with a knife blade
Two large spring onions (scallions)

Chili sauce
Two limes, peeled and segmented
Thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled
Two cloves of garlic
Two red chilis
Tablespoon of caster sugar
Half a wine glass of the chicken broth

Rice
One tablespoon rendered chicken fat (see below)
Rice
Chicken broth (adjust amounts according to how many people are eating)

Begin by bringing the water, stock, salt, msg, rice wine and soya sauce to a rolling boil. Pull out any poultry fat from the inside of the chicken, and put it in a dry frying pan on a medium heat to render out the fat. Stuff the chicken with the ginger, garlic and spring onions, and place it in the boiling water. Bring back to the boil for two minutes uncovered, then put the lid on and simmer for 40 minutes. It’s helpful if you use a heavy, thick-bottomed pan like one by Le Creuset, as the heat will disperse better and you will avoid catching the bottom of your chicken.

Meanwhile, place all the ingredients for the sauce except the chicken stock in a blender (or you could use a pestle and mortar. I’m lazy and use the Magimix). Lime doesn’t give up its juice readily like a lemon, so the best way to get all of the juice out is to quarter and peel the lime by hand as in the picture, then process in the Magimix.

I don’t want to make the sauce too spicy here, so I’ve removed the seeds and the white ribs from these chilis. The hottest part of the chili is these ribs, and then the seeds. Removing them still leaves this sauce very hot indeed; use more or less chili as you wish.

When the chicken has been poaching for forty minutes, remove it from the cooking liquid and put aside. Add half a wine glass of the stock to the pureed sauce ingredients, and mix well. (This isn’t a great photo – I’ve sloshed the sauce about a bit here. It tastes fantastic, though.)

I had run out of Thai fragrant rice, so used basmati for this; you may prefer a stickier rice. I always use a rice cooker, so I put my rendered fat in with enough rice for two, stir well to make sure all the grains are coated, and fill the rice cooker with the chicken broth up to the two-portion line, as I usually would with water.

The broth is served alongside the chicken and its flavoured rice as a soup. It’s got a tiny amount of glossy fat from the chicken floating on it, and it’s clean-tasting, clear and delicious. We prefer to eat it as a starter before serving the chicken and the rice, which isn’t traditional (but I defy you to have a kitchen smelling of this stuff and not eat it at the first opportunity). Any broth you have left over can be frozen and used as chicken stock. It’s surprisingly successful used as a base in Western dishes – try it in gravy and soups.

This dish would usually be served with some sliced cucumber. I don’t have any in the fridge, so we’re just eating the chicken and the rice on its own. I’m rubbish at carving, but thankfully Mr Weasel, a butcher’s grandson, has meat-chopping in his blood, and sets about the chicken (in Malaysia it’s always eaten at room temperature, which I prefer – the chicken is somehow much juicier this way, and the muscle tissue relaxes and makes the meat tender and toothsome) with abandon. And a very sharp knife.

The hot rice has taken on all the flavour from the broth, and a gorgeous sheen from the fat. It’s a glorious contrast with the, moist, tender chicken. The meat is served with the dipping sauce and a bowl of soya sauce. Any cold bug that might have been thinking of settling has given up in the face of all this nutrition and gone to pester the neighbours.

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Sloe gin

**UPDATE** For pictures of the finished gin, pictures of a sloe bush, tips on finding a sloe bush and drinks recipes, click here.

This is, apparently, the hottest autumn on record in the UK. Things are definitely not behaving like they usually do outdoors; the leaves are staying on the trees, the apples and pears came ready early, and there are shoots in the garden which shouldn’t be there until next year. Most importantly for the hedgerow foragers among you, the sloes (the fruit of the blackthorn plant – see this post for pictures of the bush) were early, and there has been no frost.

This recipe is much more successful if you pick and use the sloes after they’ve been subject to a good hard frost. Since Mother Nature was not prepared to provide me with one, I turned to Mother Miele, and bunged a box of them in the freezer in September.

Raw sloes are bitter and astringent, and this drink needs a lot of sugar to balance them and result in a syrupy, deep pink liqueur. Gin is used as the traditional base, and I love the combination of the juniper and the plummy sloes, but you can use vodka or another clear spirit.

No cooking is involved. Each of the sloes is pricked all over once defrosted (you can embed some needles in a cork to speed this up) and steeped in sugar and gin – for every pound of sloes I use 8 oz of caster sugar and 1 3/4 pints of gin. The gin doesn’t have to be a particularly fancy one; I just used Waitrose’s own brand London Gin. For gin and tonic I usually use Hendrick’s, a far more complicated (and expensive) gin, whose aromatics include rosepetals and cucumber. Steeping sloes in gin was historically used as a way to disguise tainted gin, so it doesn’t make much sense to use your most expensive gin in this recipe.

I’m using a glass Rumtopf (a German pot for making liqueur fruits, usually made from porcelain) to steep the sloes. Although many recipes say you can stir the mixture regularly and then strain the berries out and make a start on drinking after two months, the gin is much more delicious if you can manage to restrain yourself and not stir it, and then leave it steeping for at least six months before you strain and bottle.

The rumtopf is not completely airtight, so I create a seal with some cling film. (You can use any large container you have for this; my parents use a jar which spends the other half of the year as a storage vessel for rice.) The sugar you can see here will gradually dissolve over the months ahead, and the bright, syrupy juices will leach out of the pricked sloes and combine with the sweetened gin. (For those of you who can’t wait six months, Gordon’s started selling sloe gin pre-bottled last year. It’s not as good as the home-made stuff, but it should keep you pretty happy until summer.)

There’s a quarter bottle of neat gin left over. Thankfully, I have prepositioned some tonic water and limes. I’m in for a pleasant evening contemplating my rumtopf.

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India – the food bit

Delhi saw us eating less adventurously than I would have liked – we were on a tight schedule, eating mostly at the numerous ceremonies and parties, and later not able to eat due to a stomach bug. I still managed to get plenty of variety in, though, and can tell you about some of the highlights of the food.

Some of the curry I ordered was startlingly good. This is a Murg Tikka Patialewala – chicken marinated in yoghurt and spices, grilled and cooked in a pureed tomato and cashew sauce. The one-size-fits-all curry powder you see in the UK is a British empire invention, originally mixed for colonials to send home to cook with. No two curries in the same restaurant in India had the same base of spices (unlike those in some lazy Indian restaurants in the UK). This chicken was very heavy on the fenugreek and cumin, and had a lot of raw grated ginger stirred into it.

We ate breads with the curry – crisp parathas and open-textured naan, all made with rich and delicious ghee. Eating a curry with your hands takes a bit of getting used to (the right hand only – the left is reserved for . . . other purposes), but can be done quite neatly if you use a piece of bread as a little envelope to put your curry in. Papads (popadoms), grilled rather than fried, and flavoured with cracked black pepper, were served with every meal.

On one of our two free afternoons, we took a trishaw ride around Chandi Chowk, one of Delhi’s oldest market areas. The driver was pedaling furiously, and it was extremely hard to stop in the constant stream of trishaw traffic, but we were able to look at, if not taste, a variety of street food (all going past at speed).

People were crowding everywhere, many eating on the hoof. Stalls were ordered by type, so we pedaled through a stationery quarter, a car parts quarter, a sari quarter and a jewellery quarter. I asked the driver to take us to the food quarter. He put a spurt on and started to pedal enthusiastically through the crowd; no mean feat on a trishaw with two compulsive overeaters perched on the back.

Asking to see the nutritional sites was a bit of a mistake on my part. Unfortunately, ‘food quarter’ when parsed through our driver turned out to mean ‘chicken market’. Hundreds of chickens, packed five to a wire crate, hunched in damp and stinking misery. Given rumours of bird flu, I spent about half a second ascertaining that none of the chickens were coughing, and, waving my arms furiously, asked the driver to continue. He did.

Straight to an open-air, flyblown goat butchers. I gave up and went shopping for fabric.

One of the most impressive things available on the streets was the fruit. These pomegranates (are those custard apples with them? Let me know if you’ve any idea) were the reddest, glossiest, juiciest ones I’ve ever seen. We were able to enjoy some pomegranate seeds later, sprinkled on a curry. Satsumas, still green but perfectly ripe, were for sale everywhere, and we ate some in our room.

Lurid soft drinks punctuated all the wedding buffet meals. In the interests of science I tried all of these – the pink one tasted of roses, and the green and blue were identical in taste, flavoured with sweet, sweet spices, particularly cardamom. Other dishes at the buffets were tasty, but undistinguished (which is what happens, I suppose, when you’re catering huge amounts for more than two hundred people at once and trying to keep it all warm). Waiters popped up every twenty seconds with different silver platters of spicy canapes, and were not intimidated by my photographing all the food.

The very best thing I ate was this gulab jamun – a tooth-achingly sweet dessert made from a condensed milk sponge dough wrapped around nuts and spices, particularly cardamom, soaked in sugar syrup, and sprinkled with more nuts. The sugar syrup was also spiced – you can see a strand of saffron on the ball of gulab jamun in the front of the bowl.

I wish we’d been in India for longer, and had some more time to sample some less formal foods. Normal service resumes tomorrow – my stomach seems to be behaving again.

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Delhi belly

So – I’m back from the wedding in Delhi. I made a horrible mistake while eating in India – I had some salad. It appears the salad was washed in something a bit more . . . natural than what comes out of the tap in Cambridgeshire. My stomach has spent the last few days trying bodily to escape from its housing, and as of this moment is making interesting treacly noises. As a result, you’re not going to get as food-centric a post as usual, because I’m finding food a bit difficult to contemplate right now.

Food plays an important role in the various Hindu wedding ceremonies we took part in over the last week, quite apart from providing necessary nibbles at all the parties that these involved. This meant that I ended up in a New Delhi branch of Pizza Express, of all places, singing karaoke Eagles in duet with my father-in-law over slices of Veneziana pizza on Thursday night. (I did not photograph this. You all know what pizza looks like.)

Friday lunchtime saw a ceremony welcoming the groom and his family to the bride’s family. We sat with the groom (Mr Weasel’s cousin) on the marble floor of a hotel room, where a priest and the elders of the bride’s family witnessed his intention to marry the bride – apparently this served as a kind of certification in the days before codified marriage licences. He was presented with symbolic gifts, including a silver coin for prosperity and a coconut clad in a close-fitting silver casket for fertility. He was showered with rice to symbolise nourishment, and ghee (clarified butter) was burned in a small lamp to feed the sacred fire.

Fresh flowers, symbolising beauty, were scattered and the members of the party were given a vermillion bindhi (dab on the forehead) and a piece of mauli (holy red thread) around the wrist as blessings. The men’s bindhis had a couple of grains of rice pressed into the damp vermillion for fertility. Halwa (crushed nut sweets) were also handed around as part of the ceremony, gilded with edible silver foil.

That evening, we were invited to the mehndi ceremony, where the hands of female guests were painted with henna, which stains the skin. A man rubbed my hands with citronella oil and piped henna onto my palms using a paper cone like a tiny icing bag. The patterns on my hands eventually turned a dark red, and are only starting to wear off a little at the fingertips now, four days later. The patterns are merely decorative and don’t symbolise anything, although the bride’s patterns include the initials of her groom, and it’s said that the darker the pattern, the greater her mother-in-law’s love. (A cousin of the bride suggested rinsing my hands in lime juice and sugar to deepen the colour – a South African friend who had mendhi at her own wedding swears by daily application of Vaseline to keep the colour dark for longer. I’ve done both.) A buffet of curries and the fatal salad were served to the guests – I’ll write more about the food tomorrow when my stomach and my the food I’m writing about don’t seem quite so viscerally linked.

More food symbolism came into play on the day of the main ceremony, where handfuls of rice were kept at the ready. The groom rode a white horse (a remarkably placid horse, given all the fireworks and flash photography), followed by a very well-dressed brass band and men carrying glowing lamps. My sister-in-law, as the nearest female relative of his generation, threw turmeric and rice on him, and then threw more sweets and some rupee coins into the road beneath the feet of the horse, to banish evil spirits. His family and members of the party danced in front of the horse, keeping him from leaving the place where his new wife was waiting.

Flowers were everywhere. Darkly-scented Persian damask rose petals were fired from firework drums, the crowd threw more rose and marigold petals, all the guests wore marigold garlands, and the stage and bowers where different parts of the evening’s ceremony were to take place were strung with thousands of stephanotis blossoms.

The groom was welcomed into a pavilion by the bride’s female relatives, and painted with a new bindhi. He was joined on a throne on a platform by his bride, and they exchanged rose and stephanotis garlands to cheering from the crowd. They then went to a smaller canopied area, where the marriage was blessed, and where they walked seven times around a sacred flame.

We’ll get back to serious discussion of curry tomorrow, when my stomach has settled enough to contemplate it. India was truly remarkable; we made some new friends and learned plenty of new things. In the meantime, I’m feeling enormously privileged to have been to this really remarkable wedding, and wondering whether it would be practical to marry my husband again so we get to play in all the flowers.

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Food Court, Oriental City, Edgware

*Update – Oriental City is threatened with closure. For more details and what you can do to help, see this post.*

Edgware. Those who know London will not be moved to thoughts of big white plates glistening with chef-ish morsels when they read that word. They’ll think about the the Edgware Road in NW9 as it passes through Barnet and its artery-clogging choice of dodgy kebab shops and the now, sadly, rebranded Munchy Burger, whose logo used to be an anthropomorphic burger with sinister, rolling olive eyes and a lolling tongue made of cheese.

First impressions can be deceptive – Edgware is not all threatening burgers and ancient doner kebab. Hidden about 300m from Colindale tube station, behind a branch of Asda, two car parks and a Mercedes showroom, is a giant Malaysian mall which appears to have been transported wholesale, Star Trek style, from somewhere in deepest Kuala Lumpur. There are shops selling manga toilet paper holders, a place where you can buy an antique Chinese kang to sleep on and a porcelain monkey with LEDs in its nostrils, bonsai shops, a harshly-lit shop selling mysterious pieces of plastic with Japanese lettering, a live lobster emporium . . . and a proper Malaysian hawker centre, or food court, where you can pretend you’re on holiday for the afternoon and eat accordingly.

You enter the scrimmage of tables, hang around until you can find the seats you want, and then order as many or as few dishes you like from any of the twenty-odd Malaysian, Tamil, Indonesian, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese stalls clustered around them. On ordering and paying, you will be given a ticket with a number on. When your number flashes, your meal is ready. We went with plenty of change in our pockets and a large appetite.

Today we decided to concentrate on Vietnamese food from a stall on the mall side of the food court, along with some Chinese favourites from the roast meats stall pictured at the top of this post. This is a good place to take children. It is important that they realise that the the undifferentiated chunk of brown stuff on their plate was at one point a duck with a hook in its neck.

About £10 a head is enough to eat yourself silly here. I got some cha gio – the Vietnamese crispy spring roll, sometimes called nems. These are, to my taste, pretty superior to the Chinese variety. Their skins are made from a kind of rice paper, and their fillings include the glass noodles I cooked with the other day, with crabmeat, pork, carrot, different mushrooms, beansprouts, shallots and nam pla, that salty, fermented fish sauce which is used in much of South East Asia instead of soy. It is savoury and salty, and not fishy. I bought some of the rice paper skins in a Vietnamese supermarket in Paris a while ago – these are time-consuming but not difficult to make at home. (Another thing to add to the list for future posts.)

The cha gio are fried in a wok until crisp, and served with lettuce and mint leaves. (The mint in the picture above is Thai mint, a tender and sweet leaf which doesn’t grow very readily here in freezing England. When making these at home, I use whatever mint comes to hand from the garden.) A lettuce leaf and some mint are wrapped around the crisp little rolls, the whole ensemble is dipped into nuoc cham, a sauce made from nam pla, sugar, chili and lime. The rice paper wrappers, once fried, are crisp and chewy all at once, and the taste reminds me to ask Mr Weasel to bury me with a bottle of nam pla in order that I’m completely happy in heaven.

I needed something else to dip into this stuff – Banh Xeo, a kind of rice-flour and egg cross between an omelette and a pancake, flavoured with turmeric and filled with crisp beansprouts, prawns and marinaded pork. This too is served with lettuce and herbs to wrap and dip. The plate-sized disc (whose name, charmingly, means ‘happy pancake’) is fried in a hot wok until crisp, and folded gently around the filling. This one wasn’t the best I’ve had from this stall (the best was sublime, and I’m going to keep trying until they do it again); this pancake was a little wet and more oily than usual. Perhaps the wok wasn’t hot enough. It was still pretty darn good, and now nestles somewhere just to the left of my liver.

Mr Weasel opted for Bo Luc Lac (Shaking Beef), a lean, fried, steak dish served with a sweet, soy-based, garlicky sauce. This is served on a bed of Vietnamese salad which is made from mooli and carrot, in a mild, sweetened, rice vinegar, and Chinese leaves. We’re always amazed at the quality of the meat here – this dish was made with a gloriously tender piece of fillet steak.

Tomorrow, I’m flying to Delhi for a family wedding, which promises to be larded with squishy, sweet Indian things. If the hotel’s promised broadband turns out to work, I’ll be updating on the hoof. I am equipped with a suitcase full of medication for every conceivable stomach upset – I hope I don’t need any of it.

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Dim sum at Taipan, Milton Keynes

Forget paper, gunpowder, tea and umbrellas. China’s greatest contribution to my personal culture is dim sum, a meal traditionally eaten for brunch. It’s made up of an array of tiny dishes of little stuffed buns, fried morsels and steamed goodies, all artfully presented, perfectly delicious and the optimum size to pop effortlessly into a lazy weekend mouth.

Dim sum translates from the Cantonese as “to touch the heart”. For us it’s always something best shared and enjoyed with friends and family. This weekend, we went to Taipan, an excellent restaurant located surprisingly in the jungle of concrete and traffic controls that is Milton Keynes. The owner informs me that their new chef is presently doing something very wonderful in the evenings with garoupa and other fish considered delicacies in Hong Kong but relatively unheard of here – I’ll have to pop back in in a few weeks to check it out.

We rolled up with my parents, who live nearby enough that we can pretend we’re not driving fifty miles just for lunch, and set about the dim sum menu (presented here as a list of numbers, menu items and boxes to tick; three or so dishes per head should be sufficient, but we usually seem to tick more) with gusto. We then asked the manager if we could have the black bean crab (not dim sum, but an evening restaurant dish) as well. It’s an excellent time of year for crab, and the one which arrived at our table, steamed, segmented by the chef and stir-fried in a glossy black bean and pepper sauce was full of rich red roe, tasting of the sea. The sweet meat came away from the claws and legs we cracked open cleanly, with a minimum of the slightly revolting sucking which everyone in my family seems to start doing the moment we think nobody’s looking. We puddled the meat in the sauce.

Dumplings started to arrive in the bamboo steamers they were cooked in. Clockwise from the top, these are chiu-chau fun guo (peanuts, garlic chives, pork, prawns and shitake mushrooms), prawn and coriander dumplings (whole and minced prawn with herbs), and crystal dumplings (pork, water chestnuts, bamboo shoot, prawns, and other vegetables). We ate these with fresh chilis in soy sauce. A chili sauce and a chili oil were also on the table.

Each of these dumplings is wrapped in a rice flour skin, which becomes transluscent when steamed. Texture here is as important as flavour, and the different meats and vegetables which go to make the fillings were cut evenly into tiny pieces. The crystal dumplings in particular have a beautifully fresh crunch.

This dumpling is a bao, a fluffy, steamed bun made from a yeasty, white flour dough. This particular bao is filled with char siu, a barbecued pork in a rich red sauce. (An excellent char siu recipe used to be found at Shiokadelicious, which, to my horror, doesn’t seem to be around any more. Perhaps Renee got a recipe book deal. Fortunately, Jessica at Su Good Eats makes it to a similar recipe here.)

This particular bao is about half the size of my clenched fist. (I seem to clench my fists a lot these days.) When we visit family in Malaysia, one of my favourite breakfasts is one of these buns (but a larger one, perhaps the size of Mr Weasel’s muscular clenched fist), stuffed with char siu or perhaps with a gingery chicken mixture, or a paler pork in garlic. We really miss out here in England, where our closest equivalent is the dry-as-dust Cornish pasty. Don’t expect a recipe for one of those any time soon.

Nuggets of turnip paste rolled in XO Sauce and fried until the outsides are crisp arrive. Each is the size of a grape. Turnip paste sounds very un-prepossessing in English, but is actually a light savoury cake made of grated mooli (Japanese radish), rice flour, preserved Chinese meats, dried shrimp, ginger and other spices. It’s always fried or baked until crispy – this presentation makes it even crisper and lighter, while the XO Sauce underlines the flavours already present in the paste. My friend Wai’s mother makes a wonderful turnip paste at home – I must ask her for the recipe.

I am delighted that the waiter has decided to put this dish next to me. I cunningly hide it from everyone else behind the teapot.

More dishes arrive. Unfortunately, despite my best effort with the teapot, the family is swooping in with chopsticks faster than I can take photographs now, and I need to get in there too if I’m not to be denied my rightful dumplings. I manage one more photograph; a chive dumpling (pork, chives, garlic, soy and spices) which is first steamed, then pan-fried to get this crisp finish. These are garlic chives, which presently I don’t grow in the garden; I think I have a packet of seeds somewhere, so hopefully you’ll get to see some in the summer. They’re thicker than normal chives, and have a pronounced garlic flavour.

Several dishes later (I’ll have go back to Taipan in a few weeks and do a follow-up post so you can find out about the rest of them) we admit defeat, and waddle from the restaurant into the gaping maw of Milton Keynes, where I need to find some shoes for the wedding we’re going to in India in a few days. Thank God your feet don’t get noticeably fatter when you eat your own bodyweight in dumplings all at one sitting.

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Weeping Tiger

It’s a chromosomal abnormality passed on by my father (Chinese by way of Malaysia); every week or so I find myself subject to an overwhelming craving for oriental food. One kitchen cupboard is kept full of Chinese, Malaysian, Thai, Indonesian and Japanese condiments, including seven kinds of soy sauce, numerous sticky brown things in jars, hermetically sealed packets of blachan (the stinkiest thing in the house, but completely necessary in a lot of Malaysian and Thai dishes), dried fungus, four different kinds of dried noodle, four kinds of rice (not including the two risotto rices in the other cupboard), lye water, pork floss, fish floss, rice wines, black and red vinegars and some mysterious tins which have lost their labels. This is all in order that this craving can be assuaged any time it hits, as long as I’m in the house.

The craving thumped me between the eyes this time when we were expecting some friends. Weeping Tiger, a Thai beef dish, would hit the spot, with some Chinese noodles for some stodge. I took a good-sized piece of sirloin steak per person, and rubbed each well with kejap manis, an Indonesian sweet soy sauce.

I made some Nuoc Mam Gung – a sweet, salty, strong sauce made from raw ingredients. I put a peeled piece of ginger the length of my forefinger, two peeled limes, four cloves of garlic, half a stalk of peeled lemongrass, two birds eye chilis, four tablespoons of Nam Pla (Thai fermented fish sauce – I use Squid Brand, a Thai premium brand, because it has a fabulous label) and four tablespoons of caster sugar into the Magimix, and whizzed the lot until I had a sauce. If you follow this recipe, you may prefer to use less chili; taste the sauce when it’s out of the blender and see whether you think it needs more lime juice or fish sauce. You may want to add a little water if you find it too strong.

After the sirloins had marinated for half an hour, I grilled them in a very hot, stovetop grill-pan, keeping the middles pink (about two minutes per side). The steaks were then sliced very thin and placed, still warm, on top of a crisp salad with grated carrot, Chinese leaves, cabbage, shallot, mint leaves and coriander leaves. The nuoc mam gung I’d made earlier was drizzled on top – delicious.

This dish is notably lacking in carbohydrate. To remedy this, I made a very simple garlic cauliflower noodle stir fry which my Dad used to make regularly when my brother and I were little; real childhood comfort food.

This dish needs pea thread noodles – a very thin noodle made from mung beans. These noodles are one of my favourite kinds; they’re thread-thing, transluscent and glassy, and they don’t go slimy in sauces. I broke off half a packet and made them soft in boiling water, then drained them and rinsed them under the tap in a sieve. At the same time, I took eight dried shitake mushrooms and put them in boiling water to rehydrate. When they were soft I sliced them thinly.

To serve four people, I broke up a large cauliflower into bite-sized florets. I stir-fried six roughly chopped cloves of garlic in very hot groundnut oil, added the cauliflower and mushrooms after about a minute and stir-fried that for another three minutes. I then added a pint of chicken stock (I usually keep home-made stock in the freezer, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a stock cube if you don’t have the time), half a glass of Shaosing rice wine, about three tablespoons of mushroom soy and the same amount of light soy. I then put the lid on the wok for four minutes. Lid off, noodles in, taste, add more soy sauce. (I also add half a teaspoon of MSG at this point, which will doubtless cause gasps of horror from my Mum when she reads this; sorry Mummy.)

I thought my Chinese food craving had been squashed for the week. Unfortunately, writing this meal up has made it come back again. Time for a pork floss sandwich.

Lunchtime update:
Emails and comments have been arriving asking what the hell pork floss is. It’s not something I shall be cooking for you, since I don’t want another bout of RSI (this is a dish which needs several hours’ constant stirring); besides, it’s one of those things I always fill suitcases with when returning from Malaysia. There’s an excellent post at Umami on pork floss, which I commend to you.

Pork floss is, simply, lean, lean pork cooked with spices, sugar and sauces until the muscle fibres come apart in a dry, flossy mass; it melts in the mouth and tastes beautiful. It’s a gorgeous garnish, a delicious snack and one of my favourite things.

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Full of beans – Part 2

After a night and a day of slow steeping, the cream and yolk mixture I made last night has gone a hazelnut-brown. I strain it to get rid of the beans (the mixture was already thick from the warmed-through yolks, and has been made thicker by the acidic coffee beans), and churn it in my new ice cream maker. (This is almost a complete disaster, when I fail to read the instructions properly and get the turning on/adding liquid in the wrong order. A bit of fierce scraping with a silicone spatula sorts things out.)

Until now, I’ve made ice cream in a plastic box in the freezer, beating it with a fork frequently as it freezes. The ice cream churn results in a much softer, creamier texture.

The sweetness of the mixture is toned down a bit once the ice cream has been frozen. We eat it in happy silence – I wish I’d made more.

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Full of beans – Part 1

More friends are coming over tomorrow evening. One, Chris, is a man fuelled entirely by caffeine – his heart does not beat; it percolates. I’ll start on some whole-bean coffee ice-cream this evening, which I’ll churn while we’re eating tomorrow. After a day and a night of steeping, the custard the ice cream is based on will be rich and strong.

Why whole beans? Well, the resulting ice-cream comes out very rich, and very smooth, without an acidic edge. An overnight steep means that the ice-cream still has a strong coffee flavour.

I use a whole bag of dark-roast espresso beans, and pour over a litre of whipping cream. God; this already smells fantastic, and I haven’t even done any cooking yet. The cream and coffee beans go in a thick-bottomed saucepan (mine is a Le Creuset pan); make sure yours is thick so the bottom of the cream doesn’t scorch. I bring the cream and coffee slowly to a simmer, and remove the pan from the heat.

While the cream and coffee are warming up, I beat 225g sugar with six egg yolks using a fork, making sure not to beat in too much air. This will make the custard very sweet, but for some reason, ice-creams usually taste less sweet once frozen, so you need to be quite generous with the sugar. The yolks at this time of year are a beautiful orange.

When the cream has been scalded, it is poured over the yolks and sugar, stirring all the time to avoid scrambling them. When everything is well-mixed, it all goes back in the saucepan on a low heat, and is stirred gently until the yolks thicken the cream.

Now the mixture is put in a mixing bowl, and left on the counter until cool. I’ll put it in the fridge before I go to bed, and leave it there until dinner time tomorrow. The beans are already giving up some colour and lots of flavour to the custard – I’m looking forward to tasting the final mixture tomorrow. This one’s going to be good.

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Everything stops for tea

I married Mr Weasel not just for his charm and good looks, but also for the fact that he does the washing up, sharpens a knife like a pro, and has parents who live in Ilkley, a beautiful town in Yorkshire which boasts one of the best teashops in the country.

High tea is a tradition which has clung on boldly in Yorkshire, when the rest of us are spending our Saturday afternoons eating crisps in front of the television. When we visit the family, we are usually treated to a huge table on a Saturday, piled with scones, curd tarts, jams, toast, cakes, muffins – and endless cups of excellent tea.

Betty’s Tea Rooms are a strange thing indeed in a town fifteen miles from Leeds, Leeds being full of the sorts of places footballers eat. Betty’s is an old-fashioned teashop of the kind you read about in dismal Somerset Maugham stories about margarine and the death of hope, but without the death and the margarine. Betty’s is emphatically not dismal. Betty’s is a glorious beacon of lightly browned carbohydrate and gloopy, gloopy, sweet sauces.


I should remark at this point that the quality of the photographs in this post may be a little . . . rubbish, since I loathe and detest wandering into restaurants, tea rooms, bars and cafes and pointing my camera at things. I am half-Chinese, and I become terribly paranoid that people are casting me in their heads as a strangely grumpy-looking Japanese tourist when I pull out the camera. This leads me to try to photograph things in secret, which isn’t a recipe for good pictures.

Nobody wanted to go to Betty’s. We’d already eaten enough lamb to keep a (smallish and reasonably delicate) rugby team nourished and warmed for the day at lunchtime, and it hadn’t gone down. I bullied my mother-in-law and husband into accompanying me with the promise of cakes.

Cakes there were by the dozen. Beautiful, jewel-like cakes; the sort of cakes you expect to see lined up in a Paris branch of Hediard or Laduree. Gleaming counters of the things stretched as far as the eye could see; cakes laid out in glistening rows on cool marble, topped with shining, jellied fruits, palpitating curds and elegant piping.

My mother-in-law and Mr Weasel perked up.

Betty’s was opened by a Swiss confectioner in 1919; the first branch was in nearby Harrogate. The company has stayed small, keeping its few tearooms in Yorkshire while marketing its teas around the country as Taylors of Harrogate. The staff wear starched white aprons and black skirts, and the tearooms themselves have a real sense of 1920s’ style. The menu still has a Swiss influence in this unlikely place, the savouries menu featuring rosti with raclette and other good things.

We weren’t up to another main course, and Mr Weasel was refusing to eat anything at all (he is watching his figure in order to be able to consume more curry before erupting out of his swimming shorts when we visit India next week), so decided on a brown bread ice-cream sundae (ostensibly for me, but ultimately gargled, swilled and slurped in the most part by Mr Weasel, who was hungrier than he thought) and a custard slice for his Mum.

Brown bread ice cream is altogether more wonderful than it sounds. I seem to remember Sainsbury’s trying to sell it a few years ago; they stopped because not enough people were brave enough to try it. A shame. It’s glorious stuff. At its simplest, it’s a really good vanilla ice-cream with roasted breadcrumbs, caramelised in demerara sugar. It’s got everything; crunch, sweetness, a toasty mellowness from the crumbs and a lovely contrast between the melting ice-cream and the friable crumbs.

The sundae was enormous. It was also pleasantly uncomplicated; just glorious ice-cream in one flavour, crushed pecan nuts, broken amaretti, a glossy, buttery toffee sauce and some cream. Two pecans on top vanished somewhere while my head was turned photographing a custard slice.

Tea arrived. We’d asked for a pot of Darjeeling (which was described on the menu as being a tippy pekoe; I am not a tea expert, but it was extremely good) and a pot of Lapsang Souchong. Each came in a silver-plated pot with a handwritten label on the top, explaining which was which. We were given one little silver strainer per pot, lemon slices, cold milk and hot water to top the pots up with.

While the tea was cooling, we got to the important task of eating. This photograph of the excellent custard slice is slighly blurry because I feared expulsion from the family if I didn’t hurry up and let my mother-in-law eat it. She sliced it in half laterally, ate the base with a little custard and then ate the fondanty top with some more custard, all the time informing me that it is very easy to lose weight when you just put your mind to it. I do not know how she stays so thin.

I am rubbish at cooking patisserie. It’s fantastic to go somewhere to eat things you can’t cook yourself, making Betty’s one of my favourite places to eat in the country.

Full of sugar and love for our fellow man (especially if he is a Swiss confectioner), we staggered back up the hill to the house, where a vast spread had been set out, involving cheese scones, hams, a block of cheese the size of my head, pickled shallots, a loaf of bread and a big jar of pickle. I worry I will not have room for those curries next week.