Cake

Mmm, cake. Is there anyone that doesn't like cake? I'm not really a dessert person. I'd much rather have a starter than a dessert, and when I feel like a good ol' scoff I'd always reach for the Pringles rather than, say, Dairy Milk. So therefore my baking skills are elementary to say the least.

Out of all the cakes, lemon drizzle cake is my favourite. It's light, fluffy and the citrus twang of it is refreshing. As it's made with lemons, I convince myself it's good for me. Surely it contributes towards your five-a-day? Off I went to buy a 2lb loaf tin to make one of my own.

I looked at various recipes and went for a simple, no-nonsense one to start off with, here.

My first mistake was that I just ploughed on ahead and didn't read it in it's entirety. I added the 275gr caster sugar, and just before I put it in the oven, alas! I realised it was only supposed to have 175gr and that the remaining 100gr was for the lemon syrup to make up the drizzle.

See? I'm not good at baking. To compensate, I added the juice of half a lemon in the hope of balancing it out.

Here it is. I'm pretty proud of it actually; it looked ok and tasted great, despite it now being a lemon sponge rather than a drizzle cake. It's drizzle-less.

Neglect

After a flurry of posting, it seems like I've neglected you, dear blog. This is not so! A lot of factors prevented me from posting, such as boring weekday meals, staying at the boyfriend's house and generally not having much time. But I am back.

I've noticed that most of the posts are mainly about Oriental food, which isn't so bad as much of what I eat is Oriental, but some variation is also nice.

I never thought making pizza dough would be so easy. I've always been a bit scared of dough - my main staples are rice and noodles, after all - but after reading a few recipes and seeing just how cheap it is to make your own pizza, I took the plunge. This recipe uses dried active yeast, the kind you get in foil sachets so coupled with the bread flour, this can just be knocked up from store cupboard ingredients.

The recipe I use is here.

Apparently weighing the water is more effective than measuring it by mls. It means my scales bowl gets washed of reisdual flour, so that's fine by me.

Often I'll come home from work and I don't particularly like to wait around for an hour or more for the dough to prove, so I've found that mixing all the dough up in the morning, covering with cling film and putting it in the fridge works fine for me.


It's pretty rough-and-ready, my pizza skills aren't greatly refined but it tasted great. Instead of simmering a tomato sauce for ages, I simply squished down some tinned plum tomatoes (without their juice), scattered with anchovies, yellow pepper, red onion, garlic and oregano, topped with mozzrella, and away we went. And I ate it all.

Escape To The Country

The first time I ever saw snow was when I was 12 or 13, so I still get stupidly excited whenever I see it. This weekend was spent with my parents down in Surrey. I hadn't seen them for a while, so it was great to see them but to also go to the country. The picture above is from their back door, and much different to what I see out of my window in South East London!

A weekend of Mum's cooking was in store. My mum was never the primary cook in our house, it was always my dad who did all the cooking. In fact, my mum was always the subject of jokes involving dinner cooking (shrieks, running for takeaway menus etc etc.) but clearly things have changed. The dinner we had was quite traditional, home-cooked Chinese food.

To start, we had pork and seaweed soup. Many Chinese households have a bowl of soup before dinner, usually a fish or meat broth with some vegetables. What you see next to this soup is a cold platter of shredded chicken, cucumber, jelly fish and steamed tofu. This was dressed with a sesame sauce (made just by mixing sesame paste and soy sauce) which I forgot to photograph.

Seaweed Soup & Chicken, Jellyfish and Cucumber Salad















These two dishes to start off with were a great mixture of textures. The jelly fish isn't at all fishy, but rather like eating rubber bands, while the tofu is very soft and jelly-like, and then the meatiness of the chicken and the crunch of the cucumber. Many flinch at the idea of eating jellyfish, but it is on many dim sum restaurant menus and is such a great texture. The soup was also flavoursome and light, perfect to start the meal with.

We had to have a breather before the mains, but also because they were dishes that really need to be cooked fresh. You can buy bags of deep-fried cubes of tofu, so you just need to cut them in half, hollow them out and stuff them with some fish paste, fry them, and then just add some garlic, chilli, coriander and a little slaked cornflour to make a gravy.

Fish-Stuffed Tofu, before cooking and after:















We had this with white rice, chilli and garlic fried prawns, and gai laan (Chinese broccoli).


Oh, I do get treated well.

Steam Boat

Steam boat or hot pot is one of my favourite ways to eat. You get a big pot of stock, sometimes divided into different sections to have different flavoured stocks, and it sits on either a gas fire or an electric hob to keep it bubbling. Raw meats, seafood and vegetables are then lowered into the stock with a small wire basket (like the one you can see on top of the veg) to cook at your leisure. It's a fun and sociable way to eat, and it allows you to cook the food just how you like it. At the end, you usually have noodles to throw in to eat with the well flavoured stock to eat as a noodle soup.

We had ours at this Vietnamese restaurant in the Wing Yip complex in Croydon. We chose seafood (£39.95 for four). It was delicious - it was all very fresh, although a bit cheeky of them to give us the 'crab'stick. We chose a tom yum stock, and this was obviously made fresh and not from a cube. It was both spicy and sour, like a good tom yum should.

Meat Balls

When I was living at with my parents (a mere 4 or so years ago), my 'speciality' was meat balls. I'm not sure if it's because mine were particularly good but perhaps rather that I could be bothered to stand there and roll them to feed 4 people.

Ever since I first made them, I've always tried to alter the recipe somehow to get the ultimate meat ball. Some say simple is best and prefer just salt and pepper, but I like some extra flavourings.

Here was tonight's effort:

Meatballs in a Spicy Tomato Sauce

For one hungry person

For the balls:

125gr minced beef

2 anchovies in oil, finely chopped

2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley

Half a shallot, finely diced

1 tbsp capers, chopped

Salt and pepper to taste

I don't really think egg or breadcrumbs are necessary in meatballs. If you work the flavourings into the meat enough without working it too much into a paste, then it'll hold together fine. Fry the meat balls in a pan with some oil until browned on all sides.

Then add 1/2 diced small onion, 1 fat clove garlic, minced, 1/2 yellow pepper, diced and a large pinch of chilli flakes and fry until the onion is translucent. Add 1 tbsp tomato puree, 1/2 can chopped tomatoes and 1 tsp sugar. Simmer until thickened, serve with a pasta of your choice and a grating of Parmesan.

I had mine with tagliatelle. I had a bag of spinach in the fridge that was starting to look like it was going to get up and walk away, so I added a few washed handfuls to the pot of pasta after I'd turned off the heat, but before I'd drained it. I don't much like pasta to be drowning in sauce, more like a dressing, so add more tomato to taste if you like.

These were very good. The anchovy melts into the meat so it's not fishy, but provided a good savoury depth.

Nevertheless, the quest for the perfect meatball shall go on. What's your best meat ball?

Rice Paper Rolls

Flush with success with being (just) dextrous enough to make the potsticker dumplings, I decided to try my hand at making rice paper rolls. I love spring rolls, but dislike deep-frying. My flat has possibly the most sensitive smoke alarm in all of the land; anything fried or grilled sets it off. In fact, sometimes even the oven sets it off it you open the door for more than a peek inside, so deep-frying is no friend of mine.

I had a quick google around for a general idea of how to make them and what kind of sauce to serve them with. Carrots, peppers, a behemoth bunch of coriander and spring onions dominated my otherwise bare vegetable drawer.

Rice Paper Rolls with Peanut Dipping Sauce

Makes 10 - 12 rolls

Packet of rice paper sheets (I got a Vietnamese brand from Chinatown)

Filling:

1 carrot, cut into matchsticks

1/2 red and 1/2 yellow pepper, cut into matchsticks

2 spring onions, shredded

1/2 bunch rice vermicelli, soaked in boiling water and drained

Small handful of coriander, chopped finely

A few whole mint leaves

For the dipping sauce, mix together 3 tbsp hoi sin sauce, 1 tbsp peanut butter and a squeeze of lime juice. I used chunky peanut butter but I think either smooth or chunky would be fine.

Dip a dried rice paper sheet in a bowl of hot water. Leave for 30 secs, then remove and place on a clean tea towel and pat dry. Place the mint leaf in the upper part of the sheet, and some of the filling at the bottom half. Fold over the filling from the bottom, then fold the sides over, and then carry on rolling. Lay on a plate seam side down. The mint leaf should show through the rice paper quite clearly.

These were quite time consuming to make (so perhaps better for a weekend... or get a helper), and for some reason I steadily got worse at the rolling as time went on. I think I became impatient with hunger. The wait was worth it though; the rolls were crunchy, fresh, and reminiscent of summer. The singular mint leaf in each roll provided just the right amount of tingle without being overpowering.

A Food Blog

I've been reading blog posts for a while now, and have noticed that there is an awful lot of them. So I decided to join the masses.

I love food - both eating and cooking it. It is often wondered whether I have hollow legs, and so became the name of this blog.

This blog doesn't really have a theme (aside from food), it'll be just general musings, ramblings, and some recipes. My photography skills leave a lot to be desired but hopefully this will improve. Oriental cuisine is probably the food I cook the most. I lived in Hong Kong from birth till the age of 12 and this has influenced my preference a lot, so I thought I'd start this with some dim sum I made over the weekend.

Potsticker Dumplings (War Tip)

This is one of my favourite dim sum dishes. They're steamed and then fried, so that the bottoms go all crispy while the pleated parts stay soft from the steaming. When I was a kid we often went to a cafe in Wan Chai in Hong Kong, where they served great potsticker dumplings. It was almost ritual that we'd go there, have a huge plate of these and then follow with a cold dessert, called in Cantonese 'dau foo fah', literally 'tofu flower'. It was a block of sweet, silken tofu in a thin sugary syrup, delicious.

Anyway - I digress. The recipe was given to me by a lady on a food forum, named 'Sunflower'.

Makes 15 - 18 dumplings

To make the dough -

100gr plain flour

50ml water

Mix to form a dough and leave for half an hour.

Meanwhile, mix together:

125gr minced pork

2 tbsp spring onion, finely chopped

1 tsp finely chopped ginger

1 tbsp egg white

1 tsp cornflour

Pinch of white pepper

And leave for 30 mins.

Next, knead the dough for a couple of minutes and roll out into a sausage shape. You should be able to cut it into 15 - 18 pieces. Roll out into a circle, then add 1tsp of the pork mince to the centre. Fold in half, pinching the top where the two meet. Carefully fold the pleats, and put it on a floured plate.

To cook, heat 2 tbsp of oil in a non-stick pan and add the dumplings, making sure they sit flat. Add 100mls water, put the lid on to steam for at least 7 mins, topping up with a splash of water if needed. Take the lid off, and fry till the water has evaporated and the bottoms are crispy. Serve with black vinegar with matchsticks of ginger in it and/or chilli sauce.