Thursday 3 June 2010

The Kitchen of a Stagnant Mind

Well, it's been a while since I wrote anything here.

About three weeks ago I made some cheese using some vegetable rennet I bought. I added chives and here it is. It not as firm as the firmest bits of cottage cheese but not as wet. It was good on crackers:




I'm not having much luck in the kitchen of late. I tried to make some coconut cream-based ice cream. I needed arrowroot, which I didn't have so used cornflour instead. It thickened the coconut cream but made my iced dessert a bit grainy in the mouth. Not good, especially since I spent age hand cranking it. YOU NEED ARROWROOT FOR THIS. DON'T TRY AND SUBSTITUTE IT. I'm going to defrost it and use it up in milkshakes and stir fries.

I bought a box of mangoes on Monday and thought I would try to rescue the ice cream by pulping one and streaking it through the ice cream. The fruit was a bit sour so I added too much sugar which totally robbed any mango-ey flavour from the pulp. I couldn't go in so instead used it to make a marinade for my tofu. Thank you Jo for the idea (someone - it could have been you - said that you used mango on tofu ages ago).

- mango pulp
- sugar (I had some palm sugar knocking about) OR if mangoes are out of season you can buy sweetened mango pulp in a can from South Asian grocery stores but it IS very sweet
- crushed garlic cloves
- soy sauce.
- grated ginger root (good with the mango)
- chilli powder
- chinese 5 spice mix

I think that was all. I left my tofu to bathe in this mixture for 2 days, hoping all the papain in the mango would tenderise the bean curd. I used it in a stir fry afterwards and the tofu pieces had a delicious delicate fruity flavour. But it was still tofu. I wonder what this marinade would be like on some kind of meat or whether the taste of the meat would simply over power it. Chicken would probably work best. But chicken is so boring! It's less boring than tofu, though.

In other news, Dan made a spinach, red pepper and white asparagus risotto here the other night. Ooh, I've just realised, all of the colours of the Italian flag! He used a can of tomatoes in it which I thought would be culinary suicide but it wasn't. It was lovely. I like tomatoes a lot. I've though of using them in stir-fries to bring out their flavour.

1 comment:

  1. I like to think about the colour of food, one day I hope I'll make a meal where every dish is white or off-white in colour.

    I read somewhere that not only are you supposed to eat 5 portions of fruit & veg a day, but they should all be different colours. Tricky. Carrot, cabbage, aubergine, swede, blueberry, tomato?

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