The point of tofu

I've made this mapo tofu recipe at least six times this year, obviously because I love the taste of it.
It shows that tofu demands strong flavouring. In this recipe, the blandness of the tofu is actually needed for relief from the fiery sauce. I really think that using meat in place of the tofu might mix too many strong flavours together, doing none of them justice. Made with tofu, the bland balances out the bold, which is why it's so good.

Cooking notes

I made kadhi / curry (a yogurt soup coloured with turmeric, to be eaten with rice) for a vegan friend. This is the first thing I learned to make and I've been making it for 24 years and I rarely go wrong with it, but veganising causes problems because soy yogurt does not have the sourness of dairy yogurt which gives kadhi its characteristic taste.

To compensate for the lack of tartness in the dairy-free yogurt, I added some amchoor (dried green mango powder) which added sourness but not exactly the right kind. The vegan version I made the other day was very thick for kadhi, but that could have been because I put in too much gram flour (used to slightly thicken),  a half-deliberate, half-error. Part of my intention was to take the taste of the soy yogurt and soy milk away; they are oddly strong in their blandness. Or did I just think that up to compensate for my mistake. I don't know.

I don't think I will try to perfect the vegan recipe as there's not much call for it in my life.  My friend enjoyed it, which was the main thing, but if only she knew there was more to enjoy in it.

I got one!

One courgette, I managed to grow, from about ten (badly tended) plants. One. Still. It is quite small, but firm. I picked it today and ate it, sliced and lightly fried with a bit of salt and pepper, no more. Of course it was delicious, because I'd grown it.

It was only a week ago

A week ago, I tried proper sushi for the first time and the working week has been so long that I forgot about it until now. I thought I better record it for the sake of posterity. Proper sushi, not that crap in a black plastic tray from the 'Hurried Work Lunches' section of the supermarket or its convenience outlet, with its tame cooked fish in because if it were raw, they wouldn't be able to make it so far in advance and sell it without killing someone. A tiny plastic bottle of soy sauce and an extra pound to pay if you have the gall to want wasabi.

Actually, it was sashimi that I tried. No rice, just the hardcore stuff. The fish was incredible. The salmon tasted like avocado. There is no other way I can describe the taste. The tuna tasted fishy (as you would expect it might) and very powerful. There were some other pieces of white fish. I think one of them was a sea bream which was quite fishy and I'm not too sure how much I enjoyed that but then there was some kind of superstar white fish on my place, which was delicate and smoky and delicious.

I tried all of the pieces of fish without seasoning first, just to get a taste of them on their own, as if to work out each of their personalities without dressing. Then with the wasabi. Normally with vegetarian dishes, even a tiny bit of makes my eyes water and my nose burn. With the fish, the wasabi had met a worthy opponent and the protein counterbalanced the heat perfectly so you could still taste both. Suddenly it all made sense.
I left the restaurant deliriously happy.

Stuff that, I'm using my own recipe next time

I made stuffed courgette flowers today from this recipe using the ricotta and herb filling.

Verdict: They looked like the ones in the picture. The batter recipe was good, but the filling was rather bland. It tasted like it should have done, but it needed more oomph. Dan has a vegan cashew, tofu and spinach filling for cannelloni, which he thinks might have worked better than ricotta, but the cheese has a nice fluffy texture; cashew and tofu are too dense. The risotto filling might have been better, but I didn't have any spare and wasn't going to make any from scratch just for this. In future, I might consider a more piquant filling, or, as I saw on one site, pine nuts and sultanas with the cheese. The actual flowers tasted lovely.

Update on my garden plants:
Huantzole: The trough I have planted them in is too shallow and some parts of the plant are very red, which means the plant is distressed.
Courgettes: Planted too many, too late and all the leaves seem to have a light fungal dusting on them. It's too late in the year for them to fruit, which is why I ate the flowers.
Strawberries: Not one! Very disappointing. Maybe next year.
Japanese mustard greens: Should have tried these when they were more tender because they didn't taste too nice.

A kitchen back yard and some aliens

It's been a just over a year since I last wrote anything in this.

This year, I've made an effort at gardening. I've been given some plants by Jo, which have made my back yard a place I want to spend more time in.

• 'Pineberries': actually strawberries that are supposed to taste like pineapple. I think the first one will be ready in a week or two, so watch this space for the verdict. The mother ship plant has sent out many alien runners in an attempt to procreate. I tried to accommodate for them all, but it would have taken up too much space and too many pots, so I cut a few runners back. The most fun I have had with these is pegging runner shoots down into soil using old hairgrips and tugging them to see if they have taken root. Some of them have.
• Edible day lily. The flowers and buds can be eaten. the flowers bloom for just one day each. I told my mum about this and she said, "Don't you go eating those edible lilies."
• Huauzontle / Aztec broccoli
• Komatsuna (Japanese mustard spinach)
• Cavolo nero

I've also been growing fenugreek. This is incredibly easy to grow. It even grows in containers with no holes drilled into them for drainage. It doesn't take long and then suddenly you have leaves which will add good flavour to curries and pakora. I combined two recipes to make these:

I wanted to know what fenugreek and banana would be like in pakora. The result: good, but needs improvement. very ripe, brown banana flesh would be sweet enough to be a match for the salty, savoury pakora batter. I would consider mashing the banana straight into the batter next time.

Taking advantage of the hot weather, I bought some basil plants and have left them outside to soak up the sunshine. They are thriving. The nasturtium in my hanging basket did well until a plague of blackfly decimated several areas of the plant. I've removed it and isolated it, waiting for some nice insects to do their work and eat the damn things. It's true, I've been neglecting it somewhat and not watering it thoroughly. The golden thyme in the same basket thrives and has sprouted some small purple flowers.

I planted some black peas because I was fed up of the jar of dried peas sitting around doing nothing. They are also known as maple peas or Carlin peas. They are very hardy and used to the cool, wet Lancashire climate. The peas aren't really suitable for eating raw or lightly cooked; they are more suited to being boiled or made into pease pudding. However, the young pods can be used like mange tout. 

What to do with leftovers

I am the leftovers effin' QUEEN. The KING, even. I'm the entire goddamn monarchy.

I'd made some really rubbish houmous for my birthday party. I put too much salt in it, and having run out of chickpeas, tried to abate the saltiness by adding gram flour to the dip. It didn't work too well and added a dry taste to the proceedings. Needless to say, it hardly got touched all evening.

So I made some soup out of it, and with some other leftover ingredients from my party.  This is what I did:

1. Fried some onions in a heavy bottomed-saucepan until browned
2. Chopped up half a red chilli and added it to the onions
3. Fried some finely chopped celery separately, and added to onions and chilli
4. Added houmous to the mix, immediately followed by water to thin it down. Waited until soup was heated through
5. Final stage: stirred in chopped fresh coriander and fresh mint

As the houmous I was using was very well-blended, I added liquid aiming for a thin but creamy consistency. The consistency and texture of your soup will depend on your houmous.

It was good and I am hankering after more.

On a slightly different note, I tried some supermarket houmous recently, from Tesco. I was actually stunned by the taste. It was as salty as Marmite.

Catching up

Some of the things I've been eating since I moved to Moss Side:

Above: Jo made a beautiful gingerbread house for Dan and I as a housewarming present (back and front)

Spaghetti with tomato sauce and mushrooms. Dan made this.

Red pepper stuffed with nice things like breadcrumbs, onion, garlic and seeds. Millet with spinach and sweetcorn on the side. I don't really like millet but I eat it because it's got iron in it and it's a break from gluten. Dan made this too.







 My first attempt at sushi. Inside: avocado, yellow pepper, tofu, shreds of raw leek, carrot. I made these without a rolling mat, using a clean folded up tea towel instead. The YouTube tutorials I watched before attempting them were very reassuring. I would recommend it.

 Baked marinaded tempeh slices, roast mushroom, courgette, garlic and broccoli and mashed potatoes
with greens in them. This might have been a joint effort between Dan and I. It was a while ago and I can't quite recall.









Roast butternut squash, puy lentil salad, cucumber and radish raita, potatoes roasted with garlic and paprika. Washed down with a Belgian beer, this is what Dan and I had for dinner tonight.

In April, I planted some fenugreek in a trough and had to keep them indoors because of the hail. As soon as the temperature went up, I dragged them out. I left it to grow too long and it went a bit tough. The last few plants weren't good enough to use in cooking, so I just ate them raw. Tasty, but stringy. Eleanor planted some rocket seeds in little cardboard pots, which I have been tending to. Some of the leaves are starting to grow with wavy edges, just like the rocket you see in the shops. It's very exciting.  Dan's mum potted up some oregano, parsley and rosemary, and Humaira gave me a lovely pot of chives. Things are taking off.

I don't have a salad spinner, so instead, I loosely wrap the wet leaves in a clean tea towel then wave them round, sometimes above my head, and the water droplets fly off. Dan thinks it silly. He's right, but it does work a treat.

Note for Dan

Should you want to recreate the polenta pizza thing I made for our dinner earlier this week, follow the following:

1. Boil a kettle. Slice a medium-sized onion and fry it until soft and translucent. Add a heaped cupful of polenta and stir. Add the water from the kettle. Add slowly and make into a thick porridge, stirring continuously to make sure there are no lumps. Add a glug of oil, stir in a heaped teaspoon of pesto, a handful of frozen peas, salt, pepper and a glug of vinegar. Taste it. Polenta is ridiculously hard to make taste nice. If it's lacking in salt, hold your horses for a sec. Put the grill on. Generously grease a baking tray and spread the polenta mixture out onto it as thinly as possible. You might want to sprinkle some coarse rock salt onto it now. Stick it in the grill until it is crusty and has browned a little.

2. While the polenta is grilling, you will have time to do the toppings:

• Fry some mushroom slices with salt, pepper and garlic and set aside.
• Defrost 4 chunks of frozen chopped spinach (this will be easier when we get a microwave but for now, heat with a bit of water in a pan. When defrosted, season, add freshly grated nutmeg and stir through some cream. (If you're using non-dairy cream, make sure it's not too sweet. I used oat cream). You could probably do this with fresh spinach too. Keep warm.
• Heat up a can of chopped tomatoes with a bit of dried basil, salt, pepper, garlic powder (I was feeling lazy) and chopped black olives. Keep warm.
• Your polenta should be ready now. Cut into slices and slop your toppings on, er, on top.

It's really nice cold the next day for your lunch as well. You can have it next time. This is dish was too delish for pictures. Or mail me one.

In the 'zone.

Whoever said Necessity is the Mother of Invention clearly didn't consider Boredom.

Last week I invented the couscous omelette. Cooked couscous in an omelette. One third cup couscous, flavoured and cooked. Two eggs, beaten and seasoned. Couscous mixed into egg and fried in a pan, finished under the grill. Now all I need is a catchy name. Admittedly, it did meet some specifications (i.e. needs) of mine. Sometimes I really hate how couscous is so tiny and bitty and how it flies everywhere whenever you're trying to serve or eat it. The egg solves this problem whilst retaining the texture you get from the processed wheat grain. Protein and carbs in one tidy meal. Sweet.

Inspired by an episode of Seinfeld called The Calzone, Dan and I made calzones last night. I fussily complained about there being too much dried herbs in the tomato sauce, but actually it all worked out just fine. The sauce had onion and wilted leaf spinach in. What else went in: black olives, cubes of fried eggplant, very firm tofu strips, chorizo-style wheat protein 'sausage' slices and vegan melting cheese substitute (which was rendered invisible in the cooking process). Jo brought basil leaves to garnish them. The calzone casing - white bread dough- was light, fluffy and just perfect. Calzones are so good! And now I want to go to New York City.

Middle Eastern Bible

A bit of a strange name for this small recipe book by Fiona Hammond, and I need to take it back to the library now, but here are the things I will explore  further:
- use of samneh (seems similar to ghee)
- dukkah ( a dry "dip" for bread used with olive oil made of seeds, nuts and herbs)
 - a dip made of soaked fenugreek seeds, tomato, garlic, coriander, lemon juice, chilli and onions
- and the spice mix baharat which is made from peppercorns, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and sweet paprika. mmm...

Fiona Hammond, eh? I wonder if it's my high school alumna.

Important Ingredients

The best and most important ingredients for anything are, in no particular order: love, passion and salt. This even applies for non-edible and non-potable items. Except, perhaps, the salt. As a child who was never given convenience food at home, I was fed equally abundant portions of love and salt, so when food lacks these two things, its bland pitifulness screams out to me like a banshee.

Note: This post was sponsored by Schneide Weisse Tap 6.

Get me to the 'greek

My first fenugreek in what feels like donkey's years:

(on the side, white rice and something resembling raitu/tsatsiki/cacik because I miss being in Turkey.)

Chop it up fine and add it to dry potato curry, to pea and/or aubergine curry, to curried fish, to an omelette. Chop it up and cook lightly with chopped tomatoes and cumin and cook lightly for a lovely warm chutney you can add to a grilled cheese sandwich. It's great in moothia too. I love fenugreek. It's the smell of curry which isn't garlic that comes out in your sweat. Mraoowww.

I bought the fenugreek from a shop, about 6 inches in length is the bunch. It's not as good as the stuff my dad grows because he harvests it when it's dead tender, only an inch and a half long before the third leaf grows. You can eat that stuff raw and when I was a child, we did, all of the time.

NOTE: This post was sponsored by Schneide Weisse Tap 6

Dondurma

Turkish ice cream is kind of chewy. Yeah, you read correctly. As if it has some kind of gum. Not so much that you could blow bubbles with it, but still. I couldn't get used to it.

Also! Max the Lion is alive and well and living in Turkey. Max the Lion was an ice cream lolly you could get here in the UK, possible late 1980's to 1990's. There he is known as Aslan Max. Yeah! I know!

şarap a ya face.

Dan and I spent this last week in Turkey. We stayed near Ovacık and Hisarönü, very anglicised resorts on the Western Mediterranean, where a full English breakfast, egg and chips, liver and onions and Sunday roasts were the most advertised dishes on offer in restaurants. Curiously, an English breakfast was often cheaper than a Turkish one.


Rather than strive to experience The Real Turkey (for does it even exist? And if it did, would we even enjoy it?) through food, we just tried to eat well. Luckily this was in our control as we stayed in a self-catering apartment and I had brought with me a bulb of garlic, a lime, salt, pepper, chilli powder, garlic powder, ginger powder, ground cumin, smoked paprika and a self-blended mix of herbs. Next time I will take turmeric and some soy sauce.  On our first day there, we bought a Turkish breakfast from the small restaurant in our apartment complex: bread, butter, tomatoes, cheeses, jam, honey, some very salty black olives and some oily green olives which seemed to have no salt added to them at all. They tasted weird, metallic perhaps. I wondered how common it was to have unsalted olives.


A loaf of Turkish bread, regardless of where you bought it was 0,5 Turkish Lira (about 20p), as if by some government decree. Crusty outside, fluffy, white and soft inside, it was perfect for breakfast or lunch. We bought a bottle of olive oil for our bread as well as for cooking; lots of tomatoes because they were cheap and had nice dense flesh; yogurt; cheese and honey, cartons of cherry nectar and apricot nectar (sugary juice drinks you can pretend are pure juice if you suspend your disbelief). The pack of olives we bought remained mostly untouched because they were so salty and we had our fill of saline from swimming in the sea.


We didn't dine out much, but one time we did had what they called "balloon bread" to go with our meal, a huge puffed up flatbread. It was served with garlic butter which also had chopped dill in it. I was very fond of the pide (I think it means "pipe"), the Turkish pizza, which looks like a slipper or a lady part with stuff in it. My topping of choice was minced lamb which also had green capsicum, onion, tomato and parsley with it. Meals that weren't pide came with copious amounts of bread. My favourite meal out was at Paşa Kebab in Fethiye which was the nearest big town to us. Lots of oil. Lovely. I drank lots of ayran, the savoury yogurt drink, which is like a thin salty lassi, but with a froth on top. The most refreshing ayran I have ever had was made with fizzy water, not still. Sadly, I can't remember where I had it and when. It could have been Dalston in London, it could have been Berlin.

From left to right: imam bayildi, a salad of chopped walnuts, cucumber, onion and tomato in vinegar, oil and pomegranate molasses; barbunya (beans) and carrot in a tomato sauce; and vegetables cooked in garlic and tomato. 


In our apartment we made cacık, thick yogurt with garlic, mint and salt like the Greek tsatsiki, I suppose. I added cumin. We fried halloumi slices, adding chilli and mint to take on our beach picnic. Knowing neither wine nor Turkish, we a bought a horrible cheap white which Dan had to turn into cocktail by adding lemon slices and apricot nectar to make palatable. On the last day, I made lemonade to use up the lemons and honey then shoved a bunch of mint into the water bottle. And a teeny pinch of salt. I shook it all thoroughly to dissolve the honey and bruise the mint leaves, then shoved it in the freezer box until it was time to go out. Very refreshing. 


We went to Fethiye for the weekly market which happens on Tuesdays. There were many stalls selling just melons. Mainly watermelons. Rows and rows of them. We bought fresh figs, cherries, more tomatoes and nuts. The peanuts coated in honey and sesame seeds were perfect for snacking on. There didn't seem to be as huge a variety of vegetables as I thought there might be, even in the market of a big town, rather than a touristy resort. But maybe I expect too much, and who knows? Some stuff may just be seasonal. And at least it was all cheap and none of it seemed to be imported.There were many aubergines in the market; "regular" ones, white ones, purple mottled with white ones, small ones and long snake-like ones. The vegetarian dishes on offer relied too heavily on tomato, aubergine and capsicum - a chronic arthritis sufferer's nightmare, I should imagine. One stall had some dried branches and what looked like a solitary bright orange bitter melon (karela).


The most common flavours used seemed to be tomato, onion, parsley and mint but not a lot else.  However, I did pick up a strange condiment said to be made from fermented purple carrots which was vinegary and had chilli added to it. It dyed one's food a bit pink. I missed the taste of spices and herbs this week. Then again, maybe I'd get more choice in a throbbing heaving metropolis like Istanbul. If not, I'd say it was time to move on to experience another country's flavours.

Late afternoon snack

Dan fed me some of his lunch leftovers early this evening. Nice of him really, because I had so brusquely refused his offer of lunch:

- Ciabatta from Barbakan with olive oil
- Harissa olives - gorgeous!
- Broad bean and dill hummus from a Nigel Slater recipe
- Fresh tomato slices sprinkled with salt and sumac
- Sweet potato wedges

Again, no pictures, but essential mention because it was yum.

If the way to someone's heart isn't through their stomach, they're not worth knowing. 

Oondhiu

Oohn-dee-you?

This is a dry stew, traditionally cooked in an earthenware pot turned upside down over a fire lit in a hole dug into the ground. The idea is the vegetables cook in their own steam produced by their own water content. I did mine on the stove and it would therefore have less of a smoky taste than I imagine the real stuff would. People sell it on roadsides in India. I want to go there and try some.

I was inspired to make this because I found some lovely-looking peas at the local vegetable shop.

May add quantities if I can be bothered.

OONDHIU

Aubergine
Potato
Sweet Potato
Fresh peas, in their pods OR mange tout and frozen peas
Peanuts, bashed into coarse pieces (food processor is good for this)
Sesame seeds
Ajwain seeds (get them from South Asian grocery stores, they look a bit like celery seed)
Asafoetida (hing)
Mustard seeds
Vegetable / sunflower oil
Fresh garlic and ginger, minced
Turmeric powder
Chilli (red powder or green fresh and minced)
Salt

Chop aubergine, potato and sweet potato into roughly even sized pieces. Shell some of the peas, remove some of the more fibrous parts of the more tender pea pods Heat sesame, ajwain, mustard seeds in oil in a large pan with a lid. When seeds start to pop, add asafoetida. Then add the peanuts, all of the vegetables, spices and seasoning. Put on moderate heat with lid on pan and make sure none of it sticks to the bottom of the pan.  You may need to add more oil so nothing sticks, but don't add water. Cook for about 30 minutes until potatoes and aubergines are tender and cooked.

Serve with a flat bread like roti or naan or paratha or with rice and dal or khuri (yogurty soup which I will write about soon).

The idea with the pea pods is that you can chew all the tenderness out of them until you are left with the fibrous stuff which you leave on your plate. It's a lot of fun to eat.

Once again, I ate it all, so a picture next time. It's not much to look at anyway. But it tastes great. I'm wary that records of things online won't last, so I'm going to write recipe down this in my diary so I don't have to ring my mum again to ask her. I knew most of it anyway. 

Ful of Beans

I don't have an article yet, just a title I really like. Watch this space.

Africa Cavern, Newton Street, Manchester, Friday 20th May 2011

The word "Cavern" in the title was a lot smaller than "Africa" so for quite a while I thought it was called just "Africa" and made lots of jokes about going to Africa (for dinner).

James and I had the curried goat and jollof rice; Jo had vegetables in sauce with plantain. Jo and I had half -and-half of each other's accompaniments.

I loved the taste of the curry. Some of the pieces of meat were lovely and tender, but some were bit big and tough, one so much so, that I couldn't finish it. Sadly, the bone I got had no marrow to suck out either. But the sauce was delicious;  tomatoey, rich and spicy. Our chef and host gave me some extra chilli sauce on the side in case I wanted it hotter. I didn't need it, but tried it anyway and somewhat regretted it as it set my mouth on fire. I had to wash away the heat with lashings of this:

Ting. Jamaican grapefruit soda. A little too sweet for me, but a nice change to other sodas.

I get the feeling that the African and Caribbean food with the most flavour has meat or fish in it, which is a shame, because it's often too rich and heavy for me. I'd like something with more of a mix of flesh and veg. I enjoyed the food but can't compare it to anywhere else doing similar food in Manchester, so: open verdict.

What I did like about the place:  the very genial host / chef from the Ivory Coast; the man who was playing a drum that everyone dismissed in a friendly but offhand way as if to say, "Oh, he's always in here" ;  the telly showing Ghanaian pop videos, and take-out food costing more than eat-in, presumably for the cost of the packaging.

Reminder - Imbolc

I saw a recipe in The Restaurant Magazine for a cocktail created for the Imbolc festival in Marsden, which takes place in the early part of the year. Here it is, so that I can remember it for next year when I hope to go:

Shake the following ingredients with ice:

Whiskey
Triple Sec
Grenadine
Lemon Juice