Balls-up

I have made this mistake before but it didn't stop me from making it again.

I tried to make deep-fried seaweed and tofu balls but I added dried reconstituted mushroom to them and they hit the hot oil and spat everywhere. Also the balls started to disintegrate and lose their very ball-yness.

I ended up having to bake them instead, which was pleasant enough but without the excitement of deep fried tofu and crunchy crispy sesame seed.

That'll teach me.

Did I not get the oil hot enough? It did spit onto my hand but it didn't burn me.
Should I use the mushroom just dried next time? Part of me doesn't want to risk finding out without the safety of a deep fat fryer.

Get Stuffed

I curently do not have use of an oven. This can lead to inventiveness in cooking methods or sloppiness, where you just end up making slop.

I had some vague idea of Persian / Middle Eastern / North African food in my head when I did this.

I stuffed some green peppers and hollowed out aubergine with a mixture of
the aubergine flesh, crumbled firm tofu, garlic, a smidge of miso paste, harissa paste, mint, orange oil, vinegar, roughly chopped carrot, pine nuts, almonds, and the scooped out aubergine and minced ginger. I cooked them in a heavy bottomed pan which had been heated up with a bit of oil. Lid on pan. A Dutch oven. I
had to finish them off in the grill so that the stuffing would brown a little. I couldn't turn them over in the pan because the filling would have just fallen out.

I ate it with basmati rice which had lots of stuff in: fried some onions in oil with cardomom pods and cinnamon stick pieces in it. I added grated orange zest, almond slivers, garlic, saffron, vegetable stock, chopped dried apricots and raisins. Added ground cinnamon and ground cumin to the mix. Maybe if I had some pomegranate seeds, it might have become some kind of jewelled rice.

I was particularly pleased with the rice, because many flavours were presen without drowning each other out.

I like saffron. It tastes really weird, don't you think? It's almost like the antiseptic TCP but manages to claw its way back into your heart before you spit your food out.

Grub for pre-gig nerves and Party Food

On Friday I took part in an open mic. I was generously offered some food by Aliki, a friend of a friend, who I hadn't met prior to that day. It was the most delicious simple food I had eaten in a long time. t was basically boiled haricot beans (so nice! and not at all like baked beans!), with a fresh pesto made of lots of of olive oil, fresh parsley and raw garlic to go on top. As well as some lemon juice and some boiled greens. Lovely. The sauce is a Spanish thing. I am going to make some. Her five year old son had spaghetti, tomato sauce and sausages. He sure was missing out.

I've been thinking about party food and party drinks for a summer occasion and I am getting very excited indeed.

Things to do in Denver when you're Stale Bread.

My mum used to make this curried rotli (rotli / chappatis) where she would tear up stale rotli, temper some cumin seeds in oil, then add the pieces to the pan with spices and yogurt and cook it all up. It was lovely and a good way of using up food which had lost the appeal of freshness.

I tried a variation on this recently with some stale bread. It doesn't work as well with the crusts on, as they are less absorbent, but lack of waste was my priority.
I wish I had recorded this on the day. I can hardly remember what I did.

I fried a bit of chopped garlic in a little bit of oil. Then I added cubes of stale bread and chopped mushrooms, letting them cook until the oil had gone.

Now comes the amnesiac bit. I think I added water, but depending on what kind of flavour you want, you could add milk. I think I did choose water over milk because I added some creamed coconut, tamarind paste and chilli. As well as salt and pepper, I might have added other vegetables. I'm sure you could add stock for the liquid. It's variation on pasta, grain or even a sandwich, so use your imagination.

I would cook this down until all or most of the liquid had been absorbed. It should look quite amorphous, and be almost in one lump, like a thick porridge.

You expect me to be so organised as to have pictures?!

Filled and filling.

The filled boiled wheat paste food item is a pan-cultural phenomenon; the Chinese have their wontons, the Italians have their tortellini and ravioli and Eastern Europeans have vareniki, which I attempted to make on Sunday for a Russian-themed party:



Those which you see are not the ones I made. They are supposed to look like that. The skill with these and wontons is getting the pastry rolled out thin enough without it tearing. Also I was very impatient and didn't let the filling cool, which melted holes in the pastry and caused some to burst whilst cooking. I had to improve their taste and appearance by shallow frying them once they had been cooked.It was a not uncommon and good call.

I filled mine with chopped cooked sweetened apple. I did a few savoury ones filled with mushroom. The beauty with these is you can fill them with almost anything (edible).

I also made a very good bubble and squeak a few weeks ago. Here it is:



As I recall, it had onion, red cabbage, beetroot, white cabbage and an orange-fleshed sweet potato which I microwaved (tut tut) for speed. There were also some vegetarian sausages which were mainly potato, cheese and small pieces of vegetable. Fried it all in butter. Shame you can't see the lovely crusty burnt bits.

Ricer Dream and fake amphibians in baked batter

There's a fine line between love and crime, as Neil Tennant sang in "In the Night". There's also a fine line between genius and stupidity. The fine line of the former can make you tread the fine line of the latter as I found out yesterday.

I was watching Saturday morning cooking TV on BBC1 and saw someone making gnocchi, so I decided to make some. (genius) Even though I had more important things I should have been doing (stupidity). I steamed potatoes but they were huge baking ones, so I got impatient and hauled them out. They were a bit undercooked in the middle which meant there were bits of potato which I could not mash (stupidity), so I thought I would find them, isolate them and pulverise them (genius). Using a garlic crusher (genius). But it turns out there were a lot more hard-to-mash bits than I realised so it took ages and I was covered in potato starch (stupidity).

I think I did this because I am hankering after a potato ricer. I wonder which came first and whether one led to the invention of the other? If anyone reading this thinks I am hinting you buy me one, I assure you, I don't want one. At least not yet. I don't have enough storage space.)

Most upsetting of all, while I was doing this, I had Halo by Beyonce playing on repeat, and it did not occur to me to press stop as I was so intent on getting the task done, so now it is the soundtrack to my potato-based frustration rather than the song I like to pretend I'm a contemporary kitchen dancer to.

I boiled a few of these dumplings up for my lunch. There was far too little flour, so they were basically potato lumps. I turned all the remainders out into a bowl, worked in more flour and reshaped. So my sermon for today is: follow a recipe when making gnocchi (the woman on the telly didn't seem to) and make sure you properly cook your spuds first.

I shouldn't have left them out overnight uncovered because this morning they looked all grey. They tasted fine, though, but were aesthetically unfit to serve to others. So I cooked 'em up and scoffed 'em for breakfast with butter.

In the style of a spin doctor, I have a picture of a delightful toad in the hole I made a few Sundays ago to distract you with:



(Made using Linda McCartney veggie sausages with a few baby button mushrooms thrown in. I put so much grease in the pan to ensure some of the batter went crispy that I had to pour a good deal out of the tray before serving.)

and the cross section of the base of a red cabbage which I fell in love with a little on the day I made the above:

Winter Mishmash

Just before Christmas, I went to J. A. Hyman or Titanics, which is a Jewish delicatessen in North Manchester between Cheetham Hill Road and the Bury Old Road, or is it the Bury New Road. I admit here I would never have found it, had it not won City Life Food Retailer of the Year 2005 or so. So here I was, only 4 years after the media buzz. I wandered round it for ages. There were soups made by the deli which I would have been tempted to buy had I not been on my bike, in the rain with a lot of shopping to do, so I emerged with a packet of snacks. Look at how I demolished the packet as I scoffed them down:



Yes, falafel flavour snacks. I loved them. Crunchy extruded wheat shapes with a good dose of salt and MSG, and yes, they did taste falafel-y. If I saw them again, I would buy them, but I don't think I would go from South Manchester to North just to get them. Of course, I could use the online service. Their motto: “You shop, we schlepp”.

Then for Christmas, I went to my parents'. We didn't do Christmas; my mother had held a ceremony, and had catered for all invited so we were eating leftovers for days afterwards. The one I most enjoyed and the one which I should make is shrikhand. That's not how I would pronounce it, but that is the spelling you would put into a search engine if you wanted to find recipes. It's an Indian dessert of curd cheese, sometimes strained yogurt and sometimes cream, flavoured with sugar and ground cardomom. Slivered almonds, pistachios, and saffron strands are optional tasty additions. I ate lots of it.

I didn't do any cooking whilst there; it's hard to have free reign of an unfamiliar and small kitchen, especially one without an oven or a grill or half the ingredients you are used to using. Hardest of all is trying to cook in the knowledge that my father doesn't like too much garlic and my mother doesn't really like anything which isn't spicy.

So I made these:



If I could call them anything, it might be mini bubble and squeaks. I based them on my mother's moothia (literally "fistfuls") of spicy vegetable matter held together with gram flour and lightly fried. It is mainly grated parsnip with a bit of carrot and savoy cabbage with the merest seasoning and three strokes of cinnamon stick on a grater. None of these are particularly starchy, so to bind them together, I used that afternoon's leftover white cooked rice. I could have added a bit more, they fell apart very easily, but once they did, they fried pretty nicely.

Last night, I heated Habanero chilli flakes (a Christmas present!) in oil and shallow fried blocks of tofu before adding to a stir fry. It gave them a really nice subtle flavour and a jolly golden colour. It's good to be back on the cooking saddle.