Cookery Lesson #1

Ingredients for a stew:

Garlic, finely chopped
Onions, sliced and/or quartered

Carrots, chopped
Potatoes, chopped and parboiled
(any other root vegetable you fancy)
Celery, chopped

Couple of sprigs of thyme and rosemary tied together (or not)
2-3 bay leaves

Meat (beef, chicken, lamb, etc)

Stock/water
Wine

Directions for a stew:

1. Heat up some oil in a large-enough pot and brown the meat once oil is sizzling.

2. Transfer meat to a plate for the moment.

3. Heat up more oil if desired. Throw the chopped garlic into hot pot, wait till fragrant then add the onions.

4. When onions are soft, put meat back into the pot along with the vegetables, thyme and rosemary. Stir everything around so that it’s all mixed up, then stick bay leaves in.

5. Add enough stock/water and wine to about half the level of contents of pot, cover pot and let stew on low heat, stirring occasionally. Top up liquid with stock/water or wine, as you wish. I find the higher the wine to stock/water ratio the better, but that’s just me.

6. When everything is soft and tender, the stew is ready for eating. Serve with bread, rice or on its own.

let me just say that beef, carrots, celery, coconut milk, thai red curry paste and ang zhao (fermented red wine lees, or something equally unromantic-sounding – english is such a butchery at times) is an awesome combination.

the only thing more awesome than that right now would be beef satay and ketupat hot off the satay grill.

also, song que on kingsland road is THE PLACE for vietnamese food. mmmmm

i love how everything rises to this fever pitch and then suddenly retreats leaving a great big gaping emptiness where revision notes and textbooks used to be.

obviously naturre abhors a vacuum, but sleep alcohol and food fills that hole up pretty good. as does just pottering around in my pyjamas till 4 in the afternoon.

now it’s off into town to get, amongst other things, sesame oil, dried mushrooms, tau kee, tau hu and tau pok. oh, and maybe peanut sauce too if they have it (because i’m too lazy to make my own). i’m very excited about what i’m going to do with it all.

there shall be celebrating this weekend, squeezed in just before the 15 day window is up. i’ve told everyone to bring food or wine and mandarin oranges, so even if we run out of food, at least we’ll be drunk and our hands have something to do peeling oranges.

chocolate flavoured vitasoy here i come!

ok dudes.

so yesterday i had my property law and practice exam, and i blitzed through it like a house on fire and finished with half an hour to spare. half an hour. i thought i’d missed out a 25mark question so i had a full-on panic-flip attack, and then realised that i’m just much too intelligent for the exam. *smirk*

right.

and then we had hainanese chicken rice for dinner at the best friend’s. maaaaan i missed chicken rice. no one believed me when i said wee nam kee sells great chicken rice. everyone can tell you about boon tong kee, but that is so populist. i prefer my wee nam kee, thankyouverymuch. we had to make do with sambal oelek (from tesco’s no less, impressed c’est moi) with garlic and lime as a stand-in for real chicken rice chilli. like my grandma makes, a bottle of which is living in my fridge for special occasions. mmmmm…

and we made the chicken from scratch. none of that prima chicken rice paste nonsense. ok, well, not exactly we. i was sous chef, chopping up the garlic and ginger and eating goat’s cheese on jacob’s crackers in-between soaking the chicken in ice-cold water and giving them the best massage ever in sesame oil. but, without my assistance, it would never have happened. i am/was integral to the process, okayyy.

it’s such a shame that my boyfriend doesn’t eat meat. most of the great stuff i remember from my grandmother’s kitchen involves meat in one form or another, so you can say that it rather cramps my style. no matter, meat is not essential to south-east asian cooking. it’s time to find a recipe for kick-ass sayur lodeh.

rice is nice

being gluten- and lactose-intolerant, eating and drinking and grocery shopping is complicated.

most people don’t understand what gluten is, and so i simplify matters by telling them that i can’t eat wheat or flour. then they sort of blink really slowly and ask me to repeat myself.

but it’s not just wheat. it’s oats and barley and rye and a great big number of other grains that are suspect. gluten is the protein in grains that make the dough springy and spongy, so highly tensile bread products like bagels are basically gluten factories. even when it’s not in bread or bread-products, gluten still gets into everything somehow or other. even corn flakes and soya sauce.

and even though being lactose-intolerant is a much easier concept for people to understand, apart from big coffee chains and/or more upmarket places that cater to a more upmarket crowd, non-dairy milk is hard to come by if i’m thinking of drinking some coffee. furthermore, i’m not too big a fan of soy milk anymore, which makes the hunt for a cup of coffee with rice milk not made by me and which i’d be willing to pay good money for even harder.

it also makes being invited to dinner parties a nightmare, because i have no idea what they’re going to make. pasta? pizza? cous cous? falafel? noodles? gravy? sauce? cake? biscuits? custard? cream? ice cream? and i don’t think it’s polite to refuse food that someone’s cooked for me. and it makes me feel like a twat calling someone up the day before and telling them that i’m gluten- and lactose-intolerant and expect a special meal for myself.

it’s hard enough at my dinner parties to make separate dishes for non-/meat-eating guests and it’s just one ingredient. can you imagine if someone was making pasta in a cream sauce, with a chocolate cake for dessert, for 7 other people and i was the only one who had to eat something else?

anyway, as hard as it is, i’m rather thankful that up till now i’m only still intolerant of gluten and lactose, and not allergic. i won’t die or break out in hives or have a severe physically manifested reaction if i do eat things that contain gluten or lactose. i indulge in ice-cream sometimes, and i eat sandwiches for lunch when there’s nothing else available, and i really love pasta. it also means that whilst i might not be doing the best thing to my body and my hosts toilets, i don’t absolutely have to eat a special meal by myself when i go to dinner parties.

and i’m really lucky to be chinese and have a natural tendency towards the eating of rice and non-creamy things. the things i can do with rice. i eat it steamed, cold, warm, in salads, with other dishes, baked, in soup, as porridge, etc. i can eat rice for all 3 meals in a day.

it’s also probably a good thing that supermarkets are realising the potential (financially) of gluten- and lactose-free foods, and so i can get things like rice spaghetti, rice milk and gluten-free breads and flour quite easily. the organic shop round the corner also has a wide range of things that are gluten-/lactose-free.

but probably the best thing that comes out of all this is the fact that with these special dietary requirements, almost all convenience foods are no longer attractive to me because whilst they may look real pretty on the box, the ingredients list just makes me go ‘eurgh’ at the wheat flour and ‘eurgh’ at the milk and then ‘eeeurgh’ at the nutritional information panel. as a result, out of necessity, i buy lots of fresh ingredients and cook most of my own meals and end up eating pretty healthily incidentally.

put some meat on those bones

can i just say, that i absolutely love bak kut teh, and why i don’t make it more often since those spice-packs are so readily available, i really don’t know.

i’m still waiting for my rice to finish steaming, and for my pork-ribs to get tenderer, but i’ve had some sneaky sips and ohmygod i love love love!

the ribs are the biggest i’ve bought so far EVAR – they’re longer than my 15cm ruler – and i only just about managed to manipulate them into my cast-iron pot (i figured since i didn’t have a claypot, cast-iron would be an adequate replacement). i bought these ribs from a butcher at broadway market, and it’s highly likely that these are from a much older pig than those from the supermarkets. i’m quite pleased about that – not just because i get more rib, but i just like the thought of a more developed pig.

i scoured all the fruit and veg stalls at the market, but none of them stocked watercress (i know they’re not in season, not particularly popular in england, but still, a girl could hope.). that was a terrible disappointment, and a great gaping hole in my perfect pork-rib soup dish.

so i went to the toilets in The Dove and had a good cry.

no. i didn’t. instead i walked into broadway books and bought (1) my name is red, by orhan pamuk, (2) the mandarins, by simone de beauvoir and (3) freakonomics, by steven d. levitt and stephen j. dubner. half my book tokens used up, another £20 worth of books to go!

i really like broadway market on cold and bright saturdays. i like it even more with a cup of coffee, croissants and a paper.

soy long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night

this shit is scary!

i’ve known about the ability of soya to mimic hormones for a long time, but it never really registered as a health risk because i’m chinese and we eat tofu and drink tau huay and dip everything in soya sauce.

but fermented soy and non-fermented soy are two different things, eh? like wine and vinegar, potato and vodka, etc.

so, yeah. lactose- and gluten- intolerant as i am, i have had to switch to rice milk. and it’s surprisingly good. not as chalky as soy milk, and very light and easy to digest. i might have to try other brands, but so far i’ve been drinking Rice Dream Original, and it’s been pretty good-going for the last month or so.

the difficult thing is finding cafes and coffeeshops that serve rice milk, and also finding rice milk substitutes for cream and yoghurt, because there isn’t that big a market for such stuff (as compared to soy ones) since most people immediately choose soy over milk if they’re lactose-intolerant, and so most coffee places have the soy option, but nothing else. same story with cream and custard and yoghurt.

i think i’ll have to visit the organic shop to check out their full rice milk selection, and if their collection seems paltry, the internet is my next best friend.

someone stop me, please

if i know that i have a gluten-intolerance problem, why do i go ahead and torture myself by eating a salami pizza? and a egg-mayo sandwich? and chunky bread with pumpkin-sweet potato-and-tomato soup?*

why???

because i’m greedy, that’s why. and because i never ever remember how badly i can feel after all that gluten stockpiles in my system.

right now it’s all headache, stomach flip-flops, lethargy and general bleagh-ness. not too clever, huh.

i’d really like to just crawl back into bed and pretend all that eating never happened. but alas, corporate failure and alternative rescue procedures are on the agenda today, so i’ll just limp along and hope some of the revision goes in and stays in.

and hope all that gluten-induced disgustingness goes away soon. or that by some magical spell, everything that contains gluten in it disappears and is replaced by gluten-free alternatives.

oh how i’d love to live in a gluten-free world.

*note: over the course of two days, not all at the same time. i might be greedy, but not that greedy.

the simple life

simple things make the days go by so quickly.

who knew that doing nothing in particular would lead to saturday, and then sunday, and then monday and the start of revision?

i never got down to being touristy. i spent a lot of the time just hanging out with the best friend, eating good home-made food and grocery shopping – because we’re completely in love with veg+fruit stalls, pound shops and giant supermarkets. i spent some time in my balcony, potting things and replanting others, sowing seeds for summer crops. i finished reading the library books i got out on monday by thursday, and have to go back for more tomorrow. i’ve also learnt how to roast pumpkins.

i don’t thnk i’m going to make it to st.pauls cathedral tomorrow either. apparently we have a dim sum appointment in chinatown at 1pm, which will take up most of the day, and probably the evening too if you include the post-lunch pub trip.

there’s a brick lane documentary that clashes with csi: new york later this evening, but seeing as i’ve missed so many episodes of it already, i think the documentary will go well with vegetable curry for dinner.

the best friend reveals many things to me, some of which surprise me. most, however, are the usual things that come with not seeing each other for most part of the year, and are heart-warmingly normal and boring and everyday.

because, really, it’s the normal, boring, everyday things that i missed the most.

i read, i slept, i slept somemore

i think they should extend reading week to become reading fortnight.

i’ve so far already missed two of my morning lectures and i really can’t be arsed to go for the seminar at 2.

perhaps it’s the third-year boredom setting in – i know what they want, it’s so predictable, and i also already know what i’m gonna get so just let me get on with all the other things in my life.

in other news, i think spring is finally about to arrive. there have been showers. not drizzle, but proper rain, though not proper proper like monsoon season kind of rain. but still, shan’t complain.

i think to celebrate my skiving, i will go to the supermarket and buy ingredients to make me a pot of beef/lamb stew.