Monday 2 March 2015

Chicken chow mein

Yes, it's supposed to be chow mein and this is Chop Suey.   
It's a great song so fucking sue me


While I've been doing this blog I've done recipes from various parts of the world, but so far not from China, as such. And that's not going to change with this recipe, since this is yet another bastardised/Anglicised variation on an authentic regional dish. OK, it's Chinese, in that the ingredients are oriental but, like chicken tikka masala in Indian restaurants, it's basically thrown together to appease the delicate pallets of us poor, fragile westerners. There's no sharks' fin, no rotten smelling durian fruit, no bird's nest composed of dried avian spit (or other exotic ingredient regarded as a delicacy in the orient). Not that there's anything wrong with these ingredients from a culinary point of view per se. Tastes vary around the world and what one culture find a delicacy other people find repugnant. I mean, nobody east of the Danube in their right mind would even consider bringing a lump of rancid, congealed, mouldy milk (or "blue cheese" as we refer to it in Western Europe) anywhere near their mouth, never mind eat it. Or there is surströmming arguably the most disgusting "delicacy" in the world, which is a tinned form of effectively rotten fish originating in Sweden. On the other hand, and taking a broader view, the demand for sharks' fin in the east and in oriental restaurants all over the world is seriously depleting the global population of sharks. This is because sharks' fin soup is a luxury dish and a burgeoning middle class in countries like China, Singapore and Malaysia, keen to show off their wealth and status, has increased demand.

I've eaten sharks' fin soup. It tasted delicious. Not because of the fin but because of the ingredients that went to make the broth of the soup. The fin itself added fuck all to the flavour, only being present as strips of slightly chewy gristle floating in the broth.

This raises an obvious question. If it doesn't have any taste of its own, why is sharks' fin so popular? It's so highly prized because, according to traditional Chinese medicine, it's supposed to impart sexual potency. So sharks are being hunted to extinction because businessmen can't get a stiffy. That is bad enough, but there is actually no evidence that sharks' fin is in any way an effective remedy for erectile dysfunction. In fact, since sharks are apex predators, they accumulate toxic metals like mercury in their tissues which can lead to all manner of health problems including sterility and erectile dysfunction in men. Ahh, the irony. Personally, if any bloke wants to show his social status or how magnificent his tumescence is, I think he should buy a bigger car, shag his secretary then just fuck off, and leave sharks alone. Or try Viagra.

Dragging myself back on track, noodles are huge in east Asia. They are the perfect foodstuff: filling, cheap and versatile. They are popular street food, taste fantastic and really keep these countries running.You can have fried dishes like this or soups with noodles in. In fact most eastern Asian countries have their own versions of a noodle dishes: pad Thai in Thailand, mee goreng and laksa in Malaysia, Japanese udon. They are the origin of pasta, brought back from China by Marco Polo, apparently. Like shark fin, they also taste largely of fuck all. This means they need a well-flavoured sauce (or broth in soup recipes) and other ingredients to turn them into something worth eating.

This is a really easy dish to make. The most time-consuming part is preparing the ingredients. Chopping carrots into matchstick-sized pieces, slicing peppers into strips and finely chopping ginger are a collective pain in the arse, but they cook quicker and the results are worthwhile.

INGREDIENTS
150g dry egg noodles
300g chicken fillet cut into strips
2 tbsp light soy
black pepper
3 or 4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 piece ginger (about 3 cm), finely chopped
1 small bunch spring onions, cut diagonally into pointy sticks
1 small-medium carrot, cut into matchstick sized strips
1 red pepper, cut into thin strips
100g washed bean sprouts (about a handful)
200g mushrooms, sliced
2 tbsp vegetable oil (not olive, see notes!)

Sauce
2tbsp dark soy
1 tbsp sweet chilli sauce (the thick dipping kind)
3 tbsp dry sherry 
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tsp sugar

RECIPE
Put the chicken in a bowl and pour the light soy over it and add a liberal grind of pepper.

Mix them well so they are well coated in the soy and put in the fridge to marinate for a couple of hours or so.

Boil up a large pan of water and add the noodles.

Simmer gently until they are soft, about 5 minutes (depends on their thickness). Drain them and set aside.

Make up the sauce by adding the dark soy, chilli sauce, sherry, sesame oil and sugar to a cup and mix well then set aside.

Add half the oil to a frying pan or wok and heat until it's very hot.

Stir fry the chicken until it's cooked (about 10 minutes).

Remove the meat with a slotted spoon, leaving the oil plus any juices from the cooked chicken in the pan.

Add the remaining oil and the throw in the garlic and ginger and stir fry for about a minute.

Throw in the carrot, pepper, spring onion and mushroom and stir fry for 5-10 minutes.

Add the bean sprouts and carry on stir frying for another couple of minutes.

Return the chicken to the pan and keep moving on the heat to make sure everything is warmed.

Refresh the noodles by running them under the cold tap, drain well and add them to the pan.

Try to mix up everything and once the noodles are warmed through add the sauce mixture, and the best way I've found to do this is to gently turn them over like you might do when dressing a salad.

I would add a warning that it is a bit of a ballache to make sure that the noodles are mixed with all the other ingredient.

NOTES
Use a neutral-flavoured oil for this, like sunflower or soya, but NOT olive oil which has too much flavour and is definitely not Chinese and doesn't tolerate the high heat you need to stir fry.

The chilli sauce adds a little spicy edge to the sauce as well as a bit of sweetness and stickiness. It should be the Thai sweet type as made by the likes of Blue Dragon or Encona. These aren't very hot, but if you really can't tolerate chilli, leave it out. Then again, if you do have an aversion to chilli, why are you using a cookery blog which has a significant Scoville rating in almost every recipe?

You can put lots of different vegetables in this. I've done the same recipe with combinations including mange tout, sugar snap peas, green beans, baby sweet corn, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts. They ought to be fairly crunchy, but otherwise it's up to you. You could also make it with any other meat like beef, pork or prawn. You could even omit meat altogether and make it vegetarian.

Recipes in Chinese cookery books suggest using Chinese rice wine, or sherry as an alternative. The sherry works perfectly well, but it needs to be a dry type. Something like a fino is what you need but definitely not Harvey's fucking Bristol Cream

Like rice, soy sauce is best bought from Asian supermarkets where you can get a huge bottle for the same price as you might pay for a tiny one in your usual place.

No pictures on this entry yet. I'll take some next time I make this.

This isn't intended to be a racist blog. The rant about sharks' fin is a rant against general fuckwittedness anywhere it raises its head in the human race. All of these superstition-based remedies are as idiotic as one another. For "Chinese traditional medicine" you could just as easily read "homeopathy" or "astrology". If this sounds cynical, I can't help it. I'm a Sagittarian, it's in my nature


Friday 6 February 2015

Tomato pilaf

You might have noticed that I use some of the same ingredients in a lot of my recipes. Tomatoes are one of them. And why not? The press is full of stuff about how great they are, full of antioxidants like lycopene. Basically it's supposed to stop you getting cancer. Better still, tomatoes taste fucking great with pretty much everything.

Mind you, some pseudo-scientific fuckwits claim that all nightshade vegetables, of which tomatoes are one (a group also including peppers, chillies, potatoes and aubergines) are a bad thing to eat for a variety of reasons. These include the claim that they contain a toxic alkaloid, that tinned tomatoes contain a man-made toxin and that they can cause osteoporosis. This is all utter bullshit without any foundation in reality, let alone science, and I'm not giving these hysteria-promoting morons the privilege of a link.

Of course, not all tomatoes are good. It took George Clooney a good few years to get over appearing in this



INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 large clove of garlic, crushed
1 tsp tomato puree
150g fresh tomatoes, peeled
350 ml vegetable stock (made by adding half a vegetable stock cube to 350ml of warm water)
200g rice
Salt
Pepper

RECIPE
Heat the oil in the a heavy-based pan and add the onion and garlic. Fry them until soft, about 5 minutes. Stir in the tomato puree and add the tomatoes and stir well. Add the rice, stir so that it's coated with the tomato mixture then pour in the stock plus salt and pepper to taste. Heat until it's boiling, turn down the heat and cover for 10 minutes or more, until the rice has absorbed the liquid. Serve.

This makes enough for two-three adults.

Tomato pilaf served with pork afelia

NOTES
No pictures of the preparation for this entry. It's rice that's a sort of reddy-orangey colour, what do you need a frigging picture of?

It doesn't need any fancy rice. I used Thai jasmine rice which is what I use for most things. It needs to be quite a moist dish though.

Peeling tomatoes is a regal pain the arse. What you do is pour boiling water into a heatproof jug then cut a slit in the skin of your tomato before throwing it in the boiling water for 20 seconds or so. This should make the skin pucker and shrivel up so it looks similar in colour and texture to David Dickinson. It then becomes easy to peel off. One or two are OK, but doing a lot of tomatoes takes ages and becomes more difficult as the water cools. You could probably get away with using some tinned tomatoes, but you'd have to add less water.

This is tomato PILAF, not to be confused with Edith PIAF. though if it were about her, I daresay she may have changed her signature torch song to "Non, je ne regrette riz"
(a little linguistic humour there)

This goes really well with something like my pork afelia which I also recently posted

Monday 12 January 2015

Afelia Pork

INTRODUCTION
As you may have guessed, I have a very British love of the double entendre (and, yes, the irony of something as British as football hooliganism and binge drinking having a French name does not escape me). To really enjoy a good double entendre you do have to need it to be accompanied by the appropriate sound and all the double entendres in this blog update will have a convenient player to give you a sound from that British institution, the Carry On films, to enhance your smutty enjoyment.



Cookery is chocker-block with double entendres from your coq-au-vin...



...to your spotted dick.



Afelia pork is another, though slightly disappointing in the double entendre front. Obviously it would be sound even more rude if it was made with steak and was called afelia rump.



This double entendre-rich blog entry builds on my previous one for pulled pork, though that didn't benefit from the sounds. That recipe is one of the rash of similar dishes that have been doing the rounds for various cuts of meat for a while now, and I can see why they are so popular as I really like my meat pulled.



If that sounds appealing, do look it up. You'll find my entry very satisfying.



INGREDIENTS
1 heaped tbsp whole coriander seeds
Juice of 1 lemon (works out about 2 tbsp)
2 tbsp dry white wine
3 large cloves of garlic, crushed
Salt and pepper
500g lean pork meat in 2-3cm cubes (tenderloin is good)
1 tbsp olive oil 

Meat mixed with the marinade, ready to go in the fridge to steep

RECIPE
Crush the coriander seeds in a pestle and mortar. Yes, I'm THAT kind of cookery prick who has a pestle and mortar. Crushing them between two plates also works if you don't happen to be a foodie wanker.

Mix the crushed seeds with the lemon juice, wine, garlic, salt and pepper and half of the olive oil, then mix well.

Add the pork, and stir so that it's well covered by the liquid, cover and put it in the fridge to marinate for at least a couple of hours. This allows the marinade to tenderise the meat as well as making it taste nicer.

Be aware that your fridge will smell like Dracula's worst nightmare with the garlic.


Pork on the hob, cooking


Heat the rest of the oil in a frying pan or wok on the hob and add the meat plus any remaining  marinade and keep stirring on a medium heat until the pork is cooked, about 20 minutes.

The liquid will reduce down to an almost syrupy consistency.

Serve with roasted peppers and perhaps a rice dish, like my recipe for tomato pilaf.

And here it is ready to eat

NOTES
You could make quite a feast out of this with a starter and dessert. As a starter, a nice soup and it doesn't come any nicer than the wet, fishy mouthful of clam chowder.



A good dessert to have with this dish would be something fruity, perhaps pears poached in port, since there isn't anything nicer than a big juicy pear.



This recipe doesn't have any butter in it, but I do like to stick a knob in when I'm cooking.



Afelia is usually a dish made with red wine from Cyprus but this is Delia Smith's version made with white. You can always rely on Delia but I'm a bigger fan of Fanny Craddock's recipes as well. Delia's are great, but I love the taste of Fanny's.



My wife can't think of double entendres so I had to give her one.



  Thanks to http://www.carryon.org.uk/sounds_frm.htm who I've linked to for all the Carry On sounds

Monday 10 November 2014

Lemon pilau rice

Tim Rice, as part of the award-winning writing team with Andrew Lloyd Webber, was the one that didn't resemble Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars and the least tax-averse and also the one that wrote the words. He wrote lyrics for Evita, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar. He's got fuck all to do with this recipe, other than being called Rice.

Cooking rice can be a regal pain in the arse to get right. You can use loads of water and drain it, but lose all the flavour of the tasty things you put in. The better way is to use just the right amount of water that gets soaked up and keeps all the tasty stuff on the rice, but it's hard to get the balance right between over-cooking and under-cooking.The proportion of water and rice in this recipe just about hits the right balance, though rice does vary, depending on the type and even between different batches of the same type.

INGREDIENTS
1 mug* of basmati rice
1 1/3 mugs of water 
juice and zest of 1 lemon
5 cardamom pods
5 cloves
1 bay leaf
5cm stick of cinnamon
1/2 tsp whole black peppercorns
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 star of anise
1 tsp tumeric
1/2 tsp salt
Yeah, yeah. It's another picture of some spices. It's quite pretty. Get the fuck over it
From the top: lemon zest, bay leaf, fennel seeds, cinnamon, tumeric, star anise, cardamoms, cloves and salt in the middle

*The volume of water you need depends on the volume of rice you're using so it's easier to use the same container to measure both instead of weighing the rice

RECIPE
First it's a good idea to wash the rice to make it less stodgy when it's finished. Pour the rice into a big pan and fill the pan with water. Give it a swirl and drain out the water. Do this three more times, pouring the rice out into a sieve the final time.

Pour the oil into a heavy based pan and heat. Add the lemon zest and the spices and gently fry for a minute. Add the rinsed rice and stir until the all the rice grains look yellow. Add the water plus the lemon juice.

Heat gently until it boils then immediately turn down the heat as low as possible and cover tightly with the lid. Leave it for 20 minutes then turn off the heat completely.

When ready to serve, fluff up the rice. Before you do that though, it's not a bad idea to get rid of the whole spices that have floated to the top of the cooking rice. Nothing spoils a good curry more than lacerating the inside of your cheek on a sharp piece of cinnamon bark.

It depends on how big the mug is, but this makes plenty for two adults.


Yes, it's another blurred picture. I've got a crap phone but the rice does look nice and golden

NOTES

If you've done this right, the rice should be nice and fluffy and neither a sloppy, stodgy mess (overcooked) or like small pieces of grit (undercooked). If there is any left, it can be stored in the fridge for a day or frozen for longer, once it's cooled. When you do reheat it, make sure it's hotter than a bombardier beetle's arse after participating in a chilli eating competition the day before to kill off any nasty bugs. If it is a sloppy mess, it will be even worse the next day so better to throw it out, as nobody likes sloppy seconds.

Admit it, you never get phrases like "sloppy seconds" in any of Rick Stein's programmes

Monday 3 November 2014

Butternut squash curry

Despite resembling a large, cream-coloured sex toy, the butternut squash is one of the most delicious vegetables you can get and it makes fucking great curries. This also means that, yes, I'm doing another vegetable dish. The Indian subcontinent provides some of the absolute best vegetarian cuisine in the world, which isn't too surprising given it's the place that Buddhism started. If there was stuff like this to eat all the time I could happily remain vegetarian for the rest of my life. Well, almost, until I start jonesing for pork scratchings, a juicy steak or even just some roast chicken flavoured crisps because sometimes a tub of fucking dhal just won't cut it.

INGREDIENTS

Spices for the curry
Clockwise from the leaf: Bay, cloves, cardamom, onion seeds, black pepper, coriander, mustard seed, salt, cinnamon and star anise in the middle

2 tbsp vegetables oil
1 medium onion, sliced
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 star of whole anise
1 piece of cinnamon, about 4 cm
4 green cardamon pods
4 cloves
1 tsp black mustard seeds
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/2 tsp onion seeds
1 bayleaf
1 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp chilli flakes
half a butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into big (2-4 cm) chunks
1 green pepper, in 1-2 cm dice
150 ml water
2tsp tomato puree

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a pan and add the onion, garlic and spices and stir fry until the onion is soft (5-10 minutes). Throw in the pepper and squash and fry for another 5 minutes. Add the water and tomato puree, cover and leave the curry to stew for 30-60 minutes, whenever the squash is tender.

This makes enough for two adults as an accompaniment, leaving enough for a lunch the next day. Serve it with rice and/or Indian bread, on its own or with other curries (like my profanity-laced chicken tikka curry)

Nothing says dinner like a pan full of curry, even a crap, blurred picture of one

NOTES
I did the recipe with butternut squash, but any other pumpkin-like vegetables will work, including pumpkin itself. Just the thing if you get pissed off with the enormous fucking mountain of pumpkin flesh you end up with at Hallowe'en when carving a lantern.

You would be right to anticipate that a recipe I do sometime following Hallowe'en will be some shit with pumpkin in it for this exact reason. Hey, this is Sweary Chef, not Jamie Oliver, Delia Smith or Genghis fucking Ramsay. I do the recipes I have the ingredients for at the time, take shit pictures on my phone then write them up, usually libelling, or else being generally unpleasant about other, more accomplished people in the process. I'm basically Fanny Cradock with a penis.