Rhubarb Triangle 1: Hot and Sour Soup With Chicken and Rhubarb

50 Shades of Rhubarb

I live in West Yorkshire, in the heart (actually, it's really more of an apex) of The Rhubarb Triangle, so called because they grow arguably the world's best forced rhubarb here which comes into season in February, around the time I'm writing this blog entry. We are so proud of it in these parts that weeven have an entire festival dedicated to it. You see, although we might not have much to be proud of, what we are proud of will fuck up your kidneys and kill you if you eat the wrong bit (how fucking Northern is that?). OK, so rhubarb's not got the risk of fugu, but it's still fucking great to eat: long, deep pink stems with a unique tartness.

It's a traditional British thing to have your rhubarb in sweet dishes, like rhubarb crumble for example, but if you've read much of this blog you'll know that's not my style. Where's the spice, the chilli, the fucking profanity in that? No, I decided to get some rhubarb at the Festival and do my own sweary rhubarb triangle of three recipes, starting with this hot and sour soup. It's an Asian-based dish that I'm adding a bit of northern grit to*. Stick this one up your arse, Jamie! Fusion recipes? I shit 'em!

Hot and sour is one of the common soups you get from your average local Chinese takeaway in the UK, though usually in the UK the version we get is about as authentically Chinese as the late, great Christopher Lee yellowing up to play Fu Manchu (yes, this actually happened, for five films in the 60s). It's a great dish all the same, and you can put just about anything in it. So much so, in fact, that you do wonder if, sometimes, the less ethical establishments might gather the ingredients from the sweepings of the floor round where they prepare their food. Anyway, the point is that the throw-together nature of hot and sour soup, along with the sourness that gives it its name and the touch of sweetness it has, means that it really does suit the tart flavour of rhubarb really well.

TIMING
Preparation: 10-15 minutes chopping plus1 hour to prepare the stock base
Cooking: 30 minutes

INGREDIENTS
Stock base
2 litres water
3 or 4 chicken thighs with bone in
1 thumb-sized lump of root ginger,
1 stick of celery
half an onion, quartered
4 cloves of garlic (whole)
1 tsp whole black pepper corns

Soup
1 tbsp vegetable oil 
1 carrot cut into julienne strips
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, finely chopped
100g mushrooms, sliced
3 or 4 spring onions, sliced
2 stalks of rhubarb, leaves removed and thinly sliced
2 red chillies, finely chopped (including seeds)
4 tbsp vinegar
5 tbsp light soy sauce
2 tbsp sesame oil
4 tbsp dry sherry
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp cornflour
2 eggs, lightly beaten

Vegies chopped
(clockwise from top left: ginger, mushrooms, spring onions, red chilli, rhubarb, carrot.
Oh, and that's my favourite knife at the top of the chopping board)

RECIPE
Put the water in a big pan and start heating it on the hob.

Meanwhile, remove the skin from the chicken thighs and throw this and the thighs they came from into the pan, along with the other stock ingredients.

Heat to a rolling boil, cover and simmer for 60 minutes.

Remove the skinless thighs and shred the meat off the bones and set it aside.

Strain the stock and return it to the big pan.

In a small pan heat the vegetable oil then add the garlic, ginger and carrot to cook for a couple of minutes before adding the mushroom and cooking gently for a further 2.

Add the sauteed ginger, carrot, garlic and mushrooms, as well as the spring onions, rhubarb and chillies to the stock and allow to mix for a couple of minutes.

If only pictures had smells

Add the rest of the ingredients, apart from the cornflour and egg, to the pan and allow it to simmer gently for 15-20 minutes.

Add a little water to the cornflour in a cup and mix into a thin paste. Pour into the soup, stirring constantly.

Stir the soup so it swirls and dribble the beaten egg into the pan to make thin strands of cooked egg as it meets the boiling broth.

Serve up and enjoy. This made enough to make at least 5 hearty lunches or is a good starter for 6 people.

NOTES
*Despite being regarded as Northern as cloth caps and whippets, rhubarb actually originates in China and has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for literally thousands of year so, technically, this isn't actually a fusion recipe at all. It took the West a further couple of millenia to get to the stage of civilisation where we had developed custard in order that we could claim rhubarb as our own.

Where I mention "julienne strips" for the carrots, it's another wanky foody word for "matchstick sized pieces".

The vinegar used in this recipe would traditionally be rice vinegar if it was an authentic Chinese soup. I've never bought any rice vinegar in my life and wouldn't know what it looked or tasted like even if someone rectally assaulted me with a bottle of it. I'd usually use white wine or maybe cider vinegar instead. However, in the instance I wrote up for this blog I discovered, after buying the rest of the ingredients for the soup that I needed, that I'd ran out of wine vinegar and had to make do with some white pickling vinegar I had in the store cupboard. The soup still tasted fucking great so it's not that critical what form your acetic acid comes in. I'd probably draw the line at malt vinegar, mind and balsamic vinegar probably wouldn't work nor be worth the expense. The same thing goes for the sherry. In an authentic version it would be rice wine. As my local supermarket is in Yorkshire and not Canton, a dry sherry is (apparently, according to the cookbooks) a suitable alternative.

The word rhubarb is apparently spoken repeatedly by background actors on TV as a non-descript word to show them talking without actually saying anything, much the same way that politicians do when they're evading questions, the vacuous twats.

I couldn't do a recipe about rhubarb without mentioning the fantastic silent comedy short by Eric Sykes from 1980 called "Rhubarb Rhubarb" which I've embedded below. It's hilarious and (assuming you appreciate the ethos of this blog) you won't regret watching it, though it has got nothing to do with food.

Look out for further rhubarb-related japery in the next two recipes of my Rhubarb Triangle

Beef and Orange Tagine

I mentioned when I did a previous tagine recipe that I really have a problem with sweet fruit in savoury recipes. I then completely had an arse-about-face moment and subsequently wrote up recipes for pineapple sambal and pineapple fried rice. However, that doesn't count because the sambal is a relish and the rice is an accompaniment. My blog, my rules. And that same rule is getting bent just a little bit more now with this with its actual orange content. Well, at least it's not apricots, prunes or raisins that not only don't deserve a place in any dish, savoury or sweet, but actually ought to be projected into the heart of the fucking sun because they are the very stones from the devil's own infernal gall bladder.

Regular guest star of this blog, Rick Stein, usually twats on endlessly about how he's made such-and-such a dish for years, after being taught how to cook it when he was staying at a chateau in France or something. Another famous chef, Nigel Slater, also seems to only cook things that he ate as a child just how his Mum made it. Recipes all done and dusted, all ingredients bought and prepared. However, in sweary cooking, you sometimes have to busk it a little, or, in the words of Blackadder, "Needs must when the devil vomits in your kettle". I'd planned on cooking up a nice lamb tagine but, could I find any lamb in my local shops? Could I bollocks! I bought some beef and decided to improvise this and it turned out quite well.

TIMING
Preparation 15-20 minutes
Cooking 3 hours

INGREDIENTS
2tbsp olive oil
400g cubed stewing beef
1 medium to large onion, roughly chopped
3 large cloves garlic, crushed
Zest and juice of one orange
1 courgette, sliced
2 large tsp ras-el-hanout
1 carrot, sliced
1 tbsp tomato puree
pinch saffron
250 ml water
1 chicken stock cube

RECIPE
 Heat the oil in a flame proof casserole dish or tagine on the hob.

Add the beef and brown before removing with a slotted spoon

Turn down the heat, add the onion and garlic to the pot and allow to sweat for 10 minutes.

Throw in the carrot and carry on frying gently for another 5 minutes

Add the courgette and ras-al-hanout for a minute return the meat to the dish then add the rest of the ingredients.

Mix well, replace the pot lid and put in an oven at 150 for three hours, checking every hour or so.

Add a little more water if the dish starts to get a bit dry.

Serve it up with something like couscous, with or without a nice Moroccan flat bread

NOTES
As I said in my preamble, I had planned to make a lamb tagine but I couldn't get any lamb. I got beef and then figured orange would go well with beef and worked from there. This recipe may actually work OK with lamb but I've not tried it.

Ras-el-hanout is one of those wanky-sounding spice mixes that are listed in ingredients of recipes like this when they appear in the Grauniad. I'm reliably informed that this means "top of the shop" in Arabic because it contains the best ingredients they sell in the local spice shop. In actuality it's essentially a variation on a mild curry powder, with an emphasis on aromatic rather than hot spices It's not that different to garam masala (yes, I realise that is another wanky-sounding spice mix, but it's a little less obscure), though if you do use garam masala, this dish will taste a lot like your regular curries.

You could blend your own R-e-H and there are lots of suggestions of which spices to use online, though I bought some from my fave Asian supermarket Mullaco which I swear by. Actually, given the nature of my cooking style, I swear by pretty much fucking everything

Whilst I actually enjoyed this dish, Mrs Sweary thought it was perhaps had a little too much orange, so you might consider halving the amount of orange zest. On the other hand I suspect Mrs Sweary is actually one of the crows from the Kia-Ora advert below. It's actually quite difficult to believe something like this was not only acceptable on UK TV in the 80s, and yet seems to be remembered with some fondness today. It's actually more racist that a UKIP member's wet dream. Whatever, the point is my beef tagine with orange is too orangey for Mrs Sweary. It's just for me and my dog.

I'll be your dog
More offensive black stereotypes than you can shake a burning cross at. But, hey, it's just to sell juice

Admit it, this the first cooking blog that has used the word "vomits" that you have read.

Potato Gregg's Last Stand: Tandoori style potato curry

All good things come to an end and so do potatoes bearing vague resemblance to celebrity greengrocers, so it's time to make him useful. Well, I couldn't let him just putrefy into a mouldy, slimy mess, could I? It would do him a disservice to make something boring with him so I decided to make this great curry. It's what he would have wanted.

 Alas, poor Potato Gregg.

I knew him, Horatio

Really, the potato is taken for granted, especially in the UK. Chips (and I did mention the British obsession with the fucking chip previously), mash and the horrendously bland, plain boiled old potatoes were the accompaniment to much of the nutrition in my formative years. I mean chips are OK and mash is great if made right (it rarely was back then), but the plain boiled potatoes were just so fucking bland. Serving them up like that is just such a waste of a really versatile vegetable. Let me count the ways. There are crisps which come close to the very zenith of the art of potato cookery, but nobody I know makes their own crisps. You can have them baked, sauteed, roasted, or get exotic and go for something like hasselback, duchess, dauphinoise and, let's face it, you know if it's got a French name it's going to have a good 50% extra on the price in a lot of restaurants. Alternatively, incorporate your spuds in a stew or casserole for them to braise and they not only absorb the flavour of what they're cooking in, but actually enhance it.

There is a lot of bad press about potatoes as being full of carbohydrate and therefore amongst certain healthy/faddy diet circles (yes, adherents to the Paleolithic diet, I'm looking at you as I mentioned previously, you gullible twats) they rank up there with the jism of Satan himself as a food to avoid. However, it's a little known fact that potatoes, before the global transport network and advances in cultivation made pretty much every vegetable available all year round, were one of the major sources of vitamin C in gloomy Northern Europe in the winter months. Indeed, there is actually more vitamin C in a packet of salt and vinegar crisps than in a fresh apple. Well, I say there is, but I've not checked that fact so it might be bollocks.

Thing is, potatoes are just so fucking versatile and one of the best ways to use them is in curries where they can be a main ingredient in their own right.

INGREDIENTS
½ tsp ground tumeric
½ tsp onion seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp tandoori spice
½ tsp paprika
½ tsp salt
pinch chilli flakes
1 small onion, sliced
2 large cloves garlic, crushed
400g peeled potatoes in 2cm cubes
300ml water
100g fresh tomatoes, peeled
2 tbsp vegetable oil 

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a heavy pan and fry the spices for a minute. Throw in the onion and garlic and cook until the onion is transparent, stirring frequently.

Add the potatoes and keep stirring for 10 minutes to par-cook them and give them a nice coating of spice mix. Add the tomatoes, stir and cook for another couple of minutes before adding the water.

Bring the pan to the boil, cover and leave to cook for twenty to thirty minutes, when the potato should be tender.

This is plenty for three or four people as an accompaniment to another curry, or is substantial enough to be served on its own with rice and/or bread. Like most curries, any leftovers taste better as lunch the next day

Served up with a chicken curry, pilau rice and naan bread

NOTES
So, goodbye then, Potato Gregg. There may be other guest appearances in the future.

This is yet another vegetarian/vegan dish. It's great on its own but it makes a great part of a thali along with some of my other vegie curries and accompaniments like baingan tamatar and butternut squash curry.

I made this with old potatoes in this instance, but making it with new potatoes also works really well.

Broccoli and cashew pilaf

"Know who I love? That James Bond. Movie heroes don't come tougher than him. Everything he did was thanks to broccoli and, me being a greengrocer, I know all about broccoli Yum, yum, yum! Apples and fackin' pears"
Actually, Potato Gregg, I think you're getting confused about Albert "Cubby" Broccoli. He wasn't actually a vegetable. He was the film producer responsible for the James Bond franchise.

Broccoli is actually quite a tasty vegetable considering it's often touted as a "superfood", which is usually a synonym for "unevidenced bollocks propagated by people who's grasp of science is obtained from Frankenstein films or somewhere really unbelievable, like the Daily Mail". In the case of broccoli, however, there is actually some evidence to suggest that it does, as a cruciferous vegetable, have a high content of some compounds research suggests may be beneficial in preventing cancer, plus various antioxidants and is a source of various minerals and vitamins, so eating it is a good thing.

It's the bête noire of many children who generally hate it. Sweary Jr actually quite likes it, probably because it makes him break wind and there is nothing Sweary Jr (or Sweary Sr for that matter) thinks is more funny than farting.






"Bodily functions don't get any funnier than farting"


Oh, for fuck's sake, Potato Gregg, this is getting tedious. Please get another catch phrase or you're going to be featuring as an ingredient in my next recipe.

Anyway, despite its virtuous qualities, it's quite difficult to incorporate broccoli into recipes. It's good on its own as part of a Sunday roast, but in other things? OK, there's broccoli and Stilton soup and from Chinese takeaways you get it with beef and oyster sauce but not much else. Then there's this, a recipe that I've been making for a long time which makes great use of broccoli, pairing it with cashews plus a little spice to make a satisfying rice dish. It's a great accompaniment to anything from the Mediterranean area, be it South  European, Asian or North African. It's also good for anyone wanting a wheat-free alternative to cous cous.

INGREDIENTS
1 mug of decent quality dried rice (works out at about 200g)
½ a vegetable stock cube
75g cashew nuts
2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 tsp ground cumin
1 cinnamon stick (about 10cm long)
Black pepper
150g broccoli, broken up into bite-size florets

TIMING
Preparation: 15 minutes
Cooking: 15-20 minutes

RECIPE
Put the rice in a heavy pan and wash it in a couple of changes of water. Drain well and return to the pan and add 1½ times the volume of water as rice. Crumble in the half stock cube and stir well before heating to boiling, turning down the heat as low as possible and covering for 15-20 minutes. When it's ready, the liquid should be fully absorbed leaving nice, fluffy rice.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a deep frying pan or wok and throw in the cashews and brown them by stirring or tossing regularly for 5 minutes or so, then remove with a slotted spoon.

Add the onion, garlic and spices to the hot oil and sauté until the onions are transparent, about 10 minutes. Add the broccoli and stir fry for another 10 minutes or so until tender. If the mix gets dry add a splash of water.

Throw in the fried cashews and the cooked rice. Mix well and serve.

This recipe makes easily enough for a couple of adults and goes well with something like my recipe for pork afelia or perhaps stuffat tal fenek


NOTES
This is the second pilaf I've done in the blog after my tomato pilaf a few months back.

The word pilaf is derived from the Turkish word "pilav" which is in turn derived (by way of Persian) from the Hindi pulao or pilau.

I know I twat on about this every time I do a rice dish, but do use good rice like Thai jasmine or Basmati, and not that American long grain shit they sell on the same shelf in the supermarket. The rice is the main part of this recipe, so bland, tasteless polystyrene-textured grains just make it not worth the bother. It is the difference between a pilaf like this being something you'd be proud to serve your parents and something you'd serve your parents once you discover they're leaving the house to a local donkey sanctuary.

I don't put any salt in this recipe since stock cubes contain an awful lot.

This could be the last we see of Potato Gregg for a time as I think there is a risk of this blog turning into a ventriloquist act which, though it may be unique in terms of cooking (if you don't count Fanny Craddock and Johnnie), there's probably a good reason for that. On the other hand, I would have paid good money to see the late Keith Harris and Orville do a cookery show where Orville's nappy comes into its own when Keith mentions he's going to be making an orange sauce.

 

Keith Harris and Orville
I wish I could fry...

Stuffat Tal-Fenek, Maltese rabbit stew

See, only a very vague resemblance

First of all, I've decided that all this cooking malarkey is a difficult job to do on my own so I could do with a hand. Please allow me to introduce  my new assistant, Potato Gregg. He's a potato who happens to bear a fleeting resemblance to Cockney reformed football hooligan-cum-modern day greengrocer Gregg Wallace. Potato Gregg will be assisting in my preparation and chipping in to this blog with snippets of wisdom and culinary tips.

"Mr Potato Head doesn't get tougher than this! Cor blimey! Apples 'n' fackin' pears!"

Indeed he doesn't, Potato Gregg. Let's get on with the recipe, shall we?

Despite them being a widespread pest because they breed, well, like rabbits, we don't do much with rabbit in this country. No, because we're a nation of "animal lovers" and the little bunnies are just so cute. I mean, so are lambs, calves and piglets but they don't usually live in your garden (well, unless you're a farmer or small-holder) or indeed your living room (well, unless you get off on that sort of thing) before you eat them. And let's not forget the place of the rabbit in our culture: Peter Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, Brer Rabbit, Watership Down. Then again there's also Frank from Donnie Darko.

"Rabbits don't come any scarier than that Frank. I had nightmares about him. Myxomatosis is too good for that bastard"

Actually, Potato Gregg, I beg to differ. You forget the Rabbit of Caerbannog from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (see clip below) which was far scarier. That rabbit actually brutally murdered people while Frank was merely ominous and looked a bit iffy. Besides, he was clearly a man in a rabbit suit, looking more like Harvey after he left his head too close to the radiator overnight.

Sharp pointy teeth...

All this preamble aside, the point is that rabbit is a fantastic meat: lean, tasty and cheap. It takes a bit of cooking to ensure it's not to tough. It tastes a lot like chicken although this is the description that applies to pretty much any meat when trying to tell other people what it's like. You do wonder what the first person to eat chicken said it tasted like when telling other people how great this new bird that they'd just barbecued was.

TIMING

Preparation: 30 minutes plus marination (overnight if possible)

Cooking: 3-plus hours on the hob (you could put it in the oven for the same time at 160°C or even do this in a slow cooker)

INGREDIENTS

1 gutted rabbit, cut into 6 or 8 portions

400 ml red wine

4 or 5 bay leaves

1/2 tsp black pepper

4 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 carrot, sliced

1 large onion, chopped

1 stick of celery, finely chopped

1 tin of tomatoes

1 tbsp tomato puree

3-400g potatoes, peeled and cut into bite-sized chunks

RECIPE

Mix the wine, garlic, bay leaves and black pepper in a dish. Mix well and add the rabbit. Cover, stick it in the fridge and marinate for a good few hours, ideally overnight or as long as possible otherwise.

Marinating

Heat the oil in a heavy pan and brown the rabbit pieces on all sides, reserving the marinade.

Remove the rabbit with a slotted spoon and put on a plate

Throw the onion and celery into the pan and saute until the onion is cooked. Add the carrot, tomatoes, tomato puree and the reserved marinade.

Heat to a simmer for about10 minutes or so to break down the tomatoes a little

Put in the potatoes and mix well then return the rabbit pieces to the pot

Cover and turn down the heat to a gentle simmer for 3 hours or more.

Ready to serve

Serve with bread to mop up the rich sauce. The meat should be falling off the bone

NOTES

This recipe is the national dish of Malta. I've never been to this archipelago in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea (not yet, anyway, but it's on my list). I find it surprising that the national dish isn't some sort of seafood, given that it's a collection of small islands where you are never more than a few miles from the sea. Mind you, as a former British colony, maybe, along with the red post boxes, there's an element of British influence in the non-use of easily-obtained fish, as is the case with Brits (and as mentioned, nay ranted on, in a previous blog entry)

I'd expect the rabbit would be prepared by your butcher, but in principle you could make this with something you caught yourself or even roadkill if you're that way inclined. The rabbit I used was cleaned and portioned, but did have its various other organs like liver, kidneys, etc which I kept to enrich the sauce. It was bloody cheap as well at £4 to make a meal sufficient for 4 or more people. Parochial reference again, but I bought it at my favourite butcher, Allums of Wakefield.

If you are bothered about eating something so cute there are two things to think about making them less cute. 1: they are coprophagic and 2: they are, for all intents and purposes, just long-eared, grass-fed rats. Actually, these points may not make actually rabbits more appetising to eat, but at least you can look at them as less cuddly

This dish is called stuffat tal fenek and I've not made one double entendre out of that first word. I'm clearly losing my touch.

Like most stews, the recipe needs to cook long and slow, or else the rabbit would be stringy and chewy.

"Meat don't get any tougher than that!"

Oh, do give it a fucking rest with the catchphrase, Potato Gregg, you tuber-faced twat.