Steamed Chicken Salad with Sesame Dressing

I wrote a somewhat vitriolic version of this post dealing with food intolerances, and the nerve people have, daring to dislike certain ingredients. But honestly, I don't care. What happened was that this weekend I served some food that could have made someone sick, but didn't. That's why there are no pictures, I'm not proud of this.
My stepmother is on quite a strict diet, so I'm always on the lookout for recipes that conform. I came over to their house this Sunday arms laden with dishes I though were safe, but was blindsided by their house guest.
I made sesame dressed chicken salad from Harumi's Japanese Cooking, Uzsca-which are dumplings filled with beef and mushrooms, tomato salad and herb bread from Theodora Fitzgibbon's Making the Most of It.
Harumi uses the microwave as the primary method of cooking almost everything, which I found incredibly annoying because I have issues and can't shake the feeling that that's 'cheating' and also because my microwave was purchased at a car boot sale in 1995 and I'm always expecting it to explode and splatter me with microwaves? Having said that, it's undeniably incredibly efficient - you bone some chicken thighs and cook on a covered bowl (Harumi thinks this should take 4 minutes, but was more like 15 for me) then make a dressing using the chicken juices, tahini and soy sauce. Serve with cucumbers. It's delicious, unfortunately soy was one of the things my parent's friend couldn't have - a fact she chose to disclose at the end of the meal, wtf?

The herb bread is also good, I've made this so many times this week that I actually have a picture of it - see? You mix a decidedly unfrugal amount of milk and butter into the dough, sprinkle with dried rosemary, fennel seeds and dill seeds (delicious), and serve to someone who is secretly freaking lactose intolerant.
Next time I'm just staying in bed.

Oishinbo Style Ramen

So I suppose an argument could be made for comic books not being the best source of reliable recipes, but I've built my life on blindly believing virtually everything I read so I doubt I could be convinced.
I trust the research that goes into producing the incredibly detailed dish descriptions in the Oishinbo series, and just thinking about it now is making me hungry.

A couple of days ago I started re reading the series, and it's impossible not to get inspired. Luckily every issue has a recipe or two at the beginning of the book, and for the Ramen and Gyoza volume it was for Osihinbo Style Ramen.
The book follows, in a few separate episodes, the protagonists dissection on the ramen scene in Japan. Ramen is seen as a low class, fast food, and as such has fallen foul of the short cuts and questionable practices that famously plague the food industry in the West. This was quite a surprise to me, I'm sure a lot of people see Japan as some kind of mythical culture where everyone is nice and everything is above the dodgy standards we live with, but apparently not so. The prevalent use of MSG and kansui is criticized, which I found particularly interesting as I thought both of those were typical ingredients in noodle dishes.
Kansui is also known as lye water and is a strong alkaline that is substituted for expensive protein such as eggs in cheap noodle recipes. It gives a distinctive 'tingly' taste to the noodles - here's an interesting post about how to make normal dry pasta taste like ramen by adding baking soda to the water (it works).
Anyway, the point is that I assumed that this was an integral taste and texture element authentic noodle making, but apparently using it is just a short cut, and flavor is developed by aging dough. God love comic books, if you were looking at the pictures right now, instead of my boring synopsis, it would all stick. If only all educational materials were available in comic book format, everyone would know everything! Just imagine!!

Here's the Oishinbo Style Ramen, pork mince fried with onions, garlic, miso and sake, on top of shop bough noodles in dashi. It was... ok, nothing to write about.

4 Hour Potatoes and Pig's Ear

Look at that post title, could be the name of a new cop drama, couldn't it? 4 Hour Potato is the nickname of the tough guy, because he's hard boiled! and Pig's Ear is his sidekick, because he's so ugly. Don't steal my idea.
Over the weekend I decided to tackle these two projects since they both take a long time, but hardly any effort, so I could get on with unpacking some clothes that have seriously been in boxes since we moved into the house a year ago.
I have a fascination with offal and 'variety meats' in general. I love that you can buy tripe and trotters in some supermarkets now - for absolutely different reasons, mind. Tripe is sold in my local Morrisson's which is in a largely Eastern European part of London, and trotters are cool and sexy now so the Sainsbury's near my office in Westminster has started carrying them. But for everything else Chinatown will always be ahead of the curve, none of it will be organic or lovely, but at least it's there.
Loon Fung Supermarket on Gerrard Street has a huge butcher counter with a fierce female butcher peeking out from behind piles of odd joints, hearts, ears and feet. Occasionally you can find something like beef eye of round for a fraction of a supermarket price. There are always live razor clams, and sometimes crabs wriggling around, it's a great place to explore. I always overspend here.
This is what the ear looks like when you get it home, exactly the same colour and texture as my own skin, which is incredibly unsettling. Larousse instructs you to burn off the hair with a blow torch which really tests your resolve because it fills the room with a rancid stink and makes you feel like a murderer disposing of your victim.

You braise the ear slowly in wine and stock and carrots in a covered dish in the oven and after an hour it emerges a completely different color. Instead of an unsettling hue of human skin it is now brown and purple, like the bruises on a cadaver someone left out in the rain.
That's my internal monologue, if I was writing this up for people to read I would describe that shade as 'caramelized' and 'unctuous'. Better?
Anyway, you let the ear cool and then smother in a sauce you had been making all this time and leave for an hour to let the flavors develop, I guess.
The sauce is something else, I love Larousse Gastronomique for including this ridiculous recipe, because I doubt anybody else would invite you to make this with a straight face. The sauce you want is called Villeroi, which is just Allemande sauce diluted with stock and mushrooms (didn't you know that?), you obligingly flip all the pages of the book back from the V section to the A section and discover that the basis of the Allemande is the Veloute. Back to V, and thankfully the beginning of the shrubbery maze, and begin. A Veloute is Bechamel made with stock instead of milk, to make Villeroi you thicken your Veloute with egg yolks and cream and then add more stock and mushroom essence. On it's own this was delicious, rich and creamy. I stopped taking photographs of the pig's ear by then, but if I had to describe it as it sat in the thick, yellow, congealing sauce for the requisite hour... I would choose not to.
After an hour it's finally show time, you take the sliced ear out of the sauce, roll in breadcrumbs and fry.
The end result is spectacular. It's incredibly satisfying to add value to an essentially valueless thing, and even though I will never be able to justify the time commitment to make this again, I'm glad I tried it.
The boyfriend and I had pig's ear at a Szechuan restaurant in King's Cross a few years ago, I loved it, he hated it, we would both describe the dish as spicy, slimy and crunchy, which I think I'm in the minority in thinking of as a delicious description. My pig's ear was meaty and crunchy, which has more of a universal appeal and cost very little to produce.

Accompanying my folly above was the 4 Hour Potato, for which I got the idea from Oishibo, the Manga about food that has frustratingly not been fully translated into English. The particular storyline is about a guy who has to eat a potato, but had a bad experience with potatoes once so can't do it. But if he doesn't do it, he will be a laughing stock, so the main characters set about producing a potato dish he will eat. I'm making is sound stupid, but it's really really good!

The technique they describe involves simmering a peeled potato in dashi and butter for 4 hours, a method that I would have though would result in a mush but instead produces a soft, tender potato floating in a golden soup. It tastes nothing like a potato, the typical earthy flavors are inexplicably replaced with sugar so the whole thing is oddly sweet. In the book this is described as the 'true essence' of the potato, but honestly, I can't recommend this. I like the idea, but if I'm going to be extracting potato sugar it will be to make my own vodka.
And this concludes my report on how I spent my weekend.

Spinach Noodle Soup

Harumi Kuriahara is a superstar in Japan, similar to Delia Smith here. Like Delia, her recipes are not very complicated and surprisingly mostly made up of ingredients it would be easy to find anywhere (but I am in London).
I've wanted this book for a while and when I saw it in Oxfam at the quarter of the price I finally got to bring it home. This is how I get most of my books, just go to a charity shop in a fancy neighbourhood and you'll get all the good recipe books by famous chefs.
Day two of the soup diet:
It's actually fairly difficult to find nice, seasonal, vegetarian soup recipes in books because most authors want to do something different and delicious to distinguish their recipe and that usually means the addition of chicken or bacon. But Harumi has one, so here we go (chicken stock can be substituted for veg, obviously)
Unlike a Western method for making soup all of the components are cooked separately and then combined in the stock at the last minute. I would never usually do this, firstly because it's a pain to blanch, drain and rinse things separately and also because I would have assumed that cooking things together would enrich the flavour. But this actually makes a lot of sense, the noodles don't make the soup murky with their starch and the spinach doesn't make broth green. What you get is a relatively clear soup with pretty circles of sesame oil on the surface, the taste is very clean and fresh. Its also worth getting a dining room chair to stand on to get the white pepper off the high shelf instead of using every day black, you can taste the difference.

Ume, Ube and Uni

I don't have a good answer when people ask me why I chose the letter U as a theme for my next dinner party. I think I was really drunk a couple of months ago and kept saying 'I love you, I love you, I love you' to "someone" and I thought this was really funny. Really funny and a great idea.

Believe it or not, there aren't a lot of foods that start with the letter U. I toyed with the idea of pig uterus as a starter (found in a Chinese supermarket, they look like little curly shoelaces) but the mere mention of this prompted revulsion in even my most adventurous friends. Pretty much the only other raw ingredient I can think of is urchin (that's sea urchin, not homeless children, David) so I started with that. I remembered this article from The Guardian from a few years ago, dude was working his way through the alphabet, cooking an exotic meat for each letter and settled on urchin, he had to do a lot of leg work around London to find the stuff and ultimately nabbed some in Selfridges. Well this was years ago, I followed in his footsteps only to be told that they no longer sell them, I ended up finding some in the Japan Centre. Maths fans (that's all of you, right?) work this out - this guy was offered 3 kilos for £72, which he declined in favour of 25 grams for £6.50, terrible deal, but I suppose not every one wants a ton of this stuff in their freezer. I got mine at 100 grams for £18, 300 grams in total. The sum makes me cry a little but it's still better than the price he paid.
Uni/ urchin is an acquired taste, it's buttery, a little salty, a little sweet and I think quite bitter. Served as sushi, the sweetness of the rice and savouriness of the nori mask the bitterness a little but it's still not something I would describe as a delicacy. The other obstacle was how to make this expensive, complicated ingredient stretch to feeding 10 people. The Guardian recipe struck me as a little uninspired, but most of the other recipes I found online suggested making it up into a pasta sauce as well, which just did not suit my show off sensibilities. But timing is everything, urchin is in season during the winter, and one of my favourite blogs devoted a few posts to it, one of which included a recipe that mixed the roe into the pasta mixture. I love it when the planets align like that.
Their recipe requires something called yuzu kosho, which I found both in wet and powdered form in the Japan Centre. The yuzu is a citrus, the exotic love child of a lemon and a grapefruit - taste wise, common in Japan and cultivated somewhat in the US as well, but virtually unheard of here. And yuzu kosho is a blend of the zest and green or red chilli (here's a recipe if you want to make your own, another amazing, inspiring blog). My special Japanese source at work tells me that yuzu kosho is typically used as a soup base, and you can tell, it's a very strong concentrate - not something to just spread over your toast in the morning.
The pasta rolled out in a beautiful leathery sheet, very fragrant, and flecked with specks of this and that. But when cooked I found it lost any delicacy and became a big bowl of starch, barely suggesting any flavour other than chilli unfortunately. I don't think that this is a problem with the recipe, I only used half of the urchin quantity specified, it's an image problem. I don't really want to serve people a pile of pasta, it's a bit yawn-tastic, and doesn't showcase the ingredient as much as I'd like. Next
Ube is a kind of sweet potato, popular in the Philippines, so much so that ube ice cream is a totally normal thing available in the shops. So wierd, I wonder if it will ever catch on here.
Old David L is my go to guy when it comes to ice creams. Maybe I should buy another ice cream book at some point, for contrast, but I don't see the point at the moment - as soon as I bought the machine I realised that don't actually like ice cream all that much. It's too creamy, and sweet :( (this is the bit where the boyfriend looks over my shoulder and calls me some kind of precious princess)
Anyway, in the book that I do have he mentions an ube ice cream he had in San Francisco a couple of times and gives a recipe for a sweet potato version. I found this jar of overly sweet spread in Chinatown and literally went to town on it!
The taste is nice, sweet in an indiscriminate way, it'll do. Oh and blah blah blah, something about ume.