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.

Sausage with Sauerkraut, Quick Rolls

I found a new bread recipe to make me forget the nightmares Nordic Bakery's 'rye bread' induced last week.
It's available online so I don't feel guilty about publishing the recipe. Delia, say what you want but she know what she's doing.
I made the roast Sausage with Sauerkraut from Nigella Express to use up the jar and a half of sauerkraut my dad gave me a couple of months ago. He makes amazing sauerkraut and is very generous, but there is only so much of it you can eat 'straight'. You tip the kraut into a baking dish, sprinkle with slivers of onion and juniper berries (I used dill seeds), rest the sausages on top and drown the whole thing with German white wine.
While that was cooking I made ketchup and prepared the dough for the bread rolls.
Here's the thing about ketchup, the reason you should probably never bother making it yourself - everyone likes the ketchup they grew up with, so if your parents always bough Heinz, or Tesco own brand or whatever, you'll prefer the idiosyncrasies of that brand. It's true! Ketchup loyalty runs deep.
I actually didn't grow up eating ketchup, I was always a mayonnaise girl, so I haven't been spoiled forever and can make passable stuff for myself. In fact the boyfriend doesn't like to have it in the house because it makes him go off on one about how much sugar is hidden in EVERYTHING these days.
This is actually how idyllic our relationship is, we have nothing bigger than to argue about than condiments. Sweet, or sad?
Here's how I make ketchup for myself - pour a certain amount of tomato puree into a pan, add however much brown sugar, salt, pepper, malt vinegar and celery seeds as you like and cook on low for 20 minutes.

Here's the incredible roll recipe that takes less than 1 hour to make. I adapted it from this to make 4 small rolls.

225g bread flour
1 tsp salt
145ml hot water from the tap
1 tsp brown sugar
1 tsp fast action yeast
1 tsp butter

Mix the sugar and yeast into the water in a jug. Mix the salt into the flour and rub in the butter, pour in the water and mix into a ball, Knead the dough on a flat surface for about five minutes then shape into four rolls and leave covered in a warm place for 35 minutes. Start heating the oven at 220C.
When the rolls have risen sprinkle with flour and bake on a high shelf for 20-25 minutes.

The rolls are a little denser than hot dog rolls, but they still make amazing hot dogs. Very amazing.

Spicy Azorean Garlic Roasted Pork and Tomato Rice

Never never plan for more than a day in advance, because things will always go wrong. That's my new mantra. OK its not exactly catchy or anything but I have a temperature and I can barely keep my eyes open and it's the best I can do.
Thursday was the boyfriend's birthday, I asked him what he wanted for his special big boy meal and my handsome eloquent man asked for 'pork'. This spicy shoulder of pork from the New Portuguese Table calls for half a pound of chillies to 4 pounds of pork, does that sound excessive? It probably is. I say probably because he loved it and I drank a glass of milk. On the Nando's scale it would be Hot.
The book suggests serving this with Tomato Rice, which I also made. It's too sweet to eat by itself, but complements the heat of the pork nicely.
Now, here is the only picture I took on the night, its the baking dish full of the deadly 'gravy' I didn't dare serve. The reason for this lackluster photojournalism is that I came home feeling kind of OK, and as I went through transferring the pork out of it's marinade to the oven, preparing the rice and setting the table I got more and more headachy and feverish. I'd taken Friday off work in anticipation of the hangover I was going to be suffering from after the planned night of champagne drinking and cake eating. Instead I barely made it through dinner and went to bed at 9:30.
So here I am on a nice sunny Saturday, sitting in my pajamas watching the Eden channel and reading blogs. The boyfriend has gone off to watch football. Happy birthday. Do I sound bitter?

Hungry curry

What's it called when someone had a name that describes exactly what they do? It's on the tip of my tongue, urgh so frustrating!
Anyway, this curry mix I found in a random Asian shop is the Ussain Bolt of food - in perfect Engrish!
So delicious.

Pork Tenderloin with Celeriac Creme and Puy Lentils

Bonjour! I've been fancying it up lately - in my own mind, anyway - and decided that what's missing in my relationship is extra un-necessary work. I've decided to try and do a Sunday lunch for the boyfriend and me at least a couple times a month.
I'm using the back section of I Know How To Cook by Ginette Mathiot (one of the giant Phaidon volumes), the bit where famous professional chefs give meal ideas.
I quite hate celeriac, and it features in this dish quite prominently, but actually boiled in cream and mixed with lentils, the flavour is very subtle. We both agreed, and so much so that I was prompted, for the first time, to defile a cookbook and leave a note for my grandchildren.
The recipe was to serve 4, but somehow there didn't seem to be any leftovers, don't know wht happened there...

Sweet and Sour Pork

The boyfriend went to Spain for a long weekend to visit his mum - what a selfish bastard!
When you're living in a flat you can barely afford you kind of stop going out, and when your other half goes away for four days all your sources of entertainment vanish - you can't play drinking games on your own, I've tried, it doesn't work. I don't know how single people do it.
But the one good thing about being on my own is getting to indulge the cheesy, awful cravings that no one must ever know about. My local charity shop is always a good source of food porn.
I love Chinese food, it's my go to takeaway, and there's one thing that I always want and can't persuade anyone else to split with me. The sweet and sour, gross yuk yuk yuk, but I just can't resist that toxic looking sauce. I always thought there was a mystery to Chinese cooking, but look, come on this is just ketchup and vinegar! According to the book, this is an authentic dish - ahem, excuse me while I don't believe you, but whatever, check out these ingredients.
Pork, yeah ok. Pepper and onion, makes sense. Egg and cornflour for deep frying (which I hate doing, it's just so dangerous! And the fire blanket in my new kitchen is hung just out of reach near the ceiling, very exciting). Ketchup, is a totally bullshit ingredient, the boyfriend usually doesn't let me keep this stuff in the house (watch this, all about how mayonnaise is better than ketch on your chips). Rice wine vinegar, an entire fricking bag of sugar (!) and two jars of mystery vegetables - the recipe called for Chinese pickles, nice and vague.
Result: Yeah, my pancreas has been getting pretty snooty lately, what with all the insulin production, and trying to digest all my food like he runs the place. You gotta show em who's boss, so I like to threaten him with a bit of diabetes whenever I get the chance. He can take it, this didn't really have a whole bag of sugar, only 170g. And really that's only a teacup full, but you're not meant to eat the whole serving yourself, this is meant for 2 people, so it's more like 85g of sugar each. The recommended daily allowance is 90g so we're free and clear! (ketchup contains sugar... but... um.. shut up).
So, little jokes aside this was really way too sweet. It tasted just how you would expect, which was great, but I never want any ever again. I'm not a snob, and I don't really care about what goes in my food, as long as that food is totally delicious and not something that people would have to dare you to eat (this is what a boyfriend is for, people). This was nice, but I would probably not make it again. And I just can't get this reference out of my head

Kaeng Chud Saku

So, you think the only use to put my 1.5kg of tapioca to is pudding? Think again, idiot. This is Thai tapioca soup - ha!

I'm ill, I have one of those colds I seem to pick up every week or so from all the filthy commuters on the Tube every morning. I'm ill and nobody cares! I still have to go to stupid work because it's really busy at the moment, I can't stay in bed are read comic books, nobody feels sorry for me and brings me cups of tea! It's so unfair!!!!!!!
The conventional way to treat a cold is with lots of rest, warm liquids, vitamin C, etc. Instead I'm going to try a slightly more novel approach and try and sweat it out by eating as much chilli as possible - ah novelty, maybe if I wasn't so easily bored and on the lookout for the next new thing my life would be a lot easier... Or maybe I'd be dead.

Anyway, that was just the fever talking, from the look of the ingredients here one of the options might be to revolt and scare the illness away - this soup contains, besides tapioca, pork mince, crab meat, chicken stock and fish sauce. Eeeeew! We'll see. (Also, pork and crab, this is the most un-kosher thing ever - if only there was some milk in it as well!)
I bought this book when I spent a week in Swanage on the coast this summer. We were staying with my friend's aunt and uncle and I made sure I popped into all of the charity shops in town for, you know, the novelty of out-of-London castoffs. Rosemary Brissenden is an Australian who spent some time researching a thesis in Asia and wrote this book in 1969 after she fell in love with the food. There is a new edition of South East Asian Food out which is supposed to be really good, and which includes Laos,Cambodia and Vietnam in addition to Thailand, Malaysia Indonesia and Singapore (she couldn't go to those places the first time because of the wars). I'm always doubtful as to how authentic early foreign cookbooks could be because of the scarcity of necessary exotic ingredients at the time, but Brissenden is pretty thorough - to the point of calling for things that would be difficult to find in London even today, like jelly mushroom (sounds cute, but is probably gross).
Anyway, here's the loot, (yes, that is Cock brand fish sauce, hahahahahaha, get it out of your system, children)
The first step is to put the mince in a sieve over the pot, with half of the boiling stock in it, and to pour the other half of the the stock over it to seal the meat and prevent it from sticking in big lumps. A noble goal, and I thought it was a good idea until I realised that it just makes all the meat stick to the sieve, uff. Anyway, other stuff goes in the pot, blah blah blah, cook cook cook and voila!
Result: The tapioca is like frog spawn, or fish eyes or something, especially the grains that still have a tiny white dot in the middle. The pork seems to have entirely disintegrated and the crab looks pretty uninteresting - like the eggwhites in a chinese soup (or snot). At this point my money was on this soup making me feel worse, a lot worse. But the saving grace might have come in the form of the garnishes Brissenden suggests. Mine are chillies and coriander in white vinegar, carrot chunks in fish sauce, and chopped up peanuts (Brissenden says to fry up some flakes of garlic, but I didn't have the energy) I sprinkled the garnishes over my bowl (lots of chillies!) and dug in.
This is the nicest thing I have ever made for myself. As I was stuffing it down I thought about how I would love this isn a restaurant, how easy it was, and how much of a mark up I could expect.
All the different kins of meat flavours don't jarr with eachother, but blend into some kind of generous umami unity. Then you bite into a carrot or chilli and you get sweet, hot, sour, saltiness as well, mmmm.
I'm now wondering if this would work as a breakfast dish. Lunch, definitely. Snack, maybe...