week 30 - Every Grain of Rice - Fuschia Dunlop

While I'm sure I will look back at the blog in times to come and marvel at how well we ate during this strange period, the reality is that about 80 per cent of our time since March has been spent either cooking or washing up. (With another ten per cent reserved for feeding my bloody sourdough starter).

Mostly, it's been worth it. But as I stood in the heat of high summer, poised over a wok full of bubbling oil while desperately trying to stop my slices of aubergine disintegrating, I questioned my recipe choices. And when I then found that we didn't have any chilli oil (a constituent part of three quarters of the dishes I was cooking), the Ewing questioned my choices too. Although she still grabbed a mask and went out to the shops. Mostly to escape from me a a semi-hysterical state for a few minutes.

While it all sounds rather frantic, my mini meltdown belies how easy most of these dishes - from Fuchsia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice - actually are. In fact, I rustled up four different plates of food, plus some rice, in about an hour after work and didn't end up divorced (despite my best efforts). 

It's a great book as I have ever cooked from it has simultaneously been simple (although anything deep-fried remains my Achilles heel) yet terribly exotic. After you've stocked up on a few basic sauces and spices - then the majority of the dishes contain only a handful of ingredients and can be made within minutes. At if you are a chilli head, like me, you in luck as lots of the recipes contain a good dose of spice (and if they don't, I usually chuck in a dried chilli or two anyway...)

I tackled my nemesis, the fish fragrant aubergines, first. The dish contains precisely zero piscine elements but is so named for the sauce that draws on the seasonings used in Sichuanese fish cookery. Deep frying in a wok is not as traumatic as I always make out, and the advantage is you don't need much oil, although you do have to fry the aubergine in several batches. This is a dish that's also good cold, but make sure you drain the aubergine well before dressing, so it doesn't become too oily.

Fish fragrant aubergines

3 medium aubergines

Salt

Cooking oil, for deep-frying - about 400ml if you are using a round-bottomed wok

1 1/2 tbsp Sichuan pickled chilli paste (I used sambal oelek)

2tbsp vegetable oil

1 tbsp finely chopped ginger

1 tbsp finely chopped garlic

150ml chicken stock

2 tsp sugar

3/4 tsp potato flour (or cornflour) mixed with one tbsp cold water

2 tsp Chinkiang brown rice vinegar

4 tbsp finely sliced spring onion greens

Cut the aubergine lengthways into three thick slices, then cut these into evenly sized batons. Sprinkle them with salt, mix well and leave in a colander for at least 30 minutes to drain.

In a wok, heat the oil to 180˚C. Add the aubergine in batches and deep-fry for three to four minutes until slightly golden on the outside and soft and buttery within. Remove and drain on paper towels.

Drain the oil from the wok and rinse if necessary, then return it to a medium heat. When the wok is hot again, add 2 tbsp of oil. Add the chilli bean paste and stir-fry until the oil is red and fragrant, then add the ginger and garlic and continue to stir-fry for a minute or two.

Add the stock, vinegar and sugar and mix well. Season with salt to taste if necessary. Add the fried aubergine and the vinegar to the sauce. Stir the potato flour and water mixture, pour it over the aubergine and stir in gently to thicken the sauce. Tip into a serving dish and garnish with spring onions.

Next was one of my favourites, cold dressed chicken with a spicy Sichuanese sauce; which is very similar to another famous Sichuan cold chicken dish, 'mouth-watering' chicken. Sometimes known as the less successfully translated 'saliva' chicken. Here poached, or leftover roast, chicken is shredded and mixed with a simple spicy sauce before being garnished with sliced spring onion and sesame seeds.

Cold Chicken with a Spicy Sichuanese Sauce (Liang Ban Ji)

About 400g cold, cooked boneless chicken, shredded

3 spring onions

1/4 tsp salt

1 tbsp sesame seeds (optional)

For the Sauce

2 tablespoons light soy sauce

1 1/2 teaspoons Chinkiang (brown rice) vinegar

1 1/2 teaspoons sugar

2 tbsp chilli oil

1/2 tsp ground Sichuan pepper

Cut or tear the chicken as evenly as possible into bite-sized strips or slivers and place them in a deep bowl. Cut the spring onions at a steep angle into thin slices. Mix them and the salt with the chicken.

Combine all the sauce ingredients in a small bowl.

When you are ready to eat, pour the sauce over the chicken, and mix well with chopsticks.

Arrange on a serving dish and sprinkle with sesame seeds, if desired.

The last cucumber that we harvested from the plant that was 'allowed' to grow in our living room - I was under the firm impression it was going out onto the patio once it started to bear fruit. But apparently it was more delicate than I am, and never actually made it - was celebrated by being turned into, the now ubiquitous, 'smacked' cucumber. 

After gently bashing the whole cucumber with a rolling pin until it softens and splits (helping it soak up the dressing), chop diagonally into chunks, place in a colander with a tablespoon of salt and leave over the sink for 15 minutes to allow some of the excess water to drain away. Rinse any excess salt off the cucumber, dry briefly and place in to a bowl. then toss with chilli oil, brown rice vinegar, light soy sauce, a clove of crushed garlic (the recipe specifies three, so add more if you want a very garlicky hit, Perfect if you are working at home right now), a pinch of Sichuan peeper and a little caster sugar to taste.  A very fitting ending for our final curcubit.

The dish I was most excited about was the stir-fried potato slivers with chilli and Sichuan pepper. The raw potato is shredded very finely before being stir-fried and served, as a revelation to most westerners, while it still has a slight bite. In Sichuan cuisine this is the most popular way of treating a tuber, and while I'd seen it several times on menus before, the predictable big hitters always got the nod over the humble spud.

While cutting the potatoes (homegrown, dug fresh from the allotment, natch) so finely was something of a labour of love, there was also something rather soothing about it. And the rest of the dish was a cinch to throw together - heat some oil in a wok, toss in dried chillies and Sichuan peppercorns, then add the spuds (I used four medium-sized waxy ones that I had sliced and then soaked in cold water to remove some of the starch) and stir fry until the potatoes have a slight bite. Season to taste and try to serve while hot. While juggling all your other dishes. Hopefully while still keeping your sanity. 

I butter the toast, if you lick the knife

There was a time, just after I started writing this blog, where I would excitedly scour Time Out (before it became a free sheet I still had a paid subscription) looking for exciting restaurants and places to eat. Holidays would be meticulously planned around local specialities, the more outlandish (AKA inedible) the better, and birthdays and anniversary's would be spent in fancy pubs and restaurants, preferably the kind you could blow a months wages getting horribly drunk on fancy cocktails and forget what you'd actually had for dinner.

While increasingly real life has impinged on this approach somewhat, mostly my living breathing moments still revolve around what I'm going to put in my mouth next (behave). And while I've long since eschewed all the trendy places and the hype - currently my money is going on far more prosaic things; most recently repairing my oven. If I haven't got money for anything else, at least I can heat up things at home - I still love adventuring anywhere in search of a good feed.

Which is how we ended up on the streets of Walthamstow on a sunny Saturday morning, in search of Etles, an unassuming-looking restaurant that is currently on the 38 essential London restaurants on Eater.

An unassuming place on the High Street, owned and run by Turkic Muslims from Yili in the far west of Xinjiang, it's also the first authentic Uyghur restaurant in town. The short menu features food that connects central Asia (flat breads and lamb pilaf) with the more familiar Chinese classics (kung pao chicken and ma po tofu) with a focus on hand pulled noodles and dumplings.

There is no alcohol on the menu (although I believe you can BYO), but at 11.30 in the morning, and having sunk a few in Seven Sisters the day before, I was OK with that. The Ewing went for her favourite ayran, a salted yoghurt drink, while I went with an icy can of Diet Coke. That authentic, life-giving, nectar.

I may have talked about kidneys on the blog before, more specifically about how they are one of the few things the Ewing eschews. Even the tiny little delicate rabbit’s kidneys we ate at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saison after our wedding were politely pushed to the side. Buoyed by reading very good things about the grilled (I’m guessing lamb) kidneys here, I persuaded her to give a skewer of them a go. Reader, as usual, I was wrong.

Not only did she refuse to eat them, but I remembered I really wasn’t much of a fan. Especially with the faint prickle of a hangover, amplified by the liberal sprinkling of chilli, bouncy texture and the faintly uric tang, that Mr Bloom enjoyed so much, that makes eating them seem a little like a bush tucker challenge.

If you like offal then certainly don't let me put you off. I still finished them all, and was glad I did, but I much preferred the skewers of lamb - smoky from the grill and slightly chewy with little chunks of sweet, charred fat. A very good introduction of what was to come.

The boiled turgur dumplings are very similar to jiaozi (think Jen Cafe in Soho), with thick, springy wheat flour wrappers although they are filled with 'chopped calf', instead of the more familiar pork. Like their more famous bretheren, they are served with black vinegar and chilli oil for dipping, .  although they also serve smaller dumplings, shaped a bit like tortellini, filled with lamb and onion and served in a broth.

Hand pulled noodles come in three varieties. There are flat, ribbon like noodles in the served in Da pan ji (‘big plate chicken’) – a stew also featuring spuds, chicken and plenty of Sichuan pepper. Possibly the most famous dish of the region, this is one many people may be familiar with from trying at Silk Road in Camberwell.

Thinner noodles – similar to pici or  udon - are served as lagman, a dish of boiled noodles with a separate bowlful of meat sauce, or chaomian (also known as dingding somän) where the noodles are cut into short lengths and are wokked with beef or lamb, peppers and tomato. We went for the latter, and were rewarded with a deep meaty sauce and chewy noodles, sprinkled with sesame seeds, that together tasted like the dashing love child of a spag bol and a stir fry.

We were too full for the homemade honey cake, but the Ewing did take a handful of sweets that accompanied the - eminently reasonable - bill, to keep her going on our next leg of our trip, to the Wild Card Brewery.

Here we carried on celebrating the end of my self-imposed booze free month (lets not talk about last Friday) with a pint of their super lovely and extra frothy, neipa. All donations for my Movember efforts gratefully received for the beer fund. I've got some catching up to do over Christmas.

Life's a Peach

Having previously enjoyed nearly a decade of Not Working Monday, I can report that it’s a day many other workers, especially in the hospitality industries, also enjoy off. So while I would enjoy my very own Bank Holiday weekend every other week, it also meant many of the places I wanted to visit when I wasn’t working were shut. 

So, exciting news for anyone still in the Monday Club, you’re in luck. Not only is Peach Garden - tucked away in Ladywell Walk in Birmingham's Chinatown - open, it also offers a special of roast piglet on the first two days of the week. Something that would surely even entice Garfield from his post-weekend torpor, especially when you see the good, in all their glory, hanging in the steamy window.

It's a basic, no frills kind of place (the best kind of place) where, even at a little past eleven the morning, nearly every table was taken. As the only white faces on our visit, we were also the only ones given forks with our chopsticks. A badge I wore with a certain pride sense of pride while trying to demonstrate my best pincer technique.

Strong chinese tea comes in teacups that wouldn't have looked out of place at my Nan's, but be wary if you like yours with added sweetener, as the sugar bowl is filled with a fearsome chilli oil that glows with latent menace.

While the three roast meat and rice is the most lauded dish on the menu (a choice between pork belly, char sui, roast duck and soya chicken) I was firmly focussed on the special. Alongside solo piglet, (as a potion for the table or on top of rice) you can also throw in a choice of another meat, so I added a duck leg for good measure.

What quickly followed was attainment of some kind of porcine nirvana. Slices of meat with, surprisingly, rich porky flavour, edged with a little creamy fat and topped with strips of paper-thin, burnished crackling. The duck may have been even better, the subcutaneous fat almost rendered into the tender flesh, contrasted against the crunch of the sticky lacquered skin.

Alongside the saucer of sticky sauce that’s served with the meat (which tastes a lot like hoi sin, although someone more enlightened may know better) and a slug of fiery, crunchy chilli oil, I can’t think of many more glorious plates of food. A wonderful balance of textures and flavours that even gets me excited about white rice (near the bottom of the pile of best carbs), being the perfect foil for the layers of crunch and fat and heat that sit upon it. A dish that is so brilliantly simple, yet masterful at the same time and always makes me feel a bit little in awe (and a little bit fatter) each time I eat it.

The Ewing went with the soya chicken, something that I have never given much thought to try with all the pig and duck on offer - but, apart from being rather cold, was very well received. Sweet and yielding, it’s also a little leaner than the other options and makes a nice change of pace (words spoken as a firm Wife of Jack Spratt).

Following Giles Coren's sage advice in 'How to Eat Out' - not a sentence I'm often troubled to write - I also ordered a dish of gai lan, stir fried with garlic. Despite the price (still very good value at just over eight quid) it was, as always, a good call. The crisp, ferric greens making a welcome break from the salt, fat and carbs, which at least provided an illusion of healthiness.

As it was the Ewing and I's wedding anniversary later that week, it was fortuitous that we found this 'lover biscuit' - more commonly known as a wife cake, stuffed with winter melon, almond paste, and sesame - at the China Court Bakery, opposite the restaurant.

While not a huge fan of the above (something I should have learnt after trying them before on several occasions), they also had excellent, fluffy double pineapple char sui buns, (that contain NO pineapple, imagine that - TE) that were buy two get one free on our visit. One half-bun for each pork-permeated year we've been married. Pretty perfect for a pair of piglets. (love you babe x - TE)

Backs to the window - Xi'an Impression

Following the ‘bad news first’ rule, I’m going to get the negatives about our lunch at Xi’an Impression out the way – namely the view across the street. Now I appreciate that one man’s meat is another man’s poison, so perhaps looking at Emirates would be welcome for some patrons. But, as a supporter of North London's first team, I made sure to resolutely keep my back to the window (let's get this straight, I went to the toilet and came back to find 'we' had moved tables to make sure HER back was to Emirates - TE).

Thankfully, things markedly improved from this point onwards when the waiter, shortly after taking our order, re-approached the table to ask if we had eaten there before. After, cautiously, responding in the negative, he enthusiastically congratulated us for ordering all the right things. Not particularly difficult choices -  I had read a few reviews and blogs beforehand, plus the recommended dishes have a Facebook style ‘like’ symbol on the menu - but it still made me feel secretly smug.

Xi’an, located in the Shaanxi Province, is the end of the Silk Road, home to the terracotta Army (yes, I have been on Wikipedia) and, due to its cold climate, has a cuisine based on wheat instead of rice. Happily, this means a proliferation of noodle dishes, one of the most famous being ‘cold skin noodle with gluten’.  The dish is made by soaking a salt and flour dough in water and retaining the cloudy liquid before allowing it to settle overnight and then steaming the sediment in shallow trays, slicing into thin strips and serving cold.

While it doesn’t perhaps sound the most attractive of propositions on paper, it’s a pretty little dish, finished with a julienne of cucumber and a slick of (not very spicy) oil. Apply caution (or wear a dark shirt), these suckers are slippery.

The boneless chicken in ginger sauce was another beguiling plate - the strips of buttery poached meat built up in a dome over slices of pickled cucumber and served with a sauce spiked with strips of fiery ginger – and tasted just as good. This was possibly my dish of the day; delicate and clean with a little kick at the end and the antithesis to most boring breast dishes.

The Ewing wanted dumplings and chose the delicate pot stickers, stuffed with pork and seaweed, over the heftier boiled variety. These are served open-ended, with a crispy frill from being pan fried, and were juicy and hot - just as you want your dumpling action to be. The waiter also kindly offered to bring us the traditional Xi'an dipping sauce traditionally served with the boiled dumplings, a black vinegar and spring onion flecked number which I happily flung over everything on the table, plus myself.

Biang, biang mian – wide wheat noodles, so called for the onomatopoeic slapping sound they make on the table when they are being pulled – reminded me of the wonderful big belt noodles served at Silk Road in Camberwell. Here we tried them with beef, instead of the more familiar chicken, and were rewarded with an Eastern twist on Italian pappardelle with ragu - a rich and fragrant rib-sticker of a dish with bouncy noodles that had a pleasing elastic chew and a background heat that built from the pool of fragrant chilli oil.  

As well as tasting great, fact fans may also be interested to know that biang is also, apparently, the Chinese character comprised of the most brushstrokes - 58 strokes in its traditional form. The character for "biáng" cannot be entered into computers, hence why you will always see it written in a truncated form, or using the roman alphabet, on menus.

While I don’t have any pointless trivia about the beef ‘burger’ - the final item that emerged from the kitchen, as the first batch were still being prepared - I can report it was worth the wait. Comprised of a shallow, dense bun, a little like an English muffin, split and stuffed with shredded beef that was laced with liberal amounts of cumin and chilli (the hottest thing we ate), it was just missing a rustling pile of chips.

I jest about the fried potatoes; even the Ewing and I were struggling to clear our plates at this point. Of course, we still managed it though, leading to the second compliment of the meal when our waiter applauded us for finishing every dish, after originally thinking we had over-ordered. I assured him it was more of a testament to the quality of the food rather than our gluttonous nature, but didn’t quite know whether to feel smug or ask for my wafer thin mint and roll myself out the door.

While there’s no booze (you can bring your own), barely any room and the neighbourhood is questionable (certainly for a Lilywhite), the service is lovely, the food fantastic and, if you don’t look out the window, you’ll be more than alright.