the American dream and sweet & sour pork

Many of my childhood summer holidays were spent on the west coast of Scotland, in a place called Kilchoan in Ardnamurchan - the most westerly point of mainland Great Britain - where every day for a week, the six of us would squish into our little yellow Mini and bump six miles down a single track road until we hit the deserted beach at Sanna.

Here, we kids would leap into the dunes and race towards the sea while Mum settled in the soft white sand with Woman's Weekly and Dad rolled up his shirt sleeves and went to work under the bonnet of the car.

I'm thinking about the summer of 1976 in particular, when Candi Staton was singing about young hearts running free and the Bee Gees were telling us we should be dancing (yeah!) - when we had a heatwave in Scotland.

Imagine! Heatwave and Scotland co-existing in the same sentence!

When we weren't racing around under those high blue skies, panting in the heat, we were swimming in the sea or poking around in rock pools, collecting shells and dead sea urchins and writing messages in the sand - or just marvelling at our nut brown toes, thanks to Mum's liberal application of Ambre Solaire SPF1. The only time Dad ever ventured onto the beach, in his socks and shoes, was to help with the construction of our dam, which had to slope at a 30 degree angel and have a stone-lined slipway for controlled overspill. On one of these rare forays onto the sand, Dad pointed out over the turquoise sea and said: America is straight over there.

I dropped my bucket and spade and followed his gaze, open-mouthed, hoping to catch a glimpse of America, an alien land I'd learned all about from watching Starsky and Hutch, where they spoke with funny accents and called "chips" "fries" and the women had hair like an Alpine ski chalet.

That night when I flopped into bed and pulled the thin cotton sheet over my sunburnt body (thanks to Mum's liberal application of Ambre Solaire SPF1), I dreamed of going to America - and did so for many years to come.

Years later I did go to America - many times - and on the last occasion I had the best pork dumplings I've ever tasted, at Joe's Shanghai in Chinatown, New York. This restaurant is famous for them and as soon as you're seated, the waiter asks: do you want regular dumplings or crab? We ordered regular (pork) and a bamboo steamer arrived nestling eight plump pagoda-shaped buns containing little pork meatballs surrounded by a scalding meaty broth. They were utterly delicious.

I've never made pork dumplings, but the other day I made the next best thing: sweet and sour pork balls. This is based on a Ken Hom recipe.

Ingredients
Serves 4
450 g /1 lb fatty minced pork
1 egg white
4 tbsp water
2 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
2 tbsp rice wine
1 tbsp sugar
2 tsp salt
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 carrots, thinly sliced on the diagonal
½ green pepper, cut into squares
½ red pepper, cut into squares
4 spring onions, sliced on the diagonal
cornflour for dusting
groundnut oil for frying

For the sauce
150 ml / 5 fl oz home-made chicken stock
1 tbsp light soy sauce
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
2 tsp sesame oil
½ tsp salt
½ white pepper
1½  tbsp rice vinegar
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp tomato paste
2 tsp cornflour, blended with 1 tbsp water
fresh coriander leaves to garnish

1. Mix the pork with the egg white and water using your hands then add the soy sauces, rice wine, sugar and salt and pepper. Shape into balls and dust with cornflour.

2. In a pan of boiling water, blanch the carrots and pepper until nearly tender (about 3 minutes). Drain and set aside.

3. Heat the oil in a wok and fry the pork balls until crisp and golden (3-4 minutes). Remove and drain on kitchen paper.

4. Combine all the sauce ingredients except the cornflour mixture in a large pan and bring to the boil. Add the carrots, pepper and spring onions, then stir in the cornflour mixture and simmer gently for 2 minutes. Add the pork balls and warm through and serve with chopped corander leaves.

♫ Cook along to: Rogue Wave California

Azorean dreams and corned beef hash

It's normally around this time that I make my annual pilgrimage to Flores in the Azores to see my old friends Carol (aka Mung) and Neil.

But what with one thing (three months in Paris) and another (a trip to Scotland last month), I didn't think it fair to leave BB slaving away at the coalface while I disappeared off again on a jolly.

I'm sad not to be going this year. There's something about the peaceful rhythms of this tiny island, its savage beauty, the luminous sea, that makes me resolve to do - and be - something different.
 

Flores, Azores

But living in a little pocket of paradise bang in the middle of the Atlantic has its drawbacks; for one thing, you can't buy a tin of corned beef. The Mung and I have a great affinity for corned beef. In fact, it was over a corned beef and Branston Pickle filled roll that we first bonded, in a little caf opposite Edinburgh Sheriff Court not long after we met.

And we both agree that the tastiest thing to do with corned beef is corned beef hash with a fried egg on top.

Ingredients

Serves 2

tin of corned beef (the best quality you can find)

10 oz / 275 g waxy potatoes

1 large onion

2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 tsp soy sauce

1 tbsp grain mustard

2 eggs

2 - 3 tbsp oil for frying

salt and freshly ground pepper

1. Cut the corned beef into chunks and mix in a bowl with the Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce and grain mustard and set aside. In the meantime, peel and cut the potatoes into chunks and steam until nearly tender. Finely slice the onion. 

2. Fry the onion in the oil until soft and browned at the edges. Add the potatoes and corned beef, some salt and pepper and  heat through. Fry the eggs in a separate pan and serve on top of the hash.

veal stock

I don't mean to keep harping on about Gordon Blue, as BB calls it, but the longer I'm back from Paris the more I realise how much I learnt there. I am no longer intimidated by pastry, I can deftly fillet any fish you care to slap me in the belly with, bone fowl, turn vegetables and make pretentious swirls of ketchup round a crisp sandwich.

One thing I had yet to tackle was veal stock.

In the past I'd been put off by words like "simmer for 12 hours", assuming that if it took that long to cook then it must be time-consuming for the cook. But at Gordon Blue we were taught how to make a decent brown veal stock in under four hours -  so it seemed rude not to try.

I ordered 3 kilos of veal bones from my butcher, wildly guessing that they would cost me no more than €10, but when I went to collect them four days later, he said: That will be one hundred euros please Madame.

One. Hundred. Euros.

There was a split second (after I regained consciousness) where one half of my brain said: What the ....? while the other half was reaching for my wallet - the half that appreciates the value of veal stock, no matter what the price. But then he gave me a wink, pushed his pencil stub behind his ear with the two remaining stubby fingers on his right hand and said: Just kidding. For you,  gratuit.

Well, I left that butcher's with a melon-slice smile splitting my face, feeling - absurdly - doubly lucky (if you can work that one out). If there's one price we like in these parts it's gratuit, and factoring in veg from my garden, it was looking like a very good price indeed for some delicious velvety home-made veal stock.

Back at home, I tipped all the bones into two lightly oiled baking trays, mixed through some tomato paste and left them to roast in the oven until browned. While the bones were roasting I peeled and roughly chopped 2 carrots, 2 onions and a celery stalk and roasted these in another oiled baking tray until evenly browned and caramelized. Then I threw everything into my biggest stock pot, covered with 5 litres of cold water, added some sprigs of thyme, a couple of bay leaves and a few whole black peppercorns and left to simmer for three and a half hours, skimming from time to time.

So far, so on course for my 4-hour cheap veal stock.

But I hadn't reckoned on that most extreme of kitchen sports - straining.

The recipe instructed me to do this as many times as I could stand (up?) and I was disappointed, given my diligent skimming, to see thick legs of grease running down the sides of the empty pot after my first straining manoeuvre. I washed the pot (using industrial quantities of washing-up liquid to dissolve the fat) and repeated the process eight times, cursing the still lardy pot - which by this time was nearly running out the door - and the diminishing returns of my precious liquid. At this point I gave up and decided just to bag the damn stuff and be damned, divided what was left (precious little!) into poly bags and went to put them in the freezer...

... when, whoosh, the bottom of one of the bags split open and the contents splattered all over the floor and down the kitchen units.

So, to summarize. The cost (in terms of money and time) of 4 eggcupfuls of home-made veal stock:

Cost (euros)
€0.00 - veal bones
€0.00 - veg
€0.20 - tomato paste
€2.30 - washing-up liquid
€0.50 - 1 roll kitchen paper (mopping-up purposes)
€150.00 - emergency plumber (to unblock the sink because BB was away in Italy sourcing floor tiles)

Total: €153.00

Cost (time)
30 mins - roasting bones and veg
3 hrs 30 - cooking time and skimming
2 hrs - straining and washing up
30 mins - washing kitchen floor
2 hrs - attempting to unblock kitchen sink
4 hrs - waiting for emergency plumber

Total: 12 hrs 30

Veal stock. Don't try this at home!

yippee

All my badgering of friends, family and you, my readers, paid off because my vegetarian Scotch egg recipe has been voted a winner in the Foodista cookbook competition and will feature in the Foodista Best of Blogs Cookbook.

You can read reviews and/or pre-order a copy from Amazon here. It's out on 19 October 2010.

A huge thanks to everyone who voted.

Coming soon: How not to make veal stock.

spicy pomelo salad

I started writing this post on 14th July, when we were going through a mini heatwave, when the average daily temperature was 36 degrees. And it's now past 15th August, the end of summer according to the Savoyards, because the temperature always noticeably drops after this date. Already I'm reminiscing about red fruit stains on picnic linen and sausages sizzling on the BBQ and swimming capers in the lake - and my favourite Ray-Ban sunglasses, now lying on the lake bottom, seeing and seeing while the fish slip past.

We ate a lot of this spicy pomelo salad when it was hot. The pomelo is similar to a grapefruit but bigger, with a thicker skin and a milder sweeter taste. If you can't find pomelos, use pink grapefruit instead. A lovely refreshing summer salad.

Ingredients

1 large pomelo

2 tbsp vegetable oil

2 shallots, finely sliced

2 garlic cloves, finely sliced

1 or 2 small red chillies, seeded and chopped

3 spring onions, finely sliced

3 tbsp chopped peanuts

2 tbsp lime juice

1 tbsp fish sauce

1 tsp sugar

fresh coriander leaves to garnish

1. Peel the pomelo and separate into segments, removing the membrane. Break each segment into 3 or 4 pieces.

2. Heat the oil in a wok and fry the shallots and garlic until golden brown and crispy and drain on kitchen paper.

3. Mix the lime juice, fish sauce and sugar and pour over all the other ingredients which have been gently mixed together. Garnish with fresh coriander leaves.

curry magic

 

From sublime Joël Robuchon recipes to the ridiculous: curry that looks like fish food in a poly bag.

But I have to share this with you because it's the best curry, outside India, that I've ever tasted - and I'm a bit of a curry aficionado. I would estimate that 80% of non home-cooked meals (restaurants and take-aways) I had when I lived in Scotland were curries. An ex-boyfriend (and fellow aficionado) and I would scour Edinburgh for the wettest curry - because a curry has to be wet, you see.

Sadly, every curry I've had since I've been in France (including Paris, disappointingly) has been revolting: dry cloying sauces tasting predominantly of curry paste from a jar, kicking to death any other flavour threatening to make itself known. There's been nothing fresh or fragrant about any of them. The worst was in Méribel, where the chicken pieces had been coated in a torrid desiccated paste then heated in the oven. 

So imagine my joy when this little bag arrived (from my Aunt Hils) and it turned out to be so good.

At first glance the contents look like wood shavings and bark and other detritus swept up off the forest floor, but when you add water and cook for five minutes, some strange kind of alchemy takes place and you're left with the most amazing wet curry sauce, to which you simply add your meat/fish of choice. It's made by a company called Curry Magic - and they deliver to France.

I'm going to decorate the kitchen with flock wallpaper and pictures of the Taj Mahal that light up and play sitar music - so it will just be like sitting in my favourite Indian restaurant in Scotland.

fine food

I've been getting a lot of stick about the crisp sandwich and the burgers. After all my banging on about "Cordon Bleu this" and "Cordon Bleu that", you expected more from me.

So I give you ... 

langoustes en fines ravioles.

I bet they don't serve these down your local chippy.

This is based on a Joël Robuchon recipe from his book Robuchon Facile - and it really is easy, yet could conceivably feature on the menu of one of his Michelin starred restaurants.

The ravioli are made with layers of paper-thin slices of blanched turnip, their strong peppery flavour perfectly balancing the sweetness of the langoustines and the red pepper sauce. One to impress your dinner party guests with.

To make the ravioli sandwiches

Slice a small turnip very finely using a mandolin and cut into circles (about 7 cm) using a pastry cutter. Blanche the turnip slices in boiling salted water for 15 seconds, refresh in cold water and pat dry with kitchen roll. On top of 2 turnip discs, place 2 or 3 cooked langoustines, some very finely sliced fresh ginger and a flat parsley leaf and top with another disc of turnip. Stack a ravioli sandwich on top of another and serve with red pepper sauce.

Red pepper sauce

50 g onions

100 g red pepper

15 g fresh ginger

½ garlic clove, crushed with the flat side of a knife

45 g butter
pinch of paprika

100 cl fish stock

11 cl crème fraîche

salt and pepper

1. Peel and finely chop the onions. Peel the red pepper, remove the seeds and cut into big chunks. Peel and finely slice the ginger.

2. Melt 30 g of butter in a pan and add the garlic and onions and sweat for a couple of minutes. Add the paprika, salt and pepper, ginger, red pepper and fish stock and cook on a low heat for 20 minutes.

3. Add the crème fraîche and set aside for 5 minutes then add 15 g of chilled butter and sieve.