This week I have been Reading
The 2011 Tour de France race guide.
Watching
An Idiot Abroad
Listening to
The xx
Discovering
(Or rediscovering) Hamlet - Nicki Greenberg's beautiful new version, thanks to the fabulous Snarkattack, who invited me along to see Nicki talk about the creative process behind the book.
Eating
- An enormous serve of bangers'n'mash and a nourishing pint of Kilkenny at the Town Hall one dismal Tuesday evening.
- A "Chachi" - chianina meatball sandwich - another brioche donut and some amazing chocolate tart at Beatrix, which Essjay has reviewed.
- A lazy Sunday lunch at The Crimean. The Polish hunter's stew (bigos) was just the thing to revive me after a chilly bike ride.
- Generous piles of fried food with oodles of chillies and sichuan peppercorns at Sichuan House
- Succulent suckling pig at Liberteene.
- An array of bright, zesty flavours at Chin Chin, where the only problem was having to choose only some of the items from what looks to be a menu that is all hits, no filler.
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By Injera, on March 29th, 2011% Students: Two student friends from Durham want to improve their cooking skills and learn to make delicious, easy and cheap Chinese food to replace their usual mince dishes.
I was interested to see how this English show covered Chinese food. It’s presented as an introduction to ingredients and techniques for a couple of budding cooks each episode and the lovely Ching-He Huang selects accessible recipes and introduces any specialty ingredients well. In this episode, she takes a couple of students to a local supermarket to shop for produce. I’m sure her heart must’ve sunk when they admitted to not being able to distinguish between a marrow and a cucumber, although I suspect they weren’t quite as clueless as this makes out. They were, after all, shown sitting down at the dinner table in their share-house to eat one of their aforementioned “mince dishes” with a glass of wine each. Anyway, their admission didn’t put her off her game, and she happily cooked up a storm with chinkiang vinegar, chilli bean sauce, yellow bean sauce and shaohsing wine.
The cooking is billed as “in minutes”, and our host certainly races through the script swiftly enough, however these things do take time. When the cooking started in the outdoor kitchen in Chinatown (Durham has a Chinatown? – I guess the filming must be done in London, although I was surprised to see that Newcastle has one!), the sun was blazing in the sky. By the time we get to the second dish, it is very dark and the students and cook were all rugged up and looking a little miserable. The food soon cheered them up and, after a demo, they were sent to do some cooking of their own.
Chinese Food in Minutes is on the Food channel on Sundays at 7.00pm and repeats are scheduled during the week. The website contains video links to individual recipes as well as printable recipes. It’s well worth a look.
By Injera, on December 5th, 2009% Just as soon as Anthony Bourdain’s paean to Melbourne’s food had scratched the travel itch into submission, Lifestyle Food popped Gary Rhodes into my just-home-from-work TV slot with his travels around China. Thanks. From reading Fuschia Dunlop’s Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, I did know that there was a world of food beyond the eastern cities we visited, but actually seeing them activated acute travel regret.
Gary’s a personable TV presence and, as he did in his “Indian road trip”, he took a student role to local chef mentors as he learned about the dishes specific to each of the regions he visited. His “sous chefs” – I missed the beginning of the first episode, so it took me some time to figure out that they weren’t actually chefs he’d brought from his kitchen, but a couple of lucky applicants – did some colour pieces and investigations into local ingredients.
Anyway, we were particularly interested in seeing the Yangzhou segment and the method the local chef used for his Lion’s Head Meatballs. The home chef then did a mashup of his recipe and the Fuschia Dunlop version and we had them for dinner last weekend. It’s difficult to say whether it was the alterations to the recipe that made it even better than last time because for this effort he also hand-minced the pork. In order to make a final decision on which recipe reigns supreme, we’d have to make the original one again, with hand-minced pork. Perhaps…
In the meantime, I’ve posted the mashup recipe over on our shopping/recipe list blog.
By Injera, on December 1st, 2009% Friday night mojitos at the Red Monkey Tea House in Victoria Street were taking effect. The stress of the week was melting away; my defences were low. The phone rang – unknown number. Was it the unexpected delight of hearing from an old friend? The late afternoon sunshine? The mojitos? After hanging up I realised I’d agreed to go to a Melbourne Victory game the following night.
The plan – which, to my surprise, still existed the following day – was to meet at Etihad Stadium at 6.15. This posed two problems. One was resolved relatively quickly: Etihad Stadium is The Stadium Formerly Known As Telstra Dome, or The Stadium Known Even Further Back As Colonial. The other problem was more worrisome. What about dinner?
We figured that we could have an early snack, then a late snack, and call that dinner. Dumplings seemed to fit the bill for the what. The issue was where. Docklands doesn’t have much to offer, nor does the western end of the CBD. Hutong was rejected for being too far east and a call sent out on Twitter garnered that and Dumplings Plus as options. So Dumplings Plus it was.
Continue reading Cheap and cheerful (or just cheap)
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