China China, where art thou , oh China?

aka 烧肉贩

I was devastated to learn that China China, my vote for the best Chinese restaurant in London's Chinatown, closed down recently for reasons that will probably never be known. Situated in a prime location on the corner of Gerrard Place, roast duck, chicken and pork alluringly hanging on the restaurant front, China China served classic Cantonese food for years, and had the best crispy pork and rice in town. Gone are the days when I could pass by after work for a take out portion of crispy pork, or drop in for duck and preserved vegetables with crispy noodles, pi-pa tofu, or prawn dumplings.

I am now forced to undertake an exhaustive research of all the restaurants in Chinatown, to find a suitable replacement for my crispy pork cravings....... I will report back. In the meantime, I have no choice but to make my own...

Tortilla de patata

Spanish omelette

You won't be surprised to hear that in Spain there's no such thing as a Spanish omelette (there is a French omelette, which is just a folded omelette). In Spain, a Spanish omelette is called tortilla de patata (potato omelette). The basic recipe just has eggs, potatoes and onion, but you can make it more interesting by adding chorizo, spinach or roasted peppers. Contrary to what you might see on TV, a tortilla should never be cooked under the grill like a frittata. A tortilla is always turned over, which is, after all, the fun bit. No cheating now!

Ingredients:

7 new potatoes, thinly sliced
6 eggs, well beaten in a large bowl
1 onion, halved and then sliced thinly
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

In a 20cm frying pan with a lid, fry the onion and garlic in olive oil until soft and translucent and set aside (about 10 mins.). Next, fry the potatoes until soft. This takes a while, so you could aid things by adding some water at regular intervals and covering to steam them. You could cheat and microwave or parboil the potatoes, but I always find it tastes better if they're fried. Don't skimp on the olive oil now! And make sure they're fully cooked before you take them off the heat, as they won't cook much more when you add the egg.

When the potatoes are done, mix with the onion and garlic and pour into the beaten eggs. Mix well and pour the mixture back into the frying pan. Cook over medium heat, using a spatula to slowly work around the circumference of the omelette. When the egg has more or less solidified around the edges, the omelette is ready to turn over. Cover the pan with a lid and flip it over, then slide the omelette carefully back into the pan. Cook for another couple of minutes checking with a fork that the egg is fully cooked.

Eat hot or cold with some good bread, or slice in half and put in a sandwich.

Naan pizza

This was inspired by a recipe in Nigella Express. I say inspired, but in fact, I can take no credit for the inspiration, since G* made it all. It's super easy (especially when someone else does all the work), and works really well. Just get some naan bread, pour over some chopped tomatoes (or you can make yourself some passata (or have someone else make it for you), although that's not so express....), some cheese (buffalo mozzarella works well), and toppings of your choice (I recommend parma ham and rocket). Then warm in oven until suitably pizza-like.

Also works well as a substantial bruschetta with some farmhouse bread.

Recipe competition: Very crunchy granola

This was one of G*'s entries for the competition. Being rather fond of Lizi's granola from The Good Carb Food Company, I was shocked when my local health food shop hiked the price up by 14p in a week, so I refused to buy it any more. I've now resolved to making my own. This recipe, I'm told, comes from Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Café: Breakfast Served All Day. So far, I've made it without the soy protein powder, since I only seem to be able to find the vanilla-flavoured stuff used by body builders. Apart from the oats and barley and oat bran (I haven't yet figured out what oat bran is, so I haven't used that yet), it has pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and almonds (although I've used ground cashews as I have a big bag of them in the cupboard). It's certainly very crunchy and even better than Lizi's. And you can try making it with different types of honey or maple syrup. Manuka honey seems to work quite well.

Serve with home-made yogurt for a perfect start to the day.

How to: Cook a goose

Right. Now that we've all had time to recover from the excesses of Christmas, I feel I can sit back with a sense of clinical detachment and tell you about the goose. The goose has been gaining popularity as a Christmas meal among yuppiehood, no doubt due to the influence of celebrity chefhood, because people are getting bored of pasty white turkey, and because geese can't easily be bred intensively, which appeals to the judicious carnivore's conscience. All that aside, though, goose meat has a much more intense and satisfying flavour than turkey. The goose is also something like thirty percent fat by body weight (I exaggerate perhaps, but it's a ridiculous amount of fat), which makes it much less likely to turn out dry.

Sophie Grigson has a couple of good recipes for goose stuffing with cranberry and sage. Stuff the cavity with the stuffing and an onion. You might just want to put one stuffing inside and cook the other in balls outside, as it reduces the cooking time. Seal the cavity with string (or improvise with wooden skewers....). Cover in foil and cook in an oven pre-heated to 190 degrees Celsius. I suggest using a deep oven tray to collect all the fat at regular intervals, which you can use to baste the goose and roast vegetables, and store for future use. Reckon on about half an hour per kilo plus twenty, and remove the foil for the last half hour.

1. The beginning.....

2. Stuffing the goose

3. Sealing the cavity

4. Ready to cook

5. The end product, end section

6. The end product, side elevation

7. Goose fat

Recipe competition: Daube

This one is from BJ. A French stew of beef, mushrooms and sundried tomatoes cooked in wine with an orange rind. I can think of no more deserving recipe to inaugurate my brand new 22cm cerise Le Creuset cocotte..... it's a really easy recipe, though it does take time to cook, so it's better suited for those slow, lazy winter Sundays (i.e. EVERY Sunday until June.......). It's a substantial, rich stew with earthy flavours and a twist of tangy citrus, and goes well with rice, pasta or potatoes. And having just had some leftovers, I can confirm that it doesn't suffer from being left in the fridge a couple of days. It does, however, help if your wine bottle doesn't have a powdery cork that decomposes upon opening and causes red wine to spray all over your face, white top and kitchen appliances........

Apple and cranberry steamed pudding with sticky toffee sauce

For the filling:
4 eating apples, peeled, cored and cubed
25 grams unsalted butter
1 tablespoon golden caster sugar
50 grams walnuts, toasted and roughly chopped

For the sauce:
175 grams light muscovado sugar
125 grams unsalted butter
200 grams crème fraîche

For the batter:
175 grams unsalted butter
130 grams golden caster sugar
3 eggs, beaten
150 grams self-raising flour

Apples, cranberries in a pan
Cook with butter if you can.
Add the sugar when they’re brown,
Leave aside to cool them down.

Crème fraîche now with butter and sugar
Over low heat melt together,
Bring to boil and shortly simmer.
Toffee sauce, not for the slimmer.

Add chopped walnuts to the filling.
Caref’lly now and without spilling
Pour some of the toffee sauce;
When a third’s gone you can pause.

Grease a basin with some butter,
Quickly now, you must not stutter.
Cream the butter and the sugar,
Gently add the beaten eggs.
Fold the flour and then the salt,
Steady though, no room for fault.

O’er the filling next pour the batter,
Think not how you’ll end up fatter.
The whole thing you must now seal,
Listen up, ‘tis a big deal:

Take some parchment and some foil,
This part’s worth the ensuing toil.
For the pudding to expand
I must now make a demand,
That you take the double sheet
And in the centre make a pleat.

Tie this lid down with a string,
Now the cooking can begin.
Put some water in a pot
Just to halfway up the top
Of the basin, lid up-facing.
Cover well until we stop.

Ninety minutes it will need,
A long time steaming ‘tis indeed.
But your guests will want some coffee
While you warm the remaining toffee,
And with this pudding you’ll succeed
To disgust them with their greed.

Ham in Coca-Cola

This sounds totally gross, but don't knock it till you've tried it. And you really have to make it yourself to appreciate this recipe in all its glory. There are few things more fun to do than to pour a two-litre bottle of Coke on a 2-kilogram piece of ham (or gammon, rather). There's a good recipe for this in Nigella Lawson's Nigella Bites (amusingly, under the section headed Trashy). Basically, you get a mild-cured piece of gammon (you can soak it overnight to remove some of the salt), put it skin down in a large stockpot with one onion, pour two litres of Coke (the normal version, not Diet or Cherry or Orange or Zero or any of that), bring it to the boil and simmer it for two hours:

When it's done, let it cool slightly and take the skin off. Make a criss-cross pattern on the fat with a sharp knife and stick some cloves where the lines meet. Then spread a couple of tablespoons of dark treacle all over the fat, some demerara sugar and mustard powder, and cook for about 15 minutes at 180C.

Serve with vegetables of your choice

The ham has a deep, smoky, caramelized flavour. Be sure to keep the cooking stock, which you can use as a base for stews (in small doses, as it's very sweet!).

Macondo

Macondo
8 & 9 Hoxton Square
London N1

Could Macondo be the best café in the whole of London? I think so. Exposed brick walls, cozy leather sofas, this is a great place to while away the Sunday morning hours. If you while away enough hours, you might as well stay for lunch. Despite my initial apprehensions, the place does actually serve authentic tortilla de patatas and paella, as well as a variety of other appealing foods, which yesterday included mushroom stroganoff, some aubergine bake-type thing, lasagna, and the infamous broccoli with cheese, which was a bit random. But forget all that, this place has the BEST cakes ever. They have REAL cheesecake. None of this Philadelphia fridge cake nonsense, I mean proper baked cheesecake made with fromage blanc, drizzled with honey and served with whipped cream. Their coffee's pretty darn good, too, and they serve an interesting array of drinks, including mint and lime iced tea (highly recommended).

Service can be a bit flaky, though. You have to order at the till and it's all slightly chaotic when it gets busy. I ordered and paid, and then they forgot our order, and then they forgot I'd paid. It seems a bit strange given that the food is actually on display in trays sitting atop shelves. I mean, you could just give me a spoon and I'd have no problem serving myself, since it all looks so yummy! But anyway, our server was having kind of a stressed out day.

Watching the Hoxton crowd is part of the experience. They can certainly be, well, let's say "expressive" in their fashion sense, and they range from continental chain smokers to doctorate students conducting interviews about cross-cultural ethnicity for their humanities dissertation.

And that Nutella cake.... it's just waiting to be tried...... maybe next time.......

Proper, baked cheesecake (bottom) and carrot and orange cake (affectionately described to us as "squidgy" cake (it's drenched in honey, so mind your kidneys.....)

Recipe competition: Chocolate pud

For those of you sending recipes for my recipe competition, you can follow progress here. I'll be reproducing all the recipes and posting them so you can see the final product. I should stress that what I write on here is not an indication of the recipe's chances of winning, since the final judgment will be made by an independent panel of jurors. Also, I'm not posting the actual recipes here, since I'll be compiling these in a recipe book for y'all.

So, let's begin! To start things off, here's a recipe from SN. A yummy chocolate pudding that takes minutes to make. Crisp on the outside, deliciously gooey on the inside, but not excessively heavy. A great ending to any dinner party. With thanks to GK for help with the faithful reproduction of the original recipe.

Thai fragrant rice, ginger and garlic chicken pot

1 chicken leg, thigh and drumstick separated
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 cm stem ginger, finely chopped
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 cup Thai fragrant rice
1 and 3/4 cups chicken stock
4 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked and sliced
1 spring onion, sliced

Wash rice and place in heavy-bottomed, non-stick pot. Add all the other ingredients, reserving the green part of the spring onion, and place the chicken pieces on top. Add pepper to taste. Cover and bring stock to boil, simmering over medium heat until rice and chicken are cooked (20-25 mins). Sprinkle the remaining spring onion on top and serve.

Mudéjar

Or, what happened when I tried something out of Claudia Roden's book, Arabesque. I got this as a Christmas present (thanks, Gungush!), and certain people had been bugging me about making something from it. Sadly, I didn't have much of an opportunity to do anything more elaborate than humous, babaganoush and try her method for fool-proof couscous (which involves first soaking it and then sticking it in the oven - it works!). The rest was me dressing up a chicken and making some gazpacho, hence "mudéjar". Anyway, you can see the results below. Oh, the cake was from Sam and Sam Clarke's book, Moro.

Smash don't mash...

Steamed haddock with ginger, garlic and spring onion, and smashed potatoes with Boursin

So I have to thank indiagirl for this one, since it was she who suggested the whole Boursin thing, which on the face of it doesn't seem that appealing. But trust me, this is a great way of making something from bland boiled potatoes.

Marinate the haddock with some light soy sauce, oil, balsamic vinegar, Shaoxing rice wine (or dry sherry), garlic, pepper and finely chopped ginger for at least 20 minutes. Sprinkle some chopped spring onion and steam in a bamboo steamer or other method of your choice for about 5 minutes. For the potatoes, boil them in salted water until soft (I'm told I should use red-skinned potatoes for best effect, but I don't think I offended anyone by using white-skinned ones...). Drain and smash (not, I hasten to add, mash - indiagirl didn't specify how one should smash potatoes, so I just squashed them with the back of a wooden spatula, but there are probably more fun techniques, like pelting them against the wall or something). Add a generous helping of garlic and herb Boursin and mix into the smashed potatoes.

Roast chicken

Having just fed four people, I thought I'd share my thoughts on roast chicken. No doubt everyone has their own way of roasting chicken, so here's mine. The worst thing about a roast chicken is dry, bland breast meat (although I don't usually eat chicken breast anyway), so you have to stuff the thing with something to prevent it from drying. Get your preferred choice of chicken (free-range, corn-fed, or whatever works for you). Wash and pat dry. Stuff with: wedges of lemon, small onion, crushed garlic cloves, your choice of herb (mint or thyme work well), butter. Rub olive oil and salt all over skin.

I served roast potatoes with the chicken. Wash and peel the potatoes, and cut into bite-size chunks. Parboil for 5 minutes, drain and shake in the pan to fluff them up. Spread over the bottom of a deep roasting tin lined with aluminium foil. Halve two small onions, and cut each half into quarters. Crush some garlic cloves. Spread evenly among the potato chunks. Drizzle with olive oil, salt and cumin seeds. Place the rack on the roasting tin and set the chicken on top, breast side up. Cook in a pre-heated at 190C (about 75 mins. for a medium-sized chicken). You shouldn't need to baste it, and the fat and juices will be soaked up by the potatoes, giving them extra flavour.

Et voilà:

Things to do with: a pumpkin (part 1)

Hallowe'en's gone, all the pumpkins are on sale, and you just can't resist buying one, even though you have no idea what you'll do with it once you've bought it. Herewith, I provide part one of a pumpkin experimentation series, courtesy of india girl. Hopefully, I'll find more pumpkins at the supermarket to continue the series, otherwise you'll have to wait a year!

Stir-fried beef with string beans and roasted pumpkin:

Pumpkin preparation technique is important: should you skin first, then cube? Or cube first and then skin? Or perhaps cut into wedges, cook and then skin? After much discussion, I opted for the first option. Cut off the top and bottom of the pumpkin to give yourself a flat surface, cut vertically in half, then skin. Spoon out the seeds and spread out on a baking tray with some oil. Cube pumpkin and place over the seeds, drizzle with some oil. Add sea salt, pepper, ground cumin, chilli and whole, crushed garlic cloves. Cook for 15-20 in oven, pre-heated to 200C.

Serve with stir-fried beef and string beans, yoghurt, and plain rice.