Battered but Unbeatable

On Monday we had a Man vs Food meal - I had a lot of leftover roast beef from the weekend, and a hot beef sandwich with the trimmings seemed like a good idea - it meant we got to use up the gravy too, and was something done quickly when time was not on my side.

A good pig-out is fun on occasion. I had bought some oven chips (sinful) that had been in the freezer for a while and needed using, so they went on the menu. A few batons of carrot and cucumber and some spring onions were a tiny gesture to health, the BBQ beans probably less so. The meal needed another element to fill it out, so I decided to make onion rings from scratch.

A few weeks back I did a cookery school piece for Lancashire Life, Norman Musa at Ning in Manchester showing a bunch of us how to make Malaysian street food. One of the dishes was a fritter made with beansprouts, prawn and Chinese chives. Norman's batter mix was incredibly simple (and for the austerity cook nice and cheap): five tbsps of plain flour, one of self-raising, a tsp of salt and another of turmeric, beaten with water to a thick cream consistency. It worked then, and a variation on it (less turmeric, some of the salt replaced with celery salt) made excellent onion rings, fried in about 1cm of oil in a small frying pan.

Frying stuff is not of course terribly healthy, but it got another vegetable into us, and just as importantly it made the meal fun - crunchy is good.

Talking about Man vs Food, SC posed a very interesting question the other day. Why do we in Britain have loads of fast food chains, but none of the mom-and-pop joints you see on Adam Richman's programme? Places where you can get a great burger without the plastic palace experience of MacDonalds? Where they do filler-upper cooking that pleases. When I travelled on business in the USA in the 90s those were the places that were great, restaurants owned by and run for families. Cheap-end chains were awful, high-end restaurants worse - why do the Americans love that whole 'The Maitre d' will insult you now' thing? But little burger and rib diners where you could eat well for not very much, and in a good friendly atmosphere too, were priceless.

Austerity and the Chinese Supermarket

My trip to the Chinese supermarket was a pleasant eye-opener, and even with my man-flu-ebola-dengue-fever virus (it would have killed a lesser man if you could have found one) it was a joy to smell the spices permeating the various rooms. For the austerity cook it showed that shopping around is worth it - noodles were about half the price of Sainsbury's for example, tins of bamboo shoots maybe 20% cheaper, and so on.

But for any cook interested in new stuff it was brilliant. I bought some tinned mushrooms that will add a touch of authenticity to a dish or two; dried chillis that I now thanks to Norman Musa at Ning know how to use correctly; shrimp paste; sweetened soy sauce; proper milky coconut milk; cassia bark; palm sugar...

So this evening's meal will be a Malay/Chinese mini-feast, trying to repeat what I did under careful supervision on Saturday. My hope is that the house smells a little like Ning after my efforts. And that the dishes tonight are as delicious as Saturday's.

Malaysian Cooking

As part of my day job last Saturday I attended the Ning cookery school in Manchester's trendy Northern Quarter. For full details if anyone is interested check out Lancashire Life's April edition, and maybe their website in the fullness of time, but a couple of things were of particular interest to the austerity cook so I'll include them in this blog.

Firstly was how to use lemon grass. I had always thought that trimming and then bashing the moist core with the flat of a knife was the way, removing the fibrous bits after they had given up their flavour: not so as Norman Musa demonstrated. We trimmed the pieces are I had previously done, then cut them in short lengths and zapped them with water in a food processor. Wonderful smell, maximum flavour and fragrance, most bang for your ringgit.

The other was the power of toasted spice. I sometimes do this, in a hot dry pan with one whole spice. Norman had us measure decent quantities of several: cumin, pepper, cinnamon bark, cardamom and star anise (broken into small bits), then got us toasting them gently for a couple of minutes before grinding them finely. The mixture of spices again filled the room, and there was certainly more flavour imparted to the food because of this technique.

I'm off to my local Chinese supermarket tonight to buy some supplies. Fresh and relatively simple street food (this was for beginners) it was nonetheless delicious, and even in the Far East in my previous career I never smelled anything so mouth-watering.