Courgette and Chickpea and Coconut Milk

Hot food in less than 10 minutes

This meal - my Thursday dinner - is slop on a plate in all of its quick and easy glory – it looks like nothing but it took minutes to make and tasted incredible.  This is my staple food; dumplings and five hour cooking is fun and I love it from time to time, but most of the time I want to eat before 23:00.

Like this, but in fabric ballet shoes, and with less flexibility.
And with hairier legs and more dried skin.
And the fastest growing toenails in the world.

Thursdays are always a good day for me, I start work early which means I finish work early and then I head down to Deda for an adult beginners ballet class.  I am not a graceful woman, but this class is  a joy in my life, it manages to give me hope and peace and excitement and energy every single week.  And it's proper exercise, we come out sweating, but we also come out jumping around and laughing.  And so much more than that, it gives me a hour a week where I can feel at peace in my shell, and know that my body is moving in the ways that I want it to,  that I have control over what it is doing and what is happening to it.  I had a lot of health issues when I was younger, I spent a year unable to really get out of bed, I spent a lot of time in a wheelchair, and so to have this hour where I feel completely in control of my body and to be able to feel it learn new things is amazing.

I can't dance on a full stomach, but I really can't dance on an empty stomach and this Thursday I had eaten wasabi peas* and giant chocolate buttons for breakfast (not together) and wasabi peas and giant chocolate buttons for lunch (not together).  Which is not really enough.  I had about an hour before the class started so grabbed a bowl of soup from the cafe (such good food, such good soup, such good service.  I love the cube!) which was perfect, but after an hour of sweating and I wanted more food when I got home.

My wife was cooking some garlicky fried courgettes to go with some left over risotto and offered me half of them.  With the addition of a couple of things form the fridge this became a beautiful bowl of food:

Courgette and Chickpea and Coconut Milk:

serves 2

Stuff from my fridge makes a lovely meal.

Ingredients:

• 1 courgette
• 0.5 can chickpeas
• a few tablespoons Soy Yoghurt
• some garlic puree
• some lemon juice
• some chili sauce
• some soy sauce
• some creamed coconut, grated off the block
• 1 spring onion

Method:

• Fry the courgettes until coloured, about five minutes.  Add the chickpeas, some yoghurt, some garlic puree, some lemon juice, some chili sauce, some soy sauce (10 seconds each, 1 minute total) a about two tablespoons of grated creamed coconut, just grate it straight off the block (remove the plastic first!) (2 minutes, including the time taken to find a grater).

cooking instructions 1:
Shove it all in a pan

cooking instructions 2:
Stir

This would be tasty food, but it is so easy to lift a meal into something delicious, this time I freshened all the flavours by adding some chopped spring onion right at the end of the cooking (2 minutes to peel and chop), just stir it in and then serve.  The fresh light flavours bring it all together and make it something more than its parts.

You can do a similar thing with a handful of fresh herbs, stirring coriander in to curry or stew with make it more than it was before, or parsley into warning winter foods.  Fresh lemon juice does the same, or finely sliced celery leaf would work too.  The key is to add a new flavour right at the end, and it brings everything together.

Time taken to make this meal: 10 minutes, start to finish.  BOOM.

*Wasabi peas seem to the the quintessential middle class snack to me.  “What's that your eating?  Peanuts?”  “Oh no darhling, wasabi peas!”  But I do love the spicy little things.  And who am I to deny my middle class heritage?  True story: I overheard a conversation where someone said “It's to'ally legit, it's no back 'a lorry” and thought they were saying “It's totally legit, it's no baccalaureate”.  They were talking second hand phones, I heard a discussion on educational systems.  I couldn't be more middle class if I tried.

Mushroom Dim Sum cooked in Hot and Sour Broth

On making dumplings, and why this might indicate I am a bad person.

Our local cinema has a monthly Asian film night, Satori Screen and the film shown last month was Dumplings, by Fruit Chan.  A brilliant horror film talking about China vs Hong Kong, and society's need for women to stay beautiful, and the lengths that women have to take to stay beautiful to their husbands.  And also about dumplings.  A lot of dumplings.  This incredible smooth dough, all so delicately wrapped around such a delicious looking carefully crafted filling.  And yeah, the filling was foetuses (don't worry, that's not a spoiler, that happens in the first couple of minutes of the film), and yeah the dumplings may have started off soft pale pink and got darker and redder and denser throughout the film, and yeah the dim sum may have been large enough that they had to be bitten into so the filling would spill grotesquely out of someone's mouth, but (and I'm just going to have to admit it) this film made me hungry.

Aunt Mei and her sexy dumplings

My friends (good people) had the following to say about the film (stolen from facebook without their permission, ha!)

“I will never ever watch this film again. It actually made me sick!”

“It is a very good film, but it is also very 'wrong'“

But I watched it and couldn't stop thinking about making my own dumplings (no foetuses).  That might make me a bad person.

I don't watch many films* and I think this means I get distracted whilst watching them, I haven't trained my brain to concentrate on a screen for that long yet, so whilst the film was going on in front of me (and it was brilliant, I properly loved it.) I was also watching it as a cookery show.  Watching how to form the dough, and the best kneading technique.  Watching Aunt Mei stretch and roll it smooth.  Watching the consistency of the filling.  Watching to folding and sealing technique.  Watching how to stream or boil them.  AND I LOVED IT.  Who needs to google recipes when you've just watched the whole thing?

So.

Only tomato.  Promise.

As Monday was not a good Monday and Tuesday was not a good Tuesday, I soothed the disorderly mindscape with a mooch around the Chinese supermarket (Mochi!  Mochi to soothe and soften the spikes!) and focussed the mania into an evening of cooking.  It took me five hours.  But if those five hours hadn't been filled with manic chopping and forming and stirring they would have been filled with manic less-helpful-activities, so five hours of process seemed like a win.  And then we ate dumplings.  More of a win!  And my amazing housemate took beautiful photos!  Even more of a win!

And the first time you make anything it takes longer.  The first time I cooked a meal it took me three and a half hours.  The meal was Shepherd’s Pie.  I cooked the mince.  And then I flavoured the mince.  And then I cooked some potatoes.  And then I mashed the potatoes.  And then I put them together.  And then I pre heated the oven.  And then I put the pie in to cook.  (I felt so proud when it was finished.)  I'm guessing it was a similar thing here, when I make these again I figure I'll probably halve the preparation time, and the time after that it'll probably be down to an hour and a half.  I'll be able to make the broth and the filling at the same time.  I'll be quicker with the dough prep.  I'll know more about shaping and filling.  But a five hour evening playing with dough was an amazing way to spend a hard Tuesday evening.

Treats from the Chinese supermarket:

High gluten wheat flour not pictured.
And that was my main reason for going to the Chung Wah!

High gluten wheat flour!
Giant bag of dried mushrooms (200g)!  £1.15! (Ha!  Compare that to Merchant Gourmet's £1.89 for 25g!)
Fresh tofu! 40p a block!
Ung choi!  Chinese leaf!  Galangal!

And put that together with the ginger, chili, onion and garlic from soundbites and a very good meal is forming.

Mushroom Dim Sum cooked in Hot and Sour Broth

Serves 8

Tri cornered.  Like the awesome hats.  But for eating, not wearing.

Ingredients:

Dough:

• 4 cups High Gluten Wheat Flour
• 1.25 cups water
• 0.25 cups oil

Fillings:

Pictured in the background,
two of the three 'pick up your parcel' cards
that I have not yet obeyed.

• 100g Dried mushrooms (Ha!  So cheap!)
• Soy sauce
• Hoisin sauce
• 8 cloves garlic
• 1 red onion
• 8 leaves Chinese leaf
• 200g Tofu – I used fresh, silken or firm would be fine.  It's going to become mush so it doesn't really matter.
• Chilli sauce/hot sauce

Broth:

Put it all in a bowl, just like Blue Peter.

• 2 'thumbs' of ginger (or from a jar)
• 2 knobs of galangal (never seen this in a jar, feel free to leave it out)
• 1 bunch spring onions (if you get fat ones then there is less preparation work to do. It takes three times as long to trim, peel and wash three skinny onions as it does 1 fat onion. That's a tip right there, that is.)
• 8 cloves garlic (or from a jar)
• 2 red chillis (or from a jar)
• 3 sticks lemon grass (or from a jar)
• 4 old and almost past it tomatoes, peeled and de-seeded (totally inauthentic.  But I had them, they needed using that day, and tomato adds and incredible richness to any dish.  You could squirt in half a teaspoon of tomato puree and it would do exactly the same.  And would take a lot less time.)
• 1 lemon (or from a bottle)
• 1 lime (or from a bottle)
• 2 lime leaves (if you happen to have them)
• Soy sauce
• Sugar
• Vinegar (something appropriate like rice wine vinegar would be good.  I used four-year-old red cider vinegar because that's all we have in the house.  Worked fine!)
• Ung choi, washed and chopped, or pak choi, or cabbage, or any vegetable you fancy.  Or lots of vegetables.  I like long vegetables as they resemble noodles in the broth, but anything would be lovely.
• More tofu (another 200g) for chewy bits, if wanted (you should want)

Method:

• Put dried mushrooms in to soak, just covered in water, with a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce, and a table spoon of hoisin sauce.

Dough:

• Wash your hands.  Not even kidding.  Kneading dough will take off everything that is on the outside of your hands, so wash them, and then clean your nails, and then wash your wrists.  Or don't, and know that as you are eating your dumplings later, all the germs from your keyboard, and from the work photocopier (where everyone coughs on their hands and then presses the buttons) and the work coffee machine, and the petrol pump handle – all of that together – will be in your dumplings.  So wash your hands.
• Mix the flour, water and oil together into a very soft dough.  It'll be all shaggy and wet for a bit, and you may have to keep kneading it round your hands until the gluten is worked enough to take out of the bowl, but keep going with it.  If it's still too wet to form one clump after five minutes of kneading then sprinkle in some more flour.  If it doesn't come together nicely and it hard to move, add more water.  Dough is a temperamental thing, the consistency depends on so many things, the brand of flour, the temperature of your house, the humidity of your kitchen, the oil levels in your skin (gross) – all of this can make a difference so don't be afraid to adjust accordingly.  If it's too dry to move, add water.  If it's too wet to hold, add flour.  However – don't add flour just because it doesn't look smooth.  It won't look smooth for a while – it took me five minutes of kneading to get it dough like rather than wet slop , then another five to get it to hold its shape, then another five to get it stretchy and then another five to get it smooth and soft.  20 minutes in total.  But why make dough if you don't like the kneading?

You can buy dim sum and wonton wrappers.  If you want to cut down on the ingredients and the preparation time you could buy a pack of them, available either fresh or frozen, and they would be great, but I like the kneading.  I like the way the dough changes texture, I like feeling my rage seep out of me and become productive, I like the feeling of accomplishment when it all comes together.  This is why I cook things like this.  Not really for the food, you can buy all of these cheaply from a takeaway, but for the process.

• Put the soft, smooth, peace-filled dough** into a bowl, cover it and leave it to rest while you make the filling.

It makes me want to sink my face into it.

"Stop stirring, I have to take a photo!"

Filling:

• Soak the mushrooms as above, if you didn't do this previously.
• Finely chop the red onion, the garlic cloves and shred (cut into fine slivers) and then dice (chop into small cubes) the Chinese leaf.
• Fry the onion and garlic, squeeze the liquid out of mushrooms (BUT KEEP THE LIQUID!), chop them up and add them in too.
• Fry for a bit, then add the Chinese leaf and fry some more.
• Then crumble in the tofu and stir until it is all soft.  Add some of the mushroom broth if it needs more moisture (this will depend on your tofu).
• Stir in a little chili sauce (for flavour, not heat) and set aside.

Forming the dumplings:

Give the dough another quick knead, form it into a long snake and chop off walnut sized pieces.
Form a piece of dough into a ball, roll it into a circle, place a spoon of filling in the middle, bring the sides up (I made tri-cornered ones first, easiest to form, and then tried half-moons (messier and less uniform)), seal all the edges, and places on a lightly floured plate.  Repeat another  47 times.  See, manic cooking.  It has its uses.  It doesn't.  Mania is awful and comes from an awful place, but I feel better about it if I can harness it in some way.  Sometimes I can't, sometime I can.  Sometimes I make 150 biscuits.  This time I made plates and plates of dumplings.

Broth:

Shut up, my oven gloves are totally clean.

Chop tofu into cubes, toss in a little oil and put in a hot oven.  Stir ever so often.  The tofu will break up and become little chewy bits of joy.

With your broth, you can use everything from a jar, you can use everything fresh or you can combine the two.  Jarred food doesn't taste as good as fresh, but if convenience and speed are a higher priority in your life (and I say that entirely without judgement), then use jars!  Don't miss out on making broth just because you don't have the life to chop lemongrass!  Better to eat a slightly-less-bright version than no version at all.

• Peel and finely slice the ginger and galangal, and put in the mushroom broth to soak.
• Peel and finely slice the spring onions, garlic, chilli.
• Lemongrass – I like it very finely sliced so that it adds texture to the mix at the bottom of the broth, but feel free to throw it in whole to fish out later. (tiny bits of lemongrass make me think of discarded finger and toe nails.  I'm fine with that.  This may put you off ever eating it again, but given that this recipe is based on cannibalism, it shouldn't make too much of a difference.)
• In a very large pan or wok, fry the garlic, onion, chili and lemon grass in some oil.
• Add the tomato, then the ung choi
• Add the mushroom broth.  If you want to add the bits of ginger and galangal too, go for it, they can be fished out later.  Or you could wrap them in muslin and leave them floating in the broth, but I am literally never going to bother doing that.  I just chuck it in and let people eat around the woody bits of galangal, and either eat the ginger or not as they wish (I eat it, but if this was a dinner party, not just dinner, then I take it out before serving.  My wife and housemate will eat anything I put in front of them, I don't need to impress them).
• Add the juice from the lemon and the lime.
• Add sugar if needed, maybe a teaspoon
• Add another half cup (or so) of soy sauce, and more hoisin if wanted
• Top up with hot water.
• Once simmering, add the dumplings and boil them for about 5 minutes

Serve next to a bowl full of broth topped with chewy bits of tofu, and feel healed from the broth and calmer from the dumplings.

All photo credits (except the first screencap from Dumplings) to Oh Blee, a good friend and beautiful artiste!  You should totally click on some of these photos to appreciate the steam, textures, colours and soul within.


*an aside:  I don't really know how to watch films.  Whilst they're on the screen I can feel myself getting older, every minute spent watching a film is a minute I not doing something else and it terrifies me.  I'm the same with tv.  But I'm not the same with books or wasting time online.  I can be reading proper trash and it doesn't give me the time fear, but watching high quality films and TV, and there are some amazing things around, doesn't sit right with me.  Some of the modern TV shows are better than a great many of the books I have read, this isn't a one-medium-is-art-and-the-others-are-entertainment thing, it's just a clock ticking in my brain thing.  Which makes absolutely no sense – it take many more hours to read a book then it does to watch a film, so why am I so bad at it?!

And worse – I can't watch a film without hearing the ticking, but I can waste hours on pointless internet sights, the ones that collate the lols round around the net.  So I click and click and click and get older and provide a market for these sites, for the sites that do nothing but steal form everywhere else, and I give them page views and that sustains their advert prices and makes them money.  And that makes me a much worse person than finding foetus dumplings attractive does.



**another aside.  When my wife is just waking up her tummy has the texture of warm soft dough and it is the nicest thing in the word.  I think this might be another reason I like making dough; it reminds me of her (even when she is literally in the next room).



This post is massive.  Congratulations for making it to the end!  Reward yourself with some Chinese takeaway!

Apple Pie Porridge

I dreamed a dream and made it real.

Last night I dreamt of many thing, but in one tiny part of my dream I was in the café in Groundhog Day and I was eating apple pie porridge.  I woke up with a need to make that real.  We also had a friend staying over on our sofa, so breakfast was a lovely event; my wife and our friend had avocado on toast, our housemate and I had porridge, we all had various different types of tea and we all curled up under duvets and blankets and carried on talking from the night before.  Sometimes terrible things happen, and sometimes it takes duvets and tea and huddling together to try to make sense of the world.  Sometimes you can’t make sense of the world, sometimes you can only complain about it and drink tea (and wine).

Sometimes you need a hot breakfast.

Apple Pie Porridge

(Served two with leftovers.  Serves four?)

Ingredients:

everything looks classy
when you have cinnamon sticks.

• 1 apple, grated
• 1 cup oats
• 2 cups almond milk (other milk would be fine, but almond milk adds to the nutty sweetness that makes this taste more like pie)
• 2 teaspoons brown sugar (not really needed.  But I liked it.)
• Half a cinnamon stick (ground cinnamon would be totally fine)
• Pinch of ground ginger (fresh would be better, didn't have any)
• Loads of nutmeg, maybe 20 grates?
• 2 cloves
• 1 star anise

(Or scrap all of that and use a couple of teaspoons of mixed spice)

• Maple syrup to serve

Method:

• Toast the oats in a saucepan until they just start to change colour.  This will add a nutty flavour to the porridge that is reminiscent of pastry.
• Add the milk and the apple, stir well.
• Add the sugar and the spices and cook for 5-10-15 minutes.  I cooked it for longer than I would have normally cooked porridge because I wanted the apple to melt down.
• Slop into a couple of bowls and pour some syrup over the top.
• Eat, pull the blanket up around your chin and feel comforted.

Roast Butternut Squash

with Red Lentils, Tomatoes and Tamarind

A dark sultry stew to eat in your pyjamas on a quiet January night

(Or to serve with dumplings and fancy veg

if you feel the need to impress anyone)

I have a confession to make; I got caught up in the snow drama and I did some panic buying.  Not real panic buying, not five loaves of bread and all the milk in Sainsburys panic buying, but panic buying nonetheless.  I walked into the vegetable aisle to try and buy some broccoli but the whole aisle was empty.  Literally empty, no potatoes, no root vegetables, no brassics – just a whole row of plastic crates turned upside down.

(image from yahoo)

Now on a normal day this would be fine, there are other shops in existence.  But this wasn't a normal day.  This was a snow day.  I was cold and a little bit damp.  My car is a little bit dodgy.  I had my housemate and a neighbour with me, also wanting to buy a few bits and bobs.  And somehow in my head (with thanks to mass-media-snowmegeddon-hype) this became I HAVE TO BUY ENOUGH NOW TO LAST US FOR A MONTH IN CASE WE ALL GET SNOWED IN.  These people are my responsibility, I will feed the masses as we huddle together hiding from the weather.  We must be quick, quick I tell you, we must trade for goods quickly (pay) and cross the fields (A52) back to our homestead (terraced house) before the storm (mild snow) hits the village (city).  And so I freaked out a little, gave in to the panic and bought the only vegetable left in the shop, a massive, massive, massive butternut squash.

Whilst I like butternut squash, my wife isn't so keen.  So we got the squash home, spent two weeks in mild snow, didn't miss a day of work, didn't have a single day when we couldn't drive, didn't have a single day when we couldn't walk to a shop and our life went on as normal.  We ate lots of food, we drunk a fair bit of wine and the squash (who had very quickly become a vegetepal) sat in the kitchen looking unwanted.

like this, but with a squash four times as big and covered in sharpie.

A couple of days ago when I was stressed and cranky (it happens) I peeled the face of my vegetepal and roasted it for ages with some thyme and garlic, not knowing what the next step would be.  Sunday rolled around, I wanted wholesome food, squash came out of the fridge and this was borne of my cravings: 

Roast butternut squash with red lentils, tomatoes and tamarind

(serves at least four for dinner and two for lunchboxes the next day,

and probably more if wanted)

Ingredients:

I love my plates

• 1 massive butternut squash, peeled, roasted in sunflower oil for about an hour in a hot oven (gas mark 8, 230c, 450f), with 8 peeled cloves of garlic, a handful of fresh thyme.  Roast it until the pieces have darkened and the edges or corners have turned black and all of the pieces are soft.  (by the way, I kept the oil form this and used it later to cook the rest of the meal.  No way am I getting rid of garlic and thyme infused oil!  Just pour it into an empty jam jar and it’ll keep fine for a while)

• Oil (I use sunflower but only because I like the pictures of the flowers on the bottle.  Use whatever you like)
• 4 onions, chopped into fairly chunky pieces
• 4 cloves garlic, slice finely (but pureed, grated or chopped would be fine)
• 4 cans chopped tomatoes
• 1 cup red lentils (rinsed, and picked over to remove any stones, twigs etc.  or, you know, buy them from a supermarket instead of a hippy shop (buy them from a hippy shop.  It’s cheaper and better and it only takes two minutes to pick them over before cooking))
• 1 teaspoon Marmite (makes the savoury more savoury)
• 1 mushroom stockcube (because I had them, vegetable stock would be fine)
• 1 tablespoon liquid aminos (flavour sauce, much like Worcestershire sauce.  Feel free to use 1 tsp of Worcester sauce instead is you don’t mind eating fish (gross), or a teaspoon of soy sauce)
• 1 bay leaf (I used 3, but that’s a lot if you weren't gifted a carrier bag full of them by a friend with a tree in their garden)
• 2 tablespoons tamarind paste (mine is from a jar, but reconstituted from dry, or from a tube would be the same)
• 2 cups apple juice
• Some fresh thyme (if you want)

Method:

• Fry the onions over a medium heat until coloured, add the garlic and cook down until soft and brown
• Add the lentils and the tinned tomatoes.  If your tomatoes are the 17p ones, and if they’re more water than tomato (as mine often are if I buy them at the end of the month), and a tablespoon of tomato puree
• Add the Marmite, stock cube, liquid aminos, bay leaf and tamarind. (Although, honestly, if you don’t have all of these just add anything you like.  Savoury flavour is all good.  Balsamic vinegar would be lovely, cumin would be great, black pepper would be amazing, use whatever you have.)
• Stir, cover and cook on a low heat for about-an-hour (about-an-hour means anything from 20 minutes to 90 minutes.  It’s a flexible time), adding apple juice every 15 minutes or so, and stirring well.  Keep doing this until all the apple juice has been added, all the lentils are cooked, all the tomatoes have turned from light red (acidic) to dark red (sweet) and until the smell fills every corner of your house.  Add more juice if needed, add less juice if it isn't absorbing so much.  It’s stew, it’s flexible. 
• If it starts to stick on the bottom of the pan, take it off the heat, let it sit for a couple of minutes and then stir well.  Anything stuck will lift off and add an amazing dark caramel flavour to the dish.
• Once the lentils are cooked, add in the squash, removing the strings of thyme and the soft squishy cloves of roast garlic.
• Eat the soft squishy cloves of roast garlic, and hand feed them to the people you love and take a minute to marvel at this sexy exciting food.  Anyway.  Back to the stew.
• Cook for 5-10 minutes more until the squash is piping hot but try to avoid stirring it too much, try to not break up the pieces.
• Use this time to cook rice/couscous/quinoa/whatever you want to serve with the stew (or have potatoes baking for the whole time.  That would be amazing.).
• Stir in the fresh thyme and slop onto the plate.
• Warm, wholesome, full of vegetable and protein and lifted into tangy glory by the tamarind.  This may be slop, but it’s beautiful.