Cooking tips and wonderful flavour combinations

[Mr. Tea]

Ha, not sure my contribution was entirely on-topic...

I've been enjoying G&Ts with blackberries muddled with a little sugar in the glass before adding the G and the T. Looks like there should be a bumper crop this year, loads of berries are still green. They're also great boiled up with sugar, water and a little lemon juice and then poured over vanilla ice cream. This is a great way to use up plums, peaches etc. that aren't actually squishy and brown yet but have got just a little bit too tough-skinned to eat as they are.

We did beef topside the other day with a good coating of this pungent paste made from sea salt, pepper, English mustard, olive oil and finely chopped thyme and rosemary, all smooshed up in a mortar, with little slits made in the meat and slivers of garlic poked into them. Almost as good in sandwiches a few days later as it was hot with gravy, roast sweet potatoes and baked garlic Portabellos. I'm pretty much drooling at the recollection.

Edit: baboon's Chinese stew sounds pretty good, we discovered a decent-looking Oriental grocer's nearby the other day so will be making use of that.

 

[Slothrop]

Good re-up of this thread, VV & Tea.

Chicken and chestnuts is a pretty interesting combination - made a Chinese stew with them this week (with ginger, Shaoxing wine, rice vinegar, spring onions, soy etc), turned out really well - enough starch gets released from the chestnuts during cooking to give a really nice consistency without the need for any other thickeners

Sounds tasty! Dried shitake seem like an obvious addition to that, too...

Edit: and did you do the chicken in the chinese style ie chopped through the bone into little bites, or in the normal way with bigger bits?

 

[baboon2004]

@Tea - whereabouts are you living at the moment? Get some Laoganma black bean with chili sauce, your shop will probably have it. It is actually like crack, come to think of it...

@Slothrop - good point, only problem being my girlfriend hates mushrooms so I barely ever even have them in the house any more I did the chicken in a kind of haphazard way tbh! So the Chinese style would still have bits of bone in the little bites?

 

[blacktulip]

Can anyone recommend a good book / resource on indian vegetarian cooking? I'm sort of alright at it but would like to dig deeper. Some sort of Indian equivalent of Fuschia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice would be amazing...

Sorry I'm late with this, but the Prashad cookbook is EXACTLY what you asked for.


This and the Dunlop haven't left our kitchen table for months.

 

[Mr. Tea]

@Tea - whereabouts are you living at the moment? Get some Laoganma black bean with chili sauce, your shop will probably have it. It is actually like crack, come to think of it...

Oxford. Not heard of that sauce, it sounds wicked though, I love the Chinese way of flavouring stuff with chili. Will look out for it.

And the author of that silly rant should look up the large volume of research showing that the way the brain reacts to fats and sugars is remarkably similar to the way it reacts to nicotine, amphetamines and cocaine, so really the comparison between moreish foods and addictive drugs is rather on point.

 

[baboon2004]

The Laoganma is spiked with MSG, I'm pretty sure, but fermented black beans don't even need it to be incredibly moreish.

Are there decent Chinese restaurants in Oxford? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_...hnic_minority_populations#Chinese_communities - this page suggests that the Chinese population in Oxford is fairly high, but I'm not sure whether that would include a lot of students in the sense of being a transient population

 

[Mr. Tea]

I think here and Cambridge have got the highest concentration of Chinese people in the UK (though I'm sure still far fewer in total than London, obvs). I recently enjoyed lunch at the the wonderfully named Opium Den, a dimsum-oriented place in the centre. It's very reasonably priced but is apparently where Chris Patten (currently the uni's chancellor) takes visiting Chinese dignitaries.

 

[baboon2004]

Ah OK, not heard of it before (though I did live in Oxford a long time ago now - I remember the quality of Lebanese food being very high)

 

[Slothrop]

Sorry I'm late with this, but the Prashad cookbook is EXACTLY what you asked for.

Any particular picks?

I've got it and I'm quite liking it although it's not as mindblowing as Every Grain of Rice. Also, it suffers a bit for my purposes from being a restaurant cookbook rather than a home cookbook - for my money it could do with having the selections of deep fried snacks and starters trimmed heavily and the selection of main dishes and side dishes expanding a bit.

 

[baboon2004]

Coincidentally, Prashad was the cookbook that caught my eye last time I was in a bookshop (a rare occurrence these days). I liked the style, with lots of good tips, but yeah, deep-fried stuff is a bit impractical and besides the point for most home cooks.

My copy of Every Grain of Rice is extremely well read at this point (the chicken and chestnut thing above is basically a slight variation upon Dunlop's recipe), but I'm finding quite a few of the recipes seem a little too threadbare to work if you don't have the freshest ingredients possible. I preferred the book on Sichuan cookery by quite a ways for actual cooking, as beautifully produced and set out as EGOR is.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Ah OK, not heard of it before (though I did live in Oxford a long time ago now - I remember the quality of Lebanese food being very high)

There's a new Lebanese place just opened on Cowley Road, definitely want to try it out soon. The food I had in Beirut a couple of years ago was generally fantastic.

 

[Slothrop]

Coincidentally, Prashad was the cookbook that caught my eye last time I was in a bookshop (a rare occurrence these days). I liked the style, with lots of good tips, but yeah, deep-fried stuff is a bit impractical and besides the point for most home cooks.

To be fair, there is plenty of other stuff in there too...

To date, I've done a few things that were really good and one or two that tasted like generic blah with cumin and coriander.

My copy of Every Grain of Rice is extremely well read at this point (the chicken and chestnut thing above is basically a slight variation upon Dunlop's recipe), but I'm finding quite a few of the recipes seem a little too threadbare to work if you don't have the freshest ingredients possible. I preferred the book on Sichuan cookery by quite a ways for actual cooking, as beautifully produced and set out as EGOR is.

The Sichuan book has much less veggie stuff, though, doesn't it?

I do sometimes find that with EGOR it takes a bit of work to hit on good combinations of dishes to serve together. I think the thing about stuff being threadbare is kind of right, but maybe it's more that some of them are meant to be a fairly plain side vegetable along with something a bit richer and more complex. The difficulty (for me) is getting the richer and more complex bit without using meat.

 

[baboon2004]

Re the Sichuan book - as I've lost it somewhere, I couldn't say for sure!

I'd agree with that, and the problem to me is that the book doesn't really help too much with making the veggie dishes complex enough on their own. But in general I'm a fan of the book, so it's only a minor gripe.

 

[baboon2004]

There's a new Lebanese place just opened on Cowley Road, definitely want to try it out soon. The food I had in Beirut a couple of years ago was generally fantastic.

The only two I can recall right now are the one in Jericho that's been there for ever, and one on Park End Street, but they're both very good.

I ate OK in Beirut, but didn't go to any outstanding places (these things are often pot luck if you're not there for long, of course, and I was only there a week).

 

[Slothrop]

I'd agree with that, and the problem to me is that the book doesn't really help too much with making the veggie dishes complex enough on their own.

This is kind of an issue with almost all veggie cooking, actually - it's relatively hard to make things taste rich and complex and satisfying in the way that you could easily by just bunging a bit of meat in.

 

[baboon2004]

I always feel particularly proud when I've made a veggie dish that can stand on its own. Doesn't happen often, mind....

 

[viktorvaughn]

This is kind of an issue with almost all veggie cooking, actually - it's relatively hard to make things taste rich and complex and satisfying in the way that you could easily by just bunging a bit of meat in.

I think Chinese food does have some good routes into the savoury umami vibe meat provides through mushrooms and pickled veg, fermented bean paste, vinegar etc.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I always feel particularly proud when I've made a veggie dish that can stand on its own. Doesn't happen often, mind....

I suppose serving halloumi for breakfast, lunch and dinner counts as cheating?

 

[Slothrop]

I suppose serving halloumi for breakfast, lunch and dinner counts as cheating?

Tasty, tasty cheating.

Baboon: it's fairly possible in general, it's when you add in the constraints of being reasonably healthy (ie not just halloumi) and reasonably quick and straightforward that it becomes a bit of a task.

Viktor - yeah, but I think most of those add a different sort of richness. There's more to it than umami, in other words. Maybe it's something about texture or integration of the fat with the body of the food or something, as well as a big fat umami kick.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Lentils might be the biggest cliché going in vegetarian food but they carry flavour really well. But maybe that's the effect of the butter/ghee they're cooked in. They're the kind of thing I really enjoy whenever I cook them but for some weird reason hardly ever buy.