Chickpea, spinach, raisin pilaf

It has been either dull or rainy for over a week, which marks another record of unusual Sydney summer weather. The temperature surged up to around 40 degree just the week before, and one day  it dropped to a mid-low 20s overnight. Some say that the bushfires in Victoria is affecting the atmosphere, which leads to wet weather across and around Victoria. The effect of the bushfire is quite severe this year and has put many people in tragic situations , as the death toll reaches almost 200.

To change the subject, I talk with my students about food a lot during class and they response to that with enthusiasm equivalent to mine. The talk of cooking always seems endless and tickles my senses. Honestly, I wasn’t very keen on the cusine from Middle East or North Africa, in which various spices play a major role besides India. While many people pick Moroccan as their favourite flavour, it was only recently when I visited a spice shop called ‘Herbies’ that I got more interested in the cooking of those regions, although I had a pantry full of spices being a foodie on training.   The experience of smelling different spices was amazing and had an soul cleansing effect on me that day.

Chickpea, spinach, raisin pilaf

I came across this recipe and played around a bit and came up with my version. I hope you enjoy my version. ;-D It reminds a lot of Moroccan couscous dishes and Italian equivalent of rish dishes except for the different spices. “plov” or “polaf” is often considered to be one of the oldest preparations of rice which has Persian or Turkic roots. One of the earliest literary references to Pilau can be found in the histories of Alexander the Great when describing the hospitality of an Eastern Iranian provine( probably the birthplace of Alexander’s wife Roxana and geographically in modern Afghanistan).  It was known to have been served to Alexander the Great upon his capture of the Sogdian capital of Marakanda (modern Samarkand). Alexander’s army brought it back to Macedonia and spread it throughout Eastern Europe.

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 225g (8 oz) basmati rice
• 400g cooked chickpeas
• 1/2 cup cooked English spinach, drained and chopped
• 1 onion
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
• 1 tsp ground carmadon
• 1 tsp cinnamon stick, bruised
• 2 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp grated fresh root ginger
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• ¼ tsp cayenne pepper
• 50g (2 oz) raisins
• 750ml  vegetable stock
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp salt
• 50g (2 oz) cashew nuts, toasted
• 2 tbsp chopped fresh coriander
• pepper
• fresh coriander sprigs, to garnish

Method

1. Wash the rice in a sieve under cold running water until it runs clear; set aside.
2. Dry-fry the whole spices  for about 2 minutes until they start to pop and release their aroma.
3. Peel and finely chop the onion. Heat the oil in a large saucepan, add the onion, garlic, ginger and ground spices and fry for 10 minutes until the vegetables are golden. Add the dry-fried spice mixture to the pan with the rice and stir-fry for 1 minute until all the rice grains are glossy.
4. Add the chick peas, spinach, raisins, stock, lemon juice and salt to the pan. Bring to the boil, stir once and cover with a tight-fitting lid. Simmer over a low heat for 10 minutes, then take off the heat and leave undisturbed for 5 minutes.
5. Fork through the cashew nuts and coriander. Check the seasoning and serve at once, garnished with fresh coriander sprigs.

Serving Suggestion

• Personally I enjoyed a generous dollop of plain yoghurt with this vegetarian meal.

Variations

You can replace spinach with other vegetables such as carrots, zuchini, potatoes or peas for a vegetarian meal. Or you can toss through with any cooked meat of your choice.

Happy Lunar New Year!

Gong Xi Fa Cai -Mandarin (Kung Hei Fat Choi-Cantonese)

새해 복 많이 받으세요 (Se He Bok Ma Ni Ba Du Se Yo)

Yesterday we celebrated the lunar New Year’s Day with the New Year’s soup, so called, Rice cake soup (the logic is you eat the soup and you get one year older. What if you eat two bowls? ) and some other traditional Korean food. I hadn’t cooked Korean at home for so long that I needed to buy so many ingredients just for one meal. I wondered if I would have bothered to go through the preparation if it wasn’t for my blog, and the answer is ‘Probably Not’.

After finishing the lovely, nourishing soup, I called my family and proudly bragged how beautiful the soup tasted. Honestly, I was the best rice cake soup I’d ever had. What made it taste so so good? I wondered. I think the secret lies on the broth, which I made with shitaki mushrooms, but traditionally the beef stock is used. What goes into the soup varies depending on the regions and you might see clams or oysters in the soup in coastal regions, but my mum never put mushrooms in the soup as far as I remember.

Basically, the white colour of the rice cake, which is rolled into a long, thin shape, then cut  into thin slices for the soup means purity, peace, long life and prosperity. So by eating this, you cleans out any bad luck you might carry from the past year and wish a good start of the new year.

Rice cake&Dumpling Soup

My version of the soup has dumplings, which add a bit of Chinese twist to the dish, but it might have been a tradition in the northern part of Korea when Korea was one country since there has been a lot of cultural exchanges across the border throughout the history. I personally like the flavour of dumplings and I think when you cook with dumplings you don’t need any extra seasoning because they already have all the necessary flavours in them. The only problem I’ve always had in making dumpling soup is that the dumplings often pop and the stuffing leaks out and gets all messed up into the broth, so I was considering frying them separately this time and set them nicely on top so that they could be eaten individually keeping the crispiness. Then I decided against it just to save extra work, but I will definitely try that next time.

To make this healthy, tasty, good luck soup for 2 people

Ingredients

2-3 dried shitaki mushrooms- soaked in 300ml of water and save the liquid for the broth
1 cup beef, thinly sliced
dumplings- as many as you like- variety of dumplings sold at Korean shops, my favourites are veggie and kimchi.
rice cake, sliced&frozen, sold at Korean shop – soaked in water before use
1 egg – lightly beaten and seasoned with salt
1 onion- half diced for beef, half sliced for the soup
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 spring onion, thinly sliced
soy sauce – 1 Tbs for beef, 1 Tbs for soup
mirin or dry sherry
salt and pepper
toasted seaweed for garnish – but it does more than just as garnish. It completes the dish, so never skip it.
long red mild chilli, sliced (optional)

Step 1. Get all the garnishes ready to go because rice cake and dumpling only take less than 5 mins.

Cook the beef in a little garlic, diced onion, soy, mirin, a bit of salt and pepper. Set it aside.
Make the egg garnish spreading the egg into a thin layer like crepe in a fry pan and cut into strips or alternatively you can add the egg straight into the soup, but I think the former gives a better look.

Step 2. Making the soup

Boil the mushroom juice with extra 300ml water and sliced mushrooms, and add garlic, onion and soy sauce. Throw in the rice cake cook for 3-5 mins and add dumplings and cook for 2 mins. Season with salt and pepper to your taste.

Step 3. Serving

Serve it in a bowl and garnish with beef, egg strips, spring onion and shredded seaweed and sliced chilli for colour.

It’s a versatile soup, as is most of Asian cooking, so if  you are not cooking for a special occasion like New Year, you can replace rice cake with normal rice noodle, which you’d probably have better access to, or just use dumplings by themselves. If you’re not into beef, try other meat or even seafood.

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Finally, if you like dumplings and happen to be vegetarian, then make a trip to a nearby Korean shop, and there you will find an amazingly wide variety of dumplings available for vegetarians. They are quite different to Chinese ones, and I’d say they taste much better.   Why don’t you find it out yourself? *Good luck*

Crab Kebab

Last Saturday I was invited to a BBQ party for a triple celebration of Chinese New Year, Scottich Burns Night and Australia Day. The improvised crab skewer is what I took to the party. It is one of central dishes for every ritualistic ceremony and usually made with pork, but these days with hams or crab sticks. It’s very labour intensitve because, as you can see, you have to skewer several ingredients, usually par cooked carrot and spring onion, alternating them one by one. Worse to come, you have to coat it with flour and egg, and pan fry them slowly on the lower heat one by one again! Imagine making 50 of them by yourself. There was a saying, my mum used to say, that goes ‘A woman who makes good skewers makes a good wife. ‘ When my mum asked for help with the work, I would hide somewhere until the job had been done. My poor mum had to hunch over the stove making a several batches of the similar sorts for hours. It’s a party food in the end, and it might have been a less boring job when you had other people to chat and work with in the slavery of cooking.

Before I go, I’d like to present the picture of the first Haggis experience. It was such a special dish.

Haggis

Night Noodle Market

October, the Good Food Month, is over. Sydney in October vibrates with excitement as the calendar is filled with a series of joyful events boosting a feast of flavours for foodies. Restaurants and bars across the city provide fantastic culinary experiences every night of the week, and people keep their gastronomic senses entertained throughout the month. One of the popular outdoor events includes ‘Night Noodle Market’ at Hyde Park where you can also enjoy the photograph exhibition ‘Art&About’.

You think the girl in the photo is me, don’t you? *he he*

The mum and girl posing in front of the photograph seem to have blended into the photograph.

I don’t know what to make of this one, but I liked it.

At the end of these photos were lines of stalls serving a variety of Asian noodles and some other dishes such as dim sum, dumplings and all sorts of fried snacks. The atmosphere was really something, full of delicious smell, colourful lights and happy laughters. I didn’t get to try as many varieties of food as I thought because of a long wait, so I planned to go back there the following week, but that didn’t happen.

The patterns of the leaves on the red lantern look quite pretty, don’t they?

Waiting for summer to settle in is like watching dough rise. One day it’s all warm giving the impression that summer’s finally arrived, and the next day the chill comes back with disappointment. I wonder if I can speed up the arrival of summer by introducing one of my signature noodle dishes, ‘Tuna Apple Noodle Salad’. It is a dish I would often make on hot sweaty summer days to get freshen up and get my energy back. It’s so quick and simple to make, yet the taste is amazingly satisfying and refreshing. You could use real tuna steak to turn this dish into something special, or even tuna slices in a tin would do a job to make it look better. But this was made as an instant dinner fix so I used whatever I had at that time – typical of my cooking

Tuna Apple Noodle Salad

It has lots of fresh vegetables as you can see, so it is a perfect dish when you feel a bit under the weather. One ingredient you may not be familiar with would be the seaweed. You can get it in a Korean or Japanese store and you have to soak it in cold water for about 10 minutes before using it. Another option is to use toasted and seasoned seaweed that is also very popular in Korean&Japanese cuisine, and especially tuna sashimi is often served with toasted seaweed in those countries. But if you are not a fan of seaweed, you can always leave it out anyway. What is the most important part of this dish is apparently the sauce, which has four flavours well balanced together- salty, sour, sweet, spicy. It’s a very versatile dish whose flavour can be adjusted to everyone’s liking. Throw in some fresh coriander and mint if you want, although I didn’t put any herbs in this since I aimed for the Korean taste.

To make this you need:

green apple, cabbage, carrot, red onion – finely sliced
dried seaweed – soaked in cold water and chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
fresh chilli, chopped
fresh coriander or mint – optional for exotic flavour
spring onion, finely chopped for garnish
sesame seeds for garnish

Sauce:

1 Tbsp light soy sauce
1 tsp fish sauce
1 Tbsp apple vinegar or white vinegar or rice vinegar
1 Tbsp lemon juice
3 tsp brown sugar
1 tsp sea salt

Adjust the amount of each ingredient as you go. There’s no exact measurement in Asian cooking, you know.

Asian Affair

I don’t cook Asian food as much as I should because I love western food, especially Mediterranean cuisine. – Italian and Spanish. I love cheese so much I often nibble on it as a snack when I’m on the computer or watch TV and suddenly realise I have eaten the whole block of cheese.

People say Asian food is light and healthy, and these days many Europeans eat Asian food regularly and eating Asian seems such a sacred ritual to them – or else, a way to lose weight, especially when they struggle with chopsticks. I often feel compelled to go up to their table and feed them.

I, as a wine drinker, however, have to be hard pressed to ever cook any Asian because it just doesn’t seem to go with wine – for me anyway.

The only time I make Asian food is usually when I feel guilty for indulging in too much naughty food for weeks. The motive is far from pleasure, but still, it forces me to keep my Asian palate going. I would call it ‘Asian Affair’.

This particular dinner, which I have difficulty naming because more than three different cuisines are mixed.

Nancy’s Easy Peasy Satay Tofu, Spicy Eggplant, Chinese Green Kimchi

My guests’ all time favourite is, without a doubt, Satay Tofu. Its rich, nutty and sweet taste with a zing of chilli is something that warms your soul. It’s so easy to make, yet so satisfying! You will be amazed to find how simply it is to make it – to copy the taste, at least. All you need is crunchy peanut better, soy sauce, sugar and a bit of garlic and chilli, and maybe fish sauce and lemon if you want more authentic taste. But if you don’t have all the ingredients at handy, simply mix peanut butter with sweet chilli sauce, and it will do the trick just fine. *Lazy Satay*

I usually panfry flour-coated tofu like this so that it binds sauce better.

Deep fried bean curd would be even better and naughtier, but it would go against my healthy theme, wouldn’t it? I would change the taste depending on my mood by adding more chilli or garlic. Once I made it really spicy and my chilli loving guests at that time absolutely loved it.

Next is a variation of Malaysian spicy eggplant. I put capsicum for colour, but it could have been better if I had fresh chillies instead.

There are many varieties of Chinese green under the tag of ‘yao choy’, ‘choy sum’ or ‘you cai’. I got three

bunches of it for $2 on a Sunday at Paddy’s Market, and started to panic, figuring out a way to get rid of it without wasting it. This green salad seasoned with vinegar, chilli, sugar and sesame seeds was quite refreshing and complemented the rest of the dishes. Its taste was similar to Korean kimchi – even more so the next day – and I would call it ‘Accidental Kimchi Salad’. It is another way to enjoy Chinese vegetables as we normally eat them stirfried, sautéed or steamed.

Curry Weather

It’s raining outside right now, but we had have many warm and sunny days. Some days almost felt like early summer.

Wet and cold days often make me feel like, first off, baking – to warm up the house- and eating Indian – to warm up inside me.

This photo was taken from a hotel room when I moved back here after 10 month in windy Wellington – but in fact it was ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire’ situation. Last summer was unusually wet to everyone’s surprise.- The room was quite high up and I enjoyed looking out the window and down at the world below. I don’t like rain, though, I like watching rain hitting a glass window and leaving traces of tears. -Oh uh, getting sentimental, ain’t I? *did it work? at least I tried*

Prawn masala and fish tikki masala are my all time favourites in an Indian restaurant in Surry Hills.

I have a lot of good memories with my girlfriends there. We would go there for a girly chatty night. At first, it took a while to convince them to try any Indian good because of their aversion to Indian spices. But it only took one mouthful of prawn masala and vegie korma to give them curry craze. *isn’t it right, Jamie and Alice?*

Ok, Indian for dinner. Let’s see what I’ve got in the fridge. A bag of frozen prawns- one of the items I always have at hand – and leek. Leek? Hmm, Indians wouldn’t use leek in cooking, but I don’t see why I can’t.

Yeah, leek got on well with prawns. It was success. So here you get to see the photo.

This is not an authentic version, yet is a kind of dish you can make without too much hassle any time you feel like something Indian. It is especially perfect for those who can’t stand strong Indian spices and herbs.

Prawn&Leek Masala

Where’s naan? I had Lebanese bread as makeshift naan and it was quite good. Next time I might turn it into garlic naan by toasting it with a bit of oil and garlic. *he he*

Curry is so easy to make and full of goodness. When you have a cold, nothing is better than curry to wipe out the evil virus inside your body.

Recipe?

Well, put lots of garlic, onion, leek and chili in and boil the crap of them with some tomato and garam masala mix, which you can get from a spice section in a supermarket. Make sure you add prawns at the last minute to keep them nice and tender.

Actually, one of my friend who tried this dish said it was absolutely fabulous and I needed to get it known to everyone. So I’d better give you a bit more detailed recipe.

To serve 2 big eaters like me, you need

half stalk of leek, roughly sliced

1 onion, finely chopped

3-4 cloves garlic, minced

2 tsp ginger, minced

2-4 small chili- vary to your tolerance to hotness

1 canned tomatoes or 3 fresh tomatoes chopped

prawns – 5-6 prawns per person? Well, it’s up to you!

garam masala mix

2 tsp tumeric

2 tbsp oil

salt and pepper

1. Cook garlic, ginger, onion, leek and spices with oil

2. Add chili and tomatoes, and cook for 5 minutes and reduce to low heat and simmer for 20 minute – add some water if it becomes too thick.

3. Finally, add prawns and cook until prawns turn pink

I normally mix cooked rice with finely grated carrot because it looks nice.

Nancy’s Food Collections

Just a small collection of dishes I made in the remote past. My initial plan was to publish them one by one whenever I get a chance. But as time goes and more new dishes come along, I find it hard to go back to old folders. Because, firstly, my new work looks better as I’ve been trying to learn photographing skills to present my dishes better, and secondly, I have moved on to simpler cooking style from the one that three meals are stuffed into one dish. Still, I adore my old babies and some of them cry out to see the world whenever I see them squashed in disorderly old folders. So here they are. I might find some time to write about each dish in the future, but for the time being please enjoy their looks.

Western

Chicken Mushroom Penne               Salmon Spinach Spaghetti

Pumpkin Spinach Feta Bread             Turkish Gozleme

Seafood Paella Pumpkin                 Sun-dried tomato Risotto

Spicy Bean Nachos                 Spinach Hot Mousse

Eastern

Oriental Fish Soup                         Tofu Stir-fry

Seafood Korean Pancake                     Kimchi Roll

Tofu Green Curry                     Fish Masala / Tofu&Veggie Korma

Move your mouse over the photos, and a link will appear if there is a recipe for them. Or if you are interested in any dished in the picture, give me a yell, then I will post the recipe immediately. Thanks.

Colour me Gimbop!

It sounds like a movie title, doesn’t it? Hah hah. I watched ‘Colour me Kubrick‘, a movie about a guy pretending to be Stanley Kubrick, the film director of a few famous movies including ‘A Space Odyssey‘, ‘A Clockwork Orange‘ and ‘Eyes Wides Shut‘, which opened my eyes to his movie world for the first time since I was a little crawling baby, peeing in my nappies, *blush*when the previous movies came out. If you guys haven’t seen ‘Vanilla Sky‘ by Tom Cruise, I recommend it since it is inspired by ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and has some interesting scenes very dreamy and surreal. I was thinking it would be a good idea to make a section for people to write recommendations about movies or music. Ho ho. To start it off, I recommend ‘16 Blocks’. I watched it the other night and I laughed a lot, very funny, not because it was a comedy film, but the performance by the supporting actor was just hilarious, adding fun bits to the story. ‘16 Blocks’, stared by Bruce Willis, is a really good combination of suspense, action and comedy. I won’t say much. You just watch it. I guarantee you will enjoy it. v confidence v

I love different colours in my food. What looks good tastes good, doesn’t it? I turned humble Gimbop into colourful flowers. In case you might wonder what Gimbop is- what’s normally spelled as Kimbap, but I think my way of spelling it will sound the closest to the original pronunciation of it :p, it is Korean equivalent of Japanese sushi, more precisely Maki which is wrapped in nori(seaweed), but it has more stuff inside that brings out the full flavour of individual ingredients. Maki, to me, is tasteless without soy sauce and wasabi to dip in. Oh, oh, oh~ no offence here. *blush* I just think it has just too much rice and very little stuff inside. Not suitable for people on low carb diet.

So I mixed rice with vegetables of different colours to reduce the amount of rice. Carrot for orange, beetroot for purple, spinach or cucumber for green, egg yolk for yellow and the list goes on. They look too pretty to eat, don’t they? *proud* What’s inside? One with spicy tuna, the other with teriyaki mushroom.

The soup at the back is called ‘Taro soup with ground perilla seed‘. I know tropical islanders eat taro(Toran) with coconut milk,
but I replaced it with perilla seeds as is the way how Koreans eat it. They only make it on special occasions such as religious ceremonies or traditional holidays. Perilla seeds, which come from perilla leaves add creamy flavour and texture to food, and its leaves are used in making tuna or seafood maki to help digestion. But I don’t think I can get them here. I haven’t seen them at supermarkets.

Inspired by Keith Floyd

I watched ‘Floyd’s India’ on a food channel last night. Watching him throwing around all sorts of spices in exotic Indian settings got me craving for hot curry. It was coming to midnight then, and there was no way I could get Indian takeaway at that time of night. “I hate it when I can’t get late night munchies. Shops close so early!” Quietly protesting, I had to go to sleep dreaming about spicy curry dinner the next day.

I was writing this post last night and my computer went all funny, so I had to stop here. So I’m going to resume my writing, pretending now is the moment last night. It’s like traveling in time. Quite weird. It’s annoying the draft wasn’t saved automatically. I have to start all over again.

Anyway, here I am, with a full happy tummy, writing about the Indian dish I made remembering how Floyd did.

The first is a searing hot lentil curry with lots of garlic&ginger, chopped onion, ground red chilli, fennel, tumeric&corriandar powder. Throw the spice mix with lentils into a pan with oil and cook to bring out the flavour. Add chopped tomatoes and simmer until well cooked by adding a drop of water if necessary. (Indians will probably add more oil though) It sounds like an ordinary curry dish so far. Now I add tofu to complete is as Nancy’s fusion dish. Ha Ha! I love fresh tofu! I made soy ice cream with tofu a few days ago. I’m not telling you what it tasted like! Total secret!

The other dish is called ‘Taro coconut curry’. To balance the hotness I made it very mild and coconuty. Instead of using coconut cream with high saturated fat, I used grated coconut, just enough to give the flavour. Follow the same process as the first one with the different spice mix(curry, tumeric, cumin, garlic, coconut, onion). To distinguish this recipe from others I put sliced parsnip and precooked taro. Slightly fruit flavour of parsnip matched well with coconut and taro, I think? What do you think?

The picture below is hot hot hot fish masala and vegetable korma with tofu, which I made a few weeks before. I particularly enjoyed the fish curry very much. Yogurt with chopped cucumber&mint is a must have for your burning mouth. Tee Hee.

Korean fusion

(fried tofu with soy&apple sauce, fried rice with eggplant&veggies, kimchi)

160 different types of kimchi

First proper(?) Korean dinner, I mean I finally managed to make some ‘kimchi‘. You can’t really call a meal without kimchi a Korean meal. Unlike in Sydney, It is hard to get the Chinese cabbage here in Wellington, let alone a radish. I went to the veggie market last Sunday where you could get some Chinese vegetables. They were so cheap there, less than half the price at a supermarket. So I got one cabbage, but couldn’t get a radish after all, so I got parsnips instead. Replacing a radish with a parsnip will be experimental.

I cut and salted the cabbage(baechu) first overnight, and next day I rinsed it off with cold water and put it aside for later. Slice thinly some onion and parsnip, and grate some carrot as well. Kimchi usually has Chinese chives(boochu), but I don’t think I can get them here, so I will pass that until I eventually see them around. So I chopped some spring onions, more than normal for green color which the chive’s supposed to give. Now, here comes the most important and stinky(?) part. You blend lots of peeled garlic and ginger with fish sauce. That is the main seasoning mixed with Korean chilli powder and a bit of sugar, which gives kimchi the unique and healthy flavours. Wonder why it kills the bird flu virus!

Mix everything together and leave it for a few days to ferment. Of course you can eat it straight away. By fermenting it you can get some extra tangy flavour as well as a number of lactic acids, which is effective to curing intestinal disorders.

Kimchi is full of Vitamin A and C and enjoyed throuhout the cold Winter when vegetables are rare. It’s a good appetite booster too. You can make any dishes out of kimchi such as soup, stir-fry, dumpling or pancake, kimbap, etc. You name it. If you are a lover of spicy food , you will die for kimchi. Home made kimchi is alway much better and tastier than the commercial ones from the shop.

Fried tofu with soy&apple sauce

It’s become one of my favourite vegetarian dish. I just loved it! Soy sauce with apple syrup went well. It tastes like Teriyaki sauce, I guess, which has sugar in it, but with the apple flavour it’s quite something I can’t really describe. And as for the tofu, the way I normally do-frying fresh tofu crispy- gives the tofu chewy texture that’s closer to meat flesh.

Come over, guys, I will make some for you. ^^*