Noshings And Musings

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Tuesday dinner

I have an addiction to carbs. I’ve been thinking about these wonton noodles on the walk home. Finding shiitake mushrooms on yellow sticker special at Waitrose meant I absolutely had to have some tonight. Cooked in kaffir lime infused water and tossed with cilantro garlic pesto, ponzu soy and hot sesame oil.

The sensible part of me knew I should have just had a salad. Which was also what I was craving. Red cabbage, peas boiled in kaffir lime, shisho ans red onion with siracha mayo.

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Tuesday lunch

Duck legs (bargain are £3) with five spice powder, red cabbage, red onion, peppers and garlic with dried up week old easy peeler organic oranges

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Tuesday

Breakfast Hong Kong style. Frozen shiu mai from the Nertherlands from the local oriental grocer across the park, with bonus two-for-one end of market week old cilantro blitzed with garlic and the last of my puglian olive oil.

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Monday

Organic red cabbage slaw with purple carrots and red onion, siracha mayonnaise and a splash of ponzu shoyru, roasted peppers, garlic and chicken with five spice, cilantro pesto.

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Saturday.

Organic radish lazy tsukemono, sliced scallions, wonton noodles tossed with cilantro, Chinese black vinegar, honey, ponzu soy and hot sesame oil, watercress with gome and Saba shiyoyaki

I love how a few simple things taste so good and comforting. Though lost of ingredients.

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Monday. Saba shiyoyaki with water salad.

I grew to enjoy saba as an adult. It was probably too fiddly for me as a child.

I had a 4 day old cinnamon raisin bagel for breakfast which kept me full until 3pm. Due to traffic (work and kitchen) I ended up cooking at 6pm and threw together a rather tasty mix.

Prep involved soaking the watercress in salt water, then seasoning the mackerel with salt (thus shiyoyaki) and sake. Leave both alone for 20 mins, the grill the fish (I need to work out my grill and remember to turn it - poor thing is frightfully blistered on one side) for about 15 to 20 mins. Strain the water cress, slice red onion into thin strips and cube watermelon. Toss with gome, plonk on a plate and pop the warm grilled fish next to it.

I like eating this with chopsticks.

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Midnight snack with a recipe from the City that Never Sleeps

I bought some beans two weeks ago because the person next to me bought them. I’m not a bean person (with exception to the coffee, cocoa and jelly varieties).

They’ve kept rather well and I thought I should do something with them before they spoil.

Years ago I had an amazing side at Union Square Cafe - some type of finely sliced green bean with lemon juice and parmasean. So when I couldn’t sleep at 2am I decided to chef these up.

Due to my tennis elbow my knife skills have dropped to zero so these beans are roughly rather than finely chopped after being dunked in a pot of boiling water. Some cilantro, a few shakes of parmasean, a sprinkle of kampot red pepper and a swirl or two of puglian olive oil and a rather tasty midnight snack was had

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Clams vs cockles

Clams are expensive. They’re £16 per kg at the market, the shells are rather heavy and you need about 400g for a bowl of vongole. Cockles on the other hand cost £6 less per kg and some folks prefer the fleshier texture and richer flavour.

So I decided to give cockles a whirl. My gut feel was they would taste better Asian style (chilli, an insane amount of garlic, some sake or shao xin wine and spring onions sliced on the diagonal and maybe some shallots), but in the interests of true comparison I decided to make it like vongole.

Maybe my ingredients were too random or I poured too much rose into the pot, but I prefer the smaller clams.

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Things I’m eating. Saturday

All I’ve done today is shop, cook, eat and snooze. Actually like most people during these past few months those are my primary activity outside of working from home (for which I am thankful for facilitating stock making in the winter).

Saturday is market day which means Saturday nosh is largely seafood. Next best thing to being on the coast is to consume the seafood as soon as possible after you buy it.

For £30 I came away with a medium sea bream, a small cooked lobster and 410g of clams.

Lunch was vongole with capellini (I’m obsessed with capellini because it takes so little time to cook).

The novelty of vongole has not worn off yet. I love how quick and simple it is. Fry shallots, spring onion, garlic and chilli in extra virgin olive oil, add clams and chuck in some wine (I’ve run out of white wine so I used rose instead.) cover and cook until they pop open. I bought some parsley this week so I chopped that whilst the clams cooked. I always put too much wine in so I pick out the clams and shells and reduce the sauce down.

The afternoon was spent picking lobster, frying more aromatics and lobster shells and chucking water, sake, couple of carrots and a bunch of leftover vegetables to make stock.

Whilst the stock was simmering, I descaled the sea bream, separated the cilantro and parsley leaves from their stems then whipped up a cilantro, garlic and lime salsa.

I’m not a fan of descaling fish. And I think bream is harder than sea bass to descale. Given I’m still quite full and have leftovers from last night the steamed bream will be tomorrow’s dinner.

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My obsession with herbs

I love having access to fresh herbs. At the market right now there’s lemon basil, cilantro, dill and if you’re lucky, some British shisho and wasabi rocket (though none this week). I tend to make one of two things with herbs: salads or noodles which is effectively a noodle salad.

I baked the leftover salmon skin at a medium heat for 10 to 20 mins which made it a tad crispier (next time I need to go higher for a shorter of time and try not to burn anything) and tossed it with some herbs. There was meant to be mango with this but it was so tasty I finished that whilst preparing the salad...

Rocket, cilantro, shisho, white and spring onions, goma dressing.

I found some broad wonton noodles last week and used that instead of the usual “tang hoon” (glass noodles). The dish was heavier but it had a bit more bite as the noodles have the perfect amount of chew in them.

Fresh broad wonton noodles tossed with cilantro, lemon basil, spring onion, leftover steamed seabass in a ponzu soy, vinegar, honey and spicy sesame oil dressing.

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Salmon skin

I popped into the Japan Centre this week and found some salmon skin for two pounds and decided to try something new.

After looking up a few recipes I decided to bake them as it’s less messy than the traditional pan or deep frying.

Prep takes less than ten minutes. Rinse skins and pat dry, then season with salt, pepper and ふりかけ. Place on baking sheet flesh side down and bake in oven until crispy, checking every 5 to 10 mins to ensure it doesn’t burn. I decided not to oil the skins as salmon is full of omega 3 and sure enough the baking tray was swimming in oil. I think it needed more time or a higher heat as only one skin was terrifically crispy.

I’m obsessed with slicing asparagus lengthwise into thin strips and stir frying with ponzu soy. And just like the Cajun holy trinity, I tend to start every dish with onions and/ or scallions and/ or shallots, garlic. Today I also chucked in sliced strips of two small yellow zucchini from the market and some leftover shitake.

To balance the richness of the salmon skin add dash of pickles

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Char bee hoon

My father makes the best stir fried rice noodles, aka char bee hoon in Penang teochew dialect. I love watching daddy cook. He taught me

to fry each ingredient separately and not overcrowd the pan (or wok)

that leeks add sweetness (though my mom claims she taught daddy this)

stir frying noodles in the pan right after frying prawns makes them extra sweet

Today’s char bee hoon is made with leeks, asparagus, and chicken. The chicken is marinated in red miso, sake, ponzu soy with red kampot pepper, white onions and ginger. I cut the onion into crescent moons for a slightly different shape.

I had a bunch of cilantro and a lime that’s nearly shrunk to a green pebble so I decided to finally break out the mini blitzer my friend donated to me and made a sauce with a few cloves of garlic, extra virgin olive oil and red kampot pepper.

It looks and tastes much better IRL

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Like Bruce, I love fish as food.

Steamed seabass with glass noodles, shisho, cilantro leaves, dill, pickled carrots, Spanish and spring onion tossed in a ponzu soy, spicy sesame oil and black vinegar dressing with red kampot pepper.

For me, steamed fish with ginger and garlic tastes amazing. Particularly when dipped in a bit of soy - either ponzu flavoured or infused with some finely chopped bird’s eye chillies. I forgo all decorum and propriety when steamed fish is on a banquet menu, spin the lazy susan eagerly towards me once everyone has had their fill and go to town on the carcass on the plate.

I also love the pure joy of melt-in-your-mouth sushi or sashimi (particularly when you make like a cat at a sushi-ya counter for お任せ), 鯖の塩焼きgrilled mackerel with rice and pickles is comforting, and marinating any fish in miso produces a soothing, silky dish with a rounded depth. I still remember a juicy, perfectly charred barramundi which one of the guys caught that morning and brought to the barbecue, its taste likely enhanced by the unexpectedness of encountering such a treat instead of the usual chicken drummies and sausages.

I still don’t know how to appreciate the European way with fish. From grilled fillets to fish and chips, Himalayan salt slabs to salt baked displays, all of these efforts are lost on my palette.

We have two fishmongers at the market. One fillets and one doesn’t. Both are extremely popular and I’ve started to experiment with a whole fish recently.

This small sea bass cost me 15 pounds and took all afternoon to prepare. I ran a table knife down to remove its scales (I’m still making a sloppy job of this as there’s always scales left), rinsed it inside and out and plonked it on some garlic, scallions, onions, ginger and lemongrass in a bamboo steamer and cooked it until the fish became flakey.

I then flake the whole thing and save half of it to toss with the noodles and herbs which takes 5 minutes to assemble.

Sidebar: I’ve been thinking of getting a goldfish for a few months but despite a highly pescatarian diet I can’t face the prospect of accidental fishslaughter by lack of nurturing skills.

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Like most folks, my cooking repertoire is quite repetitive. It also feels like everything I cook has a similar flavour profile. Probably over garlicked.

So it’s strange that I’m not a fan of vongole, which everyone else seems to love. I love pasta. I tend to overpower everything I make with garlic. I don’t mind parsley (but I’m too lazy to chop it up so I use other herbs instead). For some reason whilst I’m a seafood fan, there’s something about clams and muscles that I don’t get.

Last weekend I decided to cook something new and bought some clams. I’d seen a recent post for vongole by Nigella, who makes everything look easy and delicious. I was also standing in line behind a man who was queuing for clams a few weeks ago and it always looks quite fun when they tip the yellow net bag to pour the clams onto the scales so I felt it was time to join the clam bandwagon. And it was so easy to cook I decided to buy more this week.

I like the novelty of buying fresh clams at the market. They’re not cheap though - today’s 400g cost 6 pounds.

It’s easy and quick to make. Wash, rinse, soak (I should probably scrub but, again, I’m lazy) the clams, chop some onions, chilli and garlic, fry in oil, chuck the clams in along with some white wine and cover and that’s it. Pasta can be done at the same time or, unconventionally, cooked first, slightly underdone and tossed in oil if you’re going for the one pot approach. Couple of minutes later, throw the pasta in, stir, add some pasta water if required, herbs and serve immediately.

This week I threw some hand torn shisho and red kampot pepper on top of the pasta and inhaled the whole lot.