Christmas 2010

I know a post is REALLY late when I have to title it by which year the meal was had. Yes, this was last year’s leftovers, but I have been busy (not really) so haven’t got round to posting about it.

But now I have, and that’s all that matters.

So, sometime last year, to be precise, on Christmas Day, we had our lovely, very delicious Christmas lunch. We’d been to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, and felt absolutely starvin’ marvin’ after it, so the fiance, his mom and I stood in the kitchen eating a WHOLE cheese and onion quiche between us.

No wonder I was so hungry the next day. But then, as traditional on Christmas Day, you’re not supposed to have breakfast. That would absolutely ruin the appetite for lunch. (On a side note, I read somewhere that on average, people consumed about 4,000 calories on Christmas – mainly because they have a greasy fry-up to begin with, and then continue the day with bulk-buy boxes of chocolates and more bottles of wine than you can imagine.)

Anyhow, onwards and oven-wards with the meal preparation. The vegetables were peeled, chopped, and put in the pan to be boiled. Parsnips went into the oven to be turned into lovely, creamy roasted parsnips.

This is almost like real-time blogging. Why? Because while the vegetables were cooking, I had to stare at this cake. Staring and wondering why I had enough manners to stop myself from biting into it whole.

And if that was not enough, I was asked to put these chocolates up on the Christmas tree. A few of them ended up in my mouth.

The few that made it up to the tree. Counted themselves lucky.

And with all real-time postings, we had to while the seconds away while the turkey roasted in the oven. Oh why is it not lunchtime yet.

Because we usually have a vegetarian meal with the main meal, this was the Noughts and Crosses pie of the day (or Tic Tac Toe depending on how you like it). The filling was a creamy, slightly curry-ish vegetable mix which worked really well.

When the turkey felt it was ready to hit the red carpet, I knew it was nearly lunchtime. OK I know it looks like it spent winter sitting indoors, but it’s because we cooked it with the foil covering it, and since we don’t eat the skin off the bird during the meal, it didn’t really matter.

This is the plate of turkey (which I hungrily put on the plate) and Cumberland sausages that were cooked with the turkey.

But enough about the bird already – let’s get to the Sideshow Bobs. Here we have the roasted parsnips. As far as I’m aware, parsnip is the only vegetable which gets better with overcooking. Like, alot better. Raw parsnips taste like carrots – and I don’t like carrots. Boiled parsnips taste like sweet potato. Hmm. Roasted parsnips taste like creamy, fluffy, slightly sticky and chewy potatoes. Probably didn’t sell it too well there, but you get the idea. I like it.

Bacon roll or sausages wrapped in bacon. The fiance had slightly under 20 of these little things.

Because I was tasked with making the bacon rolls, and because I do this two times a year, I got all the quantities wrong and ended up with a lot of extra sausage meat. So I rolled them up into little sausage meatballs and chucked them in the oven.

The items in this bowl could possibly be the fiance’s all-time favourite of the meal.

After a few hours of cooking, staring, self-restraint and maybe some nibbling in between, the Christmas lunch is finally ready!

Get the bubbly out, toast toast, open some Christmas crackers, read the jokes, and … come on, hurry up, I want to eat this!

Mmmmm Christmas lunch, meet me. Me, meet Christmas lunch. Me, eat Christmas lunch.

Once all the eating is done, we then sat down to open the presents, eat more chocs and watch a lot of TV.

Lack of sunshine = sulk = don’t wanna eat out = Chap Jae

As daylight becomes harder and harder to come by (ie when I go to work it’s dark, when I come back from work it’s dark), all the pictures I take of when I’m out will pretty much mostly be quite rubbish. I know there’s all sort of things you could do with ISO adjustment, aperture, shutter speed, etc. but I’m so rubbish at that, thus the pictures will be rubbish too. 

On that note, however, I came up with an excellent idea yesterday, while trying to digest the large amounts of Korean food I had for dinner. Here it is. Since it’s so cold (some places in the UK were –17 Celcius yesterday. Erm, what?) I’m beginning to dread the whole going-out-in-10-layers-of-clothing thingamajig. It’s seriously tiring, and that’s even before I’ve left the flat. By the time I’ve put all those layers of clothes on, and tried to waddle out the door, the thought of having to remove all of it once I get indoors is just not very exhilarating. Anyhow, this means that I won’t be eating out that much (yes, even less than I have been doing recently, which is quite a feat for a supposed food blogger).

Since I still have to eat, and since the food has to come from somewhere, I thought, why not feature a post each week about where the food comes from? It’s not that exciting really, most of the food comes from supermarkets. Thing is, it’s better than a blank page with just the banner of good food previously eaten, so why not.

Also, if I do enough features of stuff I’ve bought from supermarkets, and then what I’ve made with it, Sainsbury’s / Tesco / M&S / Asda might decide to sponsor my weekly groceries and that would be the main objective of this blog fulfilled. Yes, the main aim of this blog is to one day, enable me to get free food. I’m not fussed which supermarket / mini mart / reduced to clear aisle wants to give that free food to me, so sponsors, if you’re reading this, please feel free to e-mail me.

Sainsbury – if you’re reading, this one’s for you.

I’ve tried to hide the frozen products behind the fresh(er) ones, but because I have so many frozen products, it wasn’t very successful.

Because we had Korean for dinner, and because the smell of kimchi is still lingering on my hair and coat, I had cravings for more Korean food again today. Since we weren’t going out for food, and since the M&S ‘Dine for £10’ range wasn’t too inspiring, we decided to try our hands at making ChapJae, or the Korean version of yam noodles stir fried with meat and vegetables. I Googled for a recipe, found nothing quite believable, and decided to make something up. This is what I made up earlier.

Ingredients – please know that I don’t like measuring things, so every item here should be added as you go along, to the amounts you feel are sufficient (this is why I eat out so much)

• Chicken (something like 300g or something) cut into bite-sized pieces and then marinated in Korean hot pepper sauce, sesame oil, sugar and Maggi seasoning (good for most things)

(the red pepper sauce)

• Courgette (zucchini), red pepper, onions and carrots (all julienned)

And, not pictured because I forgot about them until I’d kept the camera away:

• Garlic
• Yam noodles (possibly found in most good Oriental supermarkets, ask someone for the Korean version)
• Some concept of how it should taste like

Because I did the prep and all that during the day(light) (ie before 4.30pm), and the cooking later on during dinner time, the pictures below look quite different. I told you I don’t know how to do that whole light / aperture thing.

Cooking method – or this is how I did it anyway.

First, I threw the onions into the frying pan. While that was frying away, I chucked in the chicken pieces and that created a sort of sizzle in the pan which made me look for the anti-bacterial spray to wipe it off the hob. A bit of degreasing later, and I was set to then throw in the rest of the vegetables. Little tip here, you might wanna throw the vegetables in maybe only when you’re about to serve the dish, depending on how soft you like the vegetables to be.

While all this throwing and wiping of hob was going on, I was also multi-tasking by soaking the yam noodles in a bowl of hot water. As they get soft quite easily, I wasn’t gonna cook them before throwing them into the pan with the chicken as that would have made them go all mushy.

When everything has been effectively chucked or thrown into the pan, and some frying has been done, it should look something like this.

The transferring of the noodles from the pan to the bowl is another skilful matter. I suggest the use of chopsticks and frying spatula thing.

It tasted surprisingly good, and I’ll be making this again, but without carrots I reckon because that lent a weird taste to it.

Pre-CNY lunch with friends

Chinese New Year = about a month ago.
Pre-Chinese New Year = more than a month ago.
This post = Late post.

The day before Chinese New Year, a few of our friends were kind enough to invite us along to their place for a group lunch. “Nothing fancy,” she said. “We’re all cooking something so feel free to bring something along.”

We decided to bring along the roast duck from Gold Mine in Queensway. Good choice too because the people who cooked and brought along their home-cooked dishes were top-class cooks. If we had cooked (not even suggesting that we even considered it for a second), our dish would have been The One That No One Ate.

To illustrate the point, this was the Roast Pork (Siew Yoke) made by our friend, A. With nothing more than an oven, some pork, and some spices he made this huge piece of lovely, crackling piece of roast pork.

When he cut it up into little, bite-sized pieces, we could actually hear the lovely crackling sounds from the skin which had been roasted to a perfect ten. Not only was it really crispy and dry, but it tasted really awesome too.

A huge bowlful of siew yoke (that went pretty quickly).

Our friend’s family friend brought along chicken curry she’d made, and this would have put our dish to shame too (so thankfully we didn’t actually make anything). Only using chicken drumsticks and thighs, she managed to make a perfectly spiced, rich and flavourful tasting chicken curry. Lots of soft, fluffy potatoes finished the dish off perfectly. Actually, we finished the dish off perfectly.

The duck we made, er, bought. £19 for a whole duck, which was more than enough for the 10 people we had at lunch. The sauce that came with it was plentiful, though we did ask for more. We prefer the duck from Gold Mine to the one from Four Seasons, because we find the skin crispier and less rubbery. Sauce-wise, they’re both similar, but these days the duck from Four Seasons seems to be more skin than meat.

Ginger chicken made by my friend, the host of the lunch. This is one of those confinement period food, enjoyed mainly by women after childbirth according to Chinese tradition. The ginger and wine in the dish provide the nutrition and ‘heat’ because ginger is one of those food considered by the Chinese to be ‘heaty’ food.

Stir-fried brocolli, very fresh and cooked just enough to maintain the al dante texture of the crunchy, green vegetable.

We had a great lunch that day; lots of great food, fantastic company, and an amazing session of competitive games after all that eating. Thanks again, A & D!

Cooking from scratch

As in, the freezer is named Scratch.

Ikea frozen meatballs with ready-made (but fresh) tagliatelle and ready-made spicy bacon tomato pasta sauce.

Not exactly blog-worthy (to some), but it tasted nice, looks nice, and took about 15 minutes to make so here it is.

Fish stew made from tilapia, prawns, plum tomatoes and fish stock, served on ready-made, fresh tagliatelle.

Been eating lots of fresh pasta recently, ever since we discovered how quick they were to cook, and how little sauces of flavouring was needed to make it nice.

We went to the fish market (Billingsgate Fish Market, Canary Wharf)

This going to the fish market business is tiring stuff, you know. Most weeks, we say, let’s go to the fish market this weekend, we’ll get loads of fish and make lots of seafood stuff. Sounds great, definitely, let’s go.

Come Saturday, the alarm rings, we snooze, get up at lunchtime, no fish market.

Last weekend though, we managed it. Despite snoozing half an hour after the original set-off time, we managed to get to the fish market, find a parking space, dodge the people carrying rucksacks of fish, and find our way to our fish. Didn’t get the scallops though, but nevermind.

Most of the people who come here (when we’re usually there anyway) look like individual buyers, ie for private consumption. Mostly tired-looking, everyone is here for a good deal. Whether it is cheap fish, or bigger fish, or fresher fish, the main thing is to get something you can’t get from the supermarkets. The industrial buyers have probably been and gone by the time these individual buyers get there, so even though we think we have it fresh, the REALLY fresh ones have already been bought.

Anyway, quite fresh is better than not fresh, hey.

Something fishy is going on.

Lots of tired, fishy, grumpy people.

This was our catch.

Tiger prawns £12 per kg

Squid £8.50 per kg

This was what we made for dinner with our (quite) fresh fish.

Chilli and garlic tiger prawn tagliatelle

We bought some fresh pasta, finely chopped some garlic and chilli, threw in some flat leaf parsley, threw in some prawns, and voila. (Not so) fresh prawns and pasta. Lovely. Until it makes you feel slightly sick. But while you’re eating it, it’s fine, so no worries.

Deep fried squid – Gordon Ramsay style (for recipes, click here)

This was actually really nice. The first batch went slightly soft because the heat wasn’t on high enough, but the second batch went a lovely brown colour, and crisped up nicely too. The five spice really adds to the flavour, and makes it taste a little more savoury than if you marinated it the usual way.