Spicy kumquat salsa

Sometimes, your cooking plans are derailed by ingredients not being available but in the last couple of weeks, mine have been inspired by unusual ingredients turning up in stores. I knew I wanted to make some kind of salsa when a bout of warm weather cut through our rainy Spring, but I hadn’t exactly imagined that it would centre around kumquats. But there they were in a basket at the Taj grocery – wintery fruits that I usually associate with Christmas but that offer an bittersweet citrus punch not dissimilar to Mexican naranja agria. As soon as I saw them I knew I had to include them in my Spring salsa, so I poked around for ingredients to balance their chewy acid pleasures, coming up with plump little radishes, long red chilies and soft avocado. This recipe barely qualifies for the name, but it makes a substantial salsa that could function as the major component of a plate, not just a condiment. We ate it with grilled chicken and tomato rice but it would make a simple supper with just a rice bowl, or a vegetarian meal with Mexican black beans and rice.

Spicy kumquat salsa

• a large handful of kumquats
• 1 avocado
• 1 large spring onion or 3 regular sized ones
• 6-8 radishes
• a large handful of ripe cherry tomatoes
• 5 long red chilies (or 2-3 serranos)
• bunch of cilantro
• 2 limes
• some olive oil

You basically just have to wash and chop everything – avocado into chunks, spring onion, chilies and kumquats thinly sliced, tomatoes halved, radishes diced, leaves pulled off cilantro stems. Salt generously with nice flaky salt, then dress with lime and a little olive oil and mix well.

Et voilà – a not exactly authentic salsa but a nice way to transition from wintery citrus fruits to the promise of summery flavours.

Serves 2.

Buddha’s jungle curry

Last weekend, I finally caught up with Thrifty Gal and got to try out my tua nao, or fermented soy bean pods. Thrifty Gal is a vegetarian who never eats Southeast Asian food in restaurants because she also has a nut allergy and it all just seems too Russian Roulette-ish. Of course, I delight in making Asian food that won’t kill her, and I was especially excited because I’d discovered in Chiang Mai a vegetarian alternative to shrimp paste. Southeast Asian food is tricky for vegetarian cooking because fish sauce and shrimp paste aren’t ingredients but foundational flavours, imparting salt and umami to dishes. You can salt with soy sauce or plain old sodium chloride, but rich umami sensations are a bit harder to achieve. Fermented fish and shrimp are basic to Thai cooking and I’ve read that poor families sometimes eat little but rice and fermented fish in the leaner months: you can’t just omit flavours this essential to a cuisine. But in the Shan market in Chiang Mai, Naomi showed me tua nao, flat dry disks of fermented soybeans which do the same job in Northern Thai and Burmese cuisines. Perhaps because these regions are further from the sea, they developed a soy-based means of creating deeply savoury notes.

Three treasures: retrofitted recipe

Three Treasures is one of our favourite Chinese vegetable dishes: we order it regularly at Lucky Star, which is of course our most favourite Chinese restaurant. It’s a simply and homey dish of braised aubergine, potato and bell pepper and a soothingly mild contrast to their many spicy Sichuan options. When Mr Lemur brought home aubergine and pepper last night, and realising I had a bag of potatoes going spare, I wondered if it might be possible to work out how it’s made. (I am not usually a big potato person but I had bought some in an aborted bacalao experiment and, of course, hadn’t figured out what to do with them instead.) A bit of research got me nowhere: I don’t know if the dish is usually called something else, or if Lucky Star just makes a very particular version, but the interwebs had very little guidance to offer me. So, I decided to try and retrofit the dish just based on the flavour.

Chinese chilli braised greens

I’ve been playing around with some chillies I bought from Brighton’s new spicy food store, Chilli Pepper Pete’s. They came in a huge bundle, about 25cm long, just asking to be hung up rustic-style in our kitchen. The store owner told me she has them specially imported from China, so I’m not entirely sure what they’re called. They are mild in the same way as the dried reds you usually find floating in large numbers in Sichuan cooking. Cooked until softened, they lend flavour for the timid, but are entirely edible and not as threatening as they might look. But unlike regular Chinese chillies, these impart a delicate smoky flavour. It’s not as aggressive as chipotle, but imbues food with a mild smokiness that’s really pleasing. I’ve used them here with spring greens but it would work really well with tofu or, I think, with pork.

Last night I tested the combination out on JD, M and their friend from London who came by for dinner. Given the unseasonably beautiful weather we’ve been having, I should probably have been making light summery salads but I’ve always thought a long day at the beach can work up an apptite for hearty food. Since M is a vegetarian, I made several vegetable dishes and one meat one for the omnivores. For the meat-eaters I slow-braised some pork in dark soy and ginger and for a couple of other vegetable dishes, I turned to Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford’s Beyond the Great Wall, which I’ve been reading avidly. I made a simple but delicious dish of tofu skin in chilli sesame dressing and another of edamame with pickled chilies and sliced garlic.  (Er, yes, detecting a theme there. I had a moment of fear that P might not like chillies but luckily she did!) It was a relaxed mix of dishes, all simple, based on one main ingredient, and perfect for an unexpected late summer evening.

Chinese chilli braised greens

• 2 onions, diced
• large chunk of ginger, julienned finely
• 6 garlic cloves, chopped
• 6 long red chillies, halved
• 8 very long Chinese dried chillies cut into 2 inch lengths, or about 20-25 normal sized ones
• 2 tbsp shaoxing wine
• 2 tbsp thin soy sauce
• 2-3 heads of spring greens, collard greens or cabbage, sliced

Sauté the onion until it is soft and browning in places, then add the garlic, chillies (fresh and dried) and ginger. Fry until soft and fragrant.

Add greens, wine and soy sauce, cover and cook on a low heat for 30 minutes.

The smokiness of the long chillies is a key feature of this dish. If you can’t get those, add in a dried chipotle to get some of the same quality. This dish works as I served it here as a side in a Chinese meal, but it also works as a simple dinner served with rice. I’ve also served it with simply grilled beef on top, or, for a more substantial vegetarian main meal, it’s good with creamy cubed tofu mixed in.

Serves 4-6

Vadai curry

This week I’m excited to have posts from two guest bloggers, both of whom are not only great cooks but also share my love of learning about new culinary cultures.  First up is Chris, who usually blogs about cinema but has a secret life as a brilliant vegetarian cook. I more or less beg him to make me his Southern biscuits with mushroom gravy every time I see him. Since I know I have some (long-suffering) vegetarian readers, I’ve persuaded him to share his south Indian-inspired vadai curry. Over to Chris…

Like many vegetarians, I have long privileged Indian food in my diet. In fact, certain Indian dishes are comfort food for me, and I’m not of South Asian descent.  However, the dishes I crave most are not necessarily the Moghul standards that Indian restaurants specialize in here in the US but rather the homier dishes that I have learned from friends, cookbooks, and the occasional restaurant serving more regional food. Vadai (or vadi, plural of vada, sometimes transliterated wada or bada) are just the sort of thing I don’t often see on restaurant menus. Basically they’re lentil fritters, typically served as a snack with coconut chutney, and you could do the same or even treat them as an appetizer. But I find them a bit more trouble than I want for anything other than a main dish. So I make a curry with them, inspired by the vadai curry I first had at the excellent Madras Cafe, tucked into a stretch of strip-mall hell in Atlanta. 

Decadent greens: spring vegetables with coconut dressing

This trip to Paris was less meaty and heavy than previous ones, what with the not eating French food plan, but restaurant food is always a bit excessive, so I’ve been enjoying a week of Asian spicy salads to recover. There’s probably nothing I like more than an Asian salad – the mixture of cooked and raw vegetables, sometimes meats, and sparkily flavoured dressing is my idea of perfect warm weather food. This salad of green vegetables is an idea I learned from Vatcharin Bhumichitr’s great little book Vatch’s Southeast Asian Salads, and I’ve been making it in variously adapted forms for years now. Essentially, the dish involves lightly blanching an assortment of greens so that you end up with a generous bowl of vibrantly coloured vegetables, which are then dressed in a warm coconut and mint dressing. You can more or less make it at any time of year with green beans, broccoli, cabbage, whatever’s available, but it’s especially appealing in the late spring and early summer when you have asparagus and broad beans, or soon fresh peas at your disposal.

Green vegetable spicy salad with coconut dressing

• 100g green beens
• half a cucumber
• 100g sugar snap peas
• 200g asparagus
• 300g broad beans (weight in pods)
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 garlic clove, chopped
• 1 large green chili, chopped
• 3 tbsp coconut cream
• 2 tsp palm sugar
• 1 tbsp fish sauce*
• juice of 1 lime
• a handful of mint leaves, chopped

*For vegetarians, add salt to taste instead of fish sauce, and a tbsp of water.

Pod the broad beans, chop the asparagus, top and tail the beans. Bring a pot of water to the boil and blanch the vegetables each for 3-5 minutes, until just cooked. After each one is done, drain well, pat dry, and add to a bowl. Keep the broad beans separate so they can be peeled when cool. Meanwhile, julienne the cucumber.

To make the dressing, heat the oil in a small pot and gently sauté the chopped garlic till golden. Remove from the heat and add the chili, sugar, coconut cream and fish sauce. When you are ready to serve, add the lime juice and mint and mix with the salad. Serve over rice.

Serves 2-3.

Goodbye Santiago…hello kale

Well, I’m home from Chile and feeling both jetlagged and ready for some lighter food. You think seafood is light, but not when it’s being used basically as a conduit for butter… Actually, truth be told the food in Chile is pretty healthy, but eating out all the time on holiday means you eat a lot more richly than at home, regardless of the cuisine.

So, for my first post back at home, I’m not making anything complex, just the slightly more rigorous food I am feeling in need of: a tofu and kale stir-fry with chilies and ginger. Now I’m not one for cleanses. Some of my more hippyish friends are inclined to really punitive diets when they’ve over-indulged but I really don’t believe in that approach. For one thing, I don’t think it’s especially good for your body to veer from one extreme to another and for another I don’t like to use food in that psychological way. It feels negative and unfeminist and just not for me. So…this dish isn’t at all a punishment for gluttony but rather a mix of some favourite flavours I didn’t get to eat for the last couple of weeks of travel.

Gingery kale and tofu stir fry

This simple dish mixes the softness of tofu with the bite of just-cooked kale, and has a Vietnamese influence in its gingery lime dressing. The trick is to be very generous with the ginger, especially the raw ginger added at the end with the lime. You could replace the kale with any other dark greens and the radish sprouts with whatever sprouts are available.

• 1 large bunch of kale
• 1 bag of radish sprouts
• 1 red pepper
• 1 block of firm tofu
• 4-5 spring onions
• 3 cloves garlic
• a generous thumb-sized chunk of ginger
• 2-3 long red chilies
• 2 stalks lemongrass
• 1 tbsp palm sugar
• 1 tbsp fish sauce or soy sauce (or more)
• 1 lime
• 2 tbsps oil

Wash and shred the kale, dice the red pepper and thinly slice the spring onions and chilies. Chop and pound the garlic, ginger and lemongrass into a paste, leaving about a tablespoon of chopped ginger to the side. Cut the tofu into bite sized chunks.

In a wok or large frying pan, heat the oil and sauté the spice paste. Add the spring onions, chilies, and red peppers and cook for a minute. Add the kale in batches and wilt. Now add the palm sugar and fish sauce, and mix well to dissolve the sugar. Add the tofu and stir carefully.

When the kale and tofu are cooked and the sauce well mixed, turn off the heat and add the lime juice, remaining raw ginger, and sprouts and mix well.

Serve over rice – it goes especially well with Thai black rice or red rice.

Serves 2

How many herbs can you fit in one pot?

I’ve read on a few blogs that Persian food tastes better than it looks, and I kind of get what they’re saying. Photographing the pheasant fesenjan was something of a challenge, because no matter how beautifully jewel-toned and succulent the dish looked in real life, photographing in close up did make it look a little bit like the Chinese restaurant scene from eXistenZ. But the idea that Persian cuisine generally looks unappetising doesn’t really hold true for me, perhaps because so much of what I cook is braised, stewed or otherwise formless. I don’t really do meat and two veg. To put it another way, Mr Lemur has unkindly suggested that this blog could easily be called Things in Bowls. So the lack of visually discrete ingredients in these Persian dishes isn’t exactly unusual to me. But what I think people really mean when they say Persian food tastes better than it looks is that the tastes are unexpectedly bright, concentrated, and punchy in comparison to the homey looking exterior. Fesenjan and khoresht ghormeh sabzi do look good to me, but their cosy style gives no clue to the amazing vibrancy of the flavours lurking beneath the surface.

For this reason, I was really excited to make khoresht ghormeh sabzi, a herb and green vegetable stew that, unlike fesenjan, I’d never made before. I love cooking greens of all kinds, and this dish promised a giddy pile up of herbal flavours. I read a bunch of different recipes and decided that, since I was making the dish to complement the fesenjan, a vegetarian version would be more appropriate. Plus, I wanted to keep the freshness and lightness of the herbs front and centre rather than using them as foundation for a meat dish. It really is a wonderful excess of greenery. Preparing the dish makes you feel like the healthiest person alive, as you chop enormous piles of spinach, dill, parsley, cilantro and more. Using herbs not in small quantities as flavouring but in giant amounts as ingredients is always liberating, and this dish really lets you go to town with the leaves. You’ll want to visit a grocery store that lets you buy herbs in generous bunches, not meagre sprigs in sealed plastic containers. Most of the ingredients are easy enough to find – spinach, dill, cilantro etc – but you might have a bit more trouble with fresh methi or fenugreek leaves. Luckily, we have a good Indian grocer nearby which always carries methi, but if you’re stuck, you could probably use dried. While it would counter the freshness that is a central part of the dish, methi actually holds up quite well in dried form.

Khoresht ghormeh sabzi, or Persian herb stew

• large bunch of spinach
• large bunch of parsley
• large bunch of dill
• large bunch of cilantro
• large bunch of methi / fenugreek leaves
• 1 medium onion
• 1 leek
• 1 bunch of scallions or green onions
• 1 bunch of chives
• 1 can black-eyed peas
• 6-8 slices of dried lemon
• 1 tsp turmeric
• oil for cooking

First, chop the onions, leeks and scallions into small pieces. Wash and finely chop all the herbs and greens. Now, most traditional recipes for this dish seem to involve complicated frying of herbs in separate pans, but since I’m doing a meatless version, it didn’t seem worthwhile. My Iranian friends may disapprove. Instead, simply heat 2-3 tbsps of oil and sauté the onion, leek and scallion until soft. Now add the spinach and herbs and cook down for 15 minutes, stirring often.

Once the greens have diminished in size and darkened in colour a good bit, add generous amounts of salt and pepper, plus turmeric and dried lemon slices, and stir for a minute. Now add about a cup of water, cover the pot and bring to the boil. Simmer for another 15 minutes and then add the beans. Simmer for a further 15 minutes or so, longer if you’d like.

Serves 4

8 rabbity vegetables for Chinese New Year

I promised the vegetarians a CNY post and for the omnivores, this crisp and light dish contrasts nicely with the richness of the beef cheeks. I’m always on the look out for Chinese dishes that have the lightness I appreciate in Vietnamese food, and researching CNY, I came upon Jen from Use Real Butter‘s recipe for rui tsai, a ten lucky ingredient salad her mother made her every year. The dish looked wonderful and it percolated in my mind when I was shopping at the Asian markets this week. I didn’t want to replicate the dish exactly, and in any case, I didn’t have several of the ingredients. But the idea of a lightly cooked salad, featuring both fresh and pickled vegetables stuck with me, as did the idea of featuring ginger in a starring role. If you simply count each of my eight ingredients as a vegetable, the salad will seem plain, but when you consider that one of these ‘vegetables’ is a good half cup of fresh ginger, then you can see the sparky flavours lurking in its deceptively plain appearance. The combination of ginger with crunchy beansprouts, bitter mustard greens, and umami mushrooms gives the dish a lovely balance of flavour, even without much in the way of  added dressing.

Eight is, of course, a lucky number in China, and each of the ingredients in this dish has special significance for New Year. For example, bean sprouts represent a positive start to the year, black fungus signifies longevity, and mixed vegetables in general suggest harmony in the home. After the tumultous Year of the Tiger, harmony seems like a good thing to aspire to in the calmer Year of the Rabbit…

Eight rabbity vegetables

• 1 cup black fungus mushrooms, soaked
• 1 cup Chinese black mushrooms, soaked
• 1/2 cup pickled mustard greens
• 1 cup beansprouts
• 1/2 cup ginger
• 1/2 cup banana flowers, soaked
• 1 cup bamboo shoots
• 1 cup cabbage
• oil for cooking
• salt

First soak all of the dried ingredients in bowls of warm water. Watch out for the black fungus mushrooms – firstly, they plump up quite a bit so you don’t need too many to make a cup, and secondly they will need careful washing once rehydrated.

While you wait for the dried vegetables to hydrate, prep the fresh ingredients. The ginger, cabbage, bamboo shoots and ginger need to be julienned, with the ginger cut especially finely. Rinse the pickled mustard greens and wash and pick through the beansprouts. Once the dried veggies are soft, squeeze them out and chop them finely too. Keep everything in separate piles for cooking.

Heat a wok or large frying pan to medium and add a small glug of oil. Now fry the vegetables one at a time, sprinkling a pinch of salt over each one. You will want to replenish the oil now and again. Cook the mushrooms for two minutes or until golden patches appear. The others can be cooked quite briefly and the beansprouts not at all if you like them crunchy. As you finish each ingredient, add it into a serving bowl. Once all are cooked, mix the salad well and taste for salt.

That’s really it. Happy CNY!