Archive for the 'Food and Drink' Category

In today’s show:

I check out the live phoneblogging platform Ipadio.com with some live phoneblogs on my mobile phone.

I’m feeling sorry for myself as I have done something to my leg and can’t run - to my great dismay.

But socializing with friends keeps me entertained. Some of the sites and friends I mention are:

# Kenny who blogs at Life for Beginners, visits from Malaysia and tells me about “foodcrawls”, the greedy person’s equivalant of pubcrawls

# An energetic young barrister tells me about adventure racing, a triathlon like sport that’s catching on in the UK

# Lybbe in Canada sends me an email comment about my podcast. Lybbe’s blog “Blah blah blah” is at http://lybbe1631.blogspot.com/ - her bio says, “Life long weight problem. Decided at 308 pounds (or more) that I wasn’t going to let myself slide any further. I’ve lost over 100 pounds and have about 50 more to lose. I feel better than I did 20 years ago, and I know I have lengthened my life expectancy.” Also, check out her new podcast, Fifty Counting Down.

You can listen to the podcast using the grey podcast-player at the end of this post…

…Or, in the main player below, where you can also check out other Fusion View podcasts:

You can also receive this and future Fusion View Podcasts free via iTunes - click on the lavender logo alongside.

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As a child growing up in Malaysia, I would read a lot of American comic books. I loved Archie and Dennis that Menace and, of course, the Peanuts. On TV, there was The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, giving the world and idyllic look inside the idealised American family - and the world lapped it up, together with all the icons of American pop culture. Although I lived thousands of miles away in an Asian culture, I knew all about skateboards, backyards, baseball, bubblegum — and the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The kids in these comics and TV shows seemed to love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that to me, it seemed like a bizarre concoction.

We could get peanut butter from the supermarkets in Kuala Lumpur — it would be the Planters brand, with a cartoon peanut dressed up as a dashing gentleman, I think. My mother would make us peanut butter sandwiches with a sprinkling of crunchy white sugar on top — the best kind of sugar would be the ones with the large crystals! But we never had jelly on top. We could not imagine what jelly would be like in a sandwich. After all, jelly is the cold stuff that you make with gelatine and flavoured water in the fridge. It has a strange rubbery texture and is eaten as a dessert or at birthday parties. I must have been a strange child because I never liked jelly — I didn’t like the rubbery sweetness or the way that melted in my mouth will stop so the idea that it was somehow yummy spread on peanut butter was very alien to me.

It was only later that I learnt that “jelly” is an Americanism for what we in the rest of the English-speaking world call “jam”. Even so, it seemed to me a very strange and un-appetising combination. So I was never tempted to pull out the jar of jam whenever I went to the cupboard to get a peanut butter.

Later in life, being health-conscious, I would only have the occasional peanut butter sandwich — this time, minus the sugar and only spread thinly on top of one slice of bread. It was tasty but nothing to get excited about.

However, since I started running recently, I have been absolutely starving a lot of the time. And for some reason, the only thing that seems to satisfy my craving is a peanut butter and jam sandwich. I have no idea how that combination suddenly popped into my consciousness again after all these years but something in my taste buds or my desperate stomach made me rummage around for some jam. The only flavour we had in the house was raspberry and I spread a thick layer over an equally thick layer of crunchy organic peanut butter on my slice of toast…

And it was to die for!

So now, I am wondering why I am not managing to lose any weight in spite of running about 10 miles week. Do you think that these peanut butter and jam sandwiches might have something to do with it?

Photo: thanks to meganmillscrm from flickr.com (CCL)

I may have become mad keen on running recently, but I am still crazy about good food and good company. This month we seem to be having quite a number of dinner parties at home, with friends coming round every Saturday evening. In my book, there is nothing better than settling down round the table with a hearty and tasty meal, relaxing and laughing with friends.

Last Saturday, my running friend Sue and her boyfriend came over. I decided to make one of my fusion specialities, soy sauce pork chop. This recipe is derived from a family recipe that is similar to a Dutch-Indonesian dish called babi kechap, which I blogged about a little while ago.

In the original Asian version, you chop up the pork in two small pieces so that it is manageable when you are eating with chopsticks. In my family’s version of the recipe, you use the very fattty pork belly cut and stew the dish on the stove for ages — the result is that the pork just melts in your mouth. Or, rather, the pork FAT melts in your mouth!

The version that I have adapted for my Western friends uses pork chops which have not been cut down any further. Ideally, there should be a thin slice of fat but you can trim that down to nothing if you prefer. Place the pork chops in a baking tray and drizzle some oil onto them — enough to oil them without drenching them.

In a regular sized like mug, mix the following ingredients:

• One sachet of miso soup powder. Miso soup is a great way to make stock as it generally does not contain additives or MSG

• 1 teaspoon of honey. I would normally use thick, treacle like soy sauce but in the absence of that specialist ingredient, honey is a good substitute

• 1 teaspoon of chilli oil. You can get this chilli oil from most Chinese grocers — it is made from dried shrimp and chilli preserved in oil. It is very hot and spicy so experiment with how much suits your taste

• Once the above ingredients are in the coffee mug, pour in regular soy sauce so that the total mixture is about one quarter of the mugs volume

• Add ginger wine — up to about half the volume of the mug

• Finally, pour hot water to fill up the mug to the brim

Stir everything in the mug well until the miso soup powder and honey have blended into the liquid.

Pour the mixture onto the pork chops.

Sprinkle chopped ginger and chopped garlic over the pork.

Cover the baking tray with tin foil and cook in the oven for around two hours on a medium heat in total. However, one hour in, turn the chops over, re-cover with the foil and return to the oven. Then 20 minutes before the end, remove the foil altogether - then baste the chops with the juice in the tray and return the tray to the oven - this will brown the chops nicely.

Serve with rice and green vegetables fried with garlic and soy sauce.

By the time our guests arrived, the house was fragrant with the honeyed scent of the pork, with added tones of ginger and soy sauce. Everyone was drooling as we sat down to eat!

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to take any photos of the dish — we were much too focused on food eating to think about food blogging…

Photo: thanks to jere-me from flickr.com (CCL)

When I go on holiday, eating good food is part of the experience. A few weeks ago, I was in Amsterdam, and although the Dutch are not well known for their world-class cuisine, I found the food at a delight. Dutch cuisine is usually associated in the global imagination with pancakes and large, red balls Edam cheese. But these days, what the Dutch are very good at is what might be called “modern European” cuisine. Their style is understated, but tasty, and everything is beautifully presented.

Take for example, the chicken and chips that I ordered at a local brasserie near our hotel on the Herengracht canal. The brasserie was nothing fancy — it seemed to be a local hangout for young professionals and had a cosy, friendly and comfortable ambience. I wanted something simple and I thought that chicken and chips, while not very exciting, would do the trick for me that evening. When you order chicken and chips in the UK, it usually comes as a chicken quarter — probably the wings and an extra bit on the end — that has been oven roasted, with a pile of chips on the side. At this brasserie, the chicken arrived delicately carved into manageable pieces and had a delicious buttery, herby flavour. The chips were crunchy on the outside and fluffy and soft on the inside. A whole dish was beautifully presented, and absolutely delicious.

It was not just this particular brasserie that presented us with an ordinary m eal that felt like a special treat. In most of the restaurants that we ate in, we would come away full, happy and satisfied. I have been to The Netherlands a number of times and that seems to hold true in most restaurants. It seems, in my experience, that it is much more difficult to happen upon a good restaurant in London or the UK by chance - you really have to go out of your way to research the guidebooks or to get recommendations from friends in order to have any halfway decent meal at a reasonable price here. So I’ve always been especially delighted whenever I’ve visited The Netherlands as I know that most the time, whichever restaurant we might pick randomly, we would be sure to end up with a good meal.

On this visit, we didn’t manage to go to an Indonesian restaurant, unfortunately. I am always keen to have at least one Indonesian meal, while in the Netherlands — I have always liked is rijsttafel, a meal for one that which comes with an array of different Asian specialties served in a delicate little bowls around a plate of rice. The multiple dishes is clearly derived from the Asian way of dining, where each person has their own bowl or plate of rice, and then everyone tucks into a range of different dishes such as chicken curry, stirfried pork as well as seafood, beef and vegetables dishes. In the Western way of eating each person has their one meal on their own plate - no sharing. However, in Asia, everything is shared, and the dishes are consequently much larger than the delicate little samples making up rijsttafel!

I was particularly tickled a few years ago, when I was in Delft with my family. The Indonesian restaurant that we loved had a dish that reminded usof a dish that has been passed down through the generations from my father’s mother’s side. It was called babi kichap. Babi means pork.Kichap means soy sauce and is the word that became ketchup in the West, meaning a condiment — and eventually coming to mean specifically, tomato ketchup. The characteristic of babi kichap is that the source is very dark — as dark as black coffee — due to the soy sauce. I don’t seem to have found it anywhere else in Europe apart from the Netherlands. I had always thought of this as a family recipe so we were all delighted to see it served in a restaurant!

Staying with the Oriental theme, I was really taken by a fast food noodle joint in the Leidseplein area. It was called Wok to Walk. The idea is that you choose a base of egg noodles, vermicelli or rice etc and then make a selection from a list of different meats and vegetables. The final step is then to choose the kind of sauce that you want e.g. peanut sauce,, oyster sauce soy sauce etc. They fry it up for you there and then and you can either have it as a takeout (the “walk” part) or you can eat it in. It was amazingly fast and quite delicious. It reminded me of Asian street food and caucused all but with a modern European twist.

There is one Dutch speciality that I tried once a while ago in Delft which was really more of an endurance test than a joy. Raw herring. It may be so some people’s taste - and it clearly is loved by the Dutch - but not to mine. We bought it fresh from a market stall, served in the little pot and garnished with a huge helping of raw onions. As it was a local speciality, I resolved to try it so I took a deep breath and popped it into my mouth. It tasted of the sea, seaweed and the mud at the bottom of an estuary and the texture was cold and slimy. It was horrible! Bleah….

So no raw herring on this last trip to Amsterdam, I’m glad to say. With all the other delicious meals, we came back from Amsterdam very chubby . I am now facing a very rigourous gym regime for the next few weeks to make up for all that overindulgence. Wish me luck!

Photos:

amsterdam by macropoulos (CCL)
babi kecap by zoyachubby from flickr.com (CCL)
maiden with raw herring by riceuriian from flickr.com (CCL)

One of my resolutions for 2009 is to be more creative. And inspired by our friends’ Nasi Lemak Lunch, we have been experimenting with creative creations in the kitchen, with some degree of success.

On Valentine’s Day, instead of going out, we cooked a lovely lunch of Yellow Prawn Curry together. In my book, the couple that feasts together, stays together…

The recipe is very simple and it was all done within 30-40 minutes:

• Mix some yellow curry paste with a can of coconut milk in a pot or wok.
• Add some fish sauce and dash of salt and sugar.
• Simmer for about 10 minutes to reduce it.
• Add prawns and tomatoes.
• Simmer for another 5 minutes or so (if you are using fresh prawn, until they are cooked).
• Serve on rice and garnish with fresh coriander, lime juice and slices of red peppers.

We added some green beans stir-fried in garlic and soy sauce.

Mmmm.

The great thing about being creative cooking is that you can eat it afterwards (unlike creative writing - eating my words is not my favourite pastime…!)

The other weekend, we were invited to Sunday lunch by some Malaysian friends who have a lovely flat in North London. They had studied in Australia and then stayed on there to work before coming to the UK 18 months ago. In very many ways they are global Anglicized Asians - like me - speaking fluent English and comfortable working and socialising in a Western environment. And yet, when we arrived at their place, I was struck by how much they were still connected to their Eastern roots - and making me realise how much I myself have recently forgotten my Malaysian side.

The first thing was that they invited us to take off our shoes, just like you would in any household you would visit in Asia. In my own home, I may sometimes go barefoot or wear home slippers but I often wander around with my outside shoes on - and I gave up many years ago asking my English visitors - and eventually all my visitors - to take their shoes off. The only people who automatically offer to de-shoe are my parents when they come to visit from Malaysia and I would then tell them, laughingly, “No, no need-lah. We’re like dirty English people now!” So it was a with a “back home” feeling that I slipped my shoes off in my friends’ flat and padded around their pale carpets and flooring.

My friends had cooked a wonderful Malaysian spread for us for lunch. The core base was nasi lemak, the Malaysian national dish of coconut rice, sambal belacan (prawn-based chili condiment), ikan bilis (fried anchovies), boiled egg and peanuts, served on a banana leaf. They had managed to find banana leaves in Chinatown so the whole look was delightfully authentic! For the sambal, my friends had lavished out on big, succulent prawns and to accompany the core dish, we were also treated to beef rendang (dry curry), chicken rendang, fried aubergine and chilli squid. One of the other guests had also brought a huge dish of Chinese barbecued spare ribs!

Needless to say, we were utterly stuffed by the end of the afternoon.

I had forgotten how delicious the taste of home cooked Malaysian food is. Normally, at home, we tend to cook Western-style or simplified versions of Malaysian recipes because that’s quicker. I like to put things in the oven and walk away whereas genuine Asian curries and other Malaysian dishes involve a lot of stove cooking where you have to be there at all times, stirring and interacting in some way with chopping boards or sauces.

We had such a relaxing Malaysian time, laughing and chatting in that loud, sing-song way that I can only do with other Malaysians that when we left, I felt a shock to step out into the cold London evening instead of a warm, tropical setting!

I may still be “dirty” and wear shoes in the house, Western-style but inspired by my friends’ fantastic home cooking, I am now resolved to dig out my old recipes that my Mum wrote down for me years ago and have a go again at cooking my favourite Malaysian meals. I’m thinking of turmeric chicken, sesame fried chicken, soy sauce belly pork, five spice pork… mmmm.

I’ll try and remember to blog about my attempts, with pictures, and you can tell me what you think…

There is a scene in a Woody Allen movie where he has taken his date to a Chinese restaurant. He is trying to impress her by showing of how much he knows about Chinese food and Chinese dining so he gives her a demonstration of how to eat with a bowl and chopsticks the “proper” Chinese way. He picks up the ball in one hand, bringing it to his mouth and starts to shovel rice and meet into his mouth while she is speaking and describing to her this skill that he is displaying. Of course, this being Woody Allen, he ends up with rice falling out of his mouth and grease all over his lips and chin, while his monologue is punctuated with slurping and sucking noises as he hoovers - or tries to hoover — the food into his mouth. Needless to say, his date is completely repulsed!

Dining Etiquette - Gender

Chinese Dining Etiquette

The English Dinner Party

Photo: thanks to ladybugbkt from flickr.com (CCL)

My post last week on Chinese Dining Etiquette inspired a number of very interesting comments about how people deal with the expectations and obligations around paying for a meal when going out with Chinese friends and family. A couple of them got me thinking more about the social and cultural dilemma around paying for meals in the context of the gender divide. Do women feel the same social pressure to offer to pay for a meal as men do, whether they are from an eastern culture or a western one?

Back in the old days, before women’s lib, it was the expectation and duty that the man paid, if a man and a woman went out to a meal together. (I am thinking here of Western culture from around the 1930s through to the 1960s, which would be my parents and grandparents generation. I am not clear as to what would have happened in East — whether it would have been acceptable for a single woman to go out for a meal with a single man during that period in Asian culture. If anyone can share their experience of that from an Asian perspective, that would be great!) My parents completed their higher education in the UK in the 1950s, which is where they met and dated, so the Western tradition played its part in their courtship. Growing up in that context in the 1960s, that was certainly the etiquette that I absorbed.

However, I came of age in the 1980s, when the women’s lib of the lates 60s and 70s had evolved into out-and-out feminism and young women now fully expected to have careers of their own. That was the era of women’s power suits and I remember an ad for Charlie perfume that featured a beautiful woman striding into a stuffy gentlemen’s club dressed in a sleek three-piece trousersuit with a tie. At university, I had long discussions with my girl friends about the etiquette of paying for a meal. Should we offer to pay for our half of a meal when we went out with a young man? Should we pay for the whole meal? Or should we play the demure young lady and let the man pay, just like in the old days?

It was generally agreed that if we paid for the whole meal, it would threaten the manhood of our date, framing us as a scary/ ballsy feminist types who would emasculate him and so frighten him away forever. But if we let him pay the whole tab, we agonised, would that mean that we would be seen as weak little women who would feel obliged to sleep with him - because the implication was that we would have surrendered all our power to him by surrendering to his greater masculine wallet?

So “going Dutch” would seem to be the most sensible option but there were still worries about what message this signalled: would we be saying that we were “just friends” and lose any opportunity of the relationship developing into something more intimate in the future? For some of my girlfriends, sharing the tab with a man still felt too forcefully as if they were asserting equal rights with men and therefore pushing our “feminist values “on him. And no one wanted to be seen as a feminist — because feminists were all men-hating, shorthaired, hairy-legged, angry, unreasonable lunatics, weren’t they? And so these tricky questions occupied us late into our student nights.

These days, 20 years on, I don’t think about the issue very much at all. Sometimes I pay for the whole meal, sometimes I share the bill and at other times, I gracefully accept a meal paid for by someone else. This is partly because the whole dating issue is no longer on the table, so to speak, so that particular aspect doesn’t come into play. Amongst my friends and close family, there is no game-playing or status-flexing needed, so if someone pays this time, someone else offers to pay next time and it all comes out in the wash. And gender no longer seems relevant in any of it.

I wonder, however, whether the dilemmas we had back in the 80s arose because we were all young and uncertain at that time of our lives or whether we were living through a transition time for women. Did young men at that time really feel threatened if a woman paid for part or all of the bill, as we girls worried so much about? Did they really expect to get into bed with us more easily if they paid the bill or was that just an anxiety on our part? Similarly, do I feel more relaxed about these things now because I am older or because I don’t have to date anymore or because women have reached greater economic parity with men in our modern times? I am not sure. Maybe it’s a combination of all the above?

What are your thoughts? I hope you will add a comment…

Photo: thanks to goonjrulz from flickr.com (CCL)

This is an easily digestible video series (excuse the pun, ha-ha) on Chinese Dining Etiquette for Westerners wanting to navigate the etiquette of dining with the Chinese, either as guests in China or as hosts inviting Chinese to your home. The expert giving the advice is an American business consultant who has a couple of decades worth of experience living in China, Mark Kemsley.

The one below is a short clip on the minefield of ordering a meal when you go to a restaurant with others in China — it all hinges on whether you are a guest or host as to whether you get to order or not.

I had never thought of it before but when we’ve been out for a formal Chinese dinner with family friends in Malaysia and arrive as guests, the meal has usually already been ordered beforehand or we settle down to chatting round the table while the host has a long and complicated discussion with the majordomo about the menu, occasionally asking us about any favourite dishes we might like to have. If my parents are the host, then my mother would be the one in charge of ordering beforehand by phone or organising the menu when we arrive.

One of the things that the business consultant does not mention in the video is the fight over the bill after the meal. Often, at these big Chinese family dinners there is a lot of excited scurrying about towards the end of the meal as the head of the guest family tries to pay for the meal in advance of the head of the host family. This usually involves a feint move with the guest pretending to go to the gents but then pausing to have a whispered conversation with the majordomo to surreptitiously pass over wads of bills in payment. This means that the host has to be on guard during the last course of the meal in order to parry this move by going over to pay first, or to have agreed a secret pact with the restaurant in advance that they should not to accept payment from anyone but the host. I guess it must be an honour thing among men but I have to say, I find it all very silly watching the various patriarchs duking it out with their wallets at the end of an otherwise pleasant evening! Perhaps I’m just too westernised but it seems to me much more civilised to allow the host to pay for the meal this time and to get the bill the next time when you’re hosting the meal…

But then, as Mr Kemsley suggests towards the end of the video, such dinners are as much to do with money as it is to do with spending time with friends or family. As the host, you need to make sure that you are seen to spend money on your guest by ordering the most expensive dishes — so presumably the corollary for the guest is to show that you, too, are generous and wealthy enough to treat your host.

I’m curious to hear from my Chinese readers what your take is on all this. Have I missed some of the cultural subtleties in my westernised view? I’d also like to hear your experiences, if you are a Westerner who has navigated Chinese dining etiquette — are there any nuances or cultural differences that have struck you?

You can also compare all this with English Dining Etiquette by taking a look at my post on The English Dinner Party

The other day, a friend gave us a pot of honey. Nothing remarkable in that, you might think. But wait. The label says “Greenwich Honey” and has his name and address on it alongside the picture of the bees and flowers. It was honey that he had cultivated from hives in his back garden. He works for London Underground and spends most of his working day in a subterranean office without any natural daylight, the passing hours rhythmically punctuated by the rumble of the tube trains overhead. In the evenings and at weekends, he spends time nurturing his bees and also tending to an allotment which is conveniently located just by his house in Greenwich. I don’t know whether it is because I know it is my friend’s honey and not a store-bought honey but to my mind, it tastes crisp, fresh and floral, and of course much better than anything that you could buy in a supermarket!

During the summer, my partner bought a tomato plant from an open garden event down the road and planted it in our back yard. We had been neglecting our garden for some time now (spending too much time indoors blogging, no doubt) and I was not convinced that we would ever see any fruit from that spindly little plant. Sure enough, we carried on neglecting our garden, including the poor little tomato plant, but to our great surprise, last week we wandered out amidst the long grass and scruffy looking shrubs and found a couple of perfectly shaped, bright red healthy, plump tomatoes hanging pendulous sleep from what was now a rather large plant! We plucked the ripest looking one, sliced it into quarters and slowly savoured each piece. Needless to say, they were each succulent and more delicious than any tomato I had ever brought home from the shop wrapped in plastic. Since then, the plant has been producing a regular flow of lovely fresh tomatoes!

There is something delightful about food that you or someone you know has grown or cultivated with their own hands. It feels even more special when it has been nurtured, almost unexpectedly, in an urban metropolis which you would usually associate with concrete, Tarmac, skyscrapers and steel. For most of us who live in cities, maintaining a connection with nature and the earth can be elusive — and we often forget how important a nourishment that connection can be to our mood and spirit. So for me, it was great to be reminded of that connection through being reminded that our food comes from the earth and not from supermarket shelves! It is so easy to re-establish that physical and spiritual connection by simply spending more time tending to my garden — there it is, waiting for me to give it some love and affection: all I have to do is make the space in my busy schedule to go out there and commune.

So in the next few months, we will be out there much more in the fresh air mucking about in the dirt to get the main part of the garden back into order. We are also going to transform a small section at the back into a vegetable garden — that is a slightly daunting task but we’ve got the books and we’ve got the Internet so we should have all the information we need to start on that new projects! I just need to make sure that I tear myself away from the books and the Internet for long enough to actually get the vegetable patch going as a physical entity and not just a grand plan that I blog about…

Photo: thanks to imageo from flickr.com (CCL)