Archive for the 'Food and Drink' Category

This post continues my series on potato recipes, inspired by the International Association for Potatoes and Onions as a Main Dish.

Years ago, my favourite restaurant used to be Nineteen at 19 Mossop Street where I used to go with my then-boyfriend Jean-Paul (not his real name). It was just off Sloane Avenue and seemed THE place to be as young would-be yuppies back in ’80s London. There were lots of dashing young men in button-down shirts and ties with willowy young women in Hermes scarves and Alice bands - it was a subset of ’80s youth culture: preppy style as interpreted via Oxbridge. The restaurant seems to have burnt down. Jean-Paul is now a leading commercial law QC at chambers in Inner Temple with a family of his own and as you know, I’ve become somewhat more arty, boho and alternative in my lifestyle choices.

Anyway, Nineteen did a great Potatoes Dauphinoise dish, which is essentially potatoes and onions - but not as a main dish. I’ve been adapting it incrementally over the years and it’s most recent incarnation in my kitchen (this weekend, in fact) turned out as follows:

1. In a medium-deep dish (deep enough for 3-4 layers of sliced potatoes) lay down a layer of sliced potatoes - 2 each per person is about right.

2. Then spread a layer of sliced onions (full or half rings; red onions add great colour) and chopped garlic.

3. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and dried herbs (rosemary or thyme or sage or mixed herbs or herbs de provence or whatever of your choice) and dot small knobs of butter around.

4. Repeat 1, 2 and 3 until the dish is almost full to the brim.

5. Add the final layer of sliced potatoes on top. Repeat 3.

6. Add a small pot of cream (single is fine, double is extra yummy and if you’re watching your weight, skimmed milk will just about do)

7. Drizzle olive oil evenly over the whole lot.

8. Bake in medium oven for an hour.

You should have crispy, golden brown potatoes on the top and succulent, flavourful soft potatoes underneath saturated with a delicious flavour of herbs and cream and onions. I think, technically, you’re meant to add grated cheese on top - which would be very yummy, too - but I don’t.

You could eat this dish as a main meal on its own, I suppose, but for the truly gourmand experience I’d recommend having it with grilled steak…

Photo: thanks to the b bc

I was listening to The Food Programme on Radio 4 the other day and they had two experts on who were debating heatedly about the date when the potato first came to England. They also featured a Slovenian group of Chefs called The Association for the Recognition of Saute Potatoes and Onions as a Main Dish, who travelled round Europe to Potato Festivals cooking up their signature dish. Having a preference for rice generally, I had no idea that people could get so passionate about potatoes.

And then I started thinking about all the recipes that I knew for different types of potato dishes and realised that, for someone who claims to be not so fond of potatoes, I knew quite a number dishes involving the spud. So here is the first in a series of posts all to do with potatoes.

This is a recipe I invented one frosty November lunchtime. It was a Saturday and I was reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, revelling in the heat and atmosphere of the Deep South, while outside, it was grey and chilly. By lunchtime, I was starving and longing for something hot and warming that I could cook and eat quickly so I could get back to my book.

We looked in the fridge and there was very little food. Damn. I needed to go to the supermarket later that afternoon. In the meantime, there was some cheese, a few peppers and onions, a few slices of ham and frozen chips. Everything apart from the frozen chips were ideal for pizza - but I couldn’t be bothered to get the flour out and make the base.

Wait. What about chip-pizza?

1. Lay out the frozen chips on a baking tray as you would normally
2. Sprinkle on top of the chips chopped peppers and onions (and in fact, any vegetable that would go well on pizza) - and garlic
3. Tear up and sprinkle the pieces of ham on top (or any other meat that you might put on pizza eg salami, pepperoni etc)
4. Grate the cheese (cheddar works well) and spread evenly over the top of it all
5. Bake in a medium oven for 30-40 mins

When you take it out, you will have melted bubbling cheese over the chips and pizza ingredients. Serve with tomato ketchup a la Jackson Pollock squirted all over the tasty pile.

You could bake the chips bare for 20 mins first to get them a bit browner and then take them out and action items 2-4 above. Then put it all back in for another 10-15 mins.

Either way, you end up with a quick, yummy dish that’s great to eat on your own or for sharing with friends (especially while watching a DVD at home) - but hideously naughty if you are worried about your figure…!

The Cornish Pasty is the iconic food of Cornwall. Everywhere we went during our holiday there a few weeks back, the delicious smell of pasties wafted out at us from bakeries and whole shops devoted to the speciality. They are savoury portable meat pies in a distinctive half moon shape. To my Eastern eye, they look like giant curry puffs.

The outer case of the pasty is made of golden brown pastry that crackles and flakes as you bite into it. Its shape comes from folding a large circle of pastry over the filling and braiding the resulting curved edge. The traditional filling is steak and potatoes but these days, there’s lamb and mint and steak & stilton and a whole range more. They have a satisfying, heavy feel in your hand, about the size and weighty book.

Curry puffs are much smaller. They can be the same handbag shape as a pasty or sometimes can look like a fatter and shorter sausage roll. Inside, the filling is made of minced pork, chicken or beef, onions, vegetables and potatoes fried in dry spicy curry. You can get fried puffs with crispy oily pastry or baked ones with flaky puff pastry. Even describing it now makes me drool…. Bizarrely, the best curry puff I’ve had was at the canteen in Singapore General Hospital some years back.

Pasties are really yum on a blustery Cornish day. We shared one in Falmouth as Hurricane Gordon blew itself in across the Atlantic, the sky glowering darkly and the sea sharp and choppy in the bay. The light drizzle was like a sheet of pins thrown at us by the wind. A hot pasty in our hands, steaming in the cold, was just what we needed.

But there is always a slight disappointment in the back of my mind. Tasty as pasties are, they strongly retain their ancient British identity as solid, rather bland but nourishing food. They aren’t - and never will be nor should be - spicy, meaty curry puffs wafting of garlic and coriander and burning your mouth with the more pugnacious taste of the East. Sigh. I do miss a good curry puff eaten in the sweltering heat of a street market…

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Can you tell which is the pic of Cornish Pasties and which of Curry Puffs?

Picture A

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Picture B

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Answer: A = Curry Puffs; B = Cornish Pasties

Continuing my report from our holiday in Cornwall….

We arrived at our holiday cottage in a valley not far from the north Cornish coast late in the afternoon. We tumbled in, tired and grumpy. We had had a long drive from London and there was still the unpacking to do. But the charm of the place perked us up. It was one of those cute, tiny little cottages with timbered beams across a low ceiling and vast open fireplaces dating from over 200 years ago. There was an richly textured garden of flowers and shrubs in the front and a lawn at the back. And - perking us up even more - there was a basket of fresh scones, a bowl of strawberry jam and a pot of clotted cream waiting for us in the kitchen.

The unpacking could wait. At at time like this, there was nothing for it but to put the kettle on, lay out the cream tea spread out in the garden and settle down for a yummy time.

Clotted cream is made from the thick cream floating at the top of full fat milk. You skim it off and boil it down till its even thicker and richer. Then you let it cool and refrigerate for a few days. The result is a gooey, vanilla-ish, glop that you can dollop on any dessert or fruit.

Scones are a cross between bread and cake - the best ones are light and fluffy with big fat currants in them. The genius of cream teas is that somehow, the blend of crumbly scone with strawberry jam and a dollop of clotted cream interspersed with lashings of hot tea just meld together into a taste experience of sheer bliss.

Whoever said that English food is not much to write home about?

Throughout our week in Cornwall, wherever we turned, there was clotted cream. You could have it on apple and blackberry crumble or with fresh strawberries or on fruit tarts or more scones than you could dream of. We took to having cream tea for breakfast as well as tea time. We walked on cliffs all over the coast but clearly did not walk long enough or hard enough to burn off the joys of clotted cream. Looking at our snapshots of our holiday, you can see me getting chubbier and rounder as the week goes on… Oh dear.

A recent survey found the iconic food of the British is fish and chips. It started me thinking about other foods that might be specificially associated with the British. There’s roast beef and yorkshire pudding, of course, and cucumber sandwiches. A few years ago, Chicken Tikka Masala, an Indian dish, was voted the nation’s favourite, showing the best of multi-cultural Britain.

For me, one of the foods that is peculiarly British is malt loaf. I don’t know what other country you can find it in. (If you can think of anywhere else in the world where it is cherished and relished, do let me know by adding a comment!)

Malt loaf is a small, dark, fruity loaf which is about the size of a mini-brick. It is sticky and soft so that when you cut into it with a knife, you have to be careful not to press down too hard or you will squash the loaf. When you’ve sliced it, it looks like a slice of bread soaked in syrupy Guinness and crammed with currants and raisins. It tastes best with a slathering of butter on it. Inside your mouth, it is sticky and caramelly, clinging to your palate and teeth. The combination of slightly salty butter and fruity, toffee-like sweetness is just yummy!

Now, we have a rule about malt loaf in our household. We are only allowed to have it after a long, bracing walk - preferably in briskly chilled air. Or, after we’ve worked hard in the garden. In those circumstances, we can luxuriate in the taste and stickiness in the belief that it is good for us - as opposed to just being sweet and fattening. Ideally, we always have it with a cup of strong tea.

Protestant work ethic, sticky currant loaf and a mug of strong tea - how much more British can we get than that!

Hmmm, even writing about it makes me drool. I will have to go for a quick march round the neighbourhood now so I can break open my stache of malt loaf in the kitchen cupboard….

The magic of books is that you can be in two places at once – physically sitting wherever you are, in your living room or on the beach and also, wherever the words on the page take you: Africa, Asia, Narnia, the past or the future.

I’ve been working on Chapter Two of my memoir, Iced Tea and Laksa. Chapter Two is entitled “Makan”, a Malay word meaning food, a meal and to eat. (Yes, you spotted it, there is a them going on here – I may be living in London but I haven’t forgotten my very Malaysian passion for food!). I was sitting in my living room in my suburban house in South London, tapping away at my laptop. It was a hot, muggy Saturday last week. Outside, my poor garden was wilting in the dry heat, a victim of the hosepipe ban in this drought.

In my mind, I was back in my grandparents house in Taiping in Malaysia. It was a hot, glaring morning and I was cycling with my brother and sister, looking up at the puff ball clouds and feeling the blaze of the sun on my skin. I remembered how my grandma would call us for lunch, “Children, come – makan!” and how we’d sit round the table with my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. While my grandma said grace, we would sit quietly, our heads bowed, waiting to say “amen” so we could eat.

And in the meantime, the food would be there on the table, steaming and smelling delicious. Sesame chicken, fried pork with potatoes, fish curry, fried kangkong with chilli. A huge bowl of fluffy white rice. And we would wait, peeking at the food from under our bowed heads, our tummies rumbling, waiting, waiting. When would we get to “amen”?

My partner Angie came in just then, that Saturday in South London. “Shall we have lunch?”

I jumped up from my laptop. “Oh, yeah!”

I was absolutely starving. “What’s for lunch?”

“I thought I’d make a salad…”

“A salad?!” Dry, crispy bits of lettuce that would leave me starving after a whole bowl of munching and crunching?!

I said, “We’ve got that left-over chicken and ginger I made last night.”

“We’re saving that for dinner tonight.”

“Let’s have it now! I’ll make something else for dinner.”

Who can live without a microwave these days? Five minutes later, we sat down to steaming hot chicken with garlic and ginger and fluffy rice. I laughed, “Amen!”

When I was growing up in Malaysia, we always had tasty, spicy, aromatic food. Day in, day out. Garlic. Chilli. Turmeric. And for fruit we always had delicious, flavour-ful mangoes, papayas, rambutans, starfruits. Dripping and juicy with taste. So far so ho-hum.

What we craved was really exotic and exciting foreign food, dishes that were really difficult to achieve in the humid tropical heat. Tastes that involved dairy and foodstuffs that would go off in the rank mugginess. Fruits that were from a cooler climate.

Like lemon meringue pie. Specifically, the home-made lemon meringue pie made by Koo-cheh, my little aunt. She was my father’s youngest aunt and came to live with us with my grandmother when my grandfather died. Kooch was only ten years older than me and she was my favourite aunt. The family called her Mary Poppins as she could always be relied on to keep an eye on us kids.

Making lemon meringue pie in a hot sticky kitchen in the tropics is no joke. It was hugely labour intensive because you had to make each of the three components from scratch. Once a year, for a special occasion, Kooch would spend a whole day in the furnace to make this exquisite dessert. She would make the shortcrust pastry base and bake it blind, with a layer of grease-proffo paper and dried beans to weight down the rising crust. Then she would make the lemon filling, grating the rind of two lemons and boiling it up in their juices, adding sugar and egg yolks and cornflour. She would fill the cooked pastry base with the gluey liquid and let it set.

Finally, she would beat the egg whites with sugar to form a thick, mountainous white fluff that she spooned over the whole lot and the pie would go into the oven to brown the meringue. Later, it would cool on the counter, protected from flies by a half-domed basket and then go into the fridge.

That evening, we would all be abuzz, my parents, grandmother and us kids, saving space for dessert. She would finally bring out the pie and and slice into the soft cloud of meringue, cut down into the rich yellow of the lemon and at last, into the crumbly crustiness of the base. No shop bought lemon meringue pie has ever compared to this home-made tangy, fresh taste blended with the bubbly yet crunchy yet chewy foam of meringue and the bland buttery taste of the baste, all cool and fresh on our palates.

We would regularly beg Kooch to make the pie but she would refuse. When I thnk back on it, she would have been around 17 or 18 and with better things to do than spend hot days cooking for her greedy family. We were lucky she made it for us once a year! But, this reluctance made her a legend in the family at that young age, like a five-star Michelin chef who would only occasionally deign to make her signature dish - and then only when the whim struck her.

Kooch now lives in Canada with her own kids who are around 17 or 18. I have the old Penguin Cookbook of hers, the pages brown and fragile and falling apart. I’ve made lemon meringue pice form there and it always, consistently tastes just as good as if we were tasting it for the first time. This is partly because I’ve only ever made it once every 8 years or more - it is that labour intensive. Or perhaps I’m that lazy…

Still, no matter if I make it or anyone else does, to my family and me, it will always be known as Kooch’s lemon meringue pie.

This Guest Blog is part of the series of Fusion Stories. For more about the Fusion Stories series, go to the Category called Fusion Stories in the sidebar on the far right.

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Photo: Azman (left) and Ian (right).

Ian writes:

What would a British born Chinese know about Malaysian food? Very little it would seem, and that was certainly the case before I met my wife, who’s Malaysian Chinese. I’ve always been passionate about food (a little too passionate, my GP tells me) but Malaysians are even more so and it’s not surprising since their cuisine is simply sublime, with a wide range of tastes that reflects the melting pot of cultures in Malaysia.

On our trip to Kuala Lumpur last December, which is always a culinary delight, I tried some buns made by my wife’s aunts (4 sweet little old ladies who are fiendish in the kitchen). The buns had a savoury chicken filling, while the bread was of the softest, fluffiest texture. I asked the aunts to teach me their secret recipe for the buns, which they did, and so, armed with the recipe, we went back to London and tried it for ourselves.

Our bun making was quite a success, but we found that each time we made them, we couldn’t finish eating all the buns (12 in a batch) ourselves, so I thought, why not sell them? I used to frequent a Malaysian stall at Leadenhall Market run by a Malaysian couple, Azman and Naza. They do the most delicious nasi lemak and curry puffs. I had become familiar with Azman and thought that I would ask if he would let me sell the buns at his stall. I was really pleasantly surprised when he said yes.

I started off with a few chicken buns and gradually experimented with other fillings. I’ve now ended up with four different fillings, including sambal ikan bilis, which is typically Malaysian.

Market days are Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. The buns are prepared beforehand (it takes about 3 hours to make a batch) and are baked in the morning. This is sometimes a frenzied affair if the buns don’t turn out for one reason or another and I have to keep baking until I have the requisite number of pretty looking marketable buns. I suppose I’m a bit of a perfectionist in that way! We typically set up the stall at about 11am when Azman trundles up in his 4×4 laden with food and apparatus. Azman’s offerings include rendang wraps, murtabak, bagedils, spring rolls, kuih bakar, cucur udang, nasi lemak, curry puffs and mee goreng. Everything is home cooked by Azman and Naza and is made from family recipes.

It doesn’t get busy at the stall until about 12pm, so we pass our time chatting with the other stall holders. There’s Annie and her aunt who sell cool ethnic jewellery, Borza who sells delectable olives, and Stuart who sells home made fudge, to name a few. The atmosphere at the market is great– all the stall holders are friendly and we help one another out, covering each other’s stalls when needed. Azman and I sometimes find ourselves waffling about the finer points of olives or the current jewellery trend!

Things start to pick up at the stall at about 12pm and continue up to about 2pm. Traffic at the stall is dependant on the weather (a big factor), what day it is (Fridays are good) and also the time of month (end of the month is best). We have our regulars, who come nearly every day. It’s a great feeling to know that people really enjoy our food! Although we have quite a number of Malaysian and Singaporean customers, they don’t make up the majority, which shows how cosmopolitan London is. Some of our customers also ask us to source items of Asian/Oriental food for them, which we are happy to do.

On a good day, we sell out everything at the stall and on a bad day, we have leftover food for dinner (great for my wife)! Our day at the stall typically ends with one of the stall holders buying a round of coffee while we compare notes on how well we did.

Work doesn’t end there though, as Azman and I dash back to our respective homes to prepare food for the next day if it’s a market day. For me, that involves preparing and making the buns from the time I get home up to about dinner time. On non-market days, I cook the fillings for the buns, which is a time consuming affair. Our kitchen now looks permanently like a war zone, with ingredients and kitchen implements taking up most of the room, much to my wife’s chagrin. We also try and experiment with new recipes, and one that we’ve just introduced is a chicken sambal puff. We try to keep things interesting for our customers!

We sometimes set up stalls at various festivals in London. You may see us at the South Bank festival later this year. We are also in the process of applying to set up stalls at various other markets in London, including Borough Market, so that we can share a taste of Malaysian food with more Londoners.

It’s hard work and tiring, but really satisfying to see people buying our home made food and giving us encouraging feedback. It’s also a nice change not to be at a desk job with a lunatic boss. One of the perks of the job, of course, is the constant supply of Malaysian food! Now, who can say no to that?

Written by Fusion View Guest Blogger: Ian Lee

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To find out how you can contribute your cross-cultural story to the Fusion Stories Series, go to my post “Tell Us Your Fusion Story” in the Announcements section of the middle sidebar on the Fusion View homepage.

I’ve been working on a memoir tentatively called Bound Feet Blues for a while now. There is a lot of material and it’s a fairly major task, which I was finding quite daunting. I took a break to experiment with blogging and over the last few months, Fusion View has evolved into this multi-media site that has got me writing and podcasting regularly in between my day job and other commitments. My friends have asked me if the blog is really a distraction technique to give me an excuse not to be getting on with writing the next book. To some extent, i think they may be right! But something exciting has come out of it for the memoir.

I had been struggling for some time now to find my personal narrative voice. The Flame Tree and Mindgame were both thrillers and I wrote those in the particular narrative voice that seems to be required of thrillers. That voice has a terseness and urgency about it. It’s all about verbs and action. Short staccato sentences. Direct, punchy descriptions. I remember being asked by my editor to take out huge chunks of philosophical discussion about the nature of personal freedom and individual choice in Mindgame and essentially, to “cut to the chase”. There are lots of breathless chases in that novel and I had hoped to squeeze in more on the deeper issues that underpin the storyline - but, nope, they had to go, sacrificed to the gods of plot and pace!

So over the past few years, it’s been an interesting struggle, learning to allow myself to take more time over the contemplative passages in my writing. I’ve worked on a couple of novels in the last few years since Mindgame that have been more personal but I’ve not been able to move beyond the first few chapters. The narrative voice is flat and the pacing is uneven. Or, it can’t decide whether it’s inside a thriller or a Henry James novel. I’ve also had difficulty with plotting - in the thrillers, something dramatic happens every few pages and you are pulled along, gasping for breath. I was not used to writing pages and pages where nothing externally dramatic happens (no car chases, no men with guns leaping through the window). It felt scary, taking my time in exploring and inhabiting the emotions and psychological drama within my characters.

What writing this blog has done for my writing style is to enable my own personal voice to come through. In writing these short posts about my family or recipes or what’s been happening in my week, I am learning to speak as me. This is not the voice of the omnipresent, omniscient narrator of the thrillers, nor is it the measured, self-conscious voice of a literary auteur. It’s just me, telling a story, plain and simple. And by speaking like this in my posts every day for the last few months, it’s become natural and comfortable - and not at all scary.

I’ve split the memoir into two books, Bound Feet Blues being the second volume. I am now working on the first part, which I’ve called Iced Tea and Laksa. This weekend, I’ve just finished Chapter One, which weighs in at just over 5600 words. It’ll need some work and editing but that will come later when I have more of the finished book so I can see how it all hangs together. Laksa, for those of you who have not yet discovered this dish, is a Malaysian speciality of noodles in a red curry and coconut soup, served with chicken, bean sprouts and fried tofu. You slurp it with chopsticks and a Chinese L-shaped soup spoon, preferably at a roadside or market stall in the sweltering tropical heat. Do not wear a white shirt!

 In Japan, the traditional geisha haunts where men go to be pampered and served by gentle, docile women gave way in the 21st century to "maid cafes" where waitresses dressed as Western-style maids served the men. Now, the women have turned the tables. Earlier this year, the Swallowtail Cafe opened in Tokyo, designed to look like an English country house and catering exclusively to women customers. The waiters are dressed as butlers and after a month long training programme, provide a subservient service to the 20- to 30-somethings who make up the majority of the female customers. The place is fully booked for months in advance.

Emiko Sakamaki is the 25 year old management consultant who created the concept for the coffeehouse. She represents the new generation of female geeks or "otaku" who love comics, video games and animation. She is quoted in The Japan Times (24 April 2006) as saying, "Women have no one to serve them. In a virtual reality environment (at the butler cafe), I think many women want to spend some time when they can feel relaxed, drinking tea elegantly, and want to have a sense of superiority."

You can find the full Japan Times article here
but you will have to register with them first (free but a hassle).

Alternatively, you can read another report at http://www.wordpress.tokyotimes.org/?p=821

Personally, I feel uncomfortable with playing out roles of subservience and dominance, even in a playful way like the Swallowtail cafe. In a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, beautiful girls in cheong sam - the traditional figure-hugging Chinese dress with a high slit down the side - serve cocktails to the guests and to place the drinks on the low table in an elegant manner, they have to kneel before you. I found that disturbing and rather took the taste of my cocktail away. I am not sure that reversing the roles to be served by subservient men actually sets the balance straight for me. Perhaps simplistically, I prefer a world based on mutual and equal respect.

Have you been to Tokyo and been to the Swallowtail Cafe or any other cafes like it? Why not drop us a line about your experience?

What do you think of this concept? Could we do with a cafe like this in London? Or in the city where you live? Add a comment and tell us what you think.