thepassionatecook

Crispy chicken balls with home-made sweet & sour sauce

Almost four years ago now, I caught myself saying on this blog that I had tired of looking out for Chinese restaurants which were all mediocre and served nothing but the same old glutamate-laden ready-made sauces... would you believe that the same passionate cook has found new love in Asian restaurants lately? And this is a relatively new disovery, a complete 180-degree turn of my palate, who would have thought?

I really didn't have much hope of ever setting foot in a Chinese outside of China again and actually enjoy my food - but I have discovered that there is a vibrant restaurant scene here in London, if you care to look beyond the Chinatown eateries that only manage to lure in hungry tourists who don't know any better. Recently, I had the pleasure of sharing some of my preferred places on (German-speaking) culinary portal kuechengoetter.de - my absolute favourite at the moment being Hunan in Pimlico, where a family-run restaurant only offers custom-made lunches and dinners serving anything between 15 and 20 courses of the most delectable, Chinese food... I could eat there every day, if they let me!

On this journey of rediscovery, I have also revived an old favourite recipe. Curious as I am, I wanted to make my own sweet & sour sauce rather than resorting to something full of preservatives and E-numbers. You wouldn't believe just how easy this is to make, there is really no excuse for not making your own... believe me, you won't regret it!

PS: I can't promise I'll ever do a proper review of it, so if you want to indulge in custom-made sichuan cuisine, see for yourself:
Hunan
51 Pimlico Road, SW1
Tel: 020 7730 5712

Tom Pla style soup with salmon and asparagus

After receiving a few complaints about the fact that my sweet tooth is coming through too much in my recipes (and how could it not, given that we've only just left behind the most indulgent weeks of the year and I am also now a Daring Baker), here's an altogether different recipe for you. Not that it is any less satisfying: indeed, it has become my very latest food addiction.

I used to be into soups in a major way, completely immersed in them during my student years, with hardly anything else in my kitchen,trying to make it through the harsh winters we get and of course, not a penny in sight in those times just after the war as we like to complain to our daughter (who seems to think that being a teenager and in love with the Jonas Brothers is the toughest job on earth). Ah, the hardships of student life!

This winter, I haven't been craving soups much and for no apparent reason. It's not for lack of being immersed in books with exams approaching at full speed, so maybe it's due to the fact that around here, winters don't actually get that cold anyway - true, the cold sort of creeps in on you with the weather always being so damp, but it's not like we're approaching zero on more than 3 days a season...

But I have recently re-discovered my love for Asian soups and it is a rekindled romance that I now indulge in with a passion without par, I have been having this soup at least once a week since the start of the year and I am far from growing tired of it. If I have made one resolution for 2008, albeit a rather loose one and nothing as commendable as losing a stone or running a marathon or putting an end to the crisis in the Middle East, it would be to slowly diminish the stack of food I have been amassing in our kitchen cupboards because I am too lazy to check what we have at home before heading to the shops. I don't really cook Asian food all that often, but every time I go I seem to buy oyster and fish sauce, tamarind paste and palm sugar... and luckily, this recipe calls for all of the above.

The soup base is always the same, but I play around with the "trimmings" as my vegetable drawers or the offers of the day dictate - more often than not - just because that's the combination I like the most - it'll be Japanese buckwheat noodles with tenderstem broccoli, shitake mushrooms and thin slices of salmon fillet dropped in at the very end so they only lightly cook as the bowls are brought to the table. But you can use anything that you happen to have at home: some greens (asparagus, mange-tout, chard), some protein (fish, prawns, even chicken, if you like), then add some noodles (any Asian type, really, but I love the Japanese buckwheat noodles above all) and mushrooms, if you like. The only thing that is non-negotiable for me is a generous helping of spring onions and coriander - and of course, tons of ginger and lime juice - which is just as well, as they're a real boost for your immune system.

Learning to cook... Indian

I can't believe that it's now more than 2 years since the very first UK (and Ireland) foodblogger meeting took place... one sunny afternoon in May at our old house in Twickenham. We've had many merry get-togethers since, be it to just eat and  have fun, check out the newest hypes in the restaurant scene, meet food bloggers from abroad or cook together - the latter being a more and more popular reason to meet up.
This month, I invited Padmaja of Spicyandhra to give us (that's Anne-Sophie, Bill, Bonnie, Jeanne, Xochitl and myself) an introduction to Indian cooking... thinking we'd learn all about Chicken Tikka Masala, Jalfrezi, or Korma (for the faint-hearted) and other staples of most British households. We couldn't have been further from the truth.
Coming to think if it, it is obvious that there is not one Indian cuisine... the subcontinent is so vast and its population so varied that you can find plenty of different cooking styles depending on where you go. And of course, there's the biggest Indian outpost right here in the UK. The country's century-long connection with India has brought along a love for Indian food, but surprisingly little understanding of it - according to Padmaja, the aforementioned dishes are nothing but an invention for the British palate!
Don't think we were disappointed... the dishes Padmaja taught us to cook were all delicious in themselves and certainly achieved one thing: at least for me, it took the fear out of cooking Indian. Mixing your own curry paste is not that daunting and, contrary to popular belief, does leave lots of room for experiments.
We started with Padmaja's signature dish and all took turns at sweating over placing a a handful of dough into boiling oil with our bare hands: lentil soup with lentil doughnuts was mildly spicy and incredibly aromatic, the doughnuts might be a bummer for the hips, but they're a real joy for the palate! Next some aubergine and potato bajjis - again, not a lump of grated vegetable like in (supposedly) Indian restaurants here, but just slices of them dunked in a subtly aromatic batter and deep-fried golden brown: eaten with a salad of raw red onion, I bet none of the participants of our little workshop had trouble finding a seat on the train back!
As a main course, we enjoyed a chicken curry, but unlike many Anglo-Indian concoctions, this was rather "dry" for want of a better word, not swimming in a sea of quite calorific sauce. Lots of tomato and a great masala paste made from fresh coconut, ginger, and dry spices, then interlaced with fresh coriander leaves and plenty of chilli, we needed a fair amount of (also home-made) chapathis to stand the heat. This and a delicious mint rice (with more green chilli) had me longing for more, more, more.
Most Indian cookbooks I know have such a daunting list of ingredients that you're almost put off by it - the first time I tried, ten years ago in Vienna, I had to clarify my own butter (ghee) before I could even think of starting, and I was unfamiliar with most of the spices. Here, however, we mostly used things that are staples even in my household: plain oil, cumin/caraway and coriander are both seeds that we use a lot in Austrian cooking as well (see my traditional roast pork) and so are poppyseeds, chilli is something I use very often, dried as well as fresh, coriander leaves I love and have all the time, ginger is widely available as well, the only things that might not feature on your daily shopping list are fresh coconut, curry leaves and gram flour - but it's definitely not like you need to buy a whole battery of spices that you'll never use up! Especially not since these dishes were so good that I will want to make them again and again...