Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Tis the season for snow, flight delays and eurostar trains getting stuck in the chunnel due to blizzard convection currents.
The time of year when it's comforting to eat warm and stodgy fare; when you feel you have a valid excuse to pad yourself with porridge for breakfast (rice or oat) and dumplings for dinner.

There are quite a few German dumpling variations: from plum-sized klöse, made from potato (a nice side next to roasted meats) - through to dampfnudeln desserts, which are similar to a Bao Zi steamed bun, but with a fruit compote or warm vanilla custard on the side.

Knödel are large savoury boiled dumplings, made from potato or bread, and if you have leftovers, they can be served in grilled slices. Golden chanterelle mushrooms make an especially delicious sauce with which to augment a fat Knödel.

I admit that snow or shine, sober or drunk, I'm partial to any sort of dumpling. It's possible that in place of a heart, I have a round, damp, chewy lump of dough.
If you have similar dumpling sentiments, you might like to try this easy-to-make recipe for Bavarian-style bread-based dumplings.



Spinach & Cheese Semmel-Knödel (adapted from a recipe in Landlust magazine)
Serves 4

400g bread (we used a mix of white and a light rye. it should be a reasonably delicious and medium-dense sort of bread: no tip top, and no gritty multigrain)
1 onion & 1 clove garlic (finely chopped)
300 g blanched spinach (drained & roughly chopped)
200 ml milk
200g gouda & 100g Emmental (or a mix of your preference), grated
4 eggs
Salt & pepper
olive oil
100 g parmesan (optional)

Cut the bread in thin slices and put into a bowl.
Sauté the onion & garlic in a little olive oil until transparent. Add the spinach & sauté one more minute.
Add the milk and heat to luke warm.
Beat the eggs with this mixture and add to the bread. Let rest 15 min.
Add grated cheese + salt & pepper.
Mix with your hands to combine.
Form 12 dumplings of a similar size.
Add to boiling salted water then reduce heat & simmer for about 20 minutes. Drain and if you like, sprinkle with grated parmesan.

Serve with salad, or any kind of spicy stew.
Cheese and spinach can be reduced, or omitted completely for a traditional accompaniment to roasted or braised meat (you'll want to have some kind of gravy or sauce in play).

We ate them in a manner that Erik said was highly unorthodox: with leftover Mexican Chicken Veracruz (baked with tomatoes, cinnamon and jalapeno pickles), and steamed broccoli. Definitely not healthfood - but, served with veg and spiciness, they weren't as rich and heavy as you might expect.

Put small amount of oil in a pot...fry one or two cloves of finely chopped garlic

Add yellow lentils, water and prawn heads and boil until cooked

Add salt to taste

Serve with more cripsy garlic if desired. Eat on its own or with other appropriate things

Over the last month or two I have taken time out from my afterwork curriculum to practice being a little bit more German. It's difficult to say what prompted this. For a long time I felt that I ended up in this country by accident rather than choice. For a few years, I felt comfortable as a citizen of no-place. But something seems to have shifted. I don't feel like I'll ever want to become German per se, but I finally feel at home enough that I allow myself a certain adopted pride for some of those quaint, old-fashioned customs... like making baked apples stuffed with rosehips, marzipan and hazelnuts, or autumn flower arrangements that include tiny crab apples.

After four years of living in Cologne, I've finally committed to my bicycle as a means of daily transport - using a 2nd hand foldable '50s klapprad to traverse the terrifyingly fast bicycle lanes and negotiate traffic (preferably with Erik alongside me as bikecoach).

In order to make my work-permit stick like glue, I recently participated in a nine-day state-subsidised integration course. I was hoping to be schooled in sausage varieties, but instead bonded with Phillipino, Jamaican, Dominican Republican and Kurdish classmates over parliamentary processes and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

At the start of the first day of our integration course, the tutor, a nice Turkish man named Herr Kaygisiz, asked us what we thought was typically German. Naturally, the first things that sprang to my mind were beer & cake.

Although I never drank beer before moving to Germany, I now enjoy a daily schwarzbier or pils. Unfortunately I don't like the local brew Kölsch so much.

Cake is a bit more difficult. Although my friends might deny it, cake still plays an integral or even iconic role in the lives of young Germans. Our pals love to spend an occasional Sunday eating cake, drinking coffee and gossiping the afternoon away. Below is a picture of Carmen's birthday tea-break - a symphony of cake.



For my own part, I would usually rather eat a sandwich. Although I admire many German cakes - rustic, not too sweet, using yeasted bases and seasonal fruit like zwetschgen plums, or copious poppyseeds or light quark cheesecake formulas - I am not a committed cake fan. Manufactum has one apple, walnut & poppyseed cake that I especially love (in photo below, with a crust of poppyseeds like purple volcanic sand). But I have never felt the need to bake a German cake.



I bake very rarely, and when I do it tends to be things like strawberry-lavender muffins, sweet potato pie, or blueberry-molasses cake, from Canadian or American books and websites. This is my habit generally when cooking - to make food I can't buy around the corner from my house. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, but of course going against the local culinary grain is also a way of satisfying nostalgia and creating a bubble in which to feel at home when you live abroad.

So for my birthday in early August, we made a nostalgic yum cha homage lunch: steamed buns, scallop shiu-mai, chinese broccoli and black sesame dumplings all made from scratch (to my chagrin it turned out Erik is much more talented at dumpling construction than me). It was a perfect lazy Sunday. And the German birthday cake that Ina brought along turned out to be the perfect dessert to follow this meal. A coconut-date cake, it was very light, fluffy and moist - so moist it was almost juicy in texture, rather than crumbly and cakey, and exactly as I like it: not too sweet.

Although I am quite keen to experiment with poppyseed-streaked muffins, if there is any cake that might start me on a path of German baking, I think it will be this delightful coconut-buttermilk-date cake.

INA'S COCOS-BUTTERMILK-DATE CAKE

Ingredients:
3 eggs
1 & 1/4 cups raw sugar (or more, to taste)
2 cups buttermilk
4 cups flour
22 g, 5.25 tsp or 1 & 1/2 packets of German baking powder (supposedly American/UK baking powder is 'double-acting', so you might use less than this recipe calls for - perhaps 4 teaspoons)
2 cups dessicated coconut
1/2 cup sugar (or more, to taste)
1/2 cup chopped dried dates
400 ml cream (or two 'becher' pottles)

Mix the first five ingredients together and pour into a greased pan. Mix the coconut, sugar and dates together and spread over the top. Bake for around 30 minutes at 140 degrees.
As soon as you remove it from the oven, pour 400 ml cream over top and let cool.

You could try it with beer I guess, but we enjoyed it with a 2008 Rheinhesser Grauer Burgunder (a dry Pinot Grigio). The cake-baker is pictured with her family below.

Following hot on the heels of their last dope music video for Turtle Pizza Cadillacs,

Here is the brand new music vid release from our dear friends Bobbi Sox and Coco Solid (who is an occasional Gut Feelings contributor), aka PARALLEL DANCE ENSEMBLE (a Denmark/New Zealand coproduction). Look out for a crunchy sweet sour creamy album from them in the near future.

Last weekend Coco had lunch with the Black Panthers' minister of culture Emory Douglas - I'm looking forward to hearing about that particular meal.

I'm re-blogging her recipe for disco rap sconez, which, says Coco, are "SO awesome slash CABBAGE!"

I have an awesome fool-proof recipe for scones, which I will now rename sconez so yous don't tease me but they are so sweetheart I have to share. If you got someone to impress, half an hour and $5 this is you man.

1 300ml bottle of cream
1 can of 7up
4 cups of flour
Dash of salt

Put it together. Cut it in squares and bake it for 15 minutes at 250 degrees...I mean degreez. Me and my baby sister Claire baked these today being broke babe buddies and watching movies. Note the jam and leftover whipped cream on the side, plus a fistful of raisins were thrown in (pimp I was def pushing the $9 mark).

My food photography needs work but trust me these rule. Oh my god when did I turn 60 in the 60's.

Check her scone photo porn and buhloon crème brulée mindstate reflections at http://www.jessicoco.blogspot.com/

Our friends Ina & Harry are quite partial to pumpkin and sweet root veg, especially in the form of desserts or jams. Harry suggested we have a sweet potato pie-making party with prosecco yesterday.

It seems like just the other day that we christened the start of spring with rhubarb-quark cheesecake in Ina & Harry's garden, shortly after they moved into that house. But in the mean time a new resident has arrived: Johanna (see gratuitously cute baby pic below).

I can assure you, despite the teeming wildlife (birds pooping on the garden table and rustling in the bushes, toads getting frisky in the pond) we were smiling like Johanna on the inside after collectively baking that pie, cooling it on the window sill, and after many glasses of prosecco and strong cups of coffee, eating the pie in the fresh air.

If you like, you can de-veganize the recipe by adding an egg to the filling (make sure to reduce the amount of tofu a little -but do not eliminate completely, as the tofu adds good texture without too much richness). Yesterday I added an egg to the crust, which made it a little chewier and less crispy-dense than usual.



Sweet Potato Pie (adapted from a recipe in the Fresh At Home cookbook by Ruth Tal Brown)

Crust:
3 cups flour (I use a mix of wholegrain and light spelt flour)
1/4 cup raw sugar
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
3/4 tsp salt
1/3 cup warm water
1/3 cup olive oil
1/3 cup margarine

1. Grease & flour a pie plate or crockery dish for tarts/quiche
2. Combine dry ingredients.
3. Add marge and oil to dry ingredients and rub it in with your fingers
4. Add water and mix thoroughly. Add more oil or water if the dough won't hold together.
5. Press the dough straight into the dish (I find that this is faster and just as effective as rolling it out first)
6. Pierce all over with a fork
7. Bake for 15 min at 175 degrees then remove to cool. Leave the oven on to keep it warm while you add the filling.

Filling:
3 medium-large sweet potatoes, peeled and diced
3/4 cup silken tofu
2 tbsp grated ginger with juices
1 tsp salt
1-1/2 tsp cinnamon
3/4 tsp fresh grated nutmeg
1 cup maple syrup or brown sugar (this time we used palm sugar)
1/3 cup of vegetable oil (sunflower, rapeseed, olive)

1. Simmer sweet potato pieces til tender
2. Blend or mash all ingredients thoroughly (you can reserve a few pieces of sweet potato to mash for the baby)
3. Spread the filling in the slightly cooled crust and bake at 175 degrees for 30 min or until top is slightly browned. Remove and cool on a windowsill before serving.

An old workmate of mine who goes by the Twitter pseudonym of MerceDeath posted the following update yesterday:
"巨大湯葉やばい!"
("Enormous Yuba, Dammn~!")

You know how milk sometimes gets a skin on top when it's heated - well, Yuba is the skin skimmed off the top of hot soya milk, containing the soy proteins in a concentrated and easily digestible form. When served fresh it is warm, a little bit slippery-soft, chewy, and savoury and can be eaten plain with a light dipping sauce. When dried it can be used in dishes both sweet (e.g. a mille-feuille made with strawberries and papery flakes of yuba) and savoury (e.g. as dim sum wrapper).

Yuba is delightful.




(By the way, the etymology of the name 'Yuba' seems strangely similar to the legend of Mapo Dofu: both are soy-derived dishes supposedly named after the skin conditions of kindly old ladies who offered the dishes to road-weary travelers. But the skin analogy is easier to understand in the case of Yuba than of Mapo Dofu, which consists of cubes of tofu simmered in spicy mince...)

I'm a big fan of Yuba, enormous or otherwise... and I trust the taste of MerceDeath. When we were colleagues, he told me he ate soymilk-nabe (hotpot) for dinner every single night, with or without kimchi flavouring. A true soymilk devotee. That's classy.

The key to his enormous yuba is simply to use a wide, shallow cooking surface: here's the recipe.

Basically you pour 400 ml of soymilk (unsweetened) onto a big flat electric hotplate surface with a rim such as the one below, and then heat it to 80℃. When a skin forms, you tug it off with chopsticks and eat it with a dipping sauce of your choice.

I'm not sure if making yuba in a fry pan would work just as well - I don't see why not? There must be some art to it, since most yuba is still made in Kyoto with what the Shunju cookbook calls 'time-consuming handwork'. Maybe the heat needs to be very even and the temperature very exact.
Using a fry pan, your yuba wouldn't be so enormous, either.

In my opinion mashed potatoes are sad and forlorn without a spot of gravy.

In case you feel that way too, here are two handy gravy recipes that are easy to whip up any time. They don't rely on your having a roasting tray swirling with meat juices at hand.

Both of these recipes - which should more correctly be titled in parentheses as 'gravy', or 'tasty miso-based sauces' – have deep flavour. One (pictured above) is garlicky, rich and tangy.

The other is more like traditional gravy: warm & silky, with a mellow savouriness from the powdered garlic & inactive yeast. The latter two ingredients are worthwhile keeping in the pantry (as well as miso in the fridge of course), in order to jazz up potatoes at a moment's notice.

Miso Gravy by Ani Phyo
Serves four

1/4 cup miso
1 tbsp cider vinegar
1 clove garlic
1/2 orange, peeled & seeded
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp pitted dates

Blend until smooth - will keep for four days in the fridge. Tastes excellent with mashed sweet potato.


Miso Gravy by Fresh, Toronto
Serves four

4 & 1/2 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp garlic powder
3/4 cup inactive yeast (I use Naturata Würz Hefeflocken)
1 & 1/2 cups stock or water (I use store-bought goose stock)
1/3 cup sunflower oil
1 & 1/2 tsp hot dijon mustard
3 tbsp miso paste, light or dark
3/4 tsp salt

1. Put dry ingredients except salt in a saucepan over low heat. Whisk in the stock to make a paste. Let this come to a boil & simmer for 30 sec.
2. Add oil, mustard, miso & salt to the saucepan, whisk until thickened & velveteen. Serve hot!



Perhaps the ultimate beige food?



Served with pan-fried tofu steaks (marinated beforehand in half cup each tamari & water plus a teaspoon each of coriander powder & garlic powder); a pile of mashed potatoes with a little cream & nutmeg; and the New York Times' apple-mustard coleslaw to which we added a little extra apple sauce & grated radish, and smoked almonds instead of walnuts, thereby making the slaw kick even more butt than before.


A rapper named Gravy:



A song called Gravy by Bun B & UKG (it's all about the chorus):

Last night we decided to have a Christmas dinner with our friends Demi & Carmen before they went to visit their families in the countryside.

I found a bunch of recipes on websites (something I rarely do - I prefer the analog world of cookbooks), and Carmen heated up some apple wine from a quirky old commune called Matsch & Brei ('smash & mash'), where they grow the apple trees in the traditional German permaculture style. The reason she heated it and added cinnamon and cloves, was due to her experience serving it to a family in Chicago, whose reaction was that it tasted like vomit. It is sort of watery, sour and dry, but I found that served this way I enjoyed it.

While meat, mashed potatoes, mint sauce and gravy might be the backbone of a kiwi christmas, having lived in Germany for a few years, this kind of solid repast isn't especially celebratory to me anymore. Plus I'm not necessarily a huge fan of traditional roasted meats: give me simmered, sautéed, smoked, braised or barbecued any day. It's great to have such hearty pub-food at the Brauhaus from time to time, but to feel like I'm making real seasonal celebrational dishes, I want something that doesn't feel like everyday fare: something with buttery spiciness, creaminess, apples and oranges. Preferably arranged in huge piles.

With the recipes gleaned from sites like Epicurious and the Fork in the Road blog, we did an all-vege menu: with two of us cooking the whole thing took probably an hour and a half.



1) Potato gratin with strips of poblano chile. This was realllly good. For those of us not living in places where fresh poblanos are readily accessible, you can quite easily buy little tins of rajas (poblano strips) from Mexican import companies. We used a 250 g tin.

2)Broccoli with wine, citrus zest & garlic
. This was the only dish that didn't make me break out in 'ooh's and 'aaah's, but the slight bitterness and the citrus zest added a lot to the overall Christmas vibes of the table. Marks for effort.

3) Savoy cabbage coleslaw with creamy mustard-apple vinaigrette & walnuts. Refreshing and crunchy, I really enjoyed this, though Germans who like their kraut-salat a bit softer could prepare it the day before serving.



4) Buttery green beans with ginger & roasted, salted crushed cashews. Simply: DOPE.

5) Little baby jesus cake. Obviously, the main reason I wanted to make this was because of the name. It's a lighter version of sticky date pudding: there's three tablespoons of butter in the cake itself, with two more (and a half cup of cream) in the sauce. I baked it in a flan/quiche dish so it took less time to cook than the recipe says, about 30 minutes: count on the full recipe serving eight people, otherwise you will end up eating it for breakfast with a hint of regret, as I did. Easy to whip it up while your guests are festively huddling around the computer after the main course, looking at sneakers online.



Serve dessert warm, straight out of the oven, with butter & brown sugar sauce, persimmon and greek yoghurt. Complimented by Pegovino grenache/syrah and a sentimental 80s flick like When Harry Met Sally.
I found that Meg Ryan goes over quite well when you're on your third serving of Baby Jesus.

He may by all appearances to be obsessed with Thai food, however Austin Bush, of Real Thai fame (now Austin Bush Photography Food Blog) and a close pal of David Thompson secretly whips up Italian comfort food at home just like the rest of us.

I know he just sent me photos of his dinner.

Swiss Chard Frittata


Grilled Eggplant Pasta


Austin says "The chard fritatta was actually really nice. The pasta simple, but good too. I think I'm going to make just about everything in that Bittman piece soon."

This from a man that stares at me blankly when I say I can't eat Thai food for every meal. It does look yummy though

This was a bit of a weird crazy mix up. I had left over smoked fish bought to me from NZ by my Dad, left over rissotto milanese from making osso bucco that Hock had been given from a supplier to try out at home and some frozen prawns and spinach. I made a white sauce and added the fish and frozen prawns and placed in the bottom of a baking tin, added a layer of sliced boiled eggs, a layer of cooked frozen spinach squeezed out to remove water and then a layer of left over risotto and then grated parmesan, which I then baked for a bout 30 mins. It was a yummy big sloppy mess of all manner of ingredients bought, given and left-over.

I used the River Cafe cook book as a basic guide for this.

Soaked white beans over night and removed their skins.

Cooked white beans in simmering water for about an hour with whole head of garlic and old herbs (thyme, marjoram)

Sauteed onion, garlic, carrot and celery, flat leaf parsley and added canned tomato and simmered. Added beans, some mushed up some whole. Added lots of salt and pepper and then torn up old bread.

Served.

When I went to eat it I realised that the soup is both delicious, with the bread adding a creamy texture, but it was also entirely vegan friendly. Definitely hearty food for tough times

This recipe is vegetarian but is so lush and yummy it doesn't feel like your missing out on anything. Do I sound like Nigella? I have been somewhat of a domestic goddess of late in an attempt to save our pennies before our impending trip to the states and japan





Basically make polenta as per directions and when cooked stir in lots of parmesan and butter and then blob out in a baking tray or spring form cake pan lined with baking paper. On top place cooked spinach, or zucchini or any vege you like along with sliced red onion and crumble goats cheese all over it (or gorgonzola or any yummy creamy cheese you like) then beat 4 to 6 eggs with some milk or cream and pour over the whole big yummy mess and bake in a pre-heated oven until firmish- about 40 mins.

Serve with tomato ragout, home made or bought and crusty bread.

I finally found an excuse to use the teppanyaki set given to us as a gift some years back.

I made okonomiyaki. I was going to make it in a pan on the stove but Hock got excited by the prospect of cooking it a la minute at the table.







Okonomiyaki is as easy as....japanese pancake pie really. Mix about a cup of flour or Japanese okonomiyaki flour with a couple of eggs and any left over vege or frozen meats you have lying around. I used frozen prawn balls, chinese cabbage, shitake, onion, spring onion, bean sprouts. I added some mirin and miso paste. I mixed it all up and slopped it on the grill. Flipped it and covered it with pre bought Japanese okonomiyaki sauce, mayo and bonito flakes and green seaweed flakes that you can buy at Japanese stores.

Hock ate it up. So I made it again a couple of weeks later but this time he didn't touch it. I understand why. You eat it once and it seems like a good idea at the time, but all in all it really is pretty gross. Works well when drunk.

One of my favourite food sites is Blue Lotus. It's a simple review of home cooked meals that I find quietly riveting. I find that there is something restive about looking at photos of what other people eat on a daily basis, in the same way that checking out someone else's trolly at the supermarket is mildly interesting.

I've been cooking a lot lately to try and use up all my dry store of goods. So if you too are a food voyeur, here is what I have been cooking and eating lately.

Spring Rain Noodles


This is bean thread vermicelli, soaked in hot water and then tossed with fried pork mince, dried shitake mushrooms (soaked in hot water for 30 mins), bean sprouts, spring onions, diced eggplant (salted and rinse to remove bitterness) and Chinese chili bean paste and ginger. Basically you add pork and fry off then all the other ingredients. Then in a side bowl mix tblspn or so of light soy, xiaosheng rice wine, chicken stock or water or mushroom juice (1/4 to 1/2 cup) with 2 teaspoons of corn flour. Add to pork to make it all saucy then add noodles and toss. Finally flavour with some sesame oil and sprinkle with corriander and beansprouts. You can make a vege version of this minus the pork and chicken stock using mushroom stock or water.



I served the noodles with this really yummy tomato salad of sliced tomato, sprinkled with corriander, sichuan pepper corns and cumin seeds and a sauce made of spring onions, rice vingear, pinch of sugar, salt, crushed garlic, and sesame oil.

Well now that the Olympics are over people will no doubt be talking about the London ones in four years time. It seems a long way off and a bit premature to be pondering upon, but it seems the London Olympics is already causing the destruction and disruption of local ways of life and cooking in ye olde London town.

This recipe is from a book about the food from inner city allotment gardens which were cultivated by many different ethnic groups but have now been bulldozed to make way for Olympic infrastructure, Moro East. It was a birthday present I received this year and I have been trying a number of the recipes. But I liked this one in particular. It is rich and buttery but not overly so, combining eggs, eggplant, spinach with the earthy musky flavour of saffron and spiked with currents and fresh herbs and nuts. I served it with a pearl barley tabouleh. I felt exotic.




Recipe Kuku Iranian Saffron Omelette
Feeling: Exotic
Taste: Buttery/ Nutty

Whole large eggplant diced (lightly salted for 15 mins then rinsed)
Large bunch of spinach, fresh or frozen (they say fresh)
6 - 8 beaten eggs
Mint - bunch chopped
Dill - bunch chopped
Current or dried fruit (I used craisins) - 2 big handful
Pine nuts - big handful
spring onion bunch
big pinch saffron
Butter - knob
Olive Oil - gulp

Heat large skillet basted with olive oil with deep sides in the oven. Dice eggplant and sprinkle with salt and leave for a while to remove bitterness and then rinse and sautee in butter with spring onions and then add spinach until it has wilted. Mix with herbs with one handful of currents, pinenuts and the rest of the ingredients. Salt and Pepper. Place saffron in small amount of warm water to release colour and add. When your ready to make the omelette, stir in the egg and then pour the whole mixture into the heated skillet. Cook for around 20 mins or until firmish...it's nice if it's not too firm. Sprinkle with more currents and dill and serve.

I mentioned in a post to K'Jam that I'd write out this recipe.

For the malt, I use Horlick's. It was the only brand that my shitty supermarket stocks. Friends have tried using malt extract from the brewing process, hops and all, and this proves to be a grim and terrible mistake. It's not to say that hops has no place in icecream. The new lychee/passionfruit-y Nelson Sauvin cultivar might work well if applied extremely judiciously, but you'd need to destroy too many batches of bitter ice cream before you came to a decent result.

Once you've eaten this, you'll wonder why malt ice cream isn't the world's most popular beige food.

Ingredients:

150gm palm sugar
250ml milk
Pinch of salt

6 egg yolks

500ml cream
100gm malt powder
50gms chopped walnuts

Method:

Grate up the palm sugar and warm in a saucepan with the milk and salt.

Whisk together the malt powder and cream in a large bowl.

In a different bowl, whisk together the egg yolks. Once the palm sugar has dissolved in the milk, slowly pour the sugary milk into the yolks, whisking constantly. Pour this mix back into the saucepan and return to a medium heat, stirring constantly until the mix forms into thin custard. You'll know when it is done when it coats the back of your spoon.

Pour the custard into the cream and malt mix. Whisk and set in an ice bath to cool.

Once chilled, pour the mix into your ice cream maker. Add the walnuts just before it is finished. Try to eat without forming a smug grin.

This is an adaption of a recipe that was part of a Cook-Do sauce advert in Orange Page magazine. Unfortunately for the advertisers, instead of the pre-prepared chinjaorousu Cook-Do sauce I made a 'spicy chinese sauce-base' recipe from the book '15 min Easy Okazu'.

Recipe magazines can be hit & miss, let alone the recipes in advertisements in magazines, but this is damn good. I'll be making this again for sure. If it had a song it would be The Race by Yello. Your mouth gets this all-over tingly spicy warmth. Every ingredient really shines, from the sweetish pumpkin, to the savoury onion, to the fresh shishitougarashi peppers. The original recipe has thin sliced pork in it but you don't need it at all (EDIT: I made the dish again last night and I now think the pork would take it next-level from being a plain pumpkin stir-fry). If you want to add the small pieces of thin sliced pork, add them at the same time as the onion (50 grams per person).

Shishitougarashi are a small sweetish green Japanese pepper - maybe a bit like the Spanish 'pimientos de padron' but a bit smaller. Similarly to pimientos de padron, they taste awesome char-grilled or broiled until floppy, and you don't need to peel: just eat whole. Apart from the little stalk bit.

Spicy Chinese Sauce-Base
1 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup oyster sauce
2 tbsp Tobanjiang or other chilli bean sauce (I used 1 tbsp each Tobanjiang and a really hot Korean BBQ sauce)
1/4 cup sake
3 big cloves garlic finely chopped
3 tbsp finely chopped fresh ginger or that pre-prepared 'oroshi' ginger paste that comes in pottles
1 tbsp oil

Sauté the garlic and ginger in the oil, taking care not to burn, until they start to give off a good aroma.

Add everything else and mix around for one or two more minutes on the heat.

Kabocha+Shishitou Stir fry
The following ingredients are for one person, so just multiply to feed more.

A small handful of kabocha or butternut squash segments (skin still on), roughly 8mm thin
A small handful of thin sliced pork bits
4-5 shishitougarashi (substitute with green bell pepper in bite size pieces or pimientos de padron)
1 onion sliced in strips/ribbons (basically in half and then thin, vertical slices).
sesame oil & olive oil
2 tbsp spicy chinese cooking sauce (above)

Heat a tablespoon of sesame oil and saute the pumpkin segments, making sure to flip over, until cooked through. Add the green peppers and give them a stir.
New learnings from having made the dish a couple of times: Take the pumpkin and peppers out of the pan.
Add a spoon of olive or other oil plus the onion and pork, and cook until the onion is soft. Put the pumpkin & peppers back in and add two tablespoons of the Spicy Chinese Sauce-base (be careful with this, if you add too much it will just taste overpoweringly like soy sauce), toss to coat and sauté for 30 seconds to a minute, check whether you need to add a bit more sauce or maybe some shichimi spice or chilli flakes, and then serve piping hot.

There aren't many things that can make brown rice taste this good.

Aka gooseberries.

I just photographed them because I think they look nice.

Here is a good salad to make with them (or any other round, interesting berry.... usually blue berries or kiwi berries).
It's a salad that works on the days when you really really don't feel like salad.

Exciting Coleslaw

Wash & chop: two handfuls of basil leaves, a couple of spring onions, a couple of baby bok-choi, a few handfuls of a dark green leafy vegetable (e.g. spinach, lamb's mache/feldsalat) and either red cabbage, or another Asian green like Mizuna/mustard greens.

Dice an avocado in small cubes. Finely chop a small hunk of ginger.

Mix all of the above together with a handful of cherry tomatoes, a decent sprinkling of black sesame seeds, and a tablespoon each of soy sauce/tamari and olive oil. Then scatter your round berries on top. (I think round is good because they are usually not too sweet and the symmetry with the tomatoes is pleasing). And serve.

Please remind me if I already posted this recipe. I have some mild version of Alzheimers so you never know.

One thing I never got round to eating in Japan was 'dry curry'. I've been wanting to try this particular recipe for a while, partly because the topping of a melting hot-water soaked 'onsen' (hotspring) egg looked so appealing in the book. We didn't really nail the egg - the white should be just barely congealed. Here are some interesting tips on cooking onsen tamago. I guess if you lay the room-temperature egg in just-boiled still water just as your rice starts cooking in a different pot, you might time it perfectly. Another error I would address regarding the photo above, is the rice. I think it looks nicer if you spread the rice a bit wider so you can see it in a ring of white around the outside. And the parsley should be chopped more über-finely too.

Mince on rice, what could be wrong with that mate. My father used to specialise in spag-bol when I was a kid, and I'm just coming back round to the comfort-power of mince.

Wafuu (japanese style) Dry Curry from '15-min Easy Delicious Okazu'.
(Serves 2)

Enough warm white short grain rice to satisfy.
150 g mince (I used a pork-beef mix)
An onion and a small carrot diced finely.
A capsicum (red or green pepper) peeled roughly and diced finely.
2 tsp hot curry powder
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp soy
1 tbsp sake
1 tbsp butter
2 very soft 'onsen' eggs
Finely chopped parsley

Cook the chopped onion in the butter gently until softened. Add the other veges and when these too are softened, turn the heat up and add the mince. When the mince has started to get clumpy, add the curry powder, sugar, soy and sake and stir fry until most of the liquid has evaporated. Check the seasonings - you might want to add a touch more curry powder. Top your warm rice with the curry-mince, sprinkle with chopped parsley and then scoop those eggs in a puddle on top.