Kao Phat Prik

I am slowly transporting all my cookery books from my parents' house to my flat- despite the lack of space for more books, I look forward to the day when the entirety of my collection is no longer based in London. I've just become reacquainted with Charmaine Solomon's Complete Asian Cookbook. I recently discovered this book was first published nearly 40 years ago- amazingly,it hasn't become at all dated.
I sometimes feel a bit overwhelmed by all the recipe books I have, and all the recipes I want to cook- and the lack of time to do it in. Recently, a dear friend and I came to the realisation that 3 meals a day doesn't feel enough to try everything. I'm trying to focus on a few recipes books, and really get into them, rather than feeling swamped by a huge collection of books. I've decided to start with The Complete Asian Cookbook- it's certainly got enough recipes to keep me going for a while.
I picked quite a simple starting point, with Kao Phat Prik, or chilli fried rice. I happened to have both leftover cooked rice, and some red curry paste in the fridge already, so I was partway there, ingredients-wise. I had made this red curry paste, but you could use any, homemade or bought.

Charmaine Solomon suggests garnishing with chilli flowers- I confess I left this part out, and just used the coriander leaves.

Ingredients
4 cups cold, cooked rice
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1 red chilli, sliced
I green chilli, sliced
1 tablespoons red curry paste (I upped this a little)
1 pork chop, finely diced or minced
500 g  peeled and deveined raw prawns, roughly chopped if large,
2 eggs, beaten and seasoned,
salt and pepper
3 tablespoon fish sauce
1 bunch chopped spring onions
handful chopped coriander leaves

Method

 Heat the oil in a wok and fry the onion and red chilli until softened. Add the curry paste, and cook until the oil begins to separate.  Add the pork and stir-fry until cooked. Add the prawns to the pan. Once these are cooked through, add the rice, and stir so it is coated with the curry paste and the pork and prawns are well combined. Push the rice to the edge of the wok, leaving a space in the centre, and pour in the beaten eggs.. Stir until they start to set. Mix with the rice and toss over high heat until the eggs are cooked. Sprinkle with fish sauce, and stir in the spring onions.  Take off the heat and stir in the coriander leaves.

Fish Fragrant Aubergine

This recipe has reignited my love of aubergines- I often eat them and find them very unappealing, with a strange woolly texture and tough skin. In this recipe, they are fried in lots of oil, and get a soft/silky texture. I also chose to remove peel them, so avoiding the possibility of difficult to eat skin, although this wasn’t specified in the original recipe.

Perhaps confusingly, ‘fish fragrant’ does not mean the recipe contains any fish- it just refers to a style of cooking involving ginger, garlic, spring onions, soy, and chilli bean paste. The result is quite hot, and very satisfying- very good if you have a cold too. You can cook other ingredients in a similar style, but my favourite is definitely this aubergine and pork mince combination. I’d like to cook prawns with these flavourings, although I am not sure how authentic cooking seafood or fish in this manner is.  

If you are hesitant about cooking with aubergines, I would recommend this- this recipe has jumped into my top ten dishes.

You might have to go to a Chinese supermarket for the chilli bean paste, and almost definitely for the Chinkiang black vinegar. I think it is worth it though, especially for the chilli bean paste, which is fast becoming one of my favourite store cupboard ingredients, for stir fries, stews, or anything I feel needs a kick.

 

The recipe I used can be found here- another recipe from Sunflower Food Galore. I chose to deep fry the aubergine, and also to peel it. I also made 1 1/2 times as much, for 4 as a main dish with rice- there was enough, but not enough for seconds- I think I would probably double the recipe next time for the same amount of people.

Jerk Gammon Hock and Jerk Ribs

I am lucky to live near a fantastic butcher, Aubrey Allen. The meat is fantastic, and they have possibly the most helpful staff I have ever encountered. I went in the other day for nothing in particular, and came out with a large gammon hock for less than £2. I didn't have any recipe in mind, but came across this jerk gammon hock recipe by Jamie Oliver. I was in the mood for something a bit more fiery than just cooking the hock in cider with root vegetables, which would have been my default cooking method for a gammon hock. It's been a while since I have cooked anything by Jamie Oliver, even though I have always enjoyed his recipes.

I had to change the a little- the recipe specified 4 500g ham hocks. Mine was certainly more than 500g, probably almost double that. I made all the marinade, but had about half of it left over. I also cooked it at a lower temperature, but for about the same time- it came out very tender on the inside, and a little blackened on the outside.

I didn't eat it right away, I let it cool and then shredded it up, coating it in a little clementine juice and olive oil, as per the recipe's instructions. The next day, I fried the ham in a hot frying pan, with a little extra olive oil and a squeeze more juice added at the end of cooking. It turns it sticky and slightly crispy- delicious. To eat alongside, I made some coconut rice, with spring onions and lots of freshly chopped coriander stirred in at the end.

I had half of the marinade left, so I used it on some pork ribs, from the aforementioned Aubrey Allen. They weren't like baby back ribs, which is what I was expecting, but far thicker, more like a slab of pork belly:

I cooked them for about an hour at 170 degrees Celsius, and then turned the heat up to 220 and cooked for a further 15 minutes to crisp up the fat.

Claudia Roden's Honey Cake

One of my all-time favourite cookery books, The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden spends more time next to the sofa or the bed for comfort reading, rather than being used for actual recipes- not that the recipes aren't wonderful, but it is a really compelling read too. I've been intending to make a project of cooking my way through it, but it something of an undertaking.

Claudia Roden's book is divided into two parts- Ashkenazi food and Sepherdic food. The majority of the recipes I have made from the book have been the Sephardic dishes, such as bazargan, a nut-heavy bulgar wheat salad made tart with pomegranate molasses. I've experimented with some of the filo pies, both savoury and incredibly sweet (such as m'hencha, a coil of almond paste, wrapped in filo, and then liberally coated in cinnamon and icing sugar). And I have spent a long time painstakingly making just one batch of kobeba (or kibbeh,or kubba, depending on where you are from). There have been other recipes I have made, but even so, I don't feel I have really scratched the surface of the collection of recipes in The Book of Jewish Food.

I haven't really touched the Ashkenazi side, with the exception of some hamantashen- rich poppy seed pastries, and this honey cake which I made this weekend. It is once of those convenient cakes that taste delicious and keep really well. It is quite rich, and stands well alone with tea. Although you could do what I did for the first servng of it, and have it with butterscotch sauce and ice cream. The cake is traditionally served at Rosh Hashanah, but I would happily have it any time of year.

The recipe can be found here.

Plaited Cranberry, Cherry and Orange Stollen

This is a variant of this stollen recipe I posted in December 2011. The dough recipe and quantities were based on this Delia Smith recipe for stollen. My original recipe changed the fruit to my liking- adding in dried cranberries and apricots, and taking out the candied peel. I also soaked the fruit in Cointreau, and surrounding the marzipan core in cranberry sauce.  This time, I kept the fruit mostly the same, but made up some of the sultanas’ and glace cherry weight with dried sour cherries. The Cointreau stayed, but the layer of cranberry sauce was left out- I did like it, and I would make it like that again, but wasn’t especially in the mood for it at the time of baking.  

The biggest change was plaiting the loaf, which is a bit fancier than my usual cooking-style, but I had a piece of plaited stollen made by a friend, and I really liked it- the marzipan is dotted throughout the loaf instead of a big chunk in the centre- I prefer it that way. I suppose this could be simplified by cutting the marzipan into chunks and adding it to the dough with the fruit- but then you might get burnt bits of marzipan at the surface of the stollen- plaiting it will keep all the sugary marzipan encased in the loaf. And it is no way near as fiddly as I thought it would be- you need quite a gentle hand working with the dough, but that’s about it.

Finally, this time I didn’t add any orangey icing, because I didn’t want to anything to disguise my success of plaiting bread dough.

The recipe below makes two stollens- I used half the dough to make one stollen, put the other half in the fridge, and made a second stollen the following day to take to a party. The dough keeps for 2 days in the fridge, according to Delia.

Ingredients
150ml Cointreau, Triple Sec or brandy
300ml full fat milk
100grams caster sugar
4tsp dried yeast
700 grams strong white bread flour
220 grams softened unsalted butter
2 eggs, beaten
140 grams dried cranberries
70 grams sultanas
80 grams dried no-soak apricots, chopped
60 grams dried sour cherries
30 grams glace cherries (natural colour, preferably), halved
50 grams almonds, chopped
grated zest of 1 lemon
grated zest of 1 orange
350 grams marzipan

 Method
 Put the dried fruit and glacé cherries in a small saucepan with your chosen alcohol. Bring the liquid to a simmer, and then remove from the heat. Now get on with the dough while you allow the fruits to become imbued with festive spirit.  Alternatively, soak the fruit overnight in the Cointreau. Warm the milk (I do this in the microwave), add 2 tsp of the caster sugar, and sprinkle of the yeast on the surface of the milk. Leave the yeast to create a frothy head on top of the milk. Now sift the flour into a large mixing bowl with the salt and remaining sugar. Make a well in the centre, and pour in the yeasted milk mixture, along with the eggs and butter. Mix with a wooden spoon, along with the dried fruits, almonds and zest. Knead the dough, either with your hands, or an electric mixer with a dough hook attachment. You may need to add more flour, you want a slightly sticky dough, it is ready when it feels springy and elastic. Put the dough in a bowl, clingfilm and leave to double in size, this could take up to 2 hours.
After the first prove, punch the dough down, and divide into two. Knead one of the halves of dough on a floured surface until it feels springy.  Divide the dough into 3 balls, and using your hands, roll each ball into a 25cm sausage. On a floured board, roll one of these pieces of dough so it has a width of about 7-8cm. Take a third of the marzipan, and using your hands roll it into a sausage almost the length of dough and place in the centre, and fold the dough over it. Remove carefully to a lined baking sheet. Repeat with the other two pieces of the stollen dough.  Plait the three lengths of dough as tightly as you can, sealing the edges together. You can repeat this process to make a second loaf, or return the other half of the dough to the fridge, covered in clingfilm. Leave the loaf or loaves to rise again, this time about 20 minutes. Set your oven to 180 degrees, and when they have finished the second prove, bake for about 35-40 minutes. Dust with icing sugar when you take it out of the oven.

Peanut Butter Fudge

I am planning on making some fudge for a secret santa present this year, and I wanted to give it a trial run. I wasn't going to risk making a dodgy recipe for a gift- and I wanted my own batch. I specifically wanted to make peanut butter fudge, as I the person I have for secret santa loves it.

A quick google search came up with the Sophie Dahl recipe for peanut butter fudge, which looked pretty easy- there is no mention of a sugar thermometer, for one thing (which I don't own). I'm quite hit and miss when it comes to fudge making, so the simpler the recipe the better, for me, at least.

I really liked the end result- it's not chewy, which is how I prefer fudge to be, but it has a really lovely flavour- the dark brown sugar makes it slightly treacley. It is incredibly sweet, so cut it into little cubes (unsurprising for a recipe that contains 800g sugar).

Merguez Baguettes with Coriander Aioli and Harissa Vegetables

Sometimes you can't beat a really good sandwich. For 2 people with large appetites, I peeled and finely sliced one small onion, and fried in some olive oil in a large frying pan. While they were cooking, I made some aioli- if you need a recipe, you could use this recipe for mayonnaise, using an additional clove of garlic and using about two thirds olive oil, one third groundnut oil. I then stirred in a handful of finely chopped coriander leaf. When the onions were golden, I added some stoned kalamata olives to the pan and a handful of halved cherry tomatoes. I cooked for a few more minutes until the tomatoes started to look slightly pulpy, and then stirred in a tablespoon of harissa (adjust to the heat of the harissa you have, and you personal taste). Then I pushed the fried onion and tomato mixture to one side of the pan, and added 6 merguez, turning the heat up to a sizzle. While they were cooking, I spread some of the aioli onto some halved lengths of baguette. When the merguez were nicely browned and cooked through, I assembled the rest of the sandwich (easiest tomatoes and onions before the sausages, I think.) Apply to face- it's pretty messy, so have some kitchen roll to hand.