Reconnecting

I’m in need of a mug of hot chocolate today.

It has been a tiring week, emotionally and mentally draining. Sometimes you just want to wind down, you feel the need to step back because life just seems to be moving so fast, seems to overwhelm you. It has been one of those days for me. I’m writing this at the end of the working week, and it is absolutely pouring outside. Winter is coming on fast and the clouds out there have cast their gloomy shadow in my room.

I made myself a mug of chocolate earlier. Where I come from, I’ve only ever known Milo. Where I am now, Milo is found only on World Food shelves in my local supermarket or in Chinatown. Strange. I thought Nestlé and chocolate were universal… Of course I now know more brands of chocolate that are out there, but I’d like to be fussy for a change. Sometimes it helps to go with what you know, what you’re familiar with.

When I was about ten, my parents went on holiday with my brother, leaving my sister and me in the care of my aunt. My aunt is cool, she still is. She loves cooking for people, and nothing is too much trouble for her when it comes to feeding the brood. When we were kids, the extended family used to congregate at her house for weekend dinner. Sometimes we went unannounced, but it didn’t matter to my aunt. She always made sure there was enough food to go round. Anyway, the prospect of staying over for a week was like a mini-holiday for us. We were allowed to stay up, watch tv, play with toys and pretty much did whatever we wanted. She made rice dumplings for us, and every night before we went to bed, she’d always make sure that we had a cup of iced Milo. For me, that was the high point of my stay there.

My aunt would chill the drink in a big stainless steel teapot and when it was cold enough, she’d call for us from the kitchen and we’d go running because we knew what was coming. We’d stand there in front of the freezer waiting expectantly with our mugs – my cousin, my sister and I – like Oliver Twist asking for more, except that we hadn’t even had some yet, but we also knew there was always more if we wanted it. Not that we were spoilt – we were polite kids I think – but this was my aunt’s brand of generosity, the way that she showed she cared.

And now I’m older. My aunt has moved out of her house. We don’t go there every weekend anymore. Chocolate drinks as I know it have become watered down. Life has become more complicated. I can pick my coffee beans from 10 different varieties. I can choose ground beans or grind it myself. I can choose to have tea in different combinations: rose and peppermint, earl gray and elderflower… That’s great. That’s absolutely super. But sometimes I just want to keep it simple. Sometimes I just need to reconnect with my old self to find myself. Because when we are surrounded with so many choices we can get caught up with it all and lose sense of who we are. All these new choices don’t have a piece of me in it. Research has indicated that our sense of smell has the strongest imprint in our memory bank. And being able to smell, and taste, something from my past that evokes such memories helps me slow down, and for a brief moment, helps me rediscover myself.

“Feasting is also closely related to memory. We eat certain things in a particular way in order to remember who we are…”
Jeff Smith 'The Frugal Gourmet Keeps the Feast'

I think I’m going to have another mug of Milo…

Breakfast at The Wolseley

I had breakfast at The Wolseley the other day. Well I had a sneak preview a few days before when I dropped by for some tea and cake and to make my reservation, but I was really more interested in the infamous breakfast.

Mind you, breakfast at The Wolseley on a weekend is no mean feat. You need to make reservations days in advance to secure a decent time slot (not good for late risers like myself), drag yourself out of bed in the wee hours of the morning on a Saturday (again not good if you’ve had a late Friday night out) and make sure you get yourself there on time to fight off any last-minute, no-reservation stragglers waiting like vultures for your table to be released. Talk about working up an appetite. Well okay, maybe I might have exaggerated the vulture bit but there is some truth behind it. The Wolseley, while admitting reservations, operates a policy of seating a proportion of seats on a first-come-first-served basis which means that it is possible, if your stars are aligned, to get a table for breakfast on a weekend without a reservation. Having said that, I noted a number of would-be patrons were turned away at the door that day.

So why The Wolseley? That was precisely what I wanted to know. So much has been said about this place that I wanted to see what the big deal was. The Wolseley was originally commissioned to be a car showroom for Wolseley Motors in the 1920s, before becoming a Barclays Bank branch. That too closed to become The Wolseley that we know today. Inside, the interior is opulent, magnificent even. The expansive dining hall leaves you momentarily rooted, but as you settle in you start to notice the tiny details. Black and gold is the colour palette here, from the artwork on the panelling to the marble floor tiles, and the black iron chandeliers with their yellow-gold cups of light. At the coffee bar, black urns of tea with gold Chinese script adorn the shelf, and above that, a Japanese lacquer painting in gold of mountains, streams and trees. And if you look high enough, tiny black painted leaves like fern slowly fan out from the tops of the pillars towards the beige-white ceiling.

The buzz of breakfast was already in full-swing when we arrived. It actually gets quite noisy here on weekends. Clinking of cups and clattering of silverware compete with the chattering of well-heeled patrons. They say that The Wolseley is the place to celebrity-spot, not that I noticed anyone familiar. A breakfast menu was swiftly handed out by a smiling waiter. He made me feel at ease; in fact there was nothing stuffy about the service. The wait staff encourage the indulgence of eating your breakfast in whatever way you like, without raising an eyebrow. I ordered a hot chocolate.

The menu is not unlike any café-on-the-corner that does breakfast, but at twice the price. It mainly consists of standard fare: full English breakfast, porridge and muesli, bacon rolls, eggs in a variety of manner. In addition it serves an array of bread (the viennoiserie). There isn’t a lot that could go wrong with that, and nothing overwhelmingly exciting at first glance. Why do people come here then? Is it because it is posh, a place to see and be seen? Do we come here so that we can tick the box and say yes, we ate at The Wolseley, and regale the tale to our friends? Are we trying to keep up with the Joneses or are we just curious, to see what makes The Wolseley tick? If we praised the food would we be doing it because it is The Wolseley?


The food arrived and we tucked in. My eggs tasted, well, like eggs. And you can’t tinker around much either with the taste of mushrooms at breakfast. As I mentioned, there is not a lot that could go wrong with breakfast staples. But here’s the distinction: a lot of effort goes into making your food look out-of-the-ordinary and taste perfect. I think we underestimate how difficult it is to get something simple as eggs to cook right. Even mushrooms need to be grilled just right so that you don’t cook the hell out of it. But that’s the beauty of it, these guys make something simple look actually simple and effortless. They know that you are paying good money for regular fare and make darn sure they pull out all the stops to get it right, right down to the presentation. The guy who did my salmon and eggs, you could tell that he took the patience to slice the salmon to equal widths and overlapped them lengthwise to form a ring around the scrambled eggs. The sausages were evenly browned. My croissant was beautifully puffed up, it looked like it was about to breathe…. Even my hot chocolate was sufficiently thick, yet not too hot as to burn my tongue. These are details that we take for granted, because we assume it is ordinary fare. But these guys pride themselves on perfecting these details where others fail. Why should breakfast be spared the extravagance and attention to detail compared to dinner? Is it not considered to be the most important meal of the day?

The guys at Wolseley have got it right I think. Talk about product differentiation. And if you read A.A. Gill’s book “Breakfast at The Wolseley”, you will come to appreciate the mechanism that runs behind the kitchen doors and on the floors. They take pains to recognise regulars and note your favourite beverage / food / newspaper / allergies. That is service. And maybe this is another reason why some people keep coming back: the familiarity and expectation of a good breakfast is sometimes better than in our own homes.

The Wolseley
160 Piccadilly
London W1J 9EB
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7499 6996

Rice to the occasion

I’m currently reading Julie & Julia, written by Julie Powell about her pet Project – cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the span of a year. An admirable effort, and I take my hat off to her especially when you have to deal with bits of animal that you are not generally accustomed to.

I reached the part where Julie has to prepare rice, and an online debate ensues on her blog about relying on modern gadgets (i.e. the rice cooker) vs. the traditional way of cooking. I wondered about that, and concluded that I couldn’t decide which side of the line I was on. By sheer coincidence, I had decided to make a Chinese dinner during the weekend which more often than not calls for a big, steaming pot of rice, and my encounter with my own modern gadget got me thinking about this argument.

So I’m making this Chinese dinner, because I like Chinese and because it is the mid-autumn festival a.k.a. mooncake festival, on the Chinese calendar. If you’re in China, or a predominantly Chinese country, this festival is a big thing. People go to town with this, almost like a second Chinese New Year. I decided that this at least warranted a decent meal and set about making a steamed chicken with ginko nuts wrapped in lotus leaf, tofu with egg gravy, and mixed vegetables with wolfberries and lotus root crisps. It sounded absolutely simple when it was a seed of an idea, but come execution time and I was like a headless chicken running about the kitchen. I was behind time, and my tofu had not turned out as I hoped it would be. Whatever confidence I had at the start of prep sort of crumbled away with the minutes. Anyway, just as I thought I had things under control and was about to pop the chicken into the wok for a steam, I realised I had forgotten about cooking rice.

A little background here. I recently acquired my little rice cooker. I didn’t do it for my benefit, as much as it has been great help. Nooo... I acquired it more for the other half really, so that he’d be able to cook rice when I wasn’t around (something he has yet to do!). It isn’t difficult, and it is rather cute, with its little beeps and blinking lights. Rice cookers have evolved from the white / olive green aluminium standard, with the spring button. Nowadays, you can program (program, mind you!!) the cooker to do all kinds of things, even bake a cake apparently (nope, not tried that yet). In any case, a rice cooker is a pretty “new” thing to me as I’ve been brought up to cook rice the traditional, manual way. It is dead simple. Just chuck the rice into a pot, and fill it up with enough water to reach the first notch of your middle finger when you stand it upright on the surface of the rice. Then leave it to boil and watch the heat till it starts drying out and crackling a little, like rice krispies. Then plonk the lid on and turn off the heat. Easy-peasy, and takes much less time than a rice cooker.

These days however, I use the rice cooker. I might as well since I forked out a decent amount of moolah for it. The thing is, with manual cooking you’re always reminded that you have a pot there that needs washing. With the rice cooker, these things can escape you, and it did. I forgot I had remnants in my cooker from a previous dinner, and it was three weeks later that I discovered I had forgotten to clear it out. The rice, as you can imagine, was in some stage of fermentation, probably would’ve turned into rice wine if I had left it longer. But it was bad. Real bad. It had changed into some shade of pink, secreted its own liquids, and smelt so rancid I had to hold my breath through the entire clearing process and Febreeze the kitchen after that. And all this happened while I was doing the headless-chicken-chasing-time thing. See, when shit hits the fan it tends to be quite a big splat isn’t it?

With the clock ticking, I decided that I’d have to resort to the old way of cooking. There was no way I was going to cook in that rice cooker without a good intense soak first, and there was no time. Funnily enough though, I surprised myself by discovering that it was like second nature to me, that to a certain extent I preferred cooking rice this way. Yeah the gadgets work well thank you very much, but I liked that I wasn’t at the “mercy” of automation, making sure I had programmed the right buttons etc.

I managed to serve a decent dinner that night, with enough fluffy rice for seconds. And as for Julie’s debate, I concluded that while I don’t mind being on the gadget side of life, where convenience rules, I think I’m pretty much old school. And I’m comfortable with that.

Back on radar

It has been a while since my last post, I fell off the radar for a while for a variety of reasons: work being the primary one, and procrastination the second. Well maybe a close second. I've also been travelling, doing my "big" UK trip. More about that in another post.

On the food front, I've definitely kept myself occupied attending the London food festival, meeting Tristan Welch in person (he is a lot smaller than I thought, but terribly friendly), meeting Michel Roux in person (!!! speechless!), and celebrated my birthday at Maze, one of Gordon Ramsay's many restaurants. Nope didn't get to meet GR. A previous birthday goer mentioned in a restaurant review website that she and her hubby were lucky enough to be invited to the kitchen for a tour. No such luck for me despite that I was there for a double birthday celebration (and I thought that would have at least counted!). I was lucky enough to get away with a free slice of birthday cake and the chef's menu for the night... Un-autographed! Bah!

In any case it has been an eventful time, and I have also been making plans for next year. Also more on that later. But for now, this post is just me saying I'm back on the radar. Stay tuned!

How would you like your eggs?

It’s a Sunday today, and ideally my Sunday reads like this: S-L-O-W...

Everything moves at a leisurely pace of 5 miles per hour but that’s the way I like my Sundays though admittedly it doesn’t always happen this way.

And so, as these opportunities come by far and few in between, I thought I’d take the opportunity to make some eggs. I love eggs for breakfast. I love them in any way: scrambled, sunny side, poached, soft-boiled, omelettes. I love it when you stay in hotels and they have egg stations at the breakfast buffet, and you can have your eggs in whatever way you want. Today I decided to go British, i.e. soft boiled served with soldiers.

The egg bit was taken from a recipe by domestic goddess Nigella Lawson, whereas the soldiers were inspired by Welsh chef Stephen Terry.

Nigella has a luxurious version of soft boiled eggs in her book “Nigella Express” (a bit ironic seeing that I was thinking of slow Sundays). I say luxurious because her version calls for dollops of cream and a nice swirl of truffle oil on the eggs before immersing them into a spa-like hot bath. Even the name sounds luxurious: Oeufs en cocotte.

As for the soldiers, I thought I’d be adventurous and do Welsh rarebit which is, I suppose you could say, posh cheese on toast. I had watched Stephen Terry prepare Welsh rarebit rabbit on an episode of Great British Menu recently, which was a tongue-in-cheek culinary creation around the traditional Welsh rarebit but served on “toasts” made from rabbit. No kidding. It looked great. But I wasn’t on a quest to be on Great British Menu, and so I decided to stick to traditional toasts made out of bread instead, and found a recipe courtesy of the Cheese Society that used Guiness. It’s even better if you can make the rarebit a day in advance and let it set in the fridge, as it’d be easier to slice and spread for extra cheesy thickness.

So into the oven everything go, and 15 minutes later I’m sitting on my couch in my PJs slurping silky eggs on melted cheesy soldiers. Mmm... Leisurely eating for a lazy Sunday. Ask me again how I like my eggs done in the morning...




Links:
For eggs, see Nigella Lawson’s “Nigella Express” for Oeufs en Cocotte

For Welsh rarebit recipe, search www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes

For Stephen Terry’s version, follow this link: www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/welshrarebitrabbit_91191.shtml

Mum's the word

As this is my very first entry on my blog, I feel it fitting to dedicate this entry to the person who first taught me to cook: my mum.

I’d like to say that I have a different story from everyone else to tell, but I don’t.

You see, I was scouring the shelves of the cookery section in my local bookstore the other day, and realised that there are so many cook books dedicated to mothers and grandmothers. Each one has an anecdote or two about learning to cook while watching mother peel onions, or grandma kneading dough, or helping out in the family restaurant. And it struck me that everyone who has the appreciation for food and loves to cook all have a similar experience. And everyone is trying to capture a Kodak moment on the pages of these books, forever immortalising the memory of their loved ones and their recipes, with an almost certain fear that we will forget. Maybe we will, or maybe it is just that in a day and age of frozen meals and TV dinners and instant this-and-that, we have become less interested to ask our mothers for recipes, or to even pass it down to our own children. Maybe it is this fear that family food secrets will one day disappear that has driven people to write books or blogs about mum’s recipes. I completely empathise; I am one of those people.

Having said that, I am not about to start writing the recipe for best chicken stew, or perfect pigs’ trotters according to mum. I would however like to say that if it wasn’t because of her I wouldn’t have learnt how to hold a knife properly (I am left-handed, these things can be potentially fatal), or learn the art of “agaration” which is simply cooking by feeling, or how to achieve a perfectly smooth steamed egg. Lord knows how many times my mum had to pick up calls at odd hours (I am 7 hours apart from home) to entertain my questions on why my sauce didn’t turn out well, or how to boil soup or braise mushrooms. Her response has always been similar: “Girl ah, didn’t I tell you to write it down last time?” Yes ma, you did.

The point is my mum has made me into the cook that I am today. Likewise with all of us, we cook and eat the way we do today because of the matriarchs in our lives. I have bonded with my mum all these years over the preparation of countless dinners, telling her about school, life, boyfriends. The first time I told my mum I loved her was in the kitchen, peeling onions (perfect to hide the emotional tears that followed; blame the onion). Now I tell her as often as I can.

Maybe this is my Kodak moment but I daresay I’d be hard-pressed to find a better one. Ma, thanks for the cooking lessons, this one is for you.