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.