| 7 July 2009 | A couple of days ago we discovered an exciting new crazy food section in the oriental grocery shop, containing such items as veggie mouth breeder fish, veggie grilled eel, veggie mutton, veggie spare ribs, and veggie shrimp (on the list but not actually on the shelf). Most of these were, it turns out, products of a company called Su Wei Siang, whose website tells me there are even crazier vegetarian delicacies such as pulled pork, emu meat, emu fillet and emu paste. All of them seem to be vegan, even. So, we bought several items including the fish, and when we got home I was looking forward to trying the fake fish, but then we discovered there were no cooking directions on the package, and I have no idea how to cook a real fish let alone a fake one. So I asked the internet, which had only three mentions of the product at all, and no instructions there either. So I emailed the company, which replied commendably politely and swiftly; I will quote it here so that anyone else in the same position can learn to cook their fish from Google without bothering the nice foodnical support people.Dear Raven,[comments] |
| 12 April 2008 | And now, a stimulating post on the subject of flour! Today I used white spelt flour for a pizza dough (full recipe; 180ml water, teaspoon salt, teaspoon sugar, tablespoon olive oil, teaspoon yeast, flour kneaded in until it's not tacky to the touch). It made a pizza dough better than I've ever had before. It wasn't a matter of working it differently - I put the ingredients in a bread-machine, so they got the same treatment they always would. So it must be the flour. If you've ever tried to make proper pizza dough, you may have been tempted to try spinning it like you see pizza chefs do on TV. If you tried it, or even thought about it while poking the dough, you'll have decided it won't work and probably written it off as you aren't skilful enough. You may be right, but that's not what's wrong. You may know how the second-choice dough-shaping method is "stretch the dough, don't squash it into shape or you'll push the air out". And if you've tried to do that, there's a good chance that didn't work either. It's not your fault! It's the dough. This dough, from white spelt flour, I picked it up out of the machine and it stretched. I held it by its upper corners, and it stretched. I got it most of the way into the rectangular shape I wanted by just holding it up and waiting for it to stretch itself. Just a little squishing required to get the corners shaped. It behaved in every way perfectly for the making of pizza, right up to "not sticking to the tray at all", and as an added bonus was relatively delicious. Not as tasty as wholemeal spelt, but the texture was definitely a win. Apparently the gluten in spelt flour is not the same as normal wheat gluten, so that perhaps explains the difference in behaviour there. (Also, some coeliacs are not harmed by spelt, though some are.) In other flour-related things, did you know that buckwheat is not in fact a wheat, nor even closely related? It's not even a grass. It's apparently more like sunflower seeds. Buckwheat flour is also very good; it makes a lovely nutty-flavoured pastry or crumble or pancakes or gingerbread or unleavened biscuits. It doesn't have any gluten though, so won't work for bread or dough (though mixing a bit in for the flavour can work). Both of these flours are supposedly (and I believe it) nutritionally superior to wheat. I certainly prefer them. The downside is they're also more expensive and harder to get hold of. I recommend making the effort. [comments] |
| 8 March 2008 | It's recipe time again! Today's incredibly short recipe is "what needs eating before it goes manky?" soup. Ingredients: a large cooking apple, a low-end-normal-sized broccoli, two cloves of garlic, a vegetable stock cube, a generous handful of coriander, water. If you don't have a cooking apple, use two ordinary apples and some lemon juice. Instructions: peel the garlic, core the apple, chop the scummy end bit off the broccoli, discard these discardables, throw everything else in the water. Boil for about fifteen minutes. Attack thoroughly with a blender. Boil for another five minutes. It's ready to eat. Serves me, or two ordinary people, or four people if you're using it as a starter rather than a whole meal. [comments] |
| 31 August 2006 | Today, a mediocre recipe-pair. Quite delicious, but not as delicious as any other recipe I've posted, and more effort, so it's not going to happen again. And not very funny either. I probably shouldn't even be posting it. Vegan naan bread and split-pea, uh, stuff Rinse 200g of split peas, then soak them for four hours, then new water and boil them for fifteen minutes, then simmer them for two hours, then drain them. You see why I'm never doing this again. Vaguely overlapping with that, put into a bread machine the following: one-and-a-half-cups of warm soymilk (not so hot it kills the yeast), 3 teaspoons of coconut oil or margarine, 2 teaspoons of active dry yeast, a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of baking powder, 2 tablespoons of olive-oil, 2 teaspoons of sugar, a teaspoon of egg-substitute-stuff, 2 teaspoons of fake-cream-cheese-stuff, and apparently about a pound of flour - I just added flour until it become suitably doughy, with the machine doughing it. Speaking of which, turn the bread machine on in dough mode. Or! You could mix all those things together in a bowl in some appropriate order without using a bread machine. Either way, afterwards you will need to wait for a couple of hours. Then bake the dough in flat pieces at gas mark 8 or 500F (I have no idea if these are equivalent - the recipe I was basing on said 500F, I used gas mark 8) for a few minutes. You can leave the result of that covered for as long as it takes to do everything else. Now the stuff! Chop up and fry an onion. Pour a tin of chopped tomatoes in with them. Add a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of turmeric, and two teaspoons of cayenne. Chop a couple of cloves of garlic and about twice that volume of ginger into slivers and put them in (or use equivalent powdered stuff, lazybones). Simmer for 15-20 minutes, then realise it boiled dry while you weren't paying attention, and tut. Lightly toast the proto-naan to burn off the 'proto' prefix. I did it in a toaster, but if you're less lazy it would be worth doing under a grill, brushing the second side with oil and sprinkling minced garlic on it before you toast it. Put stuff in a bowl, and eat with naan. Serves 2-3 with stuff, and 4-5 with naan; resolve this mismatch by having naan for breakfast. [comments] |
| 27 August 2006 | It's recipe time again! Now, I've said before that I mostly prefer stovetop cooking to baking, because it's more experimental, less downtime, and generally has less washing-up. So when I started making a cake from a several_bees recipe, I automatically started adjusting things, just as I would with a stovetop recipe of similar complexity. And, just as where with a stovetop recipe I would time things so as to reuse pans and save on washing-up, for this cake I decided to do similar reusing of utensils. Lazy man single-pan orange-and-chocolate cake that is vegan except if your vegan objects to honey in which case use something else, it's easy you fool Start with a small stainless steel saucepan that has a metal handle. Put a few knifefuls of margarine in (about 125g), and melt it a bit to make the next bit easy. Add eight teaspoons of horrible white sugar, and four teaspoons of delicious honey from the local Beesman, and stir it together. Add a teaspoon of egg-substitute powder (I don't believe this actually makes much difference), a half-teaspoon of baking powder, and stir in. Add a quarter-cup of soy milk, and stir in again. Add three quarters of a cup of strong bread flour. That's right, I said strong bread flour. The recipe said a mix of self-raising and plain, which is nothing like strong, but strong is what I had so strong is what you'll use, if you know what's good for you. And another half-teaspoon of baking powder. And since it wasn't self-raising flour, add *another* half-teaspoon of baking powder too. And don't bother with the recipe's salt, that's only there for the yeast anyway, and there isn't any yeast, pay attention. Mix it up again. Add a bit more than an eighth of a cup of orange juice, and, if you can be bothered (I couldn't, I don't even own a grater anyway) some orange zest. Add another eighth of a cup of STRONG BREAD FLOUR damn it! Stir it in again. Skip the melted chocolate from the original recipe because that would need another pan, and instead add, ooh, say, seven highly heaped teaspoons of cocoa, and a splash more soymilk. Stir it up. Add flour and stir until it's the sort of consistency where if you had two colours of it and tried to marble them together, that would work. If you were following the other recipe you'd actually be marbling them together about now, but this is a one-pan recipe, and it tastes the same whether marbled or all made as one, so THIS WAY IS BETTER. Put the pan in a 350F / gas mark 5-ish oven (this is why it had to be a metal-handled pan), and leave it in for about 45 minutes. Then take it out, let it cool a bit, and remove cake from pan. Wash the pan now, and also the teaspoon and knife you used earlier. You've probably put the cake on a plate or something so you'll have to wash that too, later, you fool. You should have kept the cake in your hand or mouth to save that effort.  |
| 25 April 2006 | It's recipe time again, this time with two recipes brought to you by the "surplus of some ingredients none of others" and "I'm not bloody going to the shops twice" schools of cookery. Spinach (or something else) and Onion (if you like) Savoury Buckwheat (or other notable flour) Pancakes (or crepes as Americans call them) Put X/2 handfuls of wholewheat flour in a mixing bowl. Add X/4 buckwheat flour, X/4 soy flour, X/4 gram flour and X/4 rye flour - if you lack any of these, substitute one of the others; soy and gram are similar, wholewheat over either of the others. Add about X/2 teaspoons of olive oil and stir. Add X/6 500ml cartons of soymilk. Stir. Add water while stirring until the batter is of a thickness that will sit on a fork for a couple of seconds, but will drain through and leave gaps between the prongs. Now chop up X small onions or X/2 large onions, and start frying in olive oil. Chop up X/2 big handfuls of spinach, and put that in to fry too. Add X/2 heaped teaspoons of powdered stock, and X pinches of salt. Stir the mix occasionally until it's suitably fried, then remove from heat. Heat oil in a non-stick pan, then pour some of the batter in, tilting the pan at about 35 degrees and rotating to spread the batter around. When all the top of the poured batter has changed colour, detach and flip the pancake (either with shaking and a clever toss, or with a scraping tool), add a smidge more oil and cook the other side. Put it on a plate, then repeat this paragraph until you run out of batter. While you're repeating this paragraph, put the spinachy-oniony-goo on the pancake on the plate, roll it up and eat it. If you're doing this just for yourself you'll have to eat it quickly, because if you're not finished by the time the next one's done you'll get increasingly far behind and they'll end up getting cold. If you have a co-eater it's much easier because you can make them eat every second one. Serves X. Creamy Spinach-Sauce Pasta First do the second paragraph of the recipe above. Add X/6 cartons of soymilk to that and put it back on the heat. Put the pasta of your choice (I like macaroni), in the quantity of your choice (enough to serve X) in boiling lightly salted water. When the pasta's nearly done, blender the spinach-onion-and-milk sauce. Drain excess water off the now-done pasta, then put the sauce on the pasta. VERY DELICIOUS. Serves X. [comments] |
| 9 March 2006 | A newly invented (or possibly reinvented) recipe - Vegan Wok Omelettes. I imagine it would work the same in a frying pan, but I like my wok, and don't have a frying pan that's as superbly non-stick, so for me it's a wok omelette. Put a bit of oil in the wok and put stir-fry sort of heat under it. Chop up six to eight mushrooms; I chop them into 4mm thick slices in two directions, resulting in 4*4*X cuboid 'chips' of mushroom. Put them in the wok. Chop up a red onion. Put it in the wok. Stir. Get a big lump (500g I think) of firm tofu. Crumble it into the wok. Stir. Add a heaped teaspoon of turmeric, a bit less of paprika, and a pinch of chilli powder. Stir until the colour saturates everything. Get four tablespoons of wheat gluten (gluten flour), and add water, stirring, until it's a medium-thin batter. Add some brewer's yeast flakes to this for a slightly cheesy flavour if you like. Once the stuff in the wok is a bit browned on at least a couple of sides, add the batter and stir it in. Maybe turn the temperature down a bit. Turn it over at some point, and you've got rather splatty ill-bound omelettes. That's the recipe as I cooked it; if I were to do it again, I'd go with double the batter for a better chance at binding success - I went for a bit short because I wasn't sure if it would ruin the flavour, but it didn't have much effect, so doubling it should be okay. Serve on some toast. [comments] |
| 24 May 2005 | With June approaching, it's about time I posted my Vegan Christmas Dinner recipe. You will need:
Grease the loaf-ish sized tin, then tip the nuts-and-bread into it. Flatten the surface out, then add water slowly and evenly until there's a few millimetres of water over the top of the stuff. Stir it around a bit if you like. Shove that in the oven at a fairly low temperature (250-300F). Wash the red cabbage, then tear it up and throw it in a saucepan on a low heat, with a lid. If it dried between washing it and entering the pan, add just a tiny splash of water. Now peel and core the apples, chop them up into smallish pieces, and mix them in with the cabbage. If your apples weren't cooking apples, also add a splash of lemon juice. Stir that occasionally for a long time. When the cabbage has been on for a couple of hours, cut up your potatoes into inch-to-two-inch pieces, brush them with grapeseed oil or whatever oil you like really, shove them in the oven (that's what the baking tray is for) with the nut-thing - put the potatoes on a higher shelf - and turn the oven up to about 350F. Keep on with stirring the cabbage occasionally. The potatoes are just being roast potatoes. Surely you know how that works? You might want to turn them over or something at some point, but really they'll still be fine if you don't. If the nut-thing reaches a dark brown colour at any point in the cooking process, take it out of the oven - it's perfectly good reheated, so there's no need to burn it just because other things aren't ready yet. The cabbage pretty much can't be overcooked, so leaving that on for too long is always alright within reason. IF YOUR HOUSE BURNS DOWN THEN IT WAS NOT WITHIN REASON. When the potatoes look nearly done, since they're the one component whose timing is actually important, make the gravy in that other saucepan. Now put all the things on a plate and eat them. You probably shouldn't put the gravy on the red cabbage, but do put it on the potatoes and nut-roast. Unless you don't like gravy, in which case you shouldn't even have made it. You don't have to follow a recipe to the letter, you know. My recipes barely even have letters, so there's no excuse. Next day, forget anew how nice roast potatoes are, and don't make them again for another six months, or until someone's blog reminds you. [comments] |
| 2 September 2004 | Listen up, World. I want some stuff, and you, the world, are just the entity that should be providing it for me, as soon as possible. I want a community living-space which is sensible. I want either a small locale like The Village or a large apartment building with each living-space properly soundproofed. I want this community to have its own large lump of bandwidth, which is near-free for the use of the residents via wireless, and 'shaped' such that the bandwidth may always be used to capacity, and if there is a conflict such that the required bandwidth exceeds capacity then whoever has used less bandwidth recently takes priority over whoever has used more, on a ratio-based scale such that if someone has used 100GB they get half as much of the available bandwidth as someone who has used 50GB, a quarter as much as someone who has used 25GB, and so on. Most of the time this limitation would not come into effect at all. Otherwise-unused bandwidth could be used for mirroring of common downloads. I want the living space to have at least one dedicated chef, possibly more depending on the size of the community. The dedicated chef should make any recipe on request, at a reasonable price for his work, with the requester supplying ingredients. A couple could get a nice curry for two made for about $20 (a curry is about half an hour's work), or community members could group their orders, such that if twenty people want curry the same night it should be less than $5 per person, as making a large amount of curry doesn't take much more effort than making a small amount. The dedicated chef is paid only for their time, not per-portion. They are also given free lodging and use of facilities in the community. People are still welcome to cook their own food if they prefer, of course. But World, cooking is time-consuming for me, and I know that while it takes me five minutes to chop up a few habaneros, a proper chef can do it in seconds. Why do you make me do things that others can do better? I want this fixed. I want the living space to, similarly, have a dedicated staff of cleaners, who will wash dishes, take out rubbish, vacuum and so forth on a similar paid-per-time basis. I know a competent cleaner can clean things more effectively than I can, in half the time, so it would be a bargain for me; a real-world cleaner would not, because they have to charge enough to cover getting to a house and such. If they're part of this small community, World, they'd always be nearby, wouldn't they? So the costs would be less. You see? Why don't things already work like this, World? What's wrong with you? I want a community gymnasium, a community assault-course, a community games room and several community ridiculously large television and sound system rooms. I want trampolines. I want a swimming pool. I want tennis courts even though I hate tennis. Few of these things require much maintenance, and if the maintenance costs are split between a community of a hundred or more people they're a pittance. Lots of people buy ridiculously large televisions and sound systems for watching movies, even though there'd be next to no disadvantage to sharing three such devices between about twenty people. I want cost-effective entertainment, World. What cleaner can afford these sorts of silly luxuries? I'll tell you, World, the answer is the cleaner who works for The Community. Yes, World, this does sound like a hotel, and I realise that. But what's different is that hotels charge extortionate prices. A community doing the same thing but each owning their room (or renting if they choose, but not at a stupid daily rate) would, yes, be similar to a hotel. But you'd own your space. You'd have a kitchen. People wouldn't come in and decide to make your bed unless you asked them to. You'd be the only one with a key unless you wanted it otherwise. So no, World, it's not really similar to a hotel at all, is it? Why don't you give me this? Why? [comments] |
| 15 June 2004 | It's that time again; Recipe Time. For today's recipe, I present RavenBlack's Semen-resembling Soup. Unlike most of my recipes, this one actually has proper specified ingredients: five medium-large potatoes or equivalent in different-sized potatoes, one large or three small onions (do not use medium sized onions), the amount of spring onions that you get from the supermarket bound together with a rubber band, one normal-sized stick of celery or twenty abnormal sized sticks, four spoons of powdered vegetable stock or equivalent in some other stock such as TCPD, half a spoon of crushed garlic, a sprinkle of each of basil, salt and pepper, three drops of a nice hot-sauce, some water, and the use of a blender. Chop up all the ingredients except the 'use of a blender' which we'll chop up later, and the ingredients that are already very small like the salt. Oh, and don't chop up the water, it'll just flow back together like a second-generation Terminator. Put the ingredients in a pan, except the 'use of a blender' which we'll add later. The amount of water to add is "enough to not quite cover everything else". Bring it to the boil as quickly as you can - be impatient if you can - and then simmer it very quickly for half an hour or so. Apply the blender to the mix, either by pouring the mix into the blender if it's a female blender, or by sticking the blender into the soup if it's male. Also switch it on. When the soup resembles semen, it's ready and delicious. Eat from a bowl, with toast and your mouth. (Also, if you have a PGP key, please sign mine and upload it to the pgpkeys.mit.edu server.) [comments] |
| 1 June 2004 | It's RavenBlack Recipe Time, with a recipe for Arbitrary Vegetable Tandoori. Ingredients:
Chop everything up into pieces of appropriate sizes; inch-cubes for big vegetables, small pieces for onions, and don't chop up the peas, tin or jar. You can chop the lid off the tin if you want, I suppose, and remove the lid from the jar but not by chopping. And when I say "chop everything up", I only mean the ingredients - don't chop up your pans and arms. Start the recalcitrant vegetables boiling or steaming; recalcitrant vegetables include potato, broccoli and cauliflower. Any vegetables which would tend to be firmer than you want them in a curry, if they were prepared by stir-frying. While those boil, fry the chopped up onion at a fairly moderate heat. Moderate for frying that is, not moderate for outdoor temperature which wouldn't be any use at all. You can't fry onions at 25 celsius. Maybe at weird pressures. If you can do that, feel free, but it's easier to do it with heat. Throw any vegetables that aren't bothering to be boiled in here as well, such as the bell peppers that you shouldn't be putting in because they aren't very good. And the peas can go in now or later, it doesn't really matter, because they're peas. When the recalcitrant vegetables are about half as boiled as you would do them if you were just going to eat them boiled, lob them across into the frying pan. If you're not a very good shot, lift them across with a tool of some sort instead. Spoon four tablespoons of tandoori paste in amongst the vegetables in the pan. More if it's mild tandoori paste or if you want the curry properly spicy. What the hell, just tip the entire jar of tandoori paste in, and add some hot sauce as well, and some chilli powder. Pour the tin of tomatoes into the pan. Or, for non-robots, just pour the tomatoes out of the tin, into the pan, and then put the tin somewhere else such as a bin or recycling receptacle. Simmer until you're really hungry, stirring whenever you feel a bit hungry but not quite so hungry that it's ready. Also, each time you stir it, taste a bit, decide it's really nice, and wish it didn't require quite so much damn simmering. Eat while you watch a dodgy subtitled kung-fu movie or, if you have one, a crazy hindi movie with singing and dancing. [comments] |
| 11 December 2003 | How to make Not-General-Tso's-But-Raven's Not-Chicken-Either Warning: May Contain Tofu. However, it is tofu cooked in such a way that people who say "eurgh, tofu" don't actually find it unpleasant. People who are allergic to tofu, however, will still swell up like comedy balloons. First, don't make sure you have all the ingredients. Ingredients are for wimps. If you're missing an ingredient, subsitute something else. For example, soy-sauce tastes much the same as brine, and it's not uncommon for Tso recipes to have wine in place of half the vinegar, which suggests that you could probably replace all the vinegar with wine if you felt like it. Especially if it's a crappy beaujolais. Replace tofu with chicken, replace garlic with onion, replace ginger with coriander, replace sugar with honey or jam, replace oil with margarine, and replace water with urine. It'll taste like crap, but you won't have to go to the shops. Now wash some dishes, because you don't want your Not-Actually-Chicken to end up tasting like baked beans Next you'll have to mix two sorts of soy-sauce together, not because it will taste any different but because the first sort will run out and you'll have to pad it out with the other sort. Once the two are mixed together you'll have about a half-cup (the measure, not actual cups which are generally bigger) of soy-sauce. Put it in some sort of mixing space like a jug or bowl or pan or large mouth that promises it won't swallow, because you're about to mix some other stuff with it. Add a little bit less white vinegar, or rice vinegar, than you just did soy sauce. It wasn't actually a half-cup at all, was it? Admit it! But that's okay so long as this is almost the same. Add about half that much sugar. I use white sugar, but that's not because all the ingredients are supposed to be white. I'd be worried, in fact, if your soy-sauce was white, and white vinegar is actually transparent anyway. Also, the half-as-much sugar is by volume, not by weight, so keep it away from those bathroom scales. Most Tso recipes call for more sugar than this, but they're evil and wrong and plotting to rot your teeth and kidneys. Add all the garlic that's left in your jar of garlic, unless your jar is much more full than mine was in which case only add about one to two teaspoons, or a few smooshed cloves. Of garlic. Don't go adding cloves just because I didn't say 'of garlic' in the same sentence as cloves. That would make a really horrible sauce. Add half a teaspoon of ground ginger, or, since your ground ginger is in one of those stupid sprinkly containers, add some arbitrary number of shakes of the container that you just made up. Probably less than 20. Add another of those 'half cups', this time of water. This is handy since whatever thing you're using to carry these so-called half-cups can have the sticky goo that thus far remains in it rinsed into the mixy-container at the same time. Put the mix in the fridge. The cooling is a factor of some sort, apparently, so the refrigeration is an actual step, silly though that seems. Now, go back in time at least 24 hours, drain a block of coarse tofu, and put it in the freezer. Then return to your own time, and retrieve the tofu, making sure you didn't bring the freezer back through the timewarp too, since you want the tofu to have had time to freeze. Now say "tsk, I forgot, this is supposed to have been defrosted", go back in time 6 hours with the tofu, and leave it covered somewhere. Return to your own time, and retrieve the defrosted tofu (though it does have to have been previously frozen - that changes its texture). Alternatively, if your time-travel device malfunctions after the previous use, you can microwave the tofu on low power to get it defrosted enough that you can cut it into inch-sized cubes, which, either way, you should do. Sprinkle the cubes with soy-sauce. Somehow cover the cubes in cornflour (this is corn-starch in America). Dipping them works but tends to result in it annoyingly flaking off, and the dip-powder solidifying gradually. Sprinkling it on them gets similar results, but uses a bit less cornflour and a bit more effort. The best way is to ask someone else to do this part while you busily, er, heat the oil. For ten minutes. Heat some deep oil. Deep-frying is best. You can, apparently, do this part with shallow frying, but I bet it sucks if you do. Heating the oil should take about three minutes, but if you've got someone else covering the tofu-blocks in cornflour, you can heat it over a lower flame to make it take the same amount of time it takes them to do that, and thus you can't possibly help them because heating oil is a very attention-intensive task. Put the sauce-sprinkled cornflour-covered cubes in the hot oil. Try to stop them sticking together. This won't work, but you'll have such fun trying, especially if you try to hold them apart with your hands underneath the surface of the boiling oil. Take pictures if you do that. But, er, remember, this recipe said not to do it, in the event of a lawsuit. While that's frying, taste the sauce in the fridge, and realise that it tastes really far too vinegary at the moment. Fix that by adding about half a teaspoon of chilli-powder, and a little more of paprika, and a few drops of a nice hot-sauce, and another quarter-cup or so of water. At this point you should decide that you'd like the sauce a bit gloopy today, and hence add about a level tablespoon of cornflour to it. Once the blobs are a bit crispy (takes between five and ten minutes), take their oil off the heat, and raise the blobs in a magical little basket thingy so the oil drains off them into the other oil, unless you are a fool who thinks shallow frying is the way forward in which case I don't know what you should do because you're silly and probably shouldn't be cooking this recipe at all. Heat a little oil in a normal shallow frying pan. Chop up an onion and fry it, unless you don't like onions in which case simply don't do the oniony bit since it's mostly just to add a bit of lumpiness to the sauce anyway. Once the onions are fried, or the oil is hot if there are to be no onions, pour the sauce into the pan. Let it get hot, and then add the blobs. Let it all simmer together for a few minutes, with stirring. About now you should panic and think "aiee, this sauce is too thin, perhaps I shouldn't have added that extra bit of water". And rightly so, because it is a bit too thin, actually, so go back in time and persuade yourself that you shouldn't have added that extra bit of water, or perhaps that you should have added a bit more cornflour. If your time machine is broken, don't worry, it's still quite nice, and the sauce does thicken up a bit if you let it cool slightly before you serve it. Serve it in the middle of a circle of broccoli or some other vegetable or some rice, which someone else cooked while you were doing all this. If they didn't then bollocks to them, can't they even make a little bit of effort when you're cooking a complicated thing like this? Nothing but lumps for dinner tonight, all of you! Blog the entire recipe with which to remind yourself. [comments] |
| 10 December 2003 | How To Cook Raven-fried Rice Ingredients: Some rice. However much you intend to eat, or how much will fit in the pans available, whichever is less.Boil the rice in about twice as much water as it takes to cover it, with a pinch of salt taken from your spice-pile, and a drop of oil, which seems to reduce the stick-to-the-pan effect. While that's happening, cut up the onion into pieces as small as you can be bothered, and smoosh the garlic if it's garlic that requires manual smooshing rather than the more convenient jar-based pre-smooshed garlic. Once the rice is done (the water will be up to about a third the depth of the rice at that point), take it off the heat and put a shallow-frying amount of oil in a wok or big frying pan that can function much like a wok, in its place. Set the onion frying, and, if you elected to go with some sort of meat-esque lumps, add them too. Stir it around a bit. When that's fried for a while (about the amount of time it takes for the rice to absorb the rest of the water it's in), tip the rice in as well, and stir it all together. Now dig through your spice drawer, and add all of the spices except bad ones to the rice, in sensible quantities. For example, with our spice-drawer as it is, I go with enough turmeric to make the rice nicely yellow, half that much coriander and paprika, half that much garam masala and salt, and half that much ginger and maybe mustard. Also add the glob of garlic, and the various sauces if any. Stir it all together again. Taste it. If it's dry-spicy, add lemon juice. If it's dry-bland, add soy-sauce. If it's just a bit bland, add salt. If it's quite a lot bland, add all the spices again. If it's too spicy, add lemon juice. Fry it until the rice at the bottom becomes crispy. Stir it around. Fry it until the new rice at the bottom becomes crispy. Stir it around again. Turn off the oven, and put it in a bowl. You're done. Enjoy it. Now, if you don't enjoy it, that means you haven't followed the recipe which included the instruction that you should enjoy it, so it's your own fault, not mine or the recipe's. [comments] |
| 7 January 2003 | Another cookery exploit; so-called garlic soup, presumably along the same lines as stone soup, since it involved more potato and onion than it did garlic. A pleasantly simple recipe, if irksome in its fiddliness; finely chop up a bulb of garlic, an onion, and a potato. Add basil, parsley, salt and cilantro. Throw it all in water. Simmer for half an hour. VERY DELICIOUS! [comments] |
| 2 January 2003 |  I mentioned making Picalilli the other day. A while later, I realised that my readers would almost certainly love to see the jars of bile that resulted. Behold! [comments] |
| 29 December 2002 | Several short entries. The first; I made picalilli, after realising that it's something that doesn't really need to be purchased. Early taste-tests suggest it's as it should be; it certainly has the proper bile-resemblance. [comments] |
| 12 October 2002 | I just cooked what the Sunflower Restaurant calls General Tso's Surprise. A terribly high-effort recipe involving draining tofu, freezing it and defrosting it, making an awkward sauce, covering the tofu lumps with intractable powder, deep-frying them, wok-frying some onion, adding the sauce to the wok, adding the deep-fried lumps to the sauce, getting the sauce-thickness balance right. Total effort expended: about an hour. Time to devour: about 10 minutes. Not something I'm likely to do often, but it's nice to know that I can produce a passable replica of my favourite restaurant-food. [comments] |
| 12 December 2001 | Mm, I made Gingerbread Corpses. This is what happens when you improvise both recipe and cutter. They're a little bland for my taste, but apparently just how the lady likes them. So that's lucky. [comments] |
| 23 November 2001 | A quick note - while my bitching tends to be directed at America, it should be noted that I am aware that England is doing its best to emulate America in every way, including the gradual introduction of lactose into snacks. [comments] |
