By: Mrs Robot

So… we're still here. It's been over a year since my last post. And we didn't get the ’rona, or have to rely on our precooked meals because we were poorly, which was great. I honestly didn't think it had been so long since I'd last posted, but I guess this had better be some sort of retrospective. I'm going to split this into two posts, one for us at home and one for food cooked by other people, because there was some of that too.

We didn't actually have any trouble getting food. We always have flour, rice, noodles, assorted nuts and pulses and so on in stock, and because we get a weekly vegbox delivery and shop at the local butcher, we never had any gaps in what we needed. We did do a bulk order with Wai Yee Hong at one point because we weren't able to get to Bath to the Chinese supermarket. But compared to friends who couldn't get pasta (and whose kids live on the stuff) we had it easy.

Last year's initial lockdown coincided with a spell of good weather, and because we're lucky enough to have a garden that meant lots of eating outside on the patio. Even if we couldn't go anywhere, we could still enjoy a Spanish spread. There was always jamon and tortilla, and Mr Robot's become extremely good at cooking pescado en adobo, chunks of white fish marinated and then floured and deep fried. I'm a big fan of those fishy nuggets. As the epidemic went on, Mavalco, which usually supplied restaurants, started selling Spanish ingredients direct, and we've placed a few orders with them.

Poor old Mr Robot had a proper lockdown birthday in May, but we made a meal of it – literally. He joked that he wanted a dinosaur cake with a raspberry ice-cream meteor for his birthday, so I made lemon-cake dinos (mould from Lakeland) and a raspberry meteor, all on a 'lost world' scene made from biscuit and chocolate ganache. I was jolly proud of that!

We cooked increasingly elaborate meals when eating indoors. Being at home meant it was possible to prep something needing long, slow cooking at lunchtime and pop it in the oven during an afternoon tea break. Pot roast pheasant midweek? Hell yeah. And I'm prone to anxiety, and found cooking a good way to switch off after the working day. There were times when I didn't have the headspace for much, but I could crack open a cookbook and make something nice. Looking at the cookbook shelf, Fuchsia Dunlop's The Food Of Sichuan and Every Grain Of Rice are two books that got a lot of use.

We didn't really push many boundaries, food-wise, though Mr Robot has enjoyed cooking Korean food – and we've both enjoyed eating it. I think it started with a recipe for Army Stew and snowballed from there.  But overall the past year or so has definitely been a time of comfort eating, everything from meat pies to Indian dishes to lasagne. And, I must confess, takeaways. This possibly should go under 'food cooked by other people' in the next post, but I feel it belongs here, because those Deliveroo/JustEat orders relate more to the food we'd cook ourselves, in that they were what we'd eat when we simply didn't have the headspace or energy to cook for ourselves. At the start of pandemic restrictions, we were often having two a week. We have become rather rotund robots!

Anyway, I shall leave you with some Christmas food. We did our usual Christmas food, a tasty spread of normality in what had been a very not-normal year. A lot of 2020 was pretty sucky, but at least the food was good!

Still greedy...

By: Mrs Robot

Even when our appetites for blogging wane, our appetites for food do not! We've new cookbooks to talk about, and lovely food to share. I shall whet your appetite – and hopefully summon the spirit of my blogging passion – with this little shot of today's lunch. Ma po tofu with rice for me (though I couldn't identify any meat in it, and usually I'd expect pork) and braised beef in udon noodle soup for Mr R, at Chili Family Noodle in Bath.

Chili Family Noodle is always really busy, especially during term times when all the students are back in town. It's an unpretentious little noodle bar at the bus station, and the food is really good. My tofu was packed with the tastes of black bean, chili bean sauce and Szechuan pepper, and I loved every mouthful. That said, I did envy those noods. Maybe we'll have to go back...

Zero dim sum game

By: Mrs Robot

Soooooo many good food things that I haven't told you about, from our trip to India to Mr Robot's birthday dinner at Henry's restaurant in Bath. So I am breaking my duck with a quick shot of today's lunch. 

The prawn and chive parcels are taken directly from Helen and Lisa Tse's book Dim Sum: Small Bites Made Easy, and the spring rolls are based on their recipe - s I didn't have any bean sprouts I subbed in julienne (not grated; I wanted bite) carrots and chopped water chestnuts.

I'm not sure whether there's something wrong with my portioning or the recipes overstate how many of each should be made, but I literally managed only 50% of the quantity each recipe should produce (yes, even when following the spring roll recipe properly). But they tasted great, and make a good al fresco lunch. It's a good job we have more chives growing, because those prawn parcels are going to become a robot family favourite.

Dan Dan DAAAAAN!

By: Mrs Robot

I've had a real craving for noodles all of a sudden. I'm not sure why - maybe the coming of spring has put me in a mood for lighter foods than my winter pies and stews. It was a good excuse to revisit some favourite old cookbooks. Given what we had in the kitchen, Dan Dan Mian from Mi Mi Aye's book Noodle! seemed like a good plan.

We'd made Ching-He Huang's recipe for Dan Dan Noodles some time ago, but it wasn't quite our thing. However, her recipe uses tahini paste and Mi Mi's doesn't, plus Mi Mi's seems to use a lot more spicy ingredients, so I thought I'd give it a go and see if we liked her version any better.

As with so many recipes in Noodle!, while the list of ingredients seems long, a quick read of the recipe reveals that the process for making Dan Dan Mian is actually very simple. You can't just start and throw in ingredients as you go along, you need to get everything ready in advance, but as long as you do that, it's very easy to make the dish. Most of the ingredients are store cupboard staples: soy sauce, black vinegar, xiaoxing wine and so on. The only thing we didn't have was Szechuan preserved vegetables. I don't know what those taste like, so subbed in some of Mr Robot's homemade kimchi as that was preserved, vegetable, and tasty.

("Oh, we just substituted homemade kimchi." How poncy does that sound?)

We both very much enjoy Szechuan peppercorns. They have a fearsome reputation, which they really don't deserve. They're numbing, not burning. Chillies make me hiccup, but I can eat those peppercorns with no problems (I occasionally chew them raw, straight out of the jar). Mi Mi's recipe began with oil seasoned with a whole tablespoon of the things, and only got better from there. The resulting minced pork sauce was rich and dark with soy sauce, spicy with Szechuan peppercorns, then stirred by each diner through bland, delicious noodles.

We could quite easily have eaten twice as much, not because the portions are small but because it is delicious and we are greedy. Ziggy, one of our two feral kittens, came along and tried to help himself, but was shunted off pronto.

I will definitely be making this again.

Bau wow

By: Mrs Robot

Today I made Chinese dumplings - bau. I love bau, but until today I've only ever bought frozen ones.

Let's go back in time, back to when I was a 15-year-old squirt with my first Saturday job, doing food prep in the kitchen at the local Chinese. I wish I could say I learned to cook there, but in truth I mainly learned how to chop buckets of mushrooms and onions! But I did get to try things like mooncake, and learned to reduce ingredients to paste with a cleaver. Knowing I was working there, some elderly friends of my mum gave me a Chinese cookbook, which they'd bought in Hong Kong. It's called The Cuisine of Cathay by Genia Lee, and it was scary. Such strange ingredients, the likes of which you'd never find in the tiny town supermarket. No matter how many onions I'd chopped, I wasn't about to try anything from the book, though I'd look at the pictures and dream of making such delicious things.

Fast-forward a quarter of a century. Mr Robot and I have been exploring Asian cookery more, and have amassed all sorts of ingredients. Suddenly, The Cuisine of Cathay isn't scary at all. In fact, it's probably more user-friendly than a lot of Asian cookbooks we own, as it was made in a time when a lot of Westerners hadn't had much experience of cooking Asian foods, so Genia Lee starts out by describing various ingredients in depth, from various kinds of rice to different types of bamboo shoot (gwei-giew, spring, fuzzy and more) to melons and gourds and more greens than I'd know what to do with. She doesn't make too many concessions to western tastes, though: sea cucumbers and fish maws are in the ingredients section, and the very first recipe calls for a dozen duck feet.

We get through buckets of spring onions nowadays...

Looking at her recipe for bau, I realised I could make them. I only needed to buy pork and spring onions; we had everything else already. The dough is remarkably similar to the one I used for pizza; it calls for 'all-purpose flour' so I used bog-standard plain. The filling is an easy blend of pork, spring onion, soy sauce, sesame oil and a few other things. Just as she very carefully shows you all manner of Chinese ingredients at the start of the book, alongside each recipe Genia has step-by-step walkthroughs of unfamiliar techniques, and she has very precise instructions and a sequence of photos explaining how to make the bau. Mine rose less than the ones I'd bought in the shops, but perhaps I just need to give them more rising time next time. They certainly tasted delicious.

You have to make the dough thinner at the edge, so it's not
too thick when all pinched together.

So, now I can have bau whenever I like, with whatever fillings I like. And now I'm no longer scared of The Cuisine of Cathay, I look forward to trying many more of the recipes in it, starting this week with Szechuan-style shredded beef. Bau? Such wow, as the doge might say...