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...

Cat Bento!

 By: Mrs Robot

Working on games magazines for a living, I am surrounded by people who really love all things Japanese. And several of my favourite foodies are likewise obsessed with the place. Me? I'd love to go, though other places always seem to bump it from my travel list, and when it comes to cooking the food looks so elaborate. As much as I admire the precision and artistry involved, I'm too chaotic a person to make it.

Only now I have to control my chaos, because Mr Robot bought me a bento box designed like an adorable little cat, so it's bento lunches for me from now on.

He got me a Hello Kitty bento cutlery set and some sweet little animal-headed sauce bottles too. And, most helpfully of all, a recipe book. That was very reassuring, because the lunches in it didn't look half as elaborate as the ones I see online, which would probably take me half an hour or more to make – and I only have about ten minutes at most to cobble together a lunch. It's nice to know no-one actually expects me to recreate the hanging gardens of Babylon or the works of Studio Ghibli using rice and cherry tomatoes.

Monday's lunch was basmati rice plus beef, green beans and carrots in oyster sauce (leftovers from Sunday night), plus cherry tomatoes and cucumber as a snack, and today it's what I hope is a more correct rice* with duck in a sweet and slightly spicy soy-heavy sauce, plus cherry tomatoes, and melon and nectarine as a snack. The duck was left over from last night. Already a pattern is developing...

As I mentioned, I've never really cooked anything Japanese, and I suspect Cat Bento will end up full of confusion cuisine. I got some deep-fried tofu from the Chinese supermarket as until now I've been sticking to pure fruit and veg at lunchtimes, and while I'm prepared to introduce rice and possibly egg, I'm not sure I want meat in my lunch too often. The cookbook has a recipe for Japanese omelette, which I should give a go. I do appreciate the portion control dictated by the size of the compartments.

Anyway, watch this space for the continuing adventures of Cat Bento...

*The Chinese supermarket in Bath stocks Chinese and Korean foods, and this rice had Korean script on the bag but also a little English script calling it 'sushi rice'. As far as I know there's no Japanese shop in town. I also tried the Thai shop, but they just had jasmine rice or readycooked sushi rice. 

Anglo-Indian Pilaf

By: Mrs Robot

I'm not going to review the cookbook yet as I haven't made enough recipes from it to do the job properly, but I just wanted to share a photo of one of the dishes from The Burma Cookbook, by Robert Carmack and Morrison Polkinghorne with you.

I mentioned in a post that my family's pretty much lost touch with the Asian part of its roots, and for me cooking food from the region is one way to try to reconnect with that. Well, this is about as connected as I can get: a dish from the mixed-race community within Burma. A lot of Indians and Anglo-Indians went to Burma with the British, and took with them all sorts of foodstuffs, many of which have become part of Burmese food. (Take Indian snacks and the Burmese love of salads, and what do you get? Samosa salad.)

You don't need any connection at all to Burma to enjoy this pilaf, however. It's really delicious. You start by making a sort of spiced lamb stew, then putting the rice on top after a couple of hours and waiting for that to absorb the excess liquid. The result is wonderfully soft meat and tasty rice, which you top with fried onions and bits of omelette.

It's fantastically easy to make, and can all be done in one pot, which I definitely appreciate because I hate washing up. If you make your own curries regularly you'll have all the spices at home already, and if you don't there aren't so many that it would all be really expensive to buy them - plus then you'd have the spices to make many more pilafs in future. The meat does take a couple of hours to stew, but you could make up that part in advance and freeze it, so when you wanted some after, say, a day at work, you's just need to thaw it and bring the meat up to a simmer before adding the rice.

I think I will be eating a lot of this in future...

Book review: Made in India

By: Mrs Robot

I mentioned in a post last year that for me part of the reason I've tried to learn to cook Asian food is to connect with the unknown parts of my ancestry. For Christmas Mr Robot bought me a copy of Meera Sodha's book Made in India, because as her family came to Britain via Uganda, he thought I'd enjoy her stories of family movements and the Indian diaspora.

And he was right; I loved reading the stories of Sodha's relatives, and also seeing how the cuisine of Africa and later the raw ingredients available in England had an impact on their family recipes. Also, it puts an end to all Mr Robot's objections when I put something creative in a curry and he complains that it's not traditional. (Well, it should. I think he's always going to object to swede curry.)

Meera Sodha's daily dal, plus a lamb curry recipe by Anjum Anand

Since getting the book I've made plenty of recipes out of it. There's been Mum's Chicken Curry and Kachumbar, Daily Dal, and Pistachio and Yoghurt Chicken Curry plus Cinnamon and Clove Pilau with Cashew Nuts. At the start of the book Sodha has a joky bit 'Eat like an Indian, think like an Indian', which includes the advice "Feed the dog chapattis. Dogs love chapattis." I can confirm that Robocat does not like chapattis, but wouldn't stop scrounging tonight's tea, Wild Pheasant Curry, which I served with Sodha's cumin-roasted cauliflower and some pilau rice.

Fresh ginger and pistachios

The recipes that I've tried from the book result in dishes that are more aromatic than spicy. I don't know if that's because the recipes I've tried use a lot more nuts than the ones I've done from other Indian cookbooks. The pistachio curry was especially lovely, rich in ground cardamom. We put the leftovers of that into toasted sandwiches! I'm not sure if I cooked the onion long enough for that one - that's a skill I'm still trying to develop.

Pistachio and yoghurt chicken curry with pilau rice

I have also very much enjoyed the vegetable side dishes. I'm not sure exactly what makes them so much more appealing than the ones in other Indian cookbooks that we own, but we'll definitely be making the cauliflower again, and the kachumbar will be good to have over the summer. It'll go nicely with Mexican or Spanish dishes as well as Indian ones.

Wild pheasant curry, cumin-roasted cauliflower, pilau rice

All in all, there's only one thing I'd change about this book, and that's the cover, which I'd make a wipe-clean one! I suspect my copy is going to end up plastered in tomato all too quickly...

All photos copyright Mr Robot, and the presentation is mine - I have been told it needs work! Trust me, though, this all tasted absolutely delicious.

Heading East

By Mr Robot

We’re having a bit of an Asian kick in the kitchen this month. Partly to finally overcome a gross deficiency in our skill set, and partly a (probably vain) bid to lose a bit of wobble from the waistline.

You see, in our two weeks in Burma we lost LOTS of weight - I went down a whole belt notch in a fortnight - with absolutely no effort at all. We ate pretty much as normal (i.e.: to bursting, and then some, plus all the beer they’d let me have) and though were doing a bit more exercise in terms of touristy walking round it wasn’t that much: most of the heavy lifting was done by car or boat.

So, stuff yourself silly, have all the beer you can get away with, and still lose weight? That’s clearly the diet for me.

I have a couple of theories:
First, the food was jolly tasty. Very strong flavours, lots of variety and - I can’t stress this enough - extremely rich. The curries especially were dark and intense; pickles were salty and tangy; everything spiced and subtle. So while rice was served in infinite portions (it just didn’t stop) and we ate until we ached, we probably consumed rather less to hit that full-to-bursting point.

You're not supposed to serve curry in a pickled tea dish, but it is pretty!

A bit like eating in a really swanky restaurant I suppose, though rather more manageable on a day-to-day basis!

Second, the starch was almost entirely rice - we had hardly anything wheat- or spud-related - and virtually no dairy either (much to the cheese-eating monster’s chagrin). Now I’m not going to go all mentalist/nutritionalist on you but it seems more than coincidence that cutting out the bloaty stuff left us less bloaty...

An experiment then - to spend a month or so revisiting that style of food in the hopes of living like kings and looking like models. Almost certainly too good to be true of course, but it’s got to be worth a go. At worst we should end up rather better noodle-whackers than we started.

Our primary inspiration for this is coming from:
MiMi Aye (Meemalee)
Uyen Luu
Ching-He Huang
Naomi Duguid

So thanks in advance to those lovely people, and we’ll let you know how we get on.

All images (c) PP Gettins