Dave's Bit Bucket

Adventures in Bachelor Cookery, part 4: Beef Ramen, Dave Style

I cracked this one the other weekend. Usually, it takes me two attempts to come up with something bordering on the delicious; this is the first time I've ever made something close to inedible the first time as a result of excess chillification, so "be careful out there".

To feed one good-sized bachelor:

• one decent-sized piece of rump steak
• a good teriyaki marinade
• a litre of water
• two vegetable stock cubes
• two sachets of miso paste
• one (and only one) reasonable sized medium chilli
• one sachet of Medium Ramen noodles
• assorted veg (particularly 4 spring onions, half a red pepper, 1 medium chilli, 5 baby corn and 4 asorted shiitake and oyster mushrooms) - ish
• further interesting things (1 thumb-sized piece of ginger root and as many cloves of garlic as you favour, all peeled and finely sliced)

24 hours before you're reckoning on cooking, put your steak (fat trimmed off using Bloody Great Knife) on a plate and liberally douse with teriyaki marinade. Don't put it in the fridge; just keep it somewhere reasonably cool and dark.

Be sure to turn the meat about every 8 hours.

(fast forward to cooking time)

Chop your veg and chilli (I invariably leave the seeds in, but that's just me). Open your noodles and free them up from eachother. Arrange everything in various dishes (I favour small pastic Tupperware-style bowls from Tesco, 35p each...) by order of addition; garlic and ginger can go together first, pepper, chilli and corn can go together as they go in second, noodles go third, mushrooms and onions go in last to keep crisp. NB. This is all prep, don't put any of this stuff in your wok yet!

Put your litre of water, stock cubes and Miso paste in your wok. Bring it up to simmering.

Meantime, get your big heavy frying pan - drizzled with a little sunflower oil - up to such a pre-incandescent heat that the oil is smoking.

Chuck your veg and noodles into your stock, leaving a couple of minutes between additions. Stir everything regularly.

Meantime, put your steak in your insanely hot pan, standing well back and potentially wearing goggles. Pour the remainder of your marinade over the top and watch it go mad. Having your extractor hood running and windows open is a really good idea by the time you get to this bit.

Flip the steak after maybe 2.5 minutes. After a further 2.5 minutes, transfer it off the heat to your chopping board.

You'll probably want to turn the gas right down on the wok at this point.

Slice your steak, with a diagonal bias if you can, with your Bloody Great Knife. It should be decidedly rare in the middle.

Pour your combined noodle / veg soup into a suitable bowl for consumption - I admit I cheated and bought a good one from Wagamama.

Put your sliced steak on top. If you're not keen on eating your meat rare, it will slowly cook itself further in the hot soup.

Serve, with sweet chilli sauce as a table condiment.

(2006-03-06 07:17:28.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Adventures in Bachelor Cookery, part 3: Veg, Stock and Condiments

I'm not hardcore enough (yet...) to go boiling bones and water in a pan for hours to make "proper" stock, so I cheat horribly and use stock cubes and other off-the-shelf concentrates. Kallo vegetable cubes work really well, and I find Knorr chicken cubes to be far too salty.

I similarly find myself lucky enough that my local Tesco stocks Yutaka, Amoy and Blue Dragon products, so I'm able to keep stocked-up on Miso paste, ready-to-wok noodles of various grades, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, sweet chilli and teriyaki sauces, etc as part of my regular shopping.

I also have a cheat up my sleeve in terms of Lee Kum Kee dark chilli soy, as sourced in San Francisco - if things go a little wrong, I've found (with one exception, when I overdid it on raw chillies when putting my first ever beef ramen together) that the addition of something savoury with a chilli kick is to my cooking what forgiveness is to sin. It's as well I like my food spicy.

Yutaka stuff I'm very new to, but the Miso paste serves to add a lovely oriental flavour on top of any other stock base. I typically add it to any Western stock I'm working with. I also have a small bottle of their Mirin, which I have yet to experiment with.

I find Blue Dragon Nam Pla sauce (and wonton soup, which makes a delightful starter) to be thoroughly excellent - if you take a small dish and finely slice finger chillies into it across their section (don't remove the seeds first) before just covering with Nam Pla sauce, you get Nam Pla Prik, which (ideally after a day to marinate) makes the most awesome Thai-style table condiment I know :-).

Amoy deliver the goods well and truly when it comes to tinned bamboo shoots and water chestnuts. Be sure to give them a good wash first, though. Their light and dark Soy sauces are also my first choice (others may favour Kikkoman, but this is just my own taste preference).

However, Amoy "straight to wok" noodles, IMHO, vary. Their Ramen noodles are lovely, although I find that when it comes to serious Udon noodles, I'm fussier than I ever thought I'd be. Wagamama's Udon noodles - and ones I've had in restaurants in the Bay Area - have a square cross-section, which is easy to heft with chopsticks and also holds sauce really well, whereas the Amoy Udon noodles have a circular cross-section that doesn't pass muster so well in either department.

Naturally, a good sweet chilli sauce is worth having in the armoury of table condiments. I'm currently working my way through a bottle of "Cottage Specialities" product (very British, but rather good).

Obviously, you also need to get your veg right. Spring onions are Japanese to begin with, so piling them in is a good idea (slice them on an angle, in sections maybe a centimetre long); and I've always been a huge fan of baby corn (slice once lengthwise). You also can (almost) never go wrong with mushrooms, and many supermarkets stock both Shiitake and Oyster varieties. Slice 'em up coarsely.

Basically, bring 'em on; in fact, before now, I've made a rather pleasant soup out of nothing more than stock and veg (but more of that later).

(2006-03-06 03:46:56.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Adventures in Bachelor Cookery, part 2: Trivial Egg Fried Rice

I figured I'd start with the fundamentals :-).

Funny thing is, I find what I got right here tastes better than any equivalent I've had from a Chinese take-away. I'm not taking pride in my cooking yet, either.

Here's my recipe (adapted a bit from the Wagamama cookbook).

To feed 1 good-sized bachelor, assuming an accompanying main dish of curry, veg, or something else entirely:

• take 1 small mug of rice - I favour Uncle Ben's long grain
• rinse in cold water repeatedly to get rid of as much of the starch as possible
• put the rice in a small saucepan, add 1.33 mugs of water
• bring to the boil
• on reaching the boil, put the lid on the pan and turn the heat right down
• let the pan and its contents do their thing for 10 mins; meantime, add a little sunflower oil to your big heavy frying pan and heat it up to the point where the oil starts smoking (aka "aim for your pan going incandescent"
• also, while this is afoot, mix up a couple of eggs in a bowl
• transfer your rice from saucepan to frying pan, keep it moving with your spatula until the water has just about stopped bubbling (ie it's boiled off) - this is also about the point where you should put any other ingredients in, if you're going for veg, prawns, etc with your rice
• pour your eggs in, move everything around vigorously for a couple of minutes until the rice / egg mix has stiffened uniformly
• transfer to plate

Enjoy. (2006-03-06 03:24:05.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Adventures in Bachelor Cookery, part 1: Introduction, Kit and Principles

So, I'm going to teach myself to cook. This is a pretty tall order, given the huge range of cuisines the world has produced, so which one to begin with?

The decision was made, shortly after New Year, when having lunch at Wagamama Basingstoke, part of my favourite chain of Japanese-style restaurants with locations outside London.

I found that Wagamama had published a cookbook. Better still, that afternoon in Tesco (the UK's largest supermarket chain, for folk outside the UK reading this, and the place I've essentially lived out of for at least 10 years shopping-wise), I found an Oriental cooking set, comprising a wok and spatula, 4 melamine bowls and spoons, 8 chopsticks and a basic cookery book, for 4 pounds 50 on remainder after Christmas.

Game on :-).

PJ O'Rourke, one of my favourite humourists, managed to almost perfectly sum up the spirit of bachelor cookery in his book "The Bachelor Home Companion".

PJ says "if you think of cooking as setting fire to things and making a mess, it's fun". I'd add "playing around with big knives and occasionally obliterating perfectly good pieces of dead flesh in ways which make you think of classic Sci-Fi death rays" to that, but more on the "obliteration" angle later :-).

So, other than ingredients, what do you need to start oriental cooking, and what are the core principles?

Here's the kit I have:

• regular 4-burner gas hob (much more controllable and intense than electric)
• wok (the aforementioned absurdly cheap one)
• small saucepan and lid (for boiing rice)
• big heavy frying pan (for frying rice post-boiling, and dealing with steaks)
• spatula
• chopping board
• Bloody Great Knife (in my case, a 10" Sabatier)

The Bloody Great Knife is used for everything from chopping and trimming meat and chopping veg to peeling garlic. Don't be fooled by knife vendors who say you need a whole block-full of 6 or more knives; as you'll find out from these postings (eventually...) if you didn't know it already, you need one Bloody Great Knife that you can rely on for almost all purposes, maybe a flexible knife for cutting and boning fish (which I'm not up to yet), and maybe a food processor if you're in a hurry, don't worry so much about attention to detail, or want to specialise in obliteration.

As I don't want to ruin said Bloody Great Knife by sharpening it ham-fistedly, I'm fortunate in that the cooks in the (thoroughly excellent, bless them) local pub where I drink regularly are more than happy to keep my knife sharp for me, provided I bring it in wrapped-up and in a zipped-closed bag. They spend maybe 5 minutes doing their stuff, and return it similarly wrapped and so sharp it can almost cut daylight. You might not be so fortunate, but I hope you are.

So, kitted out, I pulled the contents of the Wagamama cookbook off the page and into my brain, and divined some generalisations and conclusions, which I consider to be "core principles", as well as spotting a couple of recipes to start off with. The core principles are:

• there's no substiute for heat, except perhaps more heat
• close interconnecting doors, activate cooker extractor hood and open windows - you're going to be making smoke, and you don't want your smoke detectors going off
• keep everything moving quickly once you start cooking
• cooking is all about buying good ingredients and then working with them so quickly that you don't ruin them (with the exception of marinading, more later)
• cooking is a very fast process, so be sure to have all necessary ingredients chopped, prepped and within easy reach ("prior prep prevents..." and all that) - along with a plate or bowl to decant the finished food into
• be prepared to take huge liberties with recipes, as some ingredients are almost impossible to source in the UK outside London (note to readers; if anyone can point me at a source of Gyoza skins within easy drive of Basingstoke, I'm all ears - otherwise, I'll have to figure out how to make them from scratch and will Get It Horribly Wrong for a while)
• keep a pint of beer to hand - rather than do the whole Keith Floyd "get plastered on wine while cooking" thing, I prefer wine with food but beer while preparing food :-)

btw, a note to my Oriental friends. I know that talking about "Oriental cooking" is equivalent to talking about "European cooking" in terms of scope, and a gaijin like me has only eaten maybe 5% of the range of dishes that the Orient has to offer, but trust me, that 5% tastes bloody good and I aspire to cooking it. In particular, Thai and Hunan food kicks righteous ass. Singapore Noodles likewise. (2006-03-06 03:22:48.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Adventures in Bachelor Cookery, part 0: Preface

Well, where do I start...?

While I was growing up, I was fortunate enough to have a mother who had a reasonable capability with pots, pans and traditional English "home cooking". Granted, she only cooked meat "well done" (as that was how she liked it) and wouldn't cook interesting things like whole trout as she "didn't like the way it looked at her". Nonetheless, she was deft enough with pies, pastries, curries (mmm, maybe a bit ahead of her time there in 1970s South Cheshire), roasts and veg (which at least she didn't boil into tasteless mulch, choosing to leave some flavour and texture in them) to keep me sufficiently well fed that I grew up to a height of 6'4" and eventually ceased to be hugely out of proportion.

However, she refused to teach me to cook. My father didn't know how to cook either, and even if he did, I'm certain my mother wouldn't have let us loose in her kitchen. You get the idea.

They're both dead now, so they can't teach me anything about cooking (or anything else) anyway.

After heading off to University knowing how to cook precisely nothing, I've survived for the better part of 16 years on things out of packets, supermarket ready meals, take-aways, and the produce of pubs and restaurants.

Then, after a few years, I got a girlfriend. She still hasn't moved in full-time - even after 11 years and counting - however she deigns to spend a few weeks a year over here with me. She's got a few signature dishes too, and IMHO they are rather more creative than what my Mum used to serve up with the exception of the curries - although as Jasmina (the girlfriend) hails from Bosnia and still spends most of her time in Sarajevo, her idea of "good home cooking" is rather different to what my mother's would have been, anyway :-).

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate good food. I even managed to dine at the French Laundry (with Jasmina) in 2003, so it could be argued that "most food is downhill from there". Having travelled around a bit, my list of favourite dishes is pretty eclectic. Trouble is, by the start of 2006, I didn't know how to cook a single one of them.

Having gone to the lengths of moving house to try to get some of my life back by being closer to work (as well as providing a more pleasant living environment for Jasmina, in the hope of her staying over here for longer), I now have a bit more time on my hands. I've also been figuring out such fundamental things as chopping and slicing while she's been over here, by doing the "useful boyfriend / magician's apprentice" thing and wielding a knife while directed about how much of what to cut, and how.

Time, I think, to get some of that "home cooking" feeling back. I decided to do so, as a New Year's Resolution.

(2006-03-06 03:20:18.0) Permalink Comments [0]