A weekend of old Beijing style cooking

Five spice beef with potato

Diced beef slowly stewed in Chinese herbs and spices for 2 hours, then take out some of the nice beef sauce to cook the potato.  I’ve eaten potatoes in so many ways and I can tell you this is the best way of cooking potatoes!

Potatoes being cooked in rich beef sauce

This dish is such Beijingers’ favourite.  It can be eaten heartily with potatoes or rice noodles or just with seasonal vegetables.

The finished product - heaven!

Beijing style fried chicken

Eat your heart out KFC!  Best fried chickens are in town! 

The secrets?  No not 11 different herbs and spices but…

First, use free range chicks.  TV hasn’t been lying, happier chickens make for tastier food.

Second, the spices.  The ingredients we used were all fresh and easily sourced (salt, sugar, chilli powder, spring onions, ginger, garlic, fresh chillies, light and dark soy sauce, rice wine and vegetable oil).  I just had a quick search online, apparently the KFC original recipe chicken had MSG in it!!!  Oh how I hate MSG – right no more KFC from now on or rather, I will limit this to once a month going forward!

Chinese fried chicken served on Chinese newspaper - authentic!

Most efficient way to cook eggs

If you have a rice cooker at home, this is definitely the most efficient way to cook rice.  How peasant chic!

Just make sure you wash the eggs before hand!

No time to cook eggs - never again!

Stir fry enoki mushroom with cucumber

Ingredients

1 spring onion, thinly sliced

1 very small knob of ginger (about 1 cm cube), finely chopped

A bag of fresh enoki mushroom 100g, remove the stalks and wash

1 medium sized cucumber, finely sliced

1 tablespoon of vegetable oil

A pinch of salt

1 teaspoon of dark soy sauce

1 teaspoon of light soy sauce

Heat up the oil in a wok then add spring onion & ginger and fry for 30 seconds.  Add mushrooms and cucumber to the wok and stir fry for 1 minute.  After that add salt, dark and light soy sauce and stir fry for a further 3 minutes and you’re done!

You can’t get more simple but delicious meal than this – enjoy!

Note: you can buy enoki mushrooms from any Chinese supermarket.  They’re available fresh or canned.  You can find the fresh ones in the vegetable section.

Crayfish fishing!

The Boyfriend’s dad called and told us that he’s found a river in Northampton where we could fish for Crayfish.  He’d been down there last weekend to catch dinner and wondered if we wanted to have a try.  Hell yea!

We met the family at the house and the dad drove us to the river which I had no idea where it was. 

As it turns out, fishing for crayfish couldn’t be simpler.  All we did was, grab a small fishing net, hook a bit of bait, in our case a bit of raw chicken, onto the end of the wooden fishing pole and head then head straight to the river bank. 

Crayfish don’t swim and they walk along the bottom of the river bank so we had to lower our fishing pole right down to the bottom of the bank.  We waited patiently for the crayfish to come and eat the chicken.  Five minutes’ gone and I still couldn’t feel anything biting the bait so I decided to pull it up and check.  To my surprise, there was a crayfish at the end of the pole.  YAY!   I yanked the pole and tried to scoop the crayfish using my net, only to see the buggar scurry away!  Arrrh!  Apparently the technique is to go SLOW and STEADY when pulling the crayfish to the surface so they hang on long enough for you to scoop them up.

Champ

An hour in and still no luck.  Unfortunately my lack of co-ordination (and dare I say patience) meant crayfish fishing did not come naturally.  The Boyfriend and his family had caught a whole bucket of crayfish already , and I had still to catch one.  However, my despair turned to joy 15 mins later when managed to land one! 

My first crayfish!

It may have only had one arm, but I didn’t care, I had caught my first crayfish!

Only one claw...

Now came to my favourite part, cooking and eating the crayfishes.  Place the crayfishes in a deep pot covered with cold fresh water for 30 minutes, then rinse well.  Place the crayfishes in a steamer and steam for 6 minutes and they’re ready to eat. 

Best bit about fishing

Serve with a garlic vinegar sauce:

Garlic vinegar

100ml Chinese vinegar

3 knobs of garlic, finely chopped

A small knob of ginger, finely chopped

One medium red chilli, finely chopped

2 tablespoons of light soy sauce

1 tablespoon of dark soy sauce

½ teaspoon of sugar

Simply mix or shake together and serve.

How food saved my week.

I. Feel. Like. Death!!

I’ve been suffering from a summer cold  all week and it’s only gotten worse from Thursday onwards.  My voice is gone and I can only occasionally breathe out of one nostril!  I suppose this is good news for the guys at the office – at least they can spend the day in silence like true accountants!

But this week has been horrendous – even without taking into account the cold from hell. Work has been so busy that I haven’t left the office before 7:30pm all week!  Lost my temper at a colleague. Used the F word three times in less than a minute! Accountants *don’t* loose their temper, accountants *don’t* raise their voice and accountants definitely *don’t* swear in the office!  In all honesty I did go over the top, but he was rude and I’m not one for hiding my feelings…

So what  was it that saved my week? That’s easy. FOOD!!

Nuocmam

Went out with Sophie and Natalé on Wednesday and we had a fab time in Nuocmam!  If you’ve never been, it’s well worth a try. Nuocmam is a Vietnamese and Japanese fusion restaurant, just around the corner from Oxford Circus.  The food was nice – I recommend the starters over the mains.  The three of us ordered 5 starters, 2 sushi rolls, 2 salads and 1 main. Don’t be surprised. None of us are a size zero, we all love our curves and more importantly, we love our food!! The only thing to top the  food was the fact that we were all in red heels and the walk back to the station in unity was fantastic! People stared and, high on good food and girly fun, we giggled the whole way!

Went out with other friends on Friday. We didn’t book anywhere in advance this time. Doh!  Friday night in central London with no booking?!  After being turned away for the 3^rd time we ended in Arirang on Poland Street near Oxford Circus.  I have been there a few times, but this was the first time after its recent renovation.  The management team is still the same, but the decor is much better.  My favourite dishes from there are assorted pickled vegetables, Kim Chee pancake, beef, vegetables and rice in a hot stone pot, and noodles with pear in cold soup.  I wouldn’t recommend going for a BBQ at this restaurant – the portions are quite small.  And definitely don’t order the beef pancakes as they’re actually pretty horrible!

Despite going to sleep at 1:30am, I got up at 8am on Saturday to go to my spinning class. I had entirely too many calories to burn. Which I continued doing by going for a 2 and half hours walk around Hampstead with mum! And now I’m absolutely exhausted!  My cold is getting worse, and I suppose that going out twice this week didn’t help. 

I’ve put a chicken to boil for dinner.  Food has always been a comfort and this is a really simple dish that’s guaranteed to bring a smile to my face. Chinese chicken soup! Mum used to make it when I was little when I was ill.

1 medium free range chicken

1 white onion, roughly chopped

3 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped

2 star anise

1 teaspoon of peppercorn

1 tablespoon of sea salt

A thumb size of ginger, roughly chopped

3 litres of water

Wash the chicken and pat dry.  If you want a clearer soup then take the chicken skin off.

In a deep pot bring the water to the boil , then add the rest of the ingredients.  Boil the chicken for 15 minutes on high heat, then boil for a further hour on medium heat.

Serve with seasonal vegetables and plain rice.

Love,

Mama Lan

‘Red Lantern’ mocktail – recipe

Make 4
- 20 raspberries + 12 extra for decoration
- 2 limes
- 2 passion fruit
- Ginger ale to top up
- Crushed ice

Top half the glass with crushed ice. In a jug crush the 20 raspberries and squeeze in juice of a lime. Spoon in the two passion fruit and stir. Pour equal amount into each glass and top with ginger ale. Serve with lime slices and the remaining raspberries on top.