The Natural Order of Things.

Balance, is a beautiful thing. A wonderful thing that keeps everything where it needs to be. Enough force from each side to keep something situated and working. Life, in itself, is obviously a product of a world that is in perfect balance, that a body or a plant exists is because of the balance of an organism and its surroundings. The reason a daisy can live is not by chance, it's because of the situation of its leaves, absorbing sunlight, chlorophyll converts this energy into starch and food for the plant to grow and live and reproduce to make other daisies. Blah blah blah, you get the message. I won't go on too much and sound like a massive hippy, but it's incredibly important in everything. Just so you know.

A proper English daisy. Look at it, it's so damn happy. 

This realisation comes from this wonderful time of year, the lunar new year. I'd say Chūnjié, Chinese new year, but it's not just one singular country that celebrates it on, or around, this day. Bring on Tết, the Vietnamese new year, Seol-nal, the Korean new year and Losar in a few weeks, the Tibetan new year. Even Japan celebrated their new year at the same time up until 1873, when the switched to the dark side and joined the Gregorian calendar on January 1st. I've gotta say, the lunar new year sounds like so much more fun. No huge queues for bars, overpriced tickets, overpriced drinks, and an obligation to have a good time...which inevitably leads to quite the opposite. 

Most of the customs are based fully around family, and even nicer, food (not an insult to my family)! Especially in Vietnam, they have things called Củ Kiệu, which are small pickled leeks, and bánh dầy, which are tightly wrapped leaves filled with sticky rice and meat or rice, perfect for sharing over a dinner table with family. In China, their food has more of a symbolic nature, along with also being damn tasty of course. They enjoy Jiǎozi dumplings, which are shaped like crimped crescents and filled with meat or vegetables, similar to Japanese gyōzas and Nepali Mo mos. Being shaped like crescents, they represent prosperity from the original gold ingots of old China.

But I digress, one of the key concepts in Chinese, in most Asian cooking in fact, is the attitude of balance. Of having your meal perfectly balanced. Everything can be categorised into a Yin or a Yang ingredient, cooking technique etc. Once you've grasped the basics -Yin is boiling and steaming, Yang is roasting and frying - it's pretty simple. Ingredients are pretty obvious too, chances are, the more bold the flavour, the closer it'll be to a Yang segregation. Things like garlic, ginger and chilli are Yang, where rice and most vegetables are classed as Yin. The result of something being unbalanced is something that tastes too salty, something too greasy, or something that leaves you feeling bloated or sluggish, or generally quite pants. It applies everywhere throughout cooking though, it's not just with savoury Asian food. Every baking recipe you follow is a result of some sort of mastery of balance, if you're cake sinks, it's unbalanced, if it rises too much, it's unbalanced, you get the picture. It's logical if you think about it. 

In the spirit of this wonderous occasion I felt the need to get my Soy on all up in here. So I got out my marinade from my Bridge Chow Mein recipe, edited it a little, stuck it on a bunch of steamed chicken wings, and went to town on a bunch of Chinese chicken wings and mango salad.

Chinese Chicken Wings and Mango Salad

Enough for 2 hungry people

For the wings:

6 Chicken wings

1 small red chilli - however hot your liking

3 cloves of garlic - chopped

3 tablespoons (ish) dark soy 

2 tablespoons 

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon ground cumin

A few turns of black pepper

2 tablespoons soft brown sugar

Good squirt of ketchup

1 tablespoon of cornflour

A little salt

For the salad:

1 decent sized ripe mango

Rocket

Baby leaf salad leaves

Baby spinach

Half a cucumber

A small orange

Black pepper

- Put the oven on to heat to about 170C/150C (fan oven)/gas mark 2-3

The marinade/sauce is really simple - chuck everything in a bowl apart from the cornflour, salt and wings and mix it together, easy peasy.

- For the wings, put the cornflour, salt and a few turns of pepper in a bowl and toss the wings lightly in it. At this point you will need a grill pan. Put it in the oven to heat up so it gets nice and toasty. Put the chicken wings you've prepared onto the grill and cover mostly with foil, leaving a slight corner turned up, you'll see why in a minute. Shut the oven door and leave it for ten minutes to cook away nicely under their little house of foil. 

- Open the oven door and pour about a quarter of a jug with water into the bottom of the tray, be careful though, it'll belt out a hell of alot of steam, try to keep the foil as much over your wings so it catches it, and shut the door. Make sure that your wings don't touch the water by the way, they don't want to be boiled, they want to be steamed.

- Just leave them now for as long as you need really, an hour is about right. Carefully take them out of the oven and take off the foil, don't scorch your face off, nobody like a two-face wannabe. Turn the oven up to 170-180C/gas mark 4/5.

- Chuck all your wings in the sauce and toss about like a chef-ey ninja for a little while, or stir them in if you're worried about getting it all over the place. 

- Put them all back on the grill tray and cook away for another 30 minutes or so, keep an eye on it so it doesn't burn though!

- In the mean time time to prepare your salad, make sure all your leaves are washed and dried and whatnot.

- Slice your cucumber length ways so it's all long and pretty looking and put that on top of the bed of leaves you've got going on. 

- Chop or grate your mango (it's a bit of a pain to get it away from the stone but it doesn't have to be perfect looking), chuck it all on top of your leaves. The next bit helps a great deal with flavour, put a few grinds of black pepper on top of the mango and a good squeeze of a fresh orange to citrus this salad up. 

- Serve with some awesome ice water and the lovely, now crispy, chicken wings and eat that bad boy in no time!

Get in mah belleh

For now my dears I shall leave you with the notion that I may be making peppermint cream cupcakes tomorrow, think Viscount biscuits, in cupcake form. Toodle. Oo.

Peace.

JR

Pastry by Association

There are some things that I really hated when I was growing up, mushrooms was one of these things, and waiting for my dinner was another. Now I know how impatient most children are with food, but after gambolling (is that a Black Country term?) around for a few hours I used to be practically clawing at the oven to get my din dins with my brother and sisters.

This nostalgic moment comes after contemplating the fast food world of modern culture. It's not new, at all, and it's be written about to death so I won't go into the whole McDonalds-is-evil thing...even though it is. It was more the actual concept, fast food, for people who need food, fast. When I think of this for some reason I always think of business men and women, trotting about on their lunch breaks trying to get something as fast as possible before going back for the afternoon, but it has sort of taken over people's actual intake of food. It's not just for people in a rush, not even a little bit. It seems to have turned into something for people who are just trundling around during the day kind of food, for drunk students (myself included) at four in the morning because there's nothing else open kind of food, and for lazy people who don't want to cook kind of food. This made me a little sad, 'fast' has gotten a bad reputation because of these people, and it's not done anything wrong, it's just tried to get people from A (hungry) to B (full) very quickly. Poor 'fast', it's been slated by association because of this laziness.

It also made me think of the trending of foods in general, and the transition between fast food being trendy, and then slow food taking over in recent years. Slow cooker and pressure cooker sales have soared because investing in a good slow cooker can reduce your food bills by bunging a load of good ingredients together and cooking it for a very long time. Blah blah blah it's helping with this recession, etc. You get the idea. But it's true, slowing down in life has become sort of normal now, where it was once a wonder that you could get a meal in under two minutes, it is now a a little more wondrous to know that effort, care and time has gone into the creation of your food. Not to say that care and a short amount of time hasn't gone into the fast food that you're eating, but you get my general drift. 

It's a nice thought to think that a chef still enjoys what they do. Because I know personally how hard I will work to open my own little place, and how much I would enjoy every damn minute. Living the hypothetical, overdone dream, I know. 

But onwards from my unoriginal musings. I promised you a pastry recipe, and i'm going to provide one so sexy you will never need another sweet pastry dough in your life (not in the least bit overreacting here either!).

This is part way between a traditional Sable dough - kind of like a shortbread but not as rich - and a workable pastry. It isn't a particularly easy dough to work, but it's easy to make and is so ridiculously nice that you will forgive it's shortcomings otherwise. 

Before I go ahead I have to quickly mention that this isn't my personal recipe, it's from the most amazing book Pieminister. It's got some pretty amazing recipes, and a cute commentary to go along with it, definitely worth your time. It ever so slightly tweaked with timings and sugar and what-not but other then that it's left entirely untouched. Just as a note before you start though you should begin this the day before you need your pies!

Sweet Shortcrust Pastry Dough

Makes enough for 20 small pies (baked in a cupcake pan) or 1 large-ish pie, depending how thick you roll it.

250g unsalted butter

80g-100g icing sugar (depending on how sweet your filling is)

1 tblsp double cream

1 egg yolk

350g plain flour

NB - to make it the best possible pastry, you really should use butter, not Stork or other margerines, I used Yeo Valley and it was perfect. Oh, and don't leave the butter in the fridge because it will take you an absolute age to soften and make your life very, very difficult.

- If you have one, get your electric hand mixer out and cream the butter on medium speed until it is somewhat fluffy. If you don't, you are going to have epic forearm muscles beating the hell out of it with a wooden spoon.

- Beat in the icing sugar until fully combined, then add the cream and egg yolk and mix.

- If you were using an electric hand mixer turn it down to low and mix in the flour, if not, add the flour in batches and stir it relatively firmly until just combined. It should look a relatively moist dough. Flatten it into a sort of thick disc, about three inches high and eight or nine inches across...roughly, I didn't measure it.

- You absolutely need to rest this dough. In short, you will not have a chance in hell in rolling this mother out without chilling it first. If you can, leave it for a whole day double wrapped in the fridge, if you can't 4 hours is the absolute minimum time you should leave it for. The longer you leave it the better it'll be for you though!

- With regards to the filling, obviously it's entirely up to you, apple, cherry, mincemeat are all good, but you do need to alter the amount of sugar you use depending on how sweet your filling is. I find if you're making apple pies it will serve you better if you take a little bit of sugar out of the apple filling and more in the pastry, it tastes so much nicer. The original recipe actually called for 150g of icing sugar but it was far too sweet for me, so I just reduced the amount, but it's your call, if you like things really sweet, you can put 150g in. 

- After you've chilled it, flour your surface and rolling pin and roll it out to about 5mm. You may have to top up your flour to keep it from sticking to your surface, and don't worry if it cracks, just a break a bit off the edge and patch it up it blends quite easily. 

- It will crack at the edges, there's no doubt about that, but the degree of the cracking will depend on how well you've chilled your dough. This sort of cracking was after about a day and a half of chilling, just so you can compare yours.

- Cut and fill to the shape of your pan, fill with your filling (don't be stingy!) and roll out a little pastry for the tops.

- Put them in the oven, about 190C/170C fan oven/gas mark 3-5  for about 15 minutes, but keep an eye on them, you don't want them to brown too much, they're beautiful when pale.

- Leave your beautiful little pies to cool in the tin for about 5 minutes, then turn them out onto a wire rack to fully cool. Or eat them warm, whichever you fancy really.

Evidence that I had to patch up my mince pies a little bit too.

They should look something like that, in theory. But there you go, a recipe for some lovely pastry, if you pair it   with the traditional mincemeat I made just before Christmas, you've got yourself some pretty sexy mince pies. You will honestly never need another sweet shortcrust recipe, this is just too perfect.

Peace.

JR

Curious With Confectionery.

I actually can't believe it's been almost a month since I've written on my little page. After a month of horribly long shifts at my two jobs and no days off, it actually feels quite apt that going into the new year I can actually inhale and take a look of what I want to do this year. I'm not one for planning at all and i'm sure you'll find dozens of other people saying similar things to I right now but I dunno, it felt like a notion worth mentioning. I would apologise like I normally do after a long absence, but honestly, I don't know where I would have fitted the time between all the work and making my presents this year - I'll include a little note about this later on.

But onwards, a succinct recap of Christmas treats. My hamper's shape sort of morphed a few times to fit around my schedule (and ingredients) so I ended up with a wonderfully Winter combination of Spiced Gingerbread, White Chocolate and Hazelnut Cookies, Sailor Jerry's Christmas Cake and Christmas Pudding -as a side note, the capitals are used to remind myself to update this post a little later on with the links to such recipes, as I am almost 100% certain I will forget otherwise. I think it wouldn't quite be Christmas without Sailor Jerry's, it has been almost a tradition to get a good dose of Sailor Jerry's Rum whenever possible since my good days in Wales. And whilst their recipe has changed, to many people's disgust, I have chosen to embrace the new flavours and adapt my recipes to fit in with it. 

Though my mince pies never made it into the hampers due to time constraints, /I forgot to make the pastry, they are most definitely worth a good mention here. Mainly because of the fact that they are possibly the nicest mince pies I have ever made, or tasted for that matter. I know i'm probably biased because I was so proud after almost a month of stewing my mincemeat, barely touching my hamper's other goods...and loving rum, but damn it they were so yum. I shall include the recipe for the pastry soon and, if you have any mincemeat left, you can make them yourself, or if you're feeling a little done with Christmas, you can use it for some wonderful springtime sweet pies.

But enough about Christmas now, it is the furthest possible time from it now, and apart from the recipe I will include about the pastry you shall hear no more of it from me until next time. 

I'm beginning to feel a little curious with confectionery of late. Partly because over the next few weeks i'm beginning a course to attempt to become a very amateur chocolatier, and I invested in a very epic looking sugar thermometer for all my jam and sweetie needs. I'll be honest, it's still in the packet at the moment, though I've had it almost three weeks, but i'm ready and willing to give some sort of tooth melting thing a go. I've delved into the depths of the American market of marshmallows and come across some pretty beautiful things. One of my favourites at the moment is this wonderful little (not really little at all) site called 240 sweet, an Indiana-based artisan sweetie maker which makes Flumps look like crap. 

If i'm not mistaken, I believe this particular one is called Chocolate Chocolate Chip.

I'll be honest, this site has given me singularly the best inspiration to try out my own ones; one, because they pay such beautiful attention to their photographs and two, because the flavours, as a UK resident, seem relatively exotic. I think I might begin my tests with some peppermint crisp marshmallows, see how they turn out and them branch out a little to other flavour dimensions. 

I am off to go and explore the wonders of sweetie land my darlings, I shall be back soon, and with the finding of my memory card reader comes new imagery.

Peace.
JR