Domestic Science

I've moved

I moved ages ago, actually.  I just forgot to post here and say so. 

I now record my adventures in housekeeping over here.  Come by and say hello.

I don't care what the weatherman says...

…It might be raining a hailstorm out there, but I am too busy in the kitchen to notice.  After a quick trip into Crouch End for some essential ingredients, I’ve been hard at work.

First up was the ceremonial Starting of the Homebrew.  The Other Half has invested in a complete kit to make 40 pints of Woodford Wherry, and we got it going this morning.  Should be ready for Christmas. 

Next up: mincemeat.  Suddenly realised that it wasn’t that far off until Christmas and I had no mincemeat at all, as I used up all the old stuff in fruitcakes.  So there is a large tray of fruit and spices cooking slowly in the oven.  I follow the recipe from Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, though I exercise a fair bit of latitude as to the actual fruit involved.  I like sultanas, raisins, figs, dates, and no candied peel whatsoever.  I also add any odds and ends lurking in the cupboard, which this year involved a few organic apricots and a packet of dried cranberries that came free with an Ocado delivery; I am sure the lady who introduced Cranberry mania to the British would approve.  That’s got another 2 hours to go before I add the rum and bottle it.  I put the fruit for the Christmas cake to soak at the same time and I’ll make that tomorrow. 

Then there was the tomato plants.  The last fruits are never going to ripen, so I gave in and made chutney.  Fortunately I had a punnet of ripe tomatoes from the veg box, and another punnet of ripe-ish ones that I picked last week and have been ripening indoors, so its going to be a nice red colour and definitely different to the dark sticky chutney we already have from the big bag of green tomatoes our friends gave us this time last year.  Not that I am knocking the traditional dark chutney, but the donors of last year’s green tomatoes also gave us a jar of  amazing red tomato relish and I am trying to replicate that.

I am running out of bacon, so I bought a slab of belly pork this morning and that is now dry-curing in the fridge.  Can’t wait till it’s ready and I can try out the new hand-cranked slicer (just like my Mum’s) that I bought on eBay a while back.  The nice butcher boned the pork for me, and the bones are now in the slowcooker with some lamb bones I had stashed in the freezer, making stock.  I roasted them first, and added some instant veg stock so it should be nice and tasty.

We also had a milk glut.  I haven’t been eating enough porridge, I think that’s the problem.  So I am making English muffins, and also broccoli, cauliflower and Stilton soup.  Both use up milk, and the soup not only deals with the chunk of Stilton lurking in the fridge, but also the problem that this week’s box had both broccoli and cauliflower AGAIN!  And the Other Half won’t eat either of them. 

I wanted to bottle my latest batch of ginger beer too, but I can’t as I have run out of large saucepans to mix it in.  So that will have to wait until tomorrow; I can do it while I am baking the Christmas cake.   I’ll also be slow-cooking a pheasant, as they had them on offer at 3 for £10 at my butchers.  Such good value. 

But that is tomorrow’s work; for now, I am frankly exhausted so I am just going to sit here and knit, while my chutney reduces, and look forward to the ribeye I bought as a treat for our dinner.

Brambling free

I’m not sure I ought to tell you about the new campsite we’ve found.  It might get all trendy and popular and end up like Blackberry Wood, where you have to book 12 months in advance.  However, it’s a very new site, and in fact only a pilot this year - we need to encourage the owners with some regular custom, so they set it up permanently.

It’s called Forge Wood, in Kent, just 10 minutes from Tunbridge Wells.  There’s a meadow, pretty flat with soft grass, where you can pitch round the edge next to the woods.  Then there’s the woods, which are still pretty undeveloped, and would benefit from larger clearings being made, but do offer that Ray Mears experience - you are positively encouraged to gather firewood and indulge in fancy wood craft. 

There’s the possibility of a campfire - as the place has only been open two weeks you may have to lug stones from the heap by the firewood stack, to make your own firepit.  But you get to choose where you put it.  And you don’t have to chop your own logs, John the manager does a heap with his chainsaw in the afternoon. 

There’s only one shower and toilet for each sex at the moment, but it’s properly plumbed in, immaculately clean, and I never had to queue.  And there’s the Forge wood tearooms, open Wednesday to Sunday from 9-5, dispensing cappucinos, ginger beer, and the best cheese & onion toasty I ever tasted. 

And then there’s the brambles - all the way around the edge of the site, and they have just started ripening.  We picked a kilo of blackberries without really trying, and brought them home in one of the ziplock bags I optimistically persist in packing in my camp kitchen box, for just this sort of opportunity.   I’ve just made them into bramble and apple jam, and it’s utterly delicious. 

What I've learned about sourdough

My other half, knowing my interest in cakes and baking, kindly bought me a copy of The Handmade Loaf.  (My OH quite often buys me cookbooks, and also egged me on to buy a Kenwood Chef.  My OH likes cake and home made bread.  These facts may be connected.)

The first thing I learned from this book was that quick yeast and slow baking techniques don’t mix.  The quick yeast had run out of steam long before the bread went in the oven and the loaf fell extremely flat.  So, I decided to make some slow yeast of my own, and enter the mad world of sourdough.  My first few attempts didn’t go that well, but I persisted, and spent a fair bit of time on Dan Lepard’s forum (definitely worth a visit if your bread is misbehaving) and learned a few things, which I now share with you.

Leaven needs yeast from somewhere.  Yeast seems to be more plentiful on organic rye flour than on ordinary white flour (even the organic sort).  White leaven was still pretty feeble after a week.  Feeble leaven = feeble bread.  My all rye leaven was lively after 4-5 days. 

Leaven will come back to working order much faster than the books say.  Once I made my leaven and the first batch of bread, I fed the leaven with equal parts flour and water, left it out for about 4 hours, then put it in the fridge.  I forgot to take it out two days before the next bake, as per the book - I only remembered on Saturday late afternoon, for a Sunday bake.  On Saturday night, I chucked away half the mix, added the new flour and water, and left it out overnight.  By the next day it was perfectly lively, bubbling away like mad.

Sourdough really is quite a wet dough.  Really wet.  Never mind Mr. Lepard and his ‘don’t mess with the perfect flour and water balance, just knead it in oil…’.  I was going through bottles of oil to stop the stuff sticking long enough to give it a few decent kneads.  I went back to flour.  Rye flour fends off stickiness much better than soft white flour.  Just try it - you’ll see. 

The dough also makes a lot less mess if you corral it in a large roasting tin for the duration of the kneading and rising period.  Knead in the tray, shape into the ball, and leave in the tray with a cloth over.  Then you can move it to one side while you do other things, and you don’t have to constantly wipe down the surface.

Unless you are trying to make flat bread, you do need something to hold the loaf up while you rise it.  I gave in and bought cane bannetons, special bread proving baskets, on eBay. (Also a big scraper thing for shoving the dough about, and a special slasher for cutting the dough.  Still struggling with the slashing part.)  And even after all that, it will still be much flatter than you average chemically lifted supermarket bloomer.  That’s fine.  It’s supposed to look like that.  The other advantage of the cane bannetons is the nice ridgy pattern they leave on the crust, which looks very professional.

If you can’t be hovering over your dough all morning, to lovingly tend it with a short knead every hour or so, you can make up the sourdough in your mixer in the usual way with a 10 minute knead.  Then leave it for about 4 hours, come back at lunch time and shape it, leave it another 4 hours, and bake it.  I couldn’t really detect a massive difference, it still was perfectly acceptable bread. 

And finally I have learned that it is worth it.  Sourdough bread keeps better, tastes better, is more filling (so you eat less), toasts really well, and makes utterly brilliant bread crumbs with the last bit of loaf so you don’t waste a bit (I use an electric coffee grinder for this - but then I don’t use it for coffee, I can’t imagine coffee crumbs would be nice).  The OH thinks it’s good bread too.  Which is just as well, as he started it all in the first place.

50s glamour on two needles

I’ve been busy with my needles this year.  The trick I’ve learned is to only knit things you rather desperately want, and then you tend to finish them.  Like this glam version of ‘resort casual’ from a replica of Vogue Knitting 1957:

I bought the PDF from the lovely people at Vintage Knitting Patterns, and I would quite like to knit up the whole volume eventually. The models looks so elegant, not a bit of dodgy swiss embroidery or badly designed fair isle in the whole book.    I’m rather pleased with my interpretation.  It’s a gamble knitting anything that is supposed to fit, especially using different wool, but I was rather surprised that my substitute yarn (Rowan’s Silk Wool DK) knitted up to the perfect tension, even though I knit using the Continental method (or as my charming younger sister puts it, I ‘knit weird’) and for some reason generally knit things 10% bigger than specified in UK or US patterns. It’s not perfect, but it fits, and it came out how I wanted it.  Now all I need is a demiwave and a pair of perfect white linen shorts…

Down with dry cleaning

Dry clean only labels drive me mad, in so many ways.  There’s the cost, there’s the dubious environmental impact of all that solvent, there’s the remembering to drop off and pick up, and having your stuff out of circulation for a few days - or a week if you have a bad memory like me.  And there’s the worry of handing over your precious clothes to a stranger.  And when that is my best vintage suit, 1950s couture from the London house of Lachasse bought for only £75 because of moth damage and beautifully repaired at significantly more expense by the Invisible Menders in Marylebone, that is rather stressful.  But some things you just have to dry clean.

On the other hand, lots of things you don’t.  I don’t really mean to put lots of cleaners out of business, but it seems more and more things that could be washed are being sold as dry clean only because presumably the makers can’t be bothered to test washability.  So I thought I’d share my recent washing rebellion successes and tips in case you felt like risking it yourself.  But please do be careful - think before you wash!

First up, I tend to think about why the manufacturer would have put on a dry clean label.  Some fabrics or fabric constructions react badly to the usual solvent we use to remove dirt - I.e. soap and water, forcing us to use other solvents to remove the grease and dust.   Sometimes we can manage the impact of soap and water by handling clothes carefully in the process, and sometimes we can’t.   For example, many fabrics shrink the first time they are washed.  If they were made up into clothes without being ‘pre shrunk’, when you wash them in water you may end up with a garment that is too small. Lined items are a particular challenge because the lining and outer fabric can shrink differently, pulling the whole garment out of shape.  A suit jacket is the extreme example of this: a good quality suit has interlining, interfacing, and padding as well as the ordinary fabric and lining - you are unlikely to get that back in shape if you wash it.

Water tends to disarrange fibres, particularly natural ones, meaning you need to iron them flat again when they are dry.  If the item is a fiddly shape, the fabric is very delicate, or the trimming means it can’t be ironed, you may not be able to get the garment to  look how you want it too.  Some fabric dyes are water soluble - if in doubt, try to patch test on a seam or hem.  And some fabrics just can’t be washed as the fibres get too damaged.  However, wool, silk, cotton and linen should not be in that category.  The main think you have to guard against with these fibres is shrinkage, and in some cases fading.  That means washing gently, with cool water, and drying or ironing to manage shrinkage.

So for example - silk blouses.  I can’t understand why these are so often dry clean only.  If it came from a high street store, it isn’t going to be fancy natural dyes, and tightly woven fine silk doesn’t shrink, or not so I’ve ever noticed.  Looser hopsack weaves can, but not blouse silk.  The first time I wash a particular silk top, I might handwash it gently in cool waster with a little gentle detergent - I use a liquid so it is easy to dissolve in cool water.  I rinse well in several changes of water (the boring bit), blot out most of the water by rolling up in a clean towel and twisting the towel roll for a minute or two, and hanging up to dry on a coat hanger.  The blouse may look a little shrunken, because the fabric crinkles up a bit, but it will spread back out fine when you iron it with a cool iron.   If that goes well, I will probably chuck the blouse in the wash in future, on 30 degrees, in a net washing bag to protect them from snags.  The washer rinses better than I do and is more water efficient.

I apply the same approach to cashmere and other fine wool sweaters.  Its really important to keep cashmere clean, as it is prone to grit induced holes, so wash it often. You may get holes anyway, but if you catch these when they are tiny they are easy to stitch up with sewing thread the same shade as the yarn.  Check for them when you are washing.  I confess I also put new cashmere and most wool through the washer on a cool wash too, though I still handwash vintage pieces.  Ok it shrinks sometimes, but it is worth the risk because I have so many of these thin jumpers and I would spend half my weekend handwashing other wise.

When I really started to gamble was with vintage dresses bought on eBay.  They usually arrive filthy and dry cleaning doesn’t seem to get them properly clean.  In particular, one grey wool dress stank of sweat even after dry cleaning, and was unwearable till I could get it clean.  So after several assaults with Febreeze spray, and also white vinegar (good at odour removal on washable items) I took the plunge and washed it gently in cool water and detergent - in the bath so I didn’t need to scrunch it up.  Having rinsed the dress and blotted it by rolling in a towel as described above, I eased it on to my dressmakers dummy and zipped it up.  I reckoned if it was dried on a me shaped model, it couldn’t shrink so that it no longer fitted me. 

Bingo!  Not only did the dress come out fresh, clean, and still fitting me, it also dried smooth and didn’t need ironing.  This is now how I wash all my dresses and skirts, even lined ones, where there is the risk of shrinking.  In fact, with one skirt I made myself of hopsack silk came out a bit big, and I used this method to shrink it to fit.  I have had the odd case where the skirt shortened a bit, and I had to take the lining up to match, but that was another homemade job, and the lining was always on the long side.  If this is a real worry because the lined item hasn’t ever been washed before, I would perhaps let the hem down before I washed it the first time, and then turn it back up the right length afterwards.  I don’t wash suit skirts though - these are always cleaned with the jacket to avoid colour differences between the two items.

You might think its a bit excessive to buy a dressmakers dummy just to wash things, but if you have a lot of items it will save you money in the long run.  Mine cost £150,  but it costs me £8 each time I get a dress cleaned.  I did buy it mainly for dress making, but I am growing convinced that it is essential just for maintenance of your wardrobe if you are serious about clothes, particularly vintage. 

I have also washed dry clean only trousers with success - mainly simple unlined ones,  They shrank a little, but in the case of my linen oxford bags, that was a good thing as I kept treading on the hems.  To make sure I got the full shortening effect I was very careful to press rather than iron, to avoid stretching the fabric lengthways.  On the other hand, my wool pallazo pants needed to be kept long, so when I ironed them out I made sure to iron lengthways and stretch them back to the original size. 

High speed sewing: tea towel cutlery roll

The camping season is upon us.  And this year, the cookbox will stay tidy, and organised, and the teaspoons won't all fall to the bottom, nor will sharp knives lurk under the ketchup to stab the unwary.  Because THIS YEAR, I have made a cutlery roll.  The inspiration struck on Saturday afternoon and by tea time I had made what I needed, thanks to a dash round Tesco and a couple of hours with the pins and needles.  Should you also want to restore order to your cutlery, here's how I did it.

You will need:
a tea towel - mine came from Tesco, £3 for 3 tea towels.  The other two will also go camping, no more drip drying for MY Cath Kidston picnic ware...
Needle & thread
pins
A ball of string (sort of optional)
A crochet hook (even more optional)

First, lay the teatowel out flat and fold one end up to the depth needed to hold your cutlery.  Pin several straight lines, one each side and a few in the middle, to make pockets, like so:
Sew along the pins using backstitch.  This teatowel was waffled so the grid was very handy to help keep my stitches straight. Fold the top part over the pockets and roll up - voila, a cutlery roll.  If you have had enough sewing now, you could always keep it closed with an elastic band or spare hairband.  Alternatively, get a ball of string and your crochet hook.  Make a slipknot, and using the hook, pull the string throughto make a new loop.  Keep hooking the string through to make a chain like so:

When the chain is long enough, cut the string, pull the loose end through, and pull tight to close.  If you don't posess a crochet hook, you could just plait the string to make a similar rope.

Pin the string in place on one edge of the roll. about where the top of the pockets is, and check you can do the roll up and tie securely.  Sew the string in place.  You're done.
Okay, its a very black cutlery roll.  But this is going to a campsite, remember, and black won't show the dirt.  If you wanted something more arty you could use a flowered tea towel , or a vintage one from a charity shop.  You could use anything for the ties - bits of ribbon or whatever.  I quite like string though. 

And I've proved you can sew even without a trip to John Lewis haberdashery.  Your local Tesco will suffice, at a pinch.  Next week: Spontex scourers into corsages.  I'm sure Gok Wan would approve...

Slow cooker checken stock

I’ve been writing about my slow cooker a bit recently, but I haven’t covered the main reason I bought it - which is to make stock.  The topic is covered in The New English Kitchen by Rose Prince but she says that slow cookers aren’t really worth it for chicken stock, because you don’t need to cook chicken stock for so long.  I think she is wrong. The best stock I ever made from a roast chicken (pre slow cooker anyway) was using our friend Ian’s method: bung the stockpot in a very low oven overnight.  It worked brilliantly apart from the enormous expense and distressing waste of heating a fairly large oven to cook a moderate casserole of stock (not to mention the racket our oven makes when it’s on - it’s the door cooling fans, I could hear them roaring like a cyclone all night).  Hence my bright idea of using a slow cooker.

It has worked even better than I could have imagined - such a neat and easy way of turning a leftover carcass that you would normally throw out into 3 pints of useful stock that will genuinely make your risottos and soups taste so much better.  (And if you can’t even face chopping a carrot I have a very lazy version for the truly idle, at the bottom.)  To come clean, I have to admit that for the truly easy life you need not just a slow cooker, but a freezer, a microwave, and 6 tupperware tubs that take a ½ pint each.  But that isn’t asking too much of most kitchens, is it?  So here we go:

Take your leftover roast chicken, and pick it over, separating the meat into one pile and the rest into another.  I mean everything - bones, skin, everything you really don’t think you could face putting in a sandwich.  Steal the bones off your diners’ plates too.  Put the meat in the fridge (don’t forget to eat it up) and the rest of the stuff in the slow cooker.  To the bones etc add a couple of carrots, washed and chopped; an onion, skinned and chopped; two bay leaves; 6 or so peppercorns; a good teaspoon of celery seed or a chopped stick of celery (this is ideal but not critical); 3 pints (or 1.5 litres if you are that way inclined) of water.  Note: NO salt.  Close the cooker, and set to cook for about 6 hours.  Go to work, or leave over night, or do something else interesting while it brews.

When you come back to your cooked stock, take a big jug or bowl or saucepan, and sit a sieve in it.  On the work top, also have ready an empty carrier, sides rolled down to it sits up like a bowl and lined in the bottom with paper towel or a layer of newspaper (this stops your bin going soggy).  Ladle the stock out of the cooker and through the sieve into the jug, letting the sieve catch all the veg and bones.  Periodically empty out the sieve into the lined carrier. When you have tipped all the stock through the sieve and got all the bones and mess in the carrier, tie it up the bag and bin it. 

Divide the stock between your 6 tupperware tubs, label, cool, and freeze.  When you need stock, microwave a tub (on high, don’t waste time with the defrost setting) and bung in whatever you are cooking.  I find ½ pint portions are handiest, as it’s easier to defrost two tubs for soup than to only have a one pint tub in the freezer when I need a small amount for gravy.

This same approach works for other leftover bits of bird like pheasant or partridge, and makes fantastic game soup - especially if you shove a glass of wine in the stock pot.  Use proportionally less water - if you are using one pheasant carcass you only need a pint or so - plus the wine.  In this case also add other goodies like bacon and herbs - refer to the recipe for grouse soup in the River Cottage Meat book if you want (slightly more) exact instructions. 

Now, for the really lazy version.  Imagine you have a chicken carcass, but tragically you haven’t a carrot in the house.  Or an onion.  And it is late on Sunday night and not a shop open, and you know if you put off making your stock it just won’t happen, not until the carcass has had to be binned anyway.  Here’s the emergency stock plan:  follow the method above exactly - but instead of adding the carrot, onion and celery you add about 3 teaspoons of Marigold vegetable stock powder.  Continue exactly as above, and you will get a perfectly good chicken stock.  It won’t be as good as doing it with real veg, but it will be a hell of a lot nicer than even the poshest bottled chicken stock concentrate, and a lot more like chicken stock then plain Marigold powder.  Which, for plain risottos or even a leek and potato soup, can be the difference between a perfectly nice supper and a truly great supper.

Frying pan baking

I planned to make enchilladas this week with leftover roast chicken.  Enchilladas need tortillas, and my normal course is to get a pack from Tesco.  However, it was raining, and I had time on my hands, and there is a recipe for tortillas in my lovely new River Cottage meat book, so I decided to try making them myself.  

They aren’t really that hard, being just flour, a bit of lard rubbed in, and warm water to bind to a soft dough that you knead like bread dough for 10 minutes.  I must confess I can only contemplate recipes involving kneading because I have a Kenwood mixer with a dough hook that does it for me, but from all I read of cooks elsewhere, my reluctance to knead is an oddity.  Everyone else seems to find it tolerable, even enjoyable.  I find it desperately dull and prefer to leave it to the mixer which does it better than me anyway. 

For me, the hard bit comes with the rolling out - that is, if you have like me a preconceived idea that a flour tortilla should be round.  You rest the dough for about an hour, and then divide it up into lumps about the size of a small egg.  Each one you roll into a ball, flatten, and press out into a circle with the palm of your hand.  So says my recipe, anyway.  This got me nowhere, and made my arm ache to boot - you are aiming for very thin discs, it takes ages by hand - so I got out the rolling pin.   This was a lot less effort, but the damn things went square, egg shaped, sort of triangular - every shape but round.  At least they went flat.  If I had kids, this would be the bit I’d convince them was jolly fun so they did it for me.

Once you have got your heap of flat thin discs, you get a non stick frying pan pretty hot, and cook the discs one at a time, about a minute on each side, so that brown spots appear and the tortilla puffs up.  You need to press it down once you have turned it over, with a rolled up tea towel, giving you lots of opportunity to burn your hand, but it doesn’t take long, as they cook so quickly. And you just stack them in a tea towel to keep warm and stay soft.  They tasted so much better than bought ones - thinner and crisper, and generally tastier, and they keep perfectly well under clingfilm in the fridge.  You just treat them like shop bought ones once they are made.  I understand they freeze well too, but this batch hasn’t had chance.

Inspired by this successful foray into frying pan baking, I decided to give English muffins a go.  I normally get these from Tesco in packets as well, but muffins from organic flour are pretty thin on the ground, and I also rather resent handing over money to the dreadful companies that perpetuate the Chorleywood Bread Process.  English muffins are a bit more complex than tortillas, being made with a yeast dough: the usual 450g of bread flour, 1 teaspoon quick yeast, a splash of oil, a heaped teaspoon of salt, and  just under 300ml of warm liquid - the difference from ordinary bread is that you use mostly milk for the liquid.  Knead the dough and leave to raise in the usual way, before rolling out to a 1/2 inch thick sheet and cutting out with a muffin sized cutter.  Rerolll and cut till you have about 12 muffins. 

Leave to prove under a tea towel for half an hour, then heat your frying pan over a low flame and cook a few muffins at a time, about 7 minutes a side.  St Delia (for it was her Complete Cookery Course that gave me the method) doesn’t say to use a lid, but I did, and I suspect the resulting steamy atmosphere helped the muffins to rise and stay soft.   Once you have cooked all the muffins, you can cool and store them, to split and toast and smother in butter whenever you get the urge.  Or more prudently in a household of only two people, you put half of them in the freezer in polybags for another rainy day.  

Cold roast pork for a cold night

Snowed in today, which feels odd living in North London.  A good day in the kitchen filling the freezer with tubs of stew and individual shepherds pies, so when I came to cooking my own supper I wasn’t feeling up to much.  Fortunately, we still had a good chunk of roast belly pork leftover from yesterday’s dinner, and I had enough energy to chuck together some spicy kare lomen sauce to go with it.  I got this recipe out of the Wagamama cookbook, though I have adapted it a bit over time, because I don’t generally have fresh red peppers or lemon grass hanging about, when I want to make this to go with leftover roast meat.  I’ve detailed my version below, which is very easy if you have a mini chopper, a bag of frozen roast peppers, and a few basic oriental ingredients about your kitchen.  Its perfect for turning cold roast meat and plain rice into a cheering hot meal - I don’t heat the meat up, I really like the cold cold meat and the hot spicy sauce.

I wish I had discovered frozen peppers years ago.  They come ready grilled and chopped, grown in Spain so easier on the carbon footprint than local hot house ones, and because they are frozen you never waste any.  My mini chopper is also a kitchen essential, for me.  It’s a tiny little food processor, designed I think for baby food, but handy for small amounts of sauces that you can’t process in a regular machine.  It was incredibly cheap and always seems on the verge of giving out, but somehow keeps working.  The other ingredients aren’t that exotic, really - Thai fish sauce, coconut cream, lime juice, curry powder, and smoked paprika crop up in so many recipe books that anyone with an addiction to cookery programmes like me will probably have them hanging about, bought after one too many episodes of Jamie or Nigella, and maybe forgotten since.  Here’s your chance to use them up. 

So here we go - cold roast pork kare lomen:

 Get out your mini chopper, and stuff into it a small onion (roughly chopped), a clove of garlic (ditto), and about a teaspoon of that ready chopped ginger you get in jars (don’t let me stop you chopping up the real deal if you have it).  Fill up the rest of the chopper with frozen grilled peppers (still frozen), and blitz in bursts till you have a rough paste.

Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a small pan, and fry the paste from the chopper for a few minutes.  Add 1/2 tsp each of sweet smoked paprika and curry powder - I use Bolst’s hot curry powder, and if yours is mild you may need to also add a bit of chilli powder or sauce.  Keep frying until the paste smells cooked, I.e. not of raw onions.

Add 1 cup (250ml) of water and 1 sachet of creamed coconut - I use Bart’s sachets that you heat in a mug of hot water because its easy to deal with.  You could chop up and add about a tablespoon of regular block coconut instead.  Stir all together, then add 1/2 tsp hon dashi powder (japanese stock powder - if not available, leave out.  I get mine from the Japan Centre in Picadilly which is scary as all the signs are in Japanese and you have to guess what you are buying), 1/2 tsp of sugar, and hearty splashes of lime juice and Thai fish sauce. 

Add a good pinch of salt, simmer a few minutes more, and serve with plain white boiled rice and slices or chunks of cold roast pork.  Or lamb.  Or beef, probably, though I haven’t tried it.