April Adventures

This month I’ve been focusing heavily on getting craft and DIY projects finished so I’ve been trying to keep my cooking fairly straight-forward and avoiding anything overly complex or time-consuming. (There’s been a lot of stir-fries and big pots of rice in my life this month. My noodle backlog had built up again so the plethora of stir-fries has definitely helped make a dent in that.) To that end, having reached the half-way point of the month without cooking any new recipes, I decided to take advantage of the fact that when I compiled this year’s list I’d actively tried to ensure I had a mix of dish complexity on hand.

So I decided that this month’s new recipe would be a Jack Monroe special, from Cooking on a Bootstrap, a recipe called Creamy Cannelinni and Fennel (seeds) Pasta, a recipe that was originally on last year’s list – I even bought a little jar of Fennel seeds for it! Oddly enough this is the second recipe that I’ve made this year that combined pasta and tinned legumes, something I don’t think it would have occurred to me to do off my own back – fresh ones, certainly, green beans or peas in a pasta salad perhaps – but that worked surprisingly well. It’s a low and slow recipe, with only a handful of ingredients, minimal prep and minimal brain power required, which was ideal for the day I made it when I just wanted something easy and filling that would give me at least one day’s leftovers. I think if I make it again I’ll definitely add more garlic – the recipe is very much adjustable to taste, 2-4 garlic cloves according to preference and I erred on the side of caution – and probably more fennel seeds as I could barely taste them. I also added a sprinkle of hard Italian cheese at the end – which I think it benefited from – for no better reason that I had a packet open in the fridge and I could! It’s not an exciting dish, but the recipe promises creamy and comforting and it absolutely delivers.

(A second day note, this is much tastier the following day, the flavours really mature, but I found it lost a lot of its ‘sauciness’, it was much more of a pasta with beans affair today. Presumably why the recipe suggests if you’re making a bigger batch to store your extra portions of sauce separately and add freshly cooked pasta, so you can add a bit of stock when you’re re-heating the beans to reconstitute it.)

It’s not often that I manage to get round to trying two recipes off the list in one month, and even then it’s usually only when they’re related in some way – companion recipes if you like. However, this month I managed to sneak in a second completely unrelated recipe. Outside of the challenge I’ve been cooking a lot of Japanese and Korean inspired meals, partly due to having appropriate ingredients that needed using up and partly because I’ve got really into watching East Asian food programmes on Netflix recently. I put Egg tamago rolls on the list this year because I keep seeing pictures of cute little lunch/bento boxes with those rolls artfully arrange in them and thinking how tasty and pleasing to the eye they look. Every time I’ve made an omelette recently I’ve pondered the practicalities – do they need to be crepe-thin? how do I roll them? how on earth do I get the ends so neat – but on a lunch inspiration trawl of social media recently I kept coming across people making cute little square lunch items (so they fit nicely in square boxes) in small square frying pans. I felt slightly silly tracking one down, but it immediately proved it’s worth, being the perfect shape and size for my purposes – clearly what it was primarily designed for as it neatly took the half-sheet of nori that I needed to layer on my omelette-ish base. I strongly suspect that my attempt at this recipe would have crashed and burned without it, I’d have likely made it far too thin otherwise, and it was definitely it’s square straight sides that ensured it actually rolled up properly. Sometimes you can adapt and make do, but sometimes the right tool really does make all the difference.

But never-mind my susceptibility to highly specialised tools, how did they taste? Absolutely amazing. Despite having slightly over-cooked the ‘outside’ of my roll, and nearly burning my fingers trying to slice my roll into bite-sized pieces, I immediately resolved to make them again as soon as possible. I’ll definitely need a few attempts at this one to finesse it to my own high aesthetic standards, but it’s an early contender for my favourite new recipe of the year. Even my slightly clumsy first attempt came together surprisingly well, and tasted delicious, both by itself and with it’s dip. Speaking of which, the little dip that the recipe suggests you make with it was a surprise bonus. I didn’t make anything like as much of the ‘wasabi mayo’ as it suggested but it was so moreish I absolutely understand why the instruction suggesting making that much of it, as if you’ve any leftovers then you end up doing as I did and eating the rest with a small stack of dippable crisps! I’ll definitely be making that again, and look forward to experimenting with pairing it with various other snack foods.

Bubble/Boba Tea Success

I have tried on several occasions over the years – probably roughly everytime it comes back into fashion round these parts – to make my own bubble tea. It has been a complete disaster every single time. A while back, I stumbled across specifically for boba tea tapioca, pre-flavoured even, and figured I’d make one last attempt at making my own. The instructions on the back were a bit, lost in translation, shall we say – how much is 10 cups of liquid when it’s at home – so I had been on the hunt for an actually helpful recipe online for while. As so often with these things, I found it while looking for a recipe for something else entirely. While I was putting together this year’s recipe challenge list, I found it on the BBC food website in amongst the Chinese New Year recipes, oddly enough, and added it to the list so I’d have it bookmarked to try later. I do like to have a variety of recipes in the list, suitable to different seasons and moods, I didn’t mean for it to be this month’s recipe but given the derailment my culinary plans have had this month, this is exactly the kind of month it was added to the list to rescue.

Anyway, I ended up making an amalgamation of the two recipes, using the ratios and actual tea ingredients from the BBC recipe and the cooking times and techniques from the back of the packet. (Probably if I’d used the boil and rest, boil and rest technique with the giant tapioca I failed so spectacularly with last time, I’d have had better results.) I substituted out english breakfast teabags for earl grey bags, as the tapioca was lychee flavoured and I thought the flavour profiles would work well together and they did! I also side stepped making my own sugar syrup and just used the vanilla syrup I have for making matcha lattes and London fogs. I even found one of those giant chunky straws to drink it with and could finally claim success in making my own boba tea. It wasn’t even a massively time-consuming faff! I definitely need to get myself a proper latte glass – I like my boba tea hot rather than cold and iced – if I’m going to make this a regular part of my home hot drink rotation, but it worked in an ordinary mug, just looked a little ridiculous!

The one downside was that the instructions on the packet say to eat within 4 hours of cooking, which seemed a very short time in which to eat that much tapioca/drink that much tea, so I stuck it in the fridge and hoped for the best. (I seem to recall other recipes instructing me to refrigerate and eat them within 48 hours.) I tried to make another mug of boba tea the following day to use up the rest of the boba, and initially thought the warning was because the syrup solidified and even once broken up again it was all very unaesthetic, however, the boba itself seemed to have re-solidified enough to be completely inedible. So clearly something to be made in tiny batches or if I have boba loving guests visiting!

Being a firm believer in the idea that practice makes perfect, particularly in culinary terms, I’ve made several batches of boba in an attempt to finesse the process. (And also in an attempt to use up the rest of the packet!) This has been a very tasty iteration process, that has involved a couple of different kinds of tea, and some experimentation into making boba cocktails. (Lychee boba and earl grey work well together, lychee boba and baileys work well together, all three together is just too many flavours in one glass.) Mostly I’ve concluded that while buying the specific tea boba is definitely worth it, I’d rather get the most neutral flavour available to maximise my tea options with any given packet – I definitely don’t drink enough of it to justify having several packets on the go at once – but on the other hand, if they’ve got their own flavour I’m going to give the syrup a miss, as it only serves to accelerate the clumping that the boba seems to want to do naturally, without adding that much to the drink itself.

Additionally, I’ve been using a Starbucks reusable frapaccino cup as my receptacle of choice for my latter experiments, which would probably be less of a surreal experience if I liked iced boba tea. It really is the perfect size though. Relatedly, the only straws I have that are big enough for the job are paper ones and they really don’t hold up to warm beverages. I really need a latte glass for further experiments, the alternative just makes me feel too silly!

Spring Challenge Update

In my last post I was commenting on my derailed attempts at making the next recipe on my 24 in 2024 list of recipes, and looking back at the blog I realised I hadn’t actually written up the recipes from that challenge that I had in fact successfully tried out. So I thought it was high time I rectified that situation. 

Malaysian Dal Curry was actually a recipe left over from last year’s recipe list, than I never quite got round to, but I had a jar of tamarind paste needing used up so I transferred it to this year’s list to give myself a quick and easy choice to get the challenge off to a good start in January! It was one of those recipes where I look down in the ingredients list mentally ticking them off as one thing after another is already in the cupboard. I don’t remember now if I specifically bought a bag of carrots for this recipe or if I had them in already for making soup but either way that’s a maximum of 47p I spent on it, everything else was already on hand, exactly what you want on a cold damp January evening, and so was the hot, filling and tasty result that I ended up with. 

My only real criticism of this recipe is that it needed more tamarind paste. A tablespoon and a half of it to a big pot like that, I could barely taste the tamarind, to the extent that when I was eating some of the leftovers, I added an extra teaspoon of it to my portion and it was much improved. Logically I’m presuming that tamarind is a bit of an acquired taste for some people, but I love it, not being a big chilli fan – a little goes a long way – I lean towards the tangier end of south asian cooking. Without the extra tamarind this is a perfectly serviceable dal – particularly nice with parathas but also good with poppadoms, it just needs something to dunk – but if I make it again I’m definitely dialling up the star anise and the tamarind content because otherwise I might as well just be making tarka dal, those are the ingredients that really make the recipe stand out from the crowd. 

Pasta with Chickpeas and Preserved Lemon was February’s challenge meal. This was a recipe picked almost entirely because it would use up a bunch of things in my cupboard that I’d discovered needed used up when I did my ingredients cupboard clear out mid-January. 

This recipe was also evidentially meant to result in something a bit more like a middle-eastern influenced minestrone situation, however, as it turned out my big pot wasn’t actually quite big enough to contain the sheer volume of stock it called for – a litre and a half doesn’t seem a lot until you’ve already got all the other ingredients in there – I ended up with something substantially thicker. The situation was only exacerbated by the fact that I was just doing it as a bulk cook, before work one day and ran out of time, so it just got left to cool rather than being eaten immediately, and by the time I came to eat it, the remaining liquor had been entirely absorbed. I definitely preferred it as a slightly soupy pasta dish that I could eat with some flat bread, rather than as a soup. Pasta with chickpeas took some getting used to, but it wasn’t an unpleasant combination just one that I found unusual, likewise the preserved lemon added a different dimension to it though I could have done with a bit more of it, but that might just have been the difference between using preserved lemon paste and whole preserved lemons. All in all a successful dinner, not really what I was expecting from the recipe but rather tasty all the same. 

Turning the Wheel Again

Alright, so last year’s attempt at cooking 23 new recipes in 2023 challenge turned out to be a tiny bit overly ambitious, but you know what else it was? Lots of fun. I only cooked 10 of the recipes from my list, but unlike some other challenges of that ilk, I found it more inspiring than restrictive. It definitely led to me cooking a whole bunch of new recipes that weren’t on my list. I ended up making a whole bunch of interesting and different recipes because I’d opened some ingredient for one of the list recipes, enjoyed it and sought out other new recipes to cook with it. (The variety of recipes I cooked to use up the rest of the jar of gochujang paste spring to mind, which has now become enough of a staple of my cooking that it has it’s own tag on here.) And then there’s the recipes I cooked from this list that I enjoyed so much I ended up making them on multiple occasions. All in all it’s been enough of a success that not only have I decided to do it again this year with a new list, two of the recipe books featured in last years list, which were basically sitting in the last chance saloon for their positions on the cook book shelf, gleaned recipes successful that they both got stays of execution.

I haven’t finalised my list yet, because I still have to do my usual January ingredients cupboard clear out – I appreciate that this makes it sound like I only do it once a year, which isn’t true it happens at irregular intervals throughout the year, but usually only a shelf at a time, generally when I’m either looking for something specific that’s got buried or something has burst or spilled and I need to clean, I just intentionally take everything out once a year and prioritise accordingly – and I’ll want to pick some recipes to use up things that are nearing expiry. However I do have a decent list already compiled already.

One thing that I’d planned to do last year which didn’t happen at all was tea reviews. I can’t say that it particularly felt like I wasn’t drinking much tea last year, but I think I ended up mostly drinking the same few teas. Which was nice in some ways, as I’ve clearly found some nice teas that I enjoy drinking so I was able to just re-order those when I ran out, but it meant I felt I wasn’t really drinking anything worthy of it’s own post. And in the meantime, my backlog of teas, has just kept accumulating so having been attacked by rogue tea packets of several occasions lately, I think I definitely need to give the tea shelf a good clear out and make a concerted effort to drink my way through that backlog and get it back under control. Such a hardship, I know. And of course there’s no better motivator for me to actually get round to drinking those teas than writing them up. So I’m going to make a corresponding effort to write about the teas I drink!

Having got this far in this post I thought, I should probably check on my current tea situation, and bring the teas that are currently open or expiring soon to the front. (Not that use by dates are strict with teas, as long as they’re kept sealed or in an airtight container, they tend to just get a bit weaker rather than going ‘off’. It really is a ‘best before’ situation, they’ll taste their best before that date, but they’re not going to give you food poisoning unless damp gets in and if that’s an issue the date on the packet is irrelevant.) I currently have four loose leaf teas ‘on the go’ at the moment. Two from a local tea blending company Unravel tea, Jin Jun Mei – a teapot tea reviewed here – and Phoenix Ember Oolong which is my current tea ball tea, a go to when I want ‘nice tea’ but not a whole pot. They are teas in the above category, ones I discovered in my last proper go at this challenge, and liked so much I bought again. I also have a Clipper green tea, that I found at the back of a kitchen cupboard when clearing it out, a couple of months ago, I fully expected this to have lost all flavour as it’s been there long enough to be forgotten, but it’s proved to be a pleasantly mellow green tea. And finally there’s a tin full of tea that I clearly decanted from a larger packet bought at the Chinese supermarket so I presume is Pai Mu Tan tea.

There are another three teas I picked up at a Christmas craft fair that I can safely put to the back of the queue. There’s also, a box of Twinings Earl Grey, Sainsbury’s Darjeeling, a nice little tin of mysterious green tea from T2, two different boxes of Jasmine tea bags and a packet of matcha latte sachets. Not to mention an actual tin of matcha tea, but I’m not counting that as it like the Earl Grey tea bags are part of my regular rotation of hot drink supplies that don’t require particular thought to use up and replace.

Still. That is a lot of tea. Better put the kettle on in that case.