Thai Pink Eggs!
Well, I’ve always said I’ll try anything once and I do like a bit of cooking so how could I resist buying these Pink eggs when I saw them on sale in a supermarket in Thailand.
The pack simply says that they’re preserved eggs but gives no indication as to how. There’s also nothing mentioned about if any preparation is required so off to the Internet I went.
It turns out they’re a variation of Chinese Century Eggs and are prepared over a number of weeks by being sealed in a mix of clay, ash, salt and quicklime. The pics on that page also made me even more nervous about trying them…they may be Pink on the outside but they’re Black once opened!
It turns out my fears were groundless. The preservation process turns the white of the egg into a very dark brown or black and somewhat translucent set jelly that’s actually pretty flavourless. The yolk however is another matter. The colour is an opaque very dark green to black with a somewhat lighter colour on the edges and the texture appears to be that of oil paint.
The taste of the Yolk is slightly salty, rich, creamy and intensely eggy. Really very tasty indeed!
The one thing missing from the ones I had, and I can’t say I was disappointed by this omission, was the smell. Perhaps it’s the more modern preservation process or some variation in these Thai Pink versions of the Century Egg but the commonly described smell of sulphur/ammonia was absent.
All in all I think these will make a nice change for the office from bringing biscuits back 🙂
The best Chili in the World . . . EVER!
Simon Rimmer is the resident chef on BBC2’s Something for the Weekend. A couple of weeks ago on his twitter feed (@simonrim) he announced a new website he’d setup, eatsimonrimmer.com where he’s asking people to film themselves cooking their recipes and upload them.
As I seem to keep banging on about cooking on here and enjoy it so much (as anyone who has been round to our house for dinner will know), I thought it was a good opportunity to put my money where my mouth is and film something. Read more
Me and Keith . . .
Food again . . . well, yes.
This morning on the train I read a tweet from someone saying that Patrick Swayse had died . . . very sad and all but my only connection to him is a couple of, let’s be honest, somewhat crappy movies that I like (Road House and Point Break). About 2 hours later, and via another tweet, I discovered that Keith Floyd had also passed away and that one hit me a bit harder.
After a little introspection I think the reason is that the way I cook and generally muck about with food was clearly influenced by him. After a quick shuffle over to his page on Wikipedia I discovered that his first TV show, Floyd on Fish, was broadcast in 1984 and on my birthday as well. That would have made me 11 and I vividly remember watching it.
Floyd cooking on TV seemed to be a world of chaos. From ordering a handheld camera wielded by a poor bloke who Keith always thought was pointing it in the wrong direction, “not at me, at the food!”, to occasional spills, the odd missing ingredient, the general feeling that not a whole lot of planning had gone into the actual making of the dish and, of course, a generous glug of wine.
Throughout all this I always got the impression that the man really knew what he was doing. Ingredients weren’t just being thrown in for the sake of it, he knew tastes, he knew his palette and he knew that right now what this dish needed was a little touch of this . . . what I got from his programs, apart from a few laughs (and if I remember rightly some damn fine scenery) was that you didn’t have to follow a recipe like a maths formula, just go with it, create and enjoy
For one or two other view on the late great Keith Floyd you should head over to The Grauniad and check out what a few professionals think.
Keith Floyd, RIP
KFC’ish . . .
Here’s how it starts.
theWife: What do you fancy for dinner?
me: (shrug) dunno, what do you fancy?
theWife: don’t know . . . something chickeny, with lots of vegetables!.
And with that my brain starts ticking, my taste-buds start tingling and I know we’re in trouble. Read more
Food, glorious food . . .
I would say it’s that time of the year again but it isn’t . . . the fact is I’m on a diet. again. This isn’t the first diet I’ve been on and it almost certainly won’t be the last but what makes this one different from the others is that this time i’m keeping it in my pocket, it’s online, readily available and there’s no getting away from it.
I should probably back up a bit at this point and enlighten you all with some background facts. I’m 35 years old. I weigh, or at least at the start of this weighed, 19st 1lb and I have arthritis. The reason I mention the arthritis isn’t some cheap attempt to garner sympathy be simply a way to explain why I can’t just go and run the weight off like a lot of other people might. Read more
Cookin’ for Christmas
I like cooking, and what I like cooking most is large hunks of meat. Big joints of Pork or Beef are fantastic things to cook when we have friends round and even when there’s just the two of us I’ll get something bigger than needed because it just cooks better.
However Christmas is a little different as it’s traditionally Poultry time. 4 years ago for our first married Christmas I cooked a Goose. I’d never done one before but I figured it can’t be that hard, it’s just a bird. As it happens there are one or two tricks to getting a Goose right, mainly to ensure that the skin is nice and crispy, but it’s easy enough and we’re having one again this year.
Boxing day this year will be a bit different though. There’ll be 7 of us for dinner so we’ll obviously need something a little bigger. I could have just got a large Turkey but I always like to experiment and try new things out. With that in mind I’m building a 4 bird roast. I’ve done something similar just twice before but with only 2 birds in each. A Ducken (a Duck with a Chicken inside) and a Phearkey (a Turkey with 2 Pheasants inside). This year I’ll be cooking what we have christened a Duphearkenridge which consists of a Duck (for a nice crispy skin outside) stuffed with a Chicken, a Pheasant and a Partridge.
Each of the two previous times I’ve cooked one of these people ask me how difficult it is. The answer is that the preparation is more time consuming than difficult. There are plenty of instructional pages on the Interenet telling you how to debone birds but once you’ve done it you shouldn’t need to look again. It’s more tricky and a little fiddly than difficult.
You obviously have to be pretty careful with whichever bird is going to be going on the outside as that’s the one that’s got to look good, but life is made somewhat easier as you don’t have to bebone the legs or wings of that one. The inside birds you can then be a little rougher with a they’re just filling. You should still get them as whole as possible as it make the rebuild easier, but a few nicks in the skin are fine.
Once it’s all rebuilt you’ve then got to stitch it back together and this is probably where you’ll need some help. Either that or you’ll need to grow an extra pair of hands.
The actual cooking is then doen to a certain amount of guesswork as you’ve now got a solid lump of meat, rather than a bird with a hollow cavity. I tend to go off similar cooking times as for joints of Pork but I also use a meat thermometer when cooking these. The last thing you want to do is cut your magnificant creation in front of your guests only to find out that it’s not done.
A final little tip for the cooking. As the Duck, in this case, will be exposed to the heat for a lot longer than normal it will have a tendancy to dry out, particularly the lovely crispy skin. The trick here is part way through cooking, lay some streaky bacon over the bird. This will add some extra fat onto the outside during cooking keeoing things crispy and moist 🙂
More pics of the creation of this years bird can be found here on my Flickr page . . . expect a few more once it’s all cooked and keep your fingers crossed that I get the cooking times right!
mmmmmm, Thai Green Curry
Thai Green Curry, rice and Spicy Prawn Crackers
After a trip off to Al Amin for supplies, dinner tonight consisted of a rather warm Thai Green Curry, rice and freshly cooked Prawn Crackers.
I’ve cooked the curry many times before and they really are pretty easy to knock together, but I haven’t cooked prawn crackers for years. They’re good fun really. Just heat up a pan of oil, drop them in and fish them back out 10 seconds later. Chuck em into smoe sweet chilli dipping sauce and munch away all night 🙂
We actually cooked far far too many so we’ve stored them ready for munchies later . . . and later might just be tomorrow. While at the store I also picked up a Papaya so that we can chuck together a Papaya salad for lunch tomorrow . . . mmmmmmmm
Makin’ breakfast juice
juice all made and bottled, ready for transport
Last week my when we met brother-in-law, Steve, we were donated a carrier bag full of unwanted apples . . . it would seem that their new house has several apple trees in the back garden and they aparently have more apples than they know what to do with.
They’re cooking(ish) apples so they’ve spent the whole time just sat in the bag waiting for us to get round to doing something with them.
theWife is out riding around on her horsey’s so I decided to use the free time (interspresed between watching crap TV and killing anything that moves on GTA IV) to make some breakfast juice. The basic receipe is as follows.
- some Apples
- some Pears
- half a Lemon
- 1 fresh Chilli
- any miscellaneous veg you happen to have the you want to use up
The first ingredient is obvious . . . the second is probably not a surprise and maybe not even the third (the lemon helps make the juise taste fresher, less thick) but I always get a raised eyebrow when I mention the chilli and the vegetables.
This time I’ve chucked some somewhat bendy celery, and that actually has more taste then most raw juiced veg, but it’s not unusual for me to use brocolli and especially sprouts. They all have plenty of vitamins in and you can barely taste them alongside the fruit.
The secret ingredient however is the Chilli. Now don’t go silly putting in handfulls, you just need one decent sized medium chilli . . . just trust me that if you add this one thing into your juice, 5 minutes after drinking it it will feel like someone has flicked a light switch on inside your head. Real full on wake up juice 😉
Finally a word of warning about handling Chillis. Juicing them should normally be OK, particularly with mild to medium chillis, as you never open them but either way always wash your hands well after handling them. Rubbing your eyes after cutting chillis is extreemly painful and scratching your nose was probably best described by Mitch Benn as ‘the closest you can legally get to a 5 year coke habbit!’
