Yum Yum Dim Sum

Last night we had the best Chinese meal I've had in ages. Possibly ever. So although its not my cookery, I'm going to tell you about it anyway!

I had a race to run in Oxford after work and figured that it was more practical to have a meal out in town afterwards than to drive home and then start cooking late.

So, following up a top-tip we decided to go to SoJo; a very unassuming (and to be brutal, uninspiring!) looking place not far from the station. The word in cyberspace seemed univerally enthused, and everyone I mentioned it to in Oxford got a dreamy look in their eye, so it seemed worth a go.

You know the worst kind of chinese? The type that's swimming in grease? And where the noodles are soggy and over-cooked? And the flavours taste distinctly arificial? And you wake up the next day with a tummy that grumbles and is unhappy?
Well, SoJo is the polar opposite of all of that. It restores your faith in Chinese being interesting, flavoursome, and frankly delicious. Another thing - I would say that about 2/3 of the people eating at SoJo last night were Chinese, which is surely a good sign.

We shared a dim sum starter. I'd never had dim sum before, but I'll definitely be going back for more. We had a selection of steamed dim sum, and it all tasted fresh and delicious.



Then on to mains. Szechuan "Gan Shao" Seabass topped diced waterchestnut sauce for me - a pleasing contrast of soft textured fish and crunchy waterchestnuts, with enough chilli in the sauce to warm but not so much that it was uncomfortable. Dan had beef with aubergines and declared it amazing. (Whether he had more chilli I don't know, but it certainly cleared out the last of his summer cold sniffles!)

The portions were generous, but it was all so lovely that we just couldn't leave it...so we did go to bed feeling a little bit over full. Still once in a while that doesn't do anyone any harm I think! Next time I'm going back for a dim sum lunch. I'm already salivating at the thought.

Here's the link to the google page. The place doesn't have a website that I can find.

Seriously though - its my top tip. Go there!

A fishy norwegian weekend

Why don't we eat more fish in this country? Its so tasty!

Considering we're really quite a small island I find it quite surprising how unavailable good fish is. I know I live about as far from the sea as its possible to get in the UK, but nonetheless you would expect some good outlets for fishy things. Even the supermarkets have aisles of meat and maybe a tiny section at the end of one for all of their fish. Its really quite odd.

The Norwegians don't have this problem. We just spent a fabulous weekend in Bergen. Its a cliche to say it, but it was amazingly expensive (Dan was horrified - a beer cost about £8!), but really when the food is of good quality you don't resent it too badly. I don't think we could have afforded to stay for more than a weekend though!

So here's a brief tour of our gluttony...

We started at the fish market on the harbourside:




Where we bought a massive smoked salmon, crab, prawn, and crayfish salad for lunch. It may have been pouring it down with rain but we were quite happy:


The next day we decided to head up into the mountains for a good long walk. Of course, we couldn't possibly go for our expedition without a picnic. The bakery across the street from our hotel provided wonderful seed and dried fruit rye bread, and the fish market also came up trumps. We were deeply indulgent, and lunch consisted of a langoustine each and a massive bag of prawns. Yum Yum Yum.....


That night we went out for dinner to a fish restaurant near the harbour. And yes, we spent more than I ever have before on a meal.
But what a meal...
Fish soup
Crayfish, salmon and angler fish with layered potato and sweet pepper
Blackberries marinated in schnapps with vanilla icecream
I know it doesn't sound all that exciting, but it was delicious because it was beautiful ingredients, perfectly cooked.

The next day was our last day. We went in search of fish and chips, but in the end this looked more interesting:


Spicey kebabs of scampi. Massive meaty prawns. Delicious.


We couldn't resist buying some smoked wild salmon to take home. Its buttery textured, smokey flavoured, and melt-in-your-mouth perfect.


So there you have it: We went to Norway, we ate more fish and seafood than you would ever believe, we walked, and saw the sights and the countryside, we had a lovely time.

And came home feeling distinctly poor!

Recreating that holiday feeling...

When we were in Italy last autumnn Dan and I treated ourselves to a wonderful meal on the last night of our holiday.



The restaurant was down on the shores of Lake Garda, tucked away under Malcesine Castle. It was still just warm enough to sit outside in the evening, but no longer high season, so it wasn't crowded.



We gorged ourselves on lovely wine and several beautiful courses of Italian food. The courgette-stuffed tortelloni with ham and pinenut sauce sticks in the memory, as does Dan's dessert of semifreddo with peach compote.



This week I decided to take the flavours of the pasta dish and make something a little bit similar (although not as delicate, silky or delicious!). My version was a much more rustic and hearty. A quick and easy pasta bake, though not a refined culinary masterpiece!

Here's the method.

Courgette and Goats Chees pasta bake with bacon and pinenuts

Enough pasta for 2 people
2 small courgettes
1 or 2 garlic cloves
A handful basil leaves
50g goats cheese
salt and pepper
4 rashers smoked bacon
15-20g pinenuts

Put the oven on to heat up to 180C
Put the pasta on to cook in salted water.
Meanwhile whizz up the courgettes with the basil leaves, garlic and soft goats cheese. Season it.
Check if the pasta is cooked, drain in if it is and rinse in cold water.
Mix with the courgette mix. Turn into an oven proof dish and place in oven to bake for 20 minutes. Check regularly so that it doesn't scorch. Cover it if its browning at at the edges.
After about 10 minutes dry fry the pinenuts in a hot pan.
Then fry or grill the bacon. Cut the rind off and chop it into bite-size pieces.
Take the pasta out of the oven. Scoop it onto plates or into bowls.
Scatter bacon and pinenuts over the top.
Serve.

Crab cakes

A bit more experimenting making up my own recipes this week.

I had some very nice crab cakes at The Crazy Bear pub last sunday. They were salmon and crab and I had them with fat chips and rocket salad. They were just what I needed having done a hilly, muddy cross-country race that morning!

I decided to try re-creating something similar at home this week, and I had a tin of white crab meat left over from making the crab and linguine recipe (in a previous post) so it fell into place quite nicely. Instead of salmon I used smoked trout, and I served the fishcakes with new potatoes, cabbage and a poached egg.

I feel a little fraudulent calling this a 'Recipe of the Week' as I have made fishcakes plenty of times before and these were only slightly different, so I will have to do another recipe this week to really count towards the weekly target!

Here's the what I did:

Crab cakes for 2
200g potatoes - peeled, boiled and mashed
1 small tin of white crab meat (drained weight 120g)
125g smoked trout fillets
Juice of 1/2 small lemon
A small bunch of finely chopped parsley
Salt and crushed Szechuan pepper

Mix everything together in a bowl. Using your hands form the mixture into 4 equal sized balls and then flatten them slightly to make fishcake shapes.
Grill for about 5 minutes on each side, or until slightly golden on top.
Serve.

Easy!


And here's the Crazy Bear website.

Very tasty food (and they didn't mind me being in bare feet having forgotten to bring clean shoes to change into post-cross country run!)

Sunshine = icecream

We had sunshine and blue sky in Oxford today, I also spotted snowdrops in my parents' garden...oh yeah! Spring is on its way.

So, the first icecream outing of the year. And my, what an outing it was!

Any of you who have never been should really get yourselves to Oxford quick-smart and try the icecream in G&D's. My venue of choice is the Little Clarendon Street branch:


But any of the 3 will do just fine.

Today I went completely over the top with a Dime Bar cookie and a MASSIVE scoop of creamy delicious dime bar crunch icecream. I savoured it a nibble at a time over the Culture section of the newspaper.

Who says comfort food doesn't work?! It did the trick for me.

Normal service (ie healthy eating) resumes again as of now, but it was sooooo worth overloading the calories on this particular occasion!

Must have a go at homemade icecream. Its so much better than anything I've ever found in the shops.

G&D's Website
and
wiki page

Oysters and rhubarb

At the end of the summer Dan and I moved house, and we've been slowly getting to know our new area. Last night we decided to treat ourselves to dinner out instead of cooking. And to up the ante a little we chose The Plough at Kingham as our venue of choice.

I've been keen to go there for a few months. Its run by a lady who trained with Heston Blumenthal, and although she doesn't go in for some of the extremes of oddness that he likes to create I figured that the cooking would be good and the menu imaginative. I also really liked the fact that they don't publish a menu online as the menu depends on what ingredients look good on any given day.

So, a table was booked, we got out of our DIY outfits, dammit I even wore perfume! I was possibly looking forward to it a little TOO much!

Now, usually when you build somewhere up like that it disappoints. The Plough didn't.



It was oyster night. Have you ever eaten oysters? Neither of us had. They do seem to get rather bad press, and I’d consigned them to that category of “not worth paying the premium price to try something that will probably be nasty.”

However, last night curiosity got the better of us and so we asked if we could try an oyster each. (It seemed like the kind of place that wouldn’t be snooty about that sort of request.) They arrived on a bed of salt with a little shallot vinegar and the barman-proprietor suggested a little dab of the vinegar then just suck the oyster down, a couple of chews if you fancy it, and gulp to swallow (sounds a bit obscene doesn’t it?!). I went first….Dan looked a little apprehensive.

But actually, it was lovely.

When people say oysters taste of the sea I’d always thought that sounded disgusting. I mean, the taste of sea water is revolting – it burns your throat and makes you feel nauseous. But now I understand. Oysters are mildly salty, but with a light seafoody freshness. They taste like summer holidays at the seaside - Cornwall, not Blackpool!

I followed my oyster revelation with halibut. A very nice piece of fish served with a crab bisque and some kind of leafy green veg that I didn’t try very hard to identify. But the thing that made this dish memorable was the fennel bread that accompanied it. The slight aniseed flavour was a surprising but inspired compliment to the fish.

And then the pudding.

I find desserts are often a bit of a let-down in restaurants. All too often its just the same old choices of something chocolatey (which I always find too rich for the end of a meal), icecream (too cold for winter), crème brulee, maybe sticky toffee pudding. What I want at the end of a meal is something fruity.

The Plough came up trumps with Rhubarb cheesecake with rhubarb icecream. This turned out to be beautiful slices of rhubarb in a light syrup arranged on a crispy biscuit, with a cheesecake-textured goats curd mousse on the side (I know that doesn’t sound all that appetising, but trust me, it was), a scoop of homemade rhubarb icecream, and a little rhubarb jam to finish it off. Light, tangy, interesting but not alarming.

I was seriously tempted by some of the icecream flavours on offer – all homemade. Dark chocolate, elderflower and raspberry sounded intriguing, as did banana and stem ginger. Obviously, we’ll have to go back to sample some of the other delights on offer. I think we made need to save up a little first though. Its not overpriced, particularly given the quality of ingredients, the excellent service, and the well trained, imaginative chefs, but I can’t afford to pay £70 for dinner for 2 every week!

Here's the pub website.

Memorable meals

Ever had a meal that really stuck in the memory?

You try to recreate it at home, you find opportunities to return to the restaurant. You hope it will live up to the almost mythological status it has attained in your mind.

A happy collision of right place, right mood, right order.

For me its not necessarily the flashiest of meals. In fact, it almost never is. Just an inspired combination of superb ingredients allowed to speak for themselves.

Barbequed fish on the beach in Malaysia, served with rice and a lemongrass sauce. Sitting at a little table as the night fell on an island you could walk across in half an hour. I've been trying to recreate that lemongrass sauce for nearly 10 years. Simple, delicious, and perfect for the time and place.


A meal-deal of calamari and french fries with a mini bottle of prosecco; A winter picnic for a late lunch on the dock at Burano on new year's eve. Dry and subtly sparkling the wine was an inspired addition, cutting through the grease and lifting the meal from just another fish'n'chips to something we still reminisce about 2 years later.


Langoustines in Scotland. Caught that day. A mountain of them dished up in the harbour-side pub with freshly baked bread, garlic butter, and free-flowing wine. Sticky fingers. Pouring with rain outside, but snug and cosy in. I'm looking out for an excuse to return.

Scampi and chips from the fish market on the dock in Bergen. The perfect seasickness cure. Caught that morning, battered and fried in front of me, then straight into a box to takeaway. Salt and vinegar, and beautiful Norwegian surroundings. I'm looking for a reason to take Dan to Norway, just so that he can experience them. An unlikely reason for a holiday, but it'll do!


Then those meals which are delicious and memorable, but for some reason don't ever attain that lusted-for status. Looking at my list above, it could simply be that they're not fish!

Thin and crispy Italian pizza topped with smoked swordfish, rocket and wonderful milky buffalo mozzarella. Sitting in the autumn sunshine with nothing to do but relax for the rest of the day. Chicken with spices and dried fruit in a french restaurant that was really all about the wine. A sweet white I would never normally choose, but the perfect compliment to the food. Fresh bread rolls spiked with chocolate and strong espresso for breakfast in Dubrovnik. A meal of many courses in a restaurant carved into the rock in Matera. Wonderful and surprising - the host chose a selection of local specialities for us. My stomach hurt but it was worth it! My first ever taste of fresh buffalo mozzeralla. Gorgeous.

So many of the meals are really holiday memories...Of course I have my favourite bites and haunts closer to home. But perhaps because they are more easily attainable they are just that - favourites rather than legends.

Food foibles

There are certain tastes you are expected to grow into as you get older. Dark chocolate, for example, or olives. A full-bodied glass of red, strong dark coffee. All of these I adore. They are grown-up tastes. To be lingered over and savoured, but too intense to tempt one into over-indulgence.



Smelly cheese, so ripe it oozes definitely makes it onto the list, but this is a taste I just can't seem to acquire. When I mentioned this is a previous post, Carisa was has horrified and it got me thinking - Isn't it interesting how, even as adults, we still all have certain food foibles?

I'm well aware of the ridiculousness of eating raw fish with enthusiasm but being unable to force myself to eat a mushroom.


I've eaten a whole bowl of snails (actually rather nice - a bit like mussels), but I'd rather go hungry than eat anything with mayonnaise on it.



My complete failure to see the point of condiments remains a source of puzzlement to Dan, and makes buying a sandwich tricky. (Next time you buy one see if you can find one without mayonnaise, mustard, salad dressing, or cheese - see, its not easy!)
Apparently I've been this way since childhood. My mother still shudders at the shame of me declaring at a friend's house that I wouldn't eat food with 'guck' on it. I was 5 years old.

As a child I had an allergy to beef and dairy products and I still tend to avoid both. I don't understand the lust a good steak inspires in people - give me fish or seafood any day - and all I see when I look at a latte is a tummy-ache.
I love fresh, flavoursome fruit and vegetables, interesting herbs and spices, and the satisfaction of a plate popping with different colours and tastes. A little good-quality meat (I'm a terrible snob about meat) and as much fish as I can decently manage.

Whilst this all sounds horrifyingly healthy, I do have to confess to having a terribly sweet tooth. My current object of obssession are the Hummingbird Bakery's muesli bars. Sound's healthy doesn't it? They're not. I'm pretty sure there's condensed milk, butter and sugar in there; so sweet it almost makes your teeth ache, but soooo goooooood! The irony of eating super-healthy, low cal, low fat, blah, blah, blah all day, only to scupper the whole thing with one innocent-looking sweet treat is not lost upon me.

But I'm sure cake should count as a legitimate food group.

...and so to Italy

A late september trip to Italy meant that the recipe challenge was put on hold for a week, but I resolved to keep the spirit of the project alive by making an effort to try foods I had never had before...and what a place to do it! Italy in the early autumn sunshine - surely one of the loveliest places to be.



Some memorable meals included a smoked swordfish pizza with fresh buffalo mozzeralla and rocket, pear-filled pasta with a walnut sauce (delicious, although due to its slight sweetness you definitely wouldn't want more than a handful), black pasta stuffed with courgette and basil with squid and smoked bacon, hazlenut torta, and Dan's new favourite; vanilla semifreddo with peach compote. Gorgeous!



Less fancy favourites -
Paprika crisps! Why can't we get these over here? They're amazing!
Goats' cheese, ham and fresh crusty bread sitting on the top of a mountain pass in Switzerland.
Fresh apples from Merano. I have never seen so many orchards in one area.

Just a little postscript - we saw these quite a few times around Italy. I definitely want one! How cool?!