I am still welcoming the extra free time I have on my hands with my new job, which has given me so much more time to cook at home. This week I have been doing lots of tumble-down meals, mainly as my parents left me with a fridge full of goodies. I had at my disposal some crab, roast pork (燒肉 rather than 叉燒), roast duck, as well as my mum's massive collection of sauces and goodies ranging from oyster sauce to dried shrimp to fermented bean curd. I have always been terrible at cooking Chinese food, but I'm trying to improve at the moment.
Here's what my mum did with the crab:
Crab with spring onion and ginger (serves 4 with leftovers)
2 crabs, still alive
Cooking oil
1 small onion or big handful of spring onions, finely chopped
Glug of Chinese cooking wine
1 egg
Tablespoon or so of ginger, chopped into matchsticks
1. Prepare the crab. Make sure it is still alive when you come to cook - my parents either leave them roaming in the garden and then put them in the fridge for a while for them to go to sleep. Brutally kill them by levering the shell to come apart from the body. Take out the lungs/ladies fingers, take off the legs and claws, and chop the remaining body into quarters. Use the back of the knife to crack open the claws so it is easier to eat later. Set aside the legs as they are a bit hairy for this.
2. Heat some oil in the wok to a high heat, then add the onions. Stir-fry until soft, then add in the crab, along with your glug of wine. Stir-fry to make sure even distribution of heat.
3. After the crab is 80% done (easiest way to check is looking at how solid the brown meat has become in the shell), add in a beaten egg, which will collect up all the good crabby juicyness. Mix well, and finish with the ginger.
It is an amazingly easy recipe really, really letting the gorgeousness of the crab shine. The best bit is scooping out all the cholesterol-ridden brown meat from the shell and mixing it with plain rice. Here it is in all its magnificence (obviously my mum made this, I'm just trying to take credit now):
In an attempt to clear my fridge-full of food, I invited Eugene, Jess and Martin round for dinner. It dawned on me that it would be the first ever family-style Chinese dinner I've cooked for friends, and I was a bit worried. There were 4 things on the menu:
1. Braised roast pork with tofu and broccoli
2. Gingery duck with peppers
3. Morning glory (通菜) with fermented tofu and chilli
4. Leftover crab
The trickiest thing I found was to time everything. The 3 dishes I had to cook where all wok-based, and the challenge was to cook quickly enough to ensure that nothing went cold. I cheated somewhat by having two woks on the go (I am inviting unnecessary jokes about my surname now, aren't I?), and I dirtied a whole load of bowls along the way in an attempt to be all Delia and tidy. But here was the resulting feast!:
The dish I was most happy with was the morning glory I think. It is so prohibitively expensive in restaurants, but a plate cost me about £1.75 to make, helped by the leftover fermented tofu my mum had in the fridge!
Morning glory with fermented tofu and chilli (serves 4 as part of a Chinese meal)
Half a bag of morning glory (I bought a bag from Dragon Gate Supermarket in Chinatown for about £3.25 and got two meals out of it)
Cooking oil
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 small red chilli, chopped small
2 tablespoons of fermented tofu (南乳)
1. Wash the morning glory and separate the leaves from the stalks. Cut the stalks into 2 inch-long pieces.
2. Heat the wok to a high heat with some cooking oil, then add the garlic and chilli, stir frying until soft but not browned.
3. Add in the fermented tofu, with a little water to stop it catching. Add in the morning glory stalks, and stir fry for a minute or so.
4. Add in the leaves, which will reduce down like spinach very quickly. Mix well and serve.
If you have been paying attention, you will have noticed that we set aside some crab legs earlier on. My mum always steams them on top of the rice in the rice cooker, and there are a million things you can do with the meat other than just eating it just like that. I spent almost an entire episode of Economy Gastronomy getting all the meat out of the legs that were leftover:
Lucky I love extracting crab meat, because look at the paltry amount of meat you get at the end of it!:
I was debating what to do with them for ages. One option was to make them into crab cakes with my successful potato harvest (my first ever!), but given I'd just been worked hard by Susan at yoga class (that woman is a masochist in the nicest sense of the word), I needed some pasta.Linguine with crab and chilli (serves 1)
125g linguine (quarter of a packet)
Leftover white crab meat
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 small red chilli, chopped small
Little bit of grated lemon rind
100g baby spinach, washed
Juice of half a lemon
1. Put pasta on to cook. Put spinach into a colander.
2. In a small frying pan, add the olive oil, garlic, chilli and lemon rind, and fry very slowly until it simmers and the garlic is soft.
3. Drain the pasta by throwing it over the spinach (thereby cooking it), and mix with a fork in the colander to avoid big clumps of spinach.
4. Add the pasta and spinach into the frying pan, along with the crab and lemon juice. Mix well and scoff.
And believe it or not, I still have bits and pieces left in my fridge for me to tumble-down some more! I guess I need to put on more weight though before I can rival the lovely Allegra :)
No comments:
Post a Comment