I’m so doing it again!!

I fancied noodles last night. Ken Hom was in Saturday Kitchen recently, making some chicken and telling the viewers that back in his restaurant days the Chinese chefs would serve chicken breast to the Europeans and the thighs to the Chinese customers. Well, for me it is always a thigh, unless I’m making chicken kievs. So much more flavour in a thigh! So it was only natural to go with Ken’s recipe.  The putrid shrimp paste has not made appearance in my pantry since that awful prawn dish, but that was a one off, there’s no doubt this boy knows his Chinese.

2  chopped boneless thighs sat in the marinade made of 2 tsps of soy sauce, same amount of Shaoxing rice wine, 1 tsp of sesame oil, 1/2 tsp of salt, quite a lot, and the same of white pepper.

Noodles cooked and drained sat drizzled with sesame oil, while I quickly stir fried the chicken, then removed it and threw 3 minced garlic cloves into the wok. Quite a lot of lovely, crunchy mange tout, chopped spring onion, noodles into that. Then a nice little sauce- exact same ingredients like for the marinade, plus a tsp of sugar and some extra sesame oil, just because I adore it. Chicken back in, a good toss of the wok and that was that.

The white pepper that I hardly ever use in my cooking was a revelation here. As was the rice wine. This is getting done again fairly soon!

I made it slightly different last night, inspired by a photo of a pizza in Florence I saw on the internet, with Ponte Vecchio in the background. It made me squeak that it’s only early October and we’re not going to Italy for months, but my pizza this evening was one of the best. The stuffed crust had nothing to do with it, though, maybe just the looks?!

I made it all the usual way, but wrapped up some mozzarella in the edges. What it needed instead was a stronger cheese, medium cheddar maybe, but the mild, modest mozzarella got lost and could hardly be tasted. So I just spread the tomato sauce, chopped mozzarella on top, parmesan and I baked it so plain. Once out of the oven, prosciutto di San Danielle went on, a touch ( ok, a bit more than a touch) of truffle salsa and a drizzle of truffle sauce. For me – food heaven. Florek said I’ve overdone  truffle flavour, but CAN YOU ACTUALLY OVERDO TRUFFLE FLAVOUR?????…..

Vanilla panna cotta with strawberry compote to finish with. Simple, sweet, indulgent.

Cauliflower used to be my food hell when I was a child.  I remember my Mum having to mash it into tiniest pieces not to be spotted on the surface of the soup, otherwise I would not go anywhere near it. Cooked pieces of cauliflower as a side dish made me sick just looking at it.  But that was a long time ago. Now I am a huge fan of cauli. Particularly love it as a side to meats, feed lots of it to my family and this lunch time gave them a soup, the recipe from latest Good Food.

A shallot fried on olive oil, small cauli cut in florets in, 3 small spuds,chicken stock, lid on and it cooked for about 12-15 minutes.  In the meantime I chopped some chorizo and some sourdough and quickly panfried it with a little bit of garlic.

When the cauliflower was nice and soft, I blitzed it all into a creamy goodness, improved the greyish colour with a splash of double cream, seasoned generously, added some chopped parsley and that was that. Izzie scoffed down a bowl of it minus chorizo, we enjoyed the whole lot. Yum.

Wiola and Marcin brought me 2 bags of fruit the other day from Wiola’s boss’s orchard. Lots of pink, juicy apples and some delicious plums, less than 3 kg of those.  It took me 2 days to decide to try and make  a plum preserve, similar to what my Mum’s been making for years.  Jars have been ordered, Mum has been consulted and yesterday I made a start.  Chopped and deprived of stones, they went into the pan with a splash of water.

The smell the plums gave out while cooking was fantastic. I fried them gently for about 4-5 hours yesterday, stirring often to avoid any burning, then restarted the process this morning, another 4 hours, till massively reduced, thick, darkened and making hot lava sounds. Towards the end of the cooking I sweetened it to taste. Kept on adding and kept on tasting, careful, as did not want to end up with too sweet preserve or worse- a sour one that I’d not enjoy eating.

And so, 2 hours after the postie delivered the jars, this is what I had on the island;

The jars were filled with 3 cm space from the top while preserve was hot, turned upside down and left to cool in this position. 4 jars of preserve from nearly 3 kg of plums. A very good start though, I’d say!

This year we have super hot summer, nearly 2 months of heat. It’s also the first year of my growing tomatoes, which struggle in the small greenhouse in 45 degrees plus.  As I’m a beginner, notes are being taken for things to be improved next year. First of all, much bigger pots will be purchased. Each one of my toms is standing in a 5 litre pot and needs to be watered up to twice a day. Not ideal, there will be bigger pots next year. And Florek is working on a computer controlled( obviously!:-/) watering system, so that we woudn’t have to ask people to water them, when we’re on holidays, like Jon did in June.

My dad in law argued a couple of weeks ago, what is the point of growing the tomatoes, if there’s plenty of them in a supermarket. Well, an hour ago I’ve brought 2 good handfuls of cherry tomatoes from greenhouse; they have super hard skins, but underneath….candy. Sweet, warm from the sun, bursting in the mouth goodness.

We eat lots of them served the simple way we tried in Italy- roughly chopped, sprinkled with chopped shallot-generously, seasoned with salt and pepper and drowned with good Italian olive oil. Once eaten, what’s left on the plate is a pool of tomato juice and olive oil, sponged off with crusty bread- food heaven. Next year- onwards with homegrown tomatoes and other veggies. 🙂