China Crumpet

As usual when I am trying to cut back on the calories, I suddenly have an irresistible urge to bake sweets. So I figure, forget the calories, life is too short to care.

Here is my easiest and fastest recipe for from scratch cookies. They are marvelously independent, take a couple of minutes to whip up, need almost no ingredients and taste like a lazy afternoon with a good book under a sun-umbrella with the sea lapping a few feet away. If you want that bounty-bar (but better) effect, melt some good quality chocolate in a bowl set over a hot water bath and cover them with a luscious layer of chocolate or two once they’ve cooled.

For about 16 cookies you will need:

50 g butter, softened
2 eggs
1 dl (3/4 cup) sugar
5.5 dl (2 1/4 cup) grated, unsweetened coconut

NOTE: If you like you can also add the zest of one lime and a tablespoon or so of dark rum. But they are fine without these add-ons.

Set the oven to 200°C. Mix together all the ingredients in a large bowl, you should have a fairly firm batter. Butter an oven tray thoroughly or line with greaseproof paper (they seriously stick so this step is crucial!). Taking about a tablespoon of the mixture at a time, distribute the batter evenly on the tray and bake for about 15 minutes or until golden and crispy looking. They need some attention in the oven as they are a little burn prone.

Enjoy while listening to Bob Marley.

It was my husbands birthday yesterday, and since we are in complete havoc with the launch of our new company image only days away, making a big night out of it was completely out of the question. Also, the Beijing air yesterday was so thick you could cut it with a knife, not really conducive to a celebratory spirit. But as usual, I  seemed to manage to spend a couple of stray minutes drooling over yummy looking recipes on my favourite foodie websites. It was (as has been the case a lot lately) Food & Wine, with the recipes you’ll find a little further down the page, that made me decide that it would be absolute SIN not to do something a little special. Why not at least make a little cozy home cooked meal? They do say after all that the way to a man’s heart (or was it wallet??) is through his stomach!

For my birthday last year we feasted on game birds and buttery polenta, so I thought it would be fun to make a little tradition of it and serve pigeon as the main course. With it, we had a rich onion compote and golden corn cakes, courtesy of chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. To start, we had zingy little chickpea crostinis and to finish, a rich and absolutely wicked red-wine chocolate cake. The meal delicious and surprisingly easy to make – I found myself humming around completely stress free while cooking, not a normal sight while attempting to cook without hubby’s master knife skills around in my miniature kitchen.

I am listing these recipes in the order I cooked them, not in the order we ate them – obviously. Although, it was tempting to eat desert right when it was done!

THE DESERT

I began from the finish by baking the red wine chocolate cake. For this delectable treat (seriously, you need to make this) you will need:

2 cups (5 dl) flour
3/4 cup (2 dl) unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
225g unsalted butter, softened (yes, tones and tones of butter)
1 3/4 cups (4 1/2 dl) sugar (uh huh, tones and tones of sugar too)
2 large eggs
1/2 vanilla pod, cut in half and seeds scraped out (you could use vanilla extract or a potent vanilla sugar)
1 1/4 cups (3 dl) dry *cheap* red wine
Icing sugar, for dusting (more sugar, to be sure)
Whipped cream, for serving (oh kill me now…)

Preheat the oven to 175°c. Butter and flour a large cake pan. In a bowl, mix together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt.

In a large bowl, whisk the butter with the sugar semi-violently until fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat until incorporated. Add the vanilla and beat for 2 minutes longer. Working in two batches, alternately fold in the dry ingredients and the wine, until you get a lovely, gooey, dark brown batter that smells like a drunk pastry chef.

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan, and bake for 45 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes (or while you shop, no sweat), then turn it out onto a rack to let it cool completely. Dust the cake with icing sugar and serve with whipped cream.

While the cake was cooling, we actually went shopping for a little gift. It ended up being very food related, and we will probably both use it. But I am glad hubby was as glad as I am for his brand new hand mixer.

THE MAIN

When we got home from shopping, I got started on the birds. They are small and a little finicky to deal with but the end result is sooo worth all of the work. Basically, just butterflied the birds after cleaning them and seasoned them with salt and pepper. Couldn’t have been easier.

They need to go high up in a 200°c oven for about 30 minutes or until the skin is golden and crisp. When the birds are done (this is for 2 pigeons, about 500g or 1lb each) and are out of the oven, sprinkle them with:

1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon curry powder
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon

This will give them a really nice spicy finish.

THE SIDES

The corn cakes are a great side and completely surprising. Definitely a keeper recipe for the Mauritzon household! You will need:

fresh corn kernels from about 4 ears (in a pinch, use canned corn – a bit more than 1 1/2 can)
1/2 cup (1 1/2 dl) milk
1/4 cup (3/4 dl) heavy cream
2 large eggs
2 large egg yolks
1 1/4 cups (3 1/4 dl) flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

In a blender (or with a new hand blender!), combine 2/3 of the corn with the milk and puree until smooth. Add the heavy cream, eggs and egg yolks and blend. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and whisk in the flour, baking powder, salt and the remaining corn kernels.

In a large nonstick skillet, melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in 1 tablespoon of the olive oil. Spoon rounded 2 tablespoon-size dollops of batter into the hot skillet and cook over moderately high heat, turning once, until golden, about 5 minutes. Transfer the corn cakes to a rack and keep warm. Repeat to make the remaining corn cakes, using the remaining 1 tablespoon each of butter and olive oil; adjust the heat if necessary. Serve hot.

Before I started frying the corn cakes though, I started up the onion compote. It bubbled away while I fried the corn cakes and was perfect by the time everything was finished. It needs a little bit of love and a stir every now and again to make sure it doesn’t burn but other than that it is easy peasy. I love onions and this is a great way of serving them and making the otherwise humble veg a star.

You will need the following for 2 servings:

3 large onions
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons water
salt
pepper
1/2 tablespoon lemon juice

Slice the onions. Melt the butter in a large skillet and add the onions, cook on a low heat until very soft, about 10 minutes. Add water so that they do not dry out. At the end of the cooking time, season with salt, pepper and the lemon juice.

The final plating looked like this:

Onion compote on bottom, topped with corn cakes, topped with the pigeon. For an even better looking plate, lightly dress some greens in olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper and pile around.

But before we plated and ate the main though, there was of course the starter, which I started cooking last.

THE STARTER

For this tangy chickpea crostini you will need:

2 large shallots, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon minced rosemary
1/4 cup (1/2 dl) extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling
One can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
3 tablespoons water
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1 1/2 teaspoons white balsamic vinegar or white wine vinegar
4 five cm-thick Italian bread slices, toasted

Heat a skillet with a glug of oil and add the shallots. Cook until a little soft but not brown. Add the rosemary and the chickpeas. Add the water and cook/mash the mixture until you get a thick, chunky mash. Season, add the vinegar, cook for a few seconds longer and then pile on to the toasted bread slices. Drizzle some olive oil over the crostinis to finish.

There will be some chickpea mixture left over once you finish but it’s all good, it is a delicious mix to munch on with a bread slice when the need for a yummy little snack kicks in. The mains kept warm while we ate these little flavor bombs and the cake was delicious room temperature with a dollop of whipped cream.

THE END

Et voila! A romantic and delicious 3 course dinner is created in under an hour.

This was a great a meal to cook as it was to eat and I am so surprised that things in the kitchen went so smoothly! I guess all it needed from me was a little reverse thinking and planning. A good recipe probably helps too!

What do you do to make things less hectic when cooking? Do you have any fun birthday dinner traditions?

Puff pastry – a term that brings fear to many a home cook. I was reminded a couple of weeks ago of my own dread of making puff pastry from scratch when I read this account of summoning courage to make chicken pot pie. A couple of weeks earlier still, I too had conquered my pastry fear and was darned proud of myself.

So yesterday, when the snow was beating down on my windows and covered Beijing in a blanket of white (yes, it was such heavy snow that it didn’t even have time to turn black) and we decided that the only decent thing to do was make a hearty pork-shoulder and Guinness pie wrapped in a flaky crust of buttery deliciousness, I thought I would make a little step by step guide to the scary stuff. The pie is adapted from this Jamie recipe, I replaced the beef with pork because of market availability and skipped the cheese altogether, due to a lack of cheddar availability. But even with those changes it was a truly amazing meal and so comforting in the cold.

It is easy people, trust me.

Here’s what you will need:

4 dl of plain flour
1 1/2 dl cold water
2 tsp strong white vinegar
200g butter

and here’s what you do:

Take your 4 dl of flour and dump it in a bowl. Make a well in the middle.

Add the water, vinegar and about 50g (around a quater) of the butter.

Work the ingredients into a dough and form a ball, which you then wrap in plastic wrap and stick in the fridge for 15 minutes.

After it has rested, take it out and cross it with a sharp knife

When you’ve done that, roll it out to a square approximately 30×30 cm. Slice the rest (150g) of the butter up and place the slices in the middle of your square.

Then fold in the corners so that you get a smaller square envelope with all the butter evenly distributed in the middle.

It should look like this from the front:

and this from the back:

Now, roll it out a bit, making sure all surfaces and your rolling pin are nice and cool. Then comes the fun part, the folding. Fold your dough from right to left, making it 1/3 of the original width but the same length.

Then, fold it twice again, this time at a 90 degree angle, from top to bottom (or bottom to top).

You will end up with a little ball again that need to be wrapped in plastic and stuck in the fridge for another 15 minutes. It should look something like this:

After you take it out of the fridge, roll it out flat again with your rolling pin

and repeat the folding and resting. After it has rested, take it out of the fridge, roll it out and repeat the folding and resting one last time. After the third rest, et voila! You are ready to go. All you need to do after that is roll it out into desired thickness and shape and that is it. Then, you can cocoon steaming, savory pie pie filling in it like I did

or make croissants, delectable desserts - the sky’s the limit! 

Good luck!

1. This takes like a second. Or about 25 minutes actually. Plus boiling beans of course… but that really doesn’t need much attention and besides, you can always do that before hand. It serves 4 people.
2. Adapted from Food & Wine Magazine
3. 

   gorgeous, from Eric Ripert

4. 250 g dried black-eyed peas, soaked over night and rinsed
5. 1 dl dried shrimp
   (get these at your local asian grocers, or, if you’re in China too, at the local xiao mai bu even. Get the big, headless ones that are firm but not flaky)
6. 1 dl extra-virgin olive oil
7. 1/2 dl fresh lime juice
8. 1/2 dl chopped cilantro
9. 2 scallions, white and light green parts only, thinly sliced
10. 1 medium shallot, very finely chopped
11. 1 medium tomato—halved crosswise, seeded and cut into 1/4-inch dice
12. 1 small garlic clove, very finely chopped
13. 1 jalapeño, seeded and very finely chopped
14. Salt and freshly ground pepper
15. 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
16. Four medium mackerel fillets
17. In a medium saucepan, cover the black-eyed peas with 5 cm of water and bring to a boil. Simmer over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the peas are tender, about 45 minutes. Drain the peas.
18. Meanwhile, in a small bowl, cover the dried shrimp with hot water and let stand until softened, about 30 minutes. Drain and coarsely chop the shrimp.
19. In a large bowl, combine the olive oil with the lime juice, cilantro, scallions, shallot, tomato, garlic and jalapeño. Fold in the black-eyed peas and chopped dried shrimp and season with salt and pepper. Let the salad stand at room temperature for about 15 minutes, stirring once or twice.
20. In a skillet the vegetable oil until hot. Season the mackerel fillets with salt and pepper. In two batches of 2 filets each time, add them to the skillet and cook over high heat until lightly browned, about 3 minutes. Turn the fillets and cook until just opaque throughout, about 2 minutes longer.
21. Scoop the black-eyed pea salad onto 4 plates and set the sautéed mackerel fillets on top. Drizzle any remaining dressing from the salad around the plates and serve.

Hello, my name is Ingela and I am a cooking show addict.

So, after watching the whole 5 seasons of (the British please!) Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsey, I can now honestly say I absolutely never want to ever own a restaurant.

However, I have learnt that chefs often cook with cheap ingredients and use recipies that actually aren’t that complicated. Otherwise, they would not ever have time to serve their customers and they would loose money. That’s what Gordon says anyway.

Baring these new revelations in mind, I embarked on a culinary adventure into the minds of some real chefs and discovered recipes they have seen fit to trust us lowly home cooks with. And believe me when I say, Gordon was right. Nothing could have been more straight forward. All the recipes were found on Food and Wine magazine’s website and a couple have been slightly adapted due to China availability issues.

On Monday, we started with Ferran Adrià’s “toasted spaghetti with clams”, a huge success.

toasted spaghetti.. who knew THAT could be good??

We then moved on to what both hubby and I agreed were the best ribs we have ever had. Sticky and fall apart tender, “Mo’s sticky ribs recipe” by Fred Donnelly are definitely worth making AND (for all of you living in China who don’t have an oven) borrowing a neighbor or friends oven for!

finger lickin'...

Today, we made Eric Ripert’s “Sautéed Spanish Mackerel with Black-Eyed Pea Salad”. Again, we were not disappointed.

delicious, and healthy!

And now, to you, I now pass on the culinary wisdom I have learnt. Go ye and make home made glaze!

1. These babies need to cook for a long time, about 3 hours. But they pretty much take care of themselves and you will only spend about 20 minutes cooking. You will probably want to eat them all yourself… but 4 people can share them too, if you feel like company!
2. Adapted from Food & Wine Magazine
3. 
   

   with sour cream and scallions

4. 1 kg baby back ribs
5. Salt and freshly ground pepper
6. 3 chopped garlic cloves, for sprinkling
7. Extra-virgin olive oil, for drizzling
8. 1 tablespoon whole cloves
9. One 1/2 liter bottle of lager
10. 2.5 dl ketchup
11. 2.5 dl peach or apricot jam
12. 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
13. Serve with baked potatoes, sour cream and scallions or a salad, or cole slaw, or just eat ‘em as they are!
14. Preheat the oven to 150°C. On a rimmed baking sheet, season the ribs with salt, pepper and garlic. Drizzle with oil and scatter the cloves over the ribs and in the pan. Pour the beer over the ribs, cover with foil and bake for 2 hours, until the meat is tender.
15. Strain the pan juices into a saucepan. Whisk in the ketchup, jam and lemon juice and boil over high heat until reduced to about 4 dl, about 25 minutes.
16. Preheat the broiler. Set the ribs meaty side down on the baking sheet, brush with glaze and broil 10 cm from the heat for 7 minutes. Turn the ribs and brush with half of the remaining glaze. Broil for 10 minutes, until starting to char. Brush with the remaining glaze and broil until browned, 10 minutes. Let rest for 10 minutes and serve.

1. Serves 4, takes 25 minutes, start to finish. Seriously.
2. Adapted from Food & Wine magazine

1. 
   

   soon to be cleaned and cooked, little do they know...

2. 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
3. 3/4 pound spaghetti, broken into 2-inch lengths
4. 2 garlic cloves, minced
5. Crushed black pepper
6. 7,5 dl good fish stock
7. 2,5 dl water
8. 30 tasty clams of choice, cleaned and rinsed
9. 1/2 dl minced flat-leaf parsley
10. a little freshly grated parmesan (optional)
11. In a large deep skillet, heat the olive oil until shimmering. Add the spaghetti and cook over moderate heat, stirring constantly, until golden, about 3 minutes. Add the garlic and a large pinch of crushed red pepper and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the clam broth and water and bring to a boil. Cover tightly and cook over moderate heat until the pasta is barely al dente, about 8 minutes. Nestle the clams into the pasta, cover and cook until the pasta is al dente and the clams open, about 7 minutes. Add a few tablespoons of water if the pasta is too dry. Stir in the parsley, top with a bit of grated parmesan if you like, and serve.

Looking out at the Sunday drizzle today, I had to finally realize that my stockings were out of the closet for good. While this is a not all together unpleasant thing in what usually is a hot desert hole in summer, I had just gotten used to October holiday weather i.e.  20-25 degrees Celsius and blistering sunshine, blue skies and a summers breeze. But, it’s definitely not all bad, new seasons mean new goals. and boy do I have some good ones!

This fall for example, I have decided that I am going to rediscover sweet potatoes. I have never liked them but they look so appealing roasting over coals on the streets of Beijing. Plus, they feel festive somehow and paired with the right spices, they can make even the most dreary fall day seem positively Caribbean! To balance the sweetness in the potatoes, I decided to make duck. It is always lovely paired with something sweet and can usually take pretty sturdy stuff. So, here is my take on:

A pretty sweet duck dish for two

2 duck legs
1 tsp ground cinnamon
a couple whole cloves, crushed in a pestle and mortar
1 tsp fresh ground black pepper
1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1 tsp salt
1/2 large yellow onion, cut into large wedges
2 bay leaves
1 dl dry white wine

2 small-medium sweet potatoes
1 dl whole milk
1/2 dl grated Parmesan (optional, you could use a knob of butter if you like)
a couple of dashes of grated nutmeg
salt and pepper to taste

Put your oven on 200 degrees Celsius. Mix the spices for the duck. Score the duck fat in a criss cross pattern and rub it generously with the spice mix. Put in baking tray skin side up. Arrange the onion and bay leaves around the duck and bake for 1 hour. After one hour, take out the duck pour in the wine and cook for another 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, peel and chop your sweet potatoes roughly into large cubes and boil for around 15-20 minutes in generously salted water or until tender. Drain, mash with an electric whisk or a masher, add the milk, Parmesan and spices mix it up again and serve immediately with the duck and a fresh, simple green salad.

Aren’t these pretty? I have been eating them non-stop for the past few weeks. Delish!

So I was getting water from the cooler at the office and glancing around to see if any new mooncake shipments had reached our lonley administrative part of the hospital. Alas, it had not. However, I was intregued by these:

On the bag it said beef orchid bean. I know these characters, part of them are in my Chinese name, so I knew I was not making a horrible error and that it actually said “marinated century livers” or something. And yet, it did not look like any kind of beef, or any kind of orchid.

My curiosity got the better of me and I grabbed a handful and tried them. They were pretty good, a sort of spiced up, dried broad bean snack. They tasted salty and savoury and sweet at the same time and were very fragrant (fragrant is my new favourite word, it sums up China so perfectly all year round). I suppose they are meant to taste a little floral and beefy, hence the name.

Perhaps it is time to explore other uneaten snacks in the capital.

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