Well, they’re idiots. Give me the life where a family celebrates each other’s company with day after day of endless deliciousness or where a group of vegan friends build their own traditions, blowing each other’s minds with tables laden with goodness, year after year.

In this spirit, contributor Anthony has suggested an open thread on Christmas food failures and successes – he’s going to tell us about curing his own ham, which I’m pretty excited to hear about as it’s something I’d love to do.

As for me, this year’s failure was the Coffin Bay Oysters, which were not fresh enough. Boo! My sister in law had bought them (opened) the day before, they’d been in the fridge the whole time (wrapped) but they smelt odd and had a weird black slick on the shells. That’s why the flesh is still there under the piles of crayfish, served with butter melted with a touch of their mustard – sublime, and all the sweeter for the oyster disaster.

Despite being a bit crook (nothing serious, don’t worry) I still managed to glaze the ham, but instead of leaving it to marinate for hours and hours I whipped up something in five minutes. Fortunately I reaped the benefits of years of consistent kitchen-pottering and pantry-filling, basing the glaze on a tart apricot sauce made from our own apricots. Sadly, the aged tree has since had to be cut down and the sauce will never be the same – your own apricots always make the best sauce.

This year’s real triumph however was a masterpiece of Christmas leftovers, the ham and prawn bahn xeo:

All the virtues of using up the leftovers, with lots and lots of crunchy fresh things and a zingy sour-and-hot sauce. Perfect Boxing Day fare. Rather than include chillies in the sauce, they were on the side and the kids loved them too. Based on this Ottolenghi recipe from Plenty.

Open thread, so at it – what did you get right and wrong this Christmas?

But what is restaurant reviewing all about? Nowadays, for most of us, if we want an opinion on a new restaurant in our neighbourhood, we’d probably go to some online site where diners rate the reasturant and offer their opinions. There’s a lot of debate about whether we’ve yet reached the age of the citizen journalist, but surely we’ve reached the age of the citizen critic? When it comes to something as quotidian as dining out, or a film, or a brand of whitegood or hi-fi, surely everyone is a critic. Do we really expect a food critic to add to this? Do we expect a restaurant critic to approach the task in the same way as a music critic will approach a recital, or a drama critic a play? Did they ever? Do we need a ‘specialist’ to interpret the dining experience to us in the same way as, for example, an art critic interprets art? What does it mean to a ‘specialist’ when it comes to consuming food in a restaurant?

I lived in Toronto in the first half of last year, in a neighbourhood at the west end of Queen Street West (that is, west Queen Street West). Queens St West runs from downtown, but the wester it goes the more it becomes like an extended version of Gertrude St Melbourne: a motley mix of convenience stores, pawn shops, second hand dealers, ethnic eateries, independent avant-garde art galleries, trendy cafes, social service providers and boutique hotels.

The area, like Gertrude St, is bordered by public housing – or what they call ‘project housing’ – and a local performance artist, Darren O’Donnell (no relation), worked with kids from the local Parkdale High School on a project called ‘Eat the Street’, glossed as Parkdale Public School versus Queen Street West (Darren likes working with kids: one of his earlier projects was to offer passing adults ‘haircuts by kids’ – under the supervision of a stylist of course).

O’Donnell took a group of students from Parkdale to review eleven restaurants in the Queen Street West area, over a month and a half, culminating in an awards ceremony. Here are examples of what some of the schoolkids-turned-restaurant reviewers had to say about some of the restaurants on the project’s blog:

‘The washroom is too small, smells bad and it dirty. Atmosphere is good. Pretty room colours. Good outfit. I like the music’ – Tenzin Paldon

‘Very good chicken curry with rice. Okay service’ – Tenzin Chokden

‘Service was pretty fast for a big group. There was a hair in my food’- Anh

‘It was very good and spicy’ – Tenzin Choesang

‘Bathroom = 8/10. Small, but feels good, isn’t dirty. Although small, feels nice and comfy. Sorta loud. Deer Burger: I feel really disturbed and disgusted. Wonder how it’ll end up like… Burger good and all but the sauce and ingredients on top are too overwhelming and strong. Doesn’t quite fit in well’ – Ann

‘Talihun threw up some food in a toilet because it tasted like his hair’ – Monlan

(You may have noted the apparent surfeit of kids named Tenzin: the area is home to one of the largest expat Tibetan communities outside of Asia)

Badging this as Parkdale Public School vs. Queen Street West 2: Eat The Street is explicitly oppositional. But it highlights what is at stake here. When a street like Queen St West or Gertrude St starts to change and gets a reputation as a hip or cool or edgy place — whether for its food or its art or its clothing boutiques or whatever — it is because a group of people has interpreted it this way and sold that interpretation to the world. Sharon Zukin, an American scholar of gentrification, calls these people the ‘critical infrastructure’: they range from the museum curators to the art gallery staff; from the restaurant waiters through to the restaurant reviewers — and, we would now have to add, online reviewers and ‘subcultural guides’ and blogs and so on. As she says, they ‘establish and unify a new perspective for viewing and consuming the values of place’. And in this way, of course, they also establish market values. And for Zukin, what goes for the built landscape goes for the menu as well: that shift from place-defining to market-defining.

Yet although the group that is able to communicate information about new consumption opportunities is expanding thanks to the internet, the critical infrastructure is not a job for everyone: it requires people with the requisite cultural capital, if not financial capital. Those kids from Parkdale Public School do just what critics do: they visit restaurants and write up their reactions. But what they’re doing, in the context of the gentrification of west Queen St West, is also something totally different from what restaurant reviewers do.

Update: there has been an Australian version of Eat the Street in Launceston (with a photo blog and (pdf) awards), inspired and supported by the Toronto collective Mammalian Diving Reflex. There’s a lot to say about this phenomenon as performance art: the place of children in public dining; their empowerment and voice; being made to remember what was important to us as kids when dining out; and so on. In my post I’ve focused on a fairly narrow aspect of the Toronto example – the seeming opposition between Parkdale School and Queen St West – to make a point about gentrification and cuisine and the role of restaurant critics however broadly defined. I don’t know enough about the demographics of Mowbray Heights Primary School to say whether any of this is relevant to the experience in Launceston. Anyone? Anyone?

Part of the brief talk I gave was about blogging as a way of exploring and enjoying a community of interest, and it certainly seemed there was a real joy for all of us in being in a room full of people who “get” our passion because they share it.

I’m planning to write up my talk and post it soon, (you will be glad to hear that despite the fears of another attendee before the conference, it wasn’t too wanky ;) Gill of confessions of a food nazi has a post on some of her excellent talk here, and a plan to blog the rest. She’s encouraged the rest of us who participated in panels to do the same, and I think it would be great to link them all from the Eat.Drink.Blog site.

There were three (I think) attendees who weren’t on twitter, and less by the end of the day. The stream of the #eatdrinkblog hashtag appeared on the super-cool projected TweetWall – Lisa of unwakeable, Nola and Suzanne of essjayeff being the funny-girl stars of the day. Although I wish they had been less funny in the panel segment, sitting facing the audience cracking up at a tweet I couldn’t read!

I really appreciated that there wasn’t a push towards homogeneity amongst the group, in fact quite the reverse. I think the best session to demonstrate the point was the photography one, where Ellie from Kitchen Wench, Nola from Once a Waitress and Matt from Abstract Gourmet talked about their individual ways of going about making photos that worked the way they wanted them to, with a few tips and tricks thrown in. (Ellie’s tip – read the manual; Nola’s – think about using photographs as a means of communication; Matt’s – find a way to do it that works for you).

Claire from Melbourne Gastronome pulled off a real feat with her talk, managing to be legally precise and not dull. I really wasn’t expecting the sessions on SEO (by Michael of My Aching Head), “How to be social” (by Pennie of Jeroxie:addictive and consuming), geotagging (Brian of fitzroyalty) and the monetising sessions (by Jules of Stonesoup and Phil of The Last Appetite) to be interesting, but I found them fascinating because the presenters really knew their stuff – as @tummyrumbles (mellie) put it on the Tweetwall, they showed a “good balance of nerdy theory and feel good philosophy”.

I found some things quite surprising throughout the day – that so many of us who’d been blogging for a few years had blogged on other subjects (like me, mostly politics) before coming to focus on food; the immediacy of our ease in each other’s company; how generous everyone was with their expertise and how true-to-life some people’s blogging identities are. For instance The Healthy Party Girl left in the afternoon to go to cheerleader practice and came back to bum a fag and piss on in the laneway!

Once the strictly social part of the day kicked in, we started to talk about the next Eat.Drink.Blog. What made it possible this year was the organisation work (by Ed of Tomatom, Reem of I am obsessed with food… (who have a beautiful talk on why she blogs, including starting because she needed somewhere to talk about her love life!) Mellie of Tummyrumbles, , April of My Food Trail, Jess of That Jess Ho, who hung the photo exhibit, and Tammi of Tammi Tasting Terroir who moderated – thank you all).

There was also significant sponsorship from the organisations listed at the end of this post. Certainly for interstate visitors it made it much more affordable to not have to pay to register and to be treated to lovely drinks and food, and not having to handle monetary exchanges meant we don’t need to formalise an organisational structure and the further administrative load that entails. I think it’s really important that more people have the opportunity to go, but I’m eager to find a way for that to happen without losing the lovely sense of intimacy that permeated the day. On the third hand, having organising multiple streams during the day means we can really go into detail and cover a lot more ground.

There is a full list of bloggers who attended (thanks to Mellie), and I’ve set up a twitter list here. I’m conscious that I haven’t mentioned everyone; I encourage you to check out the full list.

The conference was sponsored by Daylesford and Hepburn Water, Der Raum, Prentice Wine, Red Hill Brewery, SBS Food, StreetSmart – Helping the Homeless, St Ali and The Essential Ingredient.

NB – this post is brought to you by an absence of blurry iphone photos. Not that there aren’t any, but they’re not mine – my phone’s from Aldi.

Celebrating Slava was not generally encouraged in socialist Yugoslavia, although many people did still observe it. These days Slava seems to be celebrated as an occasion to get the family together and eat pork. I am very enthusiastic about both family get togethers and roast pig, so today I did sticky pork ribs with rum glaze (thanks Nigella) and homemade coleslaw, plus smashed potatoes (thanks Jill Dupleix) and rye bread – minus the family bit, seeing as we’re on the other side of the world. I have to admit, it was a bit off piste with the rum glaze – a whole pig on a spit would probably have been more authentic – but it was in keeping with the two Balkan mainstays of pork and cabbage. And, anyway, the other thing I’ve learnt about Balkan culture is that they really know how to have a good time and these ribs were really, really finger licking good.

Oh the joys of going to the cinema – especially when driven by our loyalty to PDP! We thought we were attending a foodlover’s premier of a promising-looking film about cooking and cookbooks. The good reviews of the filmic biography of Julia Child, starring Meryl Streep, sucked us in.

What we ended up experiencing was a special foodies night for a sweetly entertaining flick that was indeed about Mrs Child, the author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but also – its contemporary theme – about food blogging! Co-starring the very perky Amy Adams: Julie and Julia, the film by Nora Ephron pressed more buttons than we had anticipated…

Apparently the Dendy assumes foodies are easily stimulated. It wasn’t a premiere, so what did we get for our extra ten bucks?

There were “free” tiny tipple cocktails (Bernini’d champagne) and on each seat a show bag of three samples including ten sea salted half macadamias, a teaspoon of lime and white pepper gianduja chocolate, half a teaspoon of vanilla salt, some Canberra Centre propaganda, and then three quarters of an hour of slightly naff food and cocktail demos. Naff though it was, it did feature Emmanuel the slowest “cocktail barista” ever to grace the stage, plus a non-committal but cliché-ridden master-sommelier-in-training. Nevertheless they did treat us to a very yummy soup-son the size of a twenty cent piece made from the vanilla salt cured salmon on a bed of mascapone cheese with horseradish. Soup-son? All the sophisticated French words were anglicized or malapropped by the Executive Chef, Neil Abrahams (vinegar-ette, acicity) throughout the event.

The film starts with a lot of 1940s car sex. We were transfixed by the art director’s perfect reconstruction of late 1940s Paris, as the bored but larger-than-life (and seemingly always inebriated) Julia Child squeezed her way through narrow streets in a monstrous Buick Woody Wagon, and through classic French street markets with her engaging and endlessly diplomatic husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci). Then we were fast-forwarded to a flat in Queens in 2002, to meet an equally bored 29-year-old Julie Powell, a frustrated would-be novelist stuck in a dead-end job taking sympathy calls post 9/11. While she’s much sharper than her yuppy friends, she doesn’t know what to do with her itchy mind.

The one thing they both love is food. Julie remembers her mother’s first Julia Child boeuf bourguignon, while Julia overcomes the barriers of gender and gaucherie to become a Cordon Bleu chef. The French, she discovers, “eat French food everyday: Heaven!” As we follow Julia passionately demystifying French recipes, we watch Julie discovering her own foodie passions via a self-imposed blog challenge (“I could write a blog. I have thoughts!”). She sets out to blog her way through every recipe in Julia’s book in a year, 536 recipes in 365 days. Time and space are nicely compressed as Julie becomes Julia. Almost.

Between postings in Paris and Marseilles, then somewhere in Germany, and then somewhere in Norway, and ultimately back “home” in the USA, there were lots of “yum” food pix and sequences. Julia discovered a correspondence between “hot cock” and cannelloni, while Julia (stuck in Queens) discovered that the poached egg was “like melted cheese”. Hmmm. Both husbands survived the “you can’t have too much butter” mantra.

But it was cute. Julie found the courage to boil live lobsters; discovered she had fans who actually read her daily purge; finally mastered the art of deboning a chook; saved her marriage from her own obsessive egotism; got an interview in the NYT and subsequently got flooded with publishing offers. All of this inspired by the spirit of Julia. Apart from a slightly sooky offering-in-homage of a half-pound of butter in a Julia Childs memorial in the Smithsonian at the end of the film, this is a delightful tale of food and love and blogging. A combination made in heaven.

We are all high from a great afternoon, where I did not much more than stand and talk to most of the guests (I missed some, or pretty much anyone who didn’t push in and make themselves known)and take lots of kind and gushy compliments — but I was only able to do this because of this fabulous bunch of people. They cooked, chopped, plated (!), laid out glasses, poured, cleaned, washed and picked up. I’ve never been in the position to need that sort of back-up, and I can see how it could be pretty addictive [Naomi, aka Dr Sista Outlaw, requested that I mention that Underground Lovers are on in the background. Wow, so they are. The layers of sound in this room are amazing.]; I’m jealous of people who have agents and managers.

We are going to celebrate a successful celebration by eating. My initial thought was to go to a restaurant, since I thought everyone would be sick of kitchenwork, but generous Zoe wants to feed us all, so she’s whipping up a quick bacon & tomato pasta for the kids, and we’re having a mushroom and truffle risotto (she made me smell fresh truffle at the markets this morning… OMG). But we can’t eat too much because we have not one, not two but THREE full-size Christmas puddings to taste and discuss… three versions of the same pudding, cooked by BB, Naomi and Zoe, and the differences and quality will be taken very seriously.

Goodness, this is live-blogging. We earlier popped in to introduce S to the Bhutanese neighbours, who just then popped in and invited us to their party… I think we’re going to eat our first course and then take all the puddings over there, which will take the pressure off us to guts ourselves while the pudding is hot & fresh. Huzzar!

[Dr Sista Outlaw chimes in] is wonderful to be down here in Canberra, where the weather is chill and the vibes are warm. Zoe and Caren have slipped out for a fag [Zoe's fagging, Caren is abstemious] and Owen and Jeremy are working out how to keep the kids corralled in one space. The most popular solution is a DVD in the room I am sleeping in. That’s fine, so long as I don’t have to be there while the DVD takes place.

I am in my pyjamas already so am resisting entreaties to go next door to the Bhutanese. Piking, yes, but it’s been a LONG day. Zoe and I kind of overdid it last night, and have so far failed to find the person responsible for deciding to get the brandy out, although we are quite pleased we can barely remember watching a very old Duran Duran on TV. We got up at 6 freakin’ 30 a.m. and made it to EPIC markets, where we managed to secure the last truffle of the season, then came home to chop and fill the car with lovely food that Zoe has spent the week preparing. Onion tarts with chevre and thyme, a Szechuan beef stew with tofu tied in bows, lovely terrine, dips …

The launch of Ampersand Duck’s studio was entirely successful, with a great speech and with very fine company, but the boys are getting just a bit silly and parental intervention is now required …

[&Duck] The kids are cloistered with DVD in a separate room. We are underfed and descending into happy slurring drunkedness, except for Owen who seems to be in. control. The risotto is cooking and smells divine. S ducked next door to the Bhutans and hasn’t reappeared, which means he’s partying hard. I have my doubts whether we’ll be able to make it next door and have visions of us waking tomorrow morning, face-down in bowls of pudding and custard in our ears. Personally all I have eaten today is a couple of pieces of excellent Amore Cake for breakfast (port chocolate cake and pecan rhubarb crumble) plus a slice of terrine and a scraping of the red-cooked beef for a very late lunch. The amount of alcohol I have drunk since changing into some comfy jeans is outweighing the food substantially. Naomi and Owen are stars. Zoe just said ‘we need more wine’. I rest my case, we are having a pudding-off-face, not a pudding-off!

8:39pm: the risotto was stupendous. We are falling over ourselves to try at least one pudding, because apparently the Bhutanese lovelies are holding off their dinner until we can come & taste it, even though we have tried our best to dissuade them. What an overwhelming sense of polite hospitality! One child won’t go to bed without pudding, so we will taste one and then take the rest next door. I just hope they aren’t making themselves stupidly drunk waiting for us.

WOOT! pudding flames! I love the fact that Zoe’s computer is next to the dining table. First pudding is Zoe’s, made with butter not suet — vege friendly. Served with cream & custard. YUM.

The children are stoked and shovelling pudding down their gobs. This is classic kidlit eating, straight out of Enid Blyton. No complaints apart from some liking cream, others liking custard. We are trying to stop BB from explaining to the kids that the bases of Bunnykins plates have rooting rabbits on them.

We have decided to try all puddings quickly and take the leftovers next door. ‘Pudding is heaps better in winter than in summer’ says Owen. Right on…

Naomi’s, the original model with suet, is delightful. Zoe’s has big chunky fruit pieces and lots of alcohol. BB’s is the best shape, and has more citrus tones. No one is prepared to make absolute judgement, but the fine points are being discussed. Each child votes for their parental pudding. The consensus is that all are absolutely delicious, especially when smothered in burning brandy and sauces.

So now we must put the poor neighbours out of their misery! Actually, I’m sure they’re happily drinking, but the poor buggers need to eat.

[Dr Sister Outlaw] someone has to hold the fort while the others go and drink with the Bhutanese … I was already in my pyjamas so here I am, taking a break from the washing up. Zoe is putting the littlest to bed, but I suspect she won’t be emerging … my reward will be lying in guilt free in the morning while her and Owen get up and attend to their early rising children. Puddings were magnificent – very different – but the pudding off has shown the reliability of the recipe. Will be interested to see what the Bhutanese think … so, that’s me, signing off from Chez PDP. Have a good one!!

This is approximately how much stuff you need to demystify your average Asian grocery store, with the addition of a bonus Hairy McClary backpack full of nappies, wipes, toddler snacks and a cold drink. If your car is getting fixed, you’ll be needing a large hand truck. Fortunately I didn’t have far to go.

When you get there you’ll need tables to fill up with all manner of until-now mysterious things, like giant packets of fungus and small jars of stinky fermented tofu, bundles of greens, jars full of bark, tiny bottles of mustard oil so pungent it burns your nasal hairs, etc, etc.

I think one reason why some people are cautious about buying things from an Asian grocery store is that so much stuff is packaged, and if you don’t know what it is, or what the thing you want looks like, it gets confusing. So we ripped open all the plastic and set about rehydrating, sniffing, poking and tasting.

I wish someone had mentioned my hair before they started taking pictures, but there you go.

We rehydrated four different kinds of dried fungus and compared them, observing that the (relatively) expensive white capped shiitakes absorbed more water, became much softer and more luscious and had an altogether more savoury and appealing smell than the cheaper brown ones, that black cloud ear (also called wood mushroom) was a “texture food” because it didn’t really have a lot to offer in the taste department but that on the other hand there’s something pretty special about white fungus.

Many of the women were very familiar with tofu, but some had never cooked with or eaten it, so we opened up some silken, firm, puffs and pressed five spice tofu – I forgot the tofu sheets – and talked about what kinds of uses they have and what they weren’t good for. Unfortunately I couldn’t bring some of the really good locally made tofu (by Shanghai Yulin Tofu) because I hadn’t been able to get to the shop.

We passed around dishes of light and dark soy sauce, and talked about what the hell that meant. We sniffed black vinegar, and rice vinegar and Chianking vinegar. We had a go at the Shaoxing wine, which Anglifed recipes often suggest can be substituted for with sherry. Well, why would you when a flash bottle costs about $8 and is MUCH better than sherry.

By this stage we were getting pretty hungry, so started to whip up some food. I explained that you only need a cheap wok from the Chinese shop, but that it must be seasoned properly. The claypot dish I had intended to make went belly up because there was a concealed switch to turn the oven on, but we ended up stir-frying the topping so we could taste it anyway.

Basic leafy Chinese veg stir-fry

The NSW Government has standardised names and published a pictorial guide to Asian vegetables. Personally I’m sad to see the end of the hairy melon, but that’s progress I suppose. Clicking the veggie’s name in the guide will give you a bigger image, alternative names and cooking information

Ingredients

• non-stingy splash of corn or peanut oil (not olive, it doesn’t handle the necessary intense heat well)
• 2 cloves garlic, smashed in a theatrical fashion with the flate of a cleaver from shoulder height down onto the chopping board
• 1 bunch leafy greens like kang kong or amaranthen choy
• light soy sauce (I like Kimlan best, then Pearl River Bridge)
• Chinkiang vinegar (Gold Plum brand is the best, but has been hard to find recently)

Method

• Wash your greens and trim into 5 cm lengths
• Turn the exhaust fan on
• Heat the empty wok hot, hot, hot until smoke is rising
• splash in oil, quickly followed by garlic
• push the garlic around quickly with a big flat spatula/wooden spoon for about 30 seconds
• As soon as you can smell the garlic, toss in the greens
• push, push, push them around to coat them with garlicky oil
• throw in a splash or two of soy sauce and push around for a minute or two more – the stems should be crispy and the leaves soft but not “melted”
• take off the heat and add a splash or two of Chinkiang vinegar

Fuchsia Dunlop’s Ma Po Tofu

It makes a huge difference to roast and grind the Sichuanese peppercorns fresh each time. We passed around some raw and toasted peppercorns so the women could see the difference themselves. We also chewed one to get the “numb and tingling” effect that they’re known for. If you don’t have a mortar and pestle to grind them, put them in a teatowel and give them a good bash with something heavy, like the end of a cleaver, a rolling pin or a can of beans.

Ingredients

• 1 block of silken tofu
• 6 stems green garlic (garlic chia), or green onions aka “shallots”
• 150 g beef mince (although we used pork)
• 2 tablespoons Sichuanese broad bean chilli sauce (look for one that uses broad beans, not soy beans. Ideally, the ingredients list reads something like “broad beans, chilli, flour, salt”
• 1 tablespoon soaked salted black beans
• 1 cup chicken stock
• a pinch of sugar, a splash of soy
• 2 teaspoons potato starch in enough water to make a slurry (cornflour is fine; you don’t need to use either if you like a slightly runnier sauce)
• roasted and ground Sichuan peppercorns

Method

• Cut tofu into squares (you can do this while it’s still in the packet) and set aside. If feasible, rest in it just boiled salted water for a few minutes.
• Cut the green garlic stems into “horses ears” – 2 cm long slices on a sharp diagonal.
• Measure everything else out into little bowls or dishes and line them up next to the stove.

• Turn on the exhaust fan. Heat the wok on high heat and add 4 tablespoons oil (1/3 cup). It might seem a lot, but remember that Chinese food is served from a shared dish on the table, and you leave the oil in the serving bowl.)
• Add the mince and cook until it has brown crunchy edges.

• Lower heat to medium, and add chilli bean paste. Stir quickly, then add the black beans. Mash up a few with your stirring tool. If you’re keen, add a couple of teaspoons of ground dried chilli now.
• Have a bit of a cough. If you added the ground chillies, have a sip of water as well.

• Add the stock and then the tofu. Move everything around gently so that the tofu gets coated. If you don’t want the pieces to break up, be careful.   You don’t need to move fast here, it’s not stir fry.
• Add a pinch of sugar and a couple of splashes of soy and leave for a few minutes to simmer.

• Stir in the green garlic and after a couple of minutes, add the starch slurry.  Let it thicken for a couple of minutes.
• Scatter Sichuan peppercorns on top to serve.

Dry fried green beans – vegan and omnivore versions

To make this substantial enough as a meal on its own with rice, you can add some smoked or five-spice pressed tofu, cut into slivers of a similar size to the beans. We did because the packet was open and because I wanted the vegetarians to stop looking sad.

Ingredients

• 300 g snake beans cut into 5 cm lengths (green beans are fine)
• 75 g soaked and finely chopped shiitake mushrooms (or use a mix including some soaked and finely chopped white fungus and black fungus, aka black cloud ear, which we did because we’d been inspecting them all) or the same weight of pork mince
• 2 teaspoons light soy sauce
• 2 teaspoons Shaoxing wine
• 1 tablespoon Tianjin preserved vegetable (finely chopped if not already shredded; it often comes in a squat little brown crock with a plastic lid)
• Sesame oil

Method

• Turn the exhaust fan on
• Heat the empty wok hot, hot, hot until smoke is rising
• Splash in oil, then the beans.  Move them around until they start to blister and get black spots – five minutes or so. They should start to get a smoky and slightly sweet smell.  Set them aside.

• Heat the wok again over a high flame and add more oil.  Add pork mince or mushrooms and stir fry for a minute, splashing in the wine and soy.
• Add Tianjin preserved vegetable and mix; add the reserved beans.
• Put in a bowl or plate and drizzle a little sesame oil on top.

Claypot pork with dried shiitakes, red dates and dried sausage

Claypots are cheap and surprisingly useful, but any heavy pot with a lid will do. If you’re using a claypot for the first time, soak it in a bucket of water for 24 hours (the lid, too). For subsequent uses, soak it for an hour or chuck it in a bucket in the morning to use in the evening. I have made this in one big claypot or two smaller ones.

Ingredients

• About 500 g pork, with some fat and lean meat (ie, 750 g chops with bones and some fat removed and sliced into pieces about 4 cm by 2 cm by ½ cm)
• 4 large shiitakes, stems removed and soaked in hot water for ten minutes then sliced
• handful dried Chinese red dates (aka jujubes, and not a true date – leave out rather than use other dates)
• 1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine (or use Sherry, but as Shaoxing wine is tastier and cheaper, go buy a bottle – get Golden Pagoda brand if you can)
• 1 teaspoon roasted sesame oil
• 1 tablespoon of ginger in fine matchsticks
• 2 tsp potato starch (cornflour is fine)
• 4 green onions or garlic stems, cut into 3 cm lengths on an angle
• 3 chinese sausages, cut inot ½ slices on an angle (so they look like ovals)
• 2 pinches sugar
• 300 g jasmine rice
• two generous cups of chicken stock

Method

• Marinate all but the rice and stock for an hour or more.  You can make the mix the night or morning before.

• Wash the rice really well and drain. Put it in the claypot with a pinch of salt stock. Homemade stock is best, but use a liquid one in preference to powders. If using a bought stock, check if you need the salt.
• Bring it up to boil, put the lid on and turn down as low as you can. I use a heat diffuser on an electric hotplate, but the hotplate itself would be fine. Don’t muck about checking it, it’ll be fine without you.

• After ten minutes, stir fry the marinated mix in a hot wok with some oil until nearly cooked (less than 5 minutes). Splash in a little stock and maybe an extra splash of soy.
• While still very hot, spread it on top of the rice and put the lid back on for 10 minutes.
• It will be very tender and the fat will have a slightly jelly-like consistency.  Eat with a stir fried green veg.

Black Bean Sauce

This recipe is for beans, but can be adapted for most anything you fancy.

Ingredients

• about 500 g green beans or snake beans, topped & tailed and cut into 4 cm pieces
• 3-4 cloves garlic, chopped fine (as much as you like)
• 2 tablespoons fermented black beans (salted black beans) soaked and drained
• 1 tablespoon clear rice vinegar
• light soy sauce
• teaspoon of potato starch (or cornflour) mixed to a slurry with a little water
• pinch of sugar
• 2 tablespoons Shaoxing wine

Method

• Follow the first three steps in the dry fried green bean recipe above, reserving beans.
• Heat wok on high heat, when smoking add oil.
• Add garlic and black beans and toss about.
• Return beans to pan, and add a splash of vinegar and a pinch of salt.
• When veg is all hot again, stir in 1 – 2 tablespoons of stock (or water) .
• Take off the heat and drizzle them with sesame oil.

It was really good fun, and I got lots of good feedback. Nancy of Roving Lemon’s Big Adventure came along to the session, and blogged about it here. Even better, two members of the group cooked stir fries for dinner that night.

ETD 7 days…

As the day of my departure looms closer, signs of pre-trip anxiety are beginning to leak out of me and forebode a chaotic week ahead. As if irrational dreams and inexplicable tears are not enough, this morning I put my expensive Italian stove-top coffee maker in the microwave (instead of on the stove top where it rightly belongs). I zapped it on high for at least a minute before I realised what I had done. Amazingly only the plastic knob suffered, now resembling a charcoalled marshmallow.

The plums are rotting on the tree and the yard is beginning to smell like cheap Spanish wine. No time to jam myself (!), so I salvaged what I could and took them over to Mother to deal with.

Family farewell lunch today, during which I ate enough carbs to see me through to Alice Springs. This blog could be over before it even began. My contribution to lunch was a bakers dozen of some banana walnut muffins (no maple today, feeling a bit povo). They’ve come out rather nicely – good to know that even when all else goes to shit my muffins still rise to the occasion. Mother’s chocolate cake was delicious, if a little wobbly. And yes, those are Ken Done place mats…

(Click photos to embiggen)