Reciplace

Chinese Hot and Sour Soup

This is much yummier than any regular old Hot and Sour soup from a Chinese restaurant, and takes hardly any time at all, thanks to a bag of coleslaw or 'american style' salad from the supermarket.  One of the key ingredients of a good Hot and Sour soup is very thinly sliced carrot and red cabbage.  Rather than spending ages making little strips of vegetables, you can just throw in a bag of coleslaw mix, without the yucky pouch of ranch dressing it comes with. 

First, in a large saucepan, heat up some olive oil and sauté 2 cloves of garlic and a handful of Enoki Mushrooms.  (Those are those alien-looking long ones.) 

After a couple of minutes, pour in 750mL chicken or vegetable broth, then add a couple of glugs each of rice vinegar, soy sauce and oyster sauce. Add some thinly chopped fresh ginger, a thinly chopped bird's eye chilli pepper, and a stick of lemon grass.  Stir in your bag of coleslaw mix (minus the pouch of ranch dressing!  Bin it!) and some thin slices of firm tofu. 

Cover and simmer for 7 minutes.  Throw in a handful of fresh soybean sprouts and serve. (Bonus points if you serve it in a soup bowl set from Chinatown.  Like I did.)

Toast with Smoked Salmon (Lox)

Sundays are all about breakfast, aren't they?  Doesn't matter if you get up at 8am (like I did today), or at 11am (like I did last weekend).  The first thing you have to do is get up and plan your special weekend breakfast.

This is one that we always have when we stay at our favourite B&B in Amsterdam, Boogaard's.  I can never make it taste as good as Peter can, but I can get pretty close.  The key ingredient is good quality, fresh smoked salmon, and fresh, warm bread or bagels.  Peter bakes his bagels fresh, and we make fresh bread (in our bread maker). 

First, spread a generous amount of cream cheese on the bread or bagels.  Sprinkle over the cream cheese some thinly sliced shallots, red onion or spring onion.  Layer the smoked salmon on top, and squeeze a wedge of lemon over top.  Finish with some fresh cracked black pepper, and serve with extra lemon wedges on the side.

Salmon with pink grapefruit and avocado

When I first moved to the UK, I told all my new friends fables of something called the 'sun', 'blue sky' and 'warm weather'. No one believed me. After four years of being here, I can finally say 'I told you so'! I'd almost forgotten what nice weather was like, and it's actually been around for a few weeks!!

Along with putting sweaters away, summer-cooking was one of those things I'd forgotten how to do while living in a country with permanently grey skies. Previous years, even in July it still felt appropriate to have bangers and mash or chicken pie with gravy for dinner! But with all this fab weather, my mind started wandering toward refreshing, light dishes. Here's what I made last night - healthy, quick, and tasted great!

Combine in a bowl: the juice of quarter of a lemon, 2 spoonfuls of olive oil, salt and pepper. Peel one pink grapefruit, and remove the white pith. Slice into chunks and stir into the lemon mixture. Peel and slice one avocado, and add it to the bowl. Mix well, and put in the fridge while you cook the salmon. Prepare some brown rice.

Put some olive oil into a hot pan. Fry two fresh wild salmon fillets for about 5 minutes on each side, until the skin is crispy. When the rice is done (did you time everything right so it's all finished at the same time?? I never do...) stir in some fresh coriander, and some more freshly squeezed lemon juice.

Make a nest on a plate with the rice, place the salmon fillet on top, and spoon the avocado and grapefruit mixture over top. Drizzle the dressing over the rice and around the place.

Vermicelli pancakes with prawns and brussels sprouts

We've been planning our trip to Japan this week.  There's just something about buddhist shrines and sumo wrestling that makes me crave udon and ramen!  I can only get through about two paragraphs of a guide book without putting it down and picking up a recipe book with pictures of noodles instead.  Next week's grocery shop is going to be mostly pak choi and fish sauce... but I needed a fix NOW!  

I scoured the cupboards, and came up with enough bits and pieces to put together a mini Oriental feast.  I stir fried garlic, king prawns, ginger, baby corn, carrots, broccoli, spring onions and spinach with some bean sprouts.  For the sauce, I used chicken stock, oyster sauce, soy sauce, sugar, pepper and cornflour.  

I soaked some vermicelli noodles (okay it's not Japanese, but it was all I had!) and fried them in the shape of a pancake, with sesame oil.  For the side dish, I fried brussels sprouts in sesame oil, then added soy sauce, sugar and sesame seeds.  The vermicelli pancake wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be, but the rest of it was lovely!  A cup of jasmine tea to go with it, and I could almost concentrate on the guide books again!   Until the section about noodle bars..... mmmmmmmmm

Four Double Yolk Eggs - What are the Chances?

The other day, we visited Middle Farm near Lewes. Middle Farm is a great afternoon trip from Brighton... cider sampling, fresh fruit and veg, and lots of incredibly cute animals to pet! (Especially the sheep who paws at his fence to be hand-fed grass - soooo sweet!)

The farm shop is pretty expensive. But considering how much the price of eggs has gone up at Tesco lately, the fresh farm eggs didn't seem so pricey this time. So we bought a carton of six extra large.

On Sunday morning, we made eggs on toast for breakfast. One by one, as we cracked each egg open, they all turned out to be double yolks! I've eaten a lot of eggs in my life, but only ever seen a handful of double yolks.

Of course I got on to Google straight away to find out what the chances are, and here's what I found:

• Double-yolks do not mean that, if hatched, the egg would have produced twins. The future-chicken is actually the egg white.
• The chances of finding a double-yolk egg is 1 in 1,000. (We'd just found four! When I read this, I thought about going out to buy a lottery ticket.)
• Double-yolks tend to come from free range young hens laying their first eggs.
• Extra large eggs are almost always double-yolked. That's why they're extra large!

So in actual fact, even though the chances of finding a double-yolk are one in one thousand... buying extra large eggs from a farm almost guarantees it. One thing I do know, they sure tasted a lot better than those tiny eggs from Tesco!