In praise of markets

We are sure it is obvious to anyone reading this blog that our interest in food borders on the obsessive. We love cooking, eating (of course), tasting new things, exploring culinary traditions from around the world, and our cookbook collection is ever-growing with no end in sight.

It should come as no surprise, then, that we are self-professed market fiends. No matter where we go, our first port of call is the market, be it big, small, obscure, or the biggest tourist-trap for miles. We don’t discriminate either – we are just as happy with markets selling fresh produce as we are with markets filled with odd souvenirs and piles of plastic shoes made in China. From Vienna to Dusseldorf, as close to home as Twickenham, and as far-flung as the excellent weekly market in Lalibela, Ethiopia (complete with a ‘parking lot’ for donkeys), we’ve made it our mission to see as many markets in as many countries as possible. Markets provide a wonderful insight into the local culture and daily life outside what the guidebooks tell you.

Columbia Road flower market - London

Naschmarkt - Vienna

Weekly market - Lalibela, Ethiopia

We were in market heaven in Vietnam. We found ourselves being drawn back over and over again to the same markets, wanting to see them at different times of day, and making sure we hadn’t missed a single corner. Our first encounter with Vietnamese markets was the big and bustling Ben Thanh market in Ho Chi Minh City. A market with multiple personalities, Ben Thanh has something for all tastes. The covered stalls entice you away from the heat and scooter fumes into a huge dimly-lit space crowded with stalls selling T-shirts with Uncle Ho or the ubiquitous yellow star on a red background (yours for only $1!) or a mind-boggling array of souvenirs for friends and family back home. Poke around a bit more, and you’re sure to find war memorabilia, although the authenticity may be suspect. In the centre, food stalls abound, with all manner of Vietnamese delights – freshly squeezed juice, pho (noodles in broth), spring rolls…At night, the outdoor perimeter of the market comes alive with food stalls crowded with plastic tables and chairs. Vendors try to encourage you to pick their ‘restaurant’ for your evening meal, and it’s difficult to decide where to spend your money. Slightly further out, you’ll find fruit stalls, mobile juice vans and portable carts selling a rainbow of cooked rice.

One of the many food stalls at Ben Thanh market

We were equally delighted by the market in Hoi An, which was a respite from the overwhelming number of tailors and shops selling tourist schmaltz. It’s easy to lose yourself in the densely packed stalls selling a dizzying array of fresh vegetables – lettuces, herbs (more varieties of basil than we’d ever seen before), tomatoes, onions, garlic, fresh turmeric and tamarind. Piles of beautiful fruit were everywhere – the beautiful yet bizarre dragon fruit, more than five varieties of oranges, pomelos as big as basketballs, custard apples, sapodillas (or chicoos, as I know them), longan, durian, jackfruit, guavas, and Vietnamese apples. The ‘department of fish’ is not for the squeamish. Fisherwomen, who sell the catch their husbands bring in each morning, sit behind baskets of still-jumpy shrimp, huge prawns, tilapia, and snapper, while the ground around them is covered in fish guts and blood. It’s worth the dirty shoes to see these women bantering with customers while smoking very large cigarettes.

Selling fish in Hoi An

The market in Hue seemed larger than the one in Hoi An, and more organized into distinct sections. We went in search of the famous Hue poem hats, which are like the traditional Vietnamese conical hats, but when held up to the light, you see images of sights around Hue or poems. After the requisite bargaining for our two hats, we soon got lost in the maze of fruits, vegetables, fresh meat (again, not for the squeamish!) and piles of rice noodles, rice paper wrappers, and sacks of rice.

Baskets of lentils at the market in Hue

Our only disappointment came in Hanoi. We went in search of two markets mentioned in our guidebook. One, supposedly in an alley between two major streets seems to have vanished, and the other was a hole in the ground, sadly demolished to make way for a glass and concrete monstrosity. The only remnant of anything market-like was the doner kebab stand, very grandly named the Goethe Café! That said, the entire old quarter in Hanoi was like one big market, where every small street specialized in one certain product. Shoes, coffee, mattresses, tombstones…anything you would ever need seemed to be within easy reach.

Spending a few hours in a market is an excellent way to build up an appetite, and we certainly did our fair share of sampling all that Vietnam had to offer on a plate. Stay tuned for more of our culinary adventures!

Viet Nam

It is difficult, on first arriving to Viet Nam, not to be overwhelmed by the masses of people, the traffic, the pollution, the incessant sputtering and stuttering of motorcycles, the impatient blaring of car horns and the general feeling that, if you put a foot wrong, you’re likely to be mown down by a stream of cheap 50cc mopeds imported from China. Really, not the way to go.

Dodge this....

But like other bourgening, southeast Asian economies, Viet Nam is a country that grows on you. Despite its difficult history, Viet Nam’s cities are now vibrant commercial centres and maintain that peculiarly Asian juxtaposition of ancient traditions and western-style development. Like its northern neighbour, Viet Nam is part of the unique 20th century experiment of socialist capitalism and the Vietnamese share a great many things with their Chinese counterparts, including unparalleled industriousness and work ethic.

Most of the time, anyway....

Being a southeast Asian country, Viet Nam is obviously at the forefront of technological development, and lead the way particularly in innovative cabling solutions for high-speed telecommunications.

Broadband anyone...?

Despite these technological advances, however, there is an increasing concern about the impact of such rapid development on the environment, and the Vietnamese are increasingly becoming recognized as responsible guardians of wildlife.

Save our swallows....

And, of course, there is the great cultural heritage of Viet Nam. The colonial legacies of the Europeans, the Champa, as well as the Chinese and Japanese, have left behind Christian, Hindu and Buddhist traditions and have resulted in important religious movements, such as the Cao Dai religion. The spirituality of the Vietnamese, however, is not confined to churches and temples. Rather, it can be seen in every day life; every quotidian experience, no matter how mundane, is a transcendental experience.

Not merely burning....

And then there’s the food. The Viet people of the south have inherited from their northern ancestors a voracious appetite. The right to eat anything in sight is enshrined in national food policy.

The recommended monthly allowance of crab is....

For practising Buddhists and tourists not keen to eat any and all parts of 4+ legged creatures, restaurants in Viet Nam are increasingly catering for vegetarian preferences.

The kind of vegetarianism I like....

In short, Viet Nam is a beautiful country. Ancient yet technologically advanced, noisy yet spiritual, and caring for its people and the environment.

New Year’s Eve – Hong Kong style

Happy new year, and happy 2010!

We rang in the new year in Hong Kong with all the glitz and spectacle that could only take place in this frenetic and vibrant city.

Our three-week trip through Hong Kong and Vietnam began when we landed on New Year’s eve morning in a foggy and cool Hong Kong.  Y & M, who had been in Hong Kong for several weeks, had scoped out the best viewing options, and we decided to stay on the Hong Kong side rather than forcing ourselves into the masses of people on the Kowloon side of the harbour.

After a much-needed nap and several food breaks, we found a relatively uncrowded bit of sidewalk overlooking the harbour and parked ourselves there for over an hour, waiting for the 4+ minute show that promised to be amazing, spectacular, and many other superlatives. Somehow, in that crowd of people, C’s parents managed to find us, claiming that C’s hair was an excellent landmark. Clearly spiky hair is good for something…

Midnight arrived and with it the promised fireworks display, synchronised between many buildings on the harbour-front, with the primary fireworks coming off Hong Kong’s tallest building, the International Finance Centre. It certainly was a spectacle to behold. C saw most of it through the lens of his camera, which is how we can share some pictures with you below!

It was a great way to start our trip, and the new year. Best of all, it wasn’t below freezing and we didn’t need toe warmers while we watched the fireworks!

A spot of Christmas baking

Yes, OK, Christmas was almost a month ago, but since we left for Hong Kong and Vietnam soon afterwards (on which more later…), I’m afraid we’re catching up. And what better way to round up the culinary year than with a spot of Christmas baking? Our oven was put to the test in the days running up to Christmas, which was a good thing, as it was also the only constant source of heat in the house!

And so there was chocolate chip shortbread, Dutch speculaas, German stollen, almond macaroons (technically, failed cinnamon stars salvaged into macaroons), Italian panettone and Swedish rye bread (of the IKEA, add water, shake-and-bake kind, which we’ve discovered is actually really good!). Before you begin to wonder how our girth and cardiac health were affected, no we didn’t scoff all this ourselves, we decided to give them as gifts in nicely decorated baskets. By all accounts, the recipients were very satisfied. We have no information regarding their subsequent girth or cardiac health.

Panettone

Speculaas

Stollen

Macaroons

Back to the brine (aka Christmas lunch)

Following last year’s successful brining experiment, we thought there was no way back; our turkey this year had to be given the brining treatment. The logistics, however, required careful planning. Firstly, the thought of ordering a turkey a month in advance and paying full price for it seems ridiculous, particularly since we had a tip-off from last year that there are plenty of turkeys left on the shelves at a discounted price on Christmas Eve. So we decided to hold off and wait until the morning of the 24th to score a half-price turkey. Admittedly, this is a risky strategy. What if there just aren’t any turkeys left? What if the turkeys that are left are too small, or too big, or not the right kind (the right kind being the free-range, bronzed variety)? Well, that’s true, but since none of us are particularly militant about the need to have turkey for Christmas, we figured we would just roast whatever else was left in the supermarket in the event of a turkey emergency. Besides, there are no fewer than 4 supermarkets within reasonable distance, and we were well resourced to cover several of them simultaneously if the need arose. Most importantly, we had to make sure we were there at the right moment when the turkeys came down in price, which we suspected would be around noon. And sure enough, after some reconnaisance and loitering around the turkey aisle, and eavesdropping on supermarket staff conversations about the turkey stock status, the sticker man came. No sooner was the reduced price sticker on the bird than we barged our way past the vulturing crowds and grabbed it: a 4.7kg free-range, bronzed turkey for £17 (original price £47). A veritable Christmas bargain! (*Co-author’s note: Unlike Canadian supermarkets, you can actually get fresh turkeys here, so we didn’t need to find a fast method to defrost a rock-solid frozen bird.)

Bird in hand, we next had to develop our brining infrastructure. In the absence of an adequately-sized picnic cooler, this was facilitated by a food-safe plastic container from our new local Swedish useful store. Hugo was then submerged in a mixture of one cup salt to one gallon of water and kept overnight in the trunk of a Volkswagen at a couple of degrees above freezing before rinsing and roasting. The result was a resounding success. As a tip, however, we’d recommend not wrapping your brined turkey with bacon, as it makes the gravy a little too salty.

nasty skank brioche

There are a few things that, once tasted, instantly compel one to try and reproduce. Brioche is one of those things. For me, it has an association with the blue, white and red bags with the plastic tie that you get in supermarkets, from where I suspect I had my first taste of brioche. Inside, a golden, glazed and gleaming loaf, from which you peel off the crimped greaseproof paper to reveal a delightfully soft, pillow-like substance. Of course, those things are probably full of E numbers and preservatives, but I would say that little compares with one’s first imagining of biting into a slice of brioche slathered with a thick layer of nutella (I’m sure that this is a complete travesty, but we won’t let that stop us). Moister than panettone, but more cake-like than bread, brioche is the Lucy of culinary development, a crucial link in the evolution from the unleavened bread of days of yore to today’s dubious Thomas the Tank Engine confections. The key, of course, is in the addition of butter, eggs and milk to the dough, which give the brioche its golden, velvet-like texture.

Now, I say “instantly compelling”, but in truth, the urge has been compelling for years. It wasn’t until this past summer, when my parents brought back a French baking book from across the Channel, that I made my first attempt. And here, just for you, I reproduce the recipe:

Pain brioché:

500g flour (I’ve tried both strong bread flour and all-purpose flour – both yield good results)

50g caster sugar

15g instant dry yeast

220g milk (lukewarm)

2 eggs + 2 egg yolks

125g butter

10g salt

Place the flour, salt and sugar in a bowl and create a well in the centre. Dissolve the yeast in the milk and pour into the well. Add the 2 whole eggs and knead for 15 minutes. Add 100g of butter and knead for a further 5 minutes. Once you’ve achieved a smooth dough, cover with a cloth and let rise for 2 hours.

Divide the dough into 3 balls of equal weight. Shape into loaves and place into buttered loaf tins. Leave to rise for another 2 hours.

Brush the top of the loaves with the egg yolks, whisked with 2 tablespoons of water, and bake in an oven, preheated to 210 Celsius, for 30 minutes. Remove from tins and leave to cool on a rack.

The addition of eggs makes this quite a stiff dough, so kneading it is quite a workout. It’s also quite sticky, so you’ll have to knead it in a bowl unless you want to be scraping dough off your counter afterwards. You can also halve the recipe to make one larger loaf.

Or you could ignore all of the above and do what I do, which is to dump everything in the breadmaker and put it on the dough setting for 2 hours, put the whole thing into a loaf tin and bake it to make one, ridiculously-sized loaf of nasty skank brioche [EN: the term "nasty skank" is not a reflection of the quality of the end product, which is excellent, but a cultural reference to that sassy, yet ultimately mediocre, box office hit "Mean Girls"]. Eat with jam or marmalade, or with the aforementioned unhealthy slathering of nutella. Makes excellent toast the next morning (and for a few days thereafter).

Brownies- the two-bite variety

Yesterday was gray and blustery, and I was feeling a bored and needed to find something exciting to do. Yes, the trials of a housewife are great…

I suddenly decided I felt like making brownies, but not just any brownies. I wanted to make two-bite brownies, from scratch. Every time I’ve had the store-bought variety, I’ve asked myself why I didn’t just make them, free of the chemicals that prolong their shelf-life into infinity. I knew I had seen a recipe in my cookbook, Home Baking by Alford and Duguid. Judging by the quality of their other recipes, I had faith this would produce the brownies I craved. After meandering through the book’s other yummy recipes, I finally found the brownie recipe, only to realize that it called for bittersweet chocolate, and I didn’t have any in my trusty baking cupboard! Having already been to the grocery store TWICE in one day, I refused to make yet another trip. So the hunt was on for a recipe that called for cocoa powder rather than chocolate.

*Note: You can substitute cocoa powder for chocolate in a recipe, but you have to increase the butter content significantly, and I was unwilling to make the brownies any more calorific than they already would be.

The internet is truly a wonderful thing…I found many recipes for two-bite brownies, most of which sounded suspiciously like any other brownie recipe made in a mini-muffin tray rather than a square pan. I discarded all the low-fat recipes. Why bother?! Here are the brownies I finally made, thanks to Canadian journalist, cookbook writer and blogger, Julie van Rosendaal.

I made them in the silicone mini-muffin cups we got for Christmas last year. By far the one of the best kitchen gadgets we’ve received as a gift, these silicone muffin cups are re-usable, fit into a regular muffin tray, and are much more environmentally friendly than paper cups. Just make sure they don’t accidentally get thrown away! (*Note: They aren’t great for gas ovens, although we’re not sure why. And do not put them into the dishwasher. The smell of the detergent will never go away, leaving you with muffins that always taste a bit soapy.)

 

Two-Bite Brownies

1/4 cup butter, softened

1 1/4 cups sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup cocoa powder

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Beat sugar and butter together until well-blended. Add in the eggs and the vanilla and mix well. In a separate bowl, mix all the dry ingredients together. Add to the butter mixture and mix until there are no more lumps of flour. Spoon into muffin tins (lightly greased), or mini-muffin cups. Bake for 12-15 minutes, but make sure you do not overbake! They will collapse slightly when they come out of the oven, but they still taste delish! Makes 24 mini-muffin size brownies, or 12 large ones (which then are no longer two-bite, but more like four-bite, unless you have a big mouth).

Bran-less Muffins

I was recently told (by the dubious woman at the bank) that since I was unemployed, but married, I must therefore be a homemaker. Yes, you read correctly. Homemaker is indeed an option on the ‘employment status’ drop-down menu on the bank’s account information. I was also told that it was better to be a homemaker than list myself as ‘unemployed’ since “you can’t get anything for saying you’re unemployed.”  This begs the question of what exactly I’ll get for saying I’m a homemaker, but I digress…

In my new role as homemaker, and in order to elevate (or maintain) my status to/as domestic goddess, I decided to wake up early on Monday morning to make muffins for our houseguests. This is also part of the G&C Bed and Breakfast, which is open for business, if anyone fancies a few nights in London.

Craving some healthy bran muffins, I started measuring, weighing, mixing, and attempting to multi-task as I chatted with our friends and helped them find things in the kitchen for their coffee, etc. After carefully filling the muffin cups with the batter and sliding the tray into the oven, I glanced over at the corner of the counter and only then realised my significant error. There was no bran in my bran muffins! The bag of bran sat, sealed shut, where I’d pulled it down from the cupboard earlier. I contemplated scooping the batter out of each cup and adding the bran, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. That said, 75 grams of wheat bran is a significant amount to forget, and I was convinced I had a disaster on my hands. I was most concerned that I had failed miserably in my domestic duties.

Our friends were quite sure that the ‘branless bran muffins’ would be fine, and indeed, they were right. They just taste like sweet, molasses-y little cakes with dates. Not bad, but not the healthy start to the day I was hoping they’d be. They look and taste fine, but next time, I’ll make sure I’m less distracted. After all, I do have to maintain my reputation and live up to the standards of my newest occupation…

P.S. Here’s the recipe for the yogurt bran muffins…WITH the bran! Apologies who don’t like weighing their ingredients, but all recipes here are in grams, rather than cups.

Bran Yogurt Muffins

Preheat oven to 375-400F. Prepare muffin tins (grease or line with paper cups).

Stir together 225g flour, 2 tsp baking powder, and 1/2 tsp salt.

In a separate bowl, beat egg with a fork. Add 110-140g brown sugar, 1 tsp vanilla, 1-2 tbsp molasses or honey, 75g WHEAT BRAN or 105g OAT BRAN, 60ml milk and 90ml oil or 85g butter melted.

Spoon 240ml plain yogurt (preferably with bacterial culture) into a jug or bowl. Stir in 1 tsp of baking soda and let it stand for 1-2 minutes. Some yogurts will react vigourously and bubble up (very cool!). Stir yogurt into the egg mixture after a few minutes.

Pour all of the wet ingredients into the dry. Stir until just combined, adding 85-100g of raisins or chopped dates if desired. Ignore any lumps. Spoon into muffin cups and bake for 20-25 minutes until the tops spring back gently when pressed.

Although omitting the bran will not ruin the taste, it is highly recommended that you keep these as BRAN muffins! Enjoy!

Caving in

Well, we did it. After months of resisting the daily barrage of leaflets through our door and insisting that we could do it better ourselves, we caved in and got INDIAN TAKEAWAY. Yes, you read correctly. We opted to get foil containers of ‘curry’ instead of using some of our own spices and culinary skills and making our own tasty delights.

Almost every day, we get takeaway menus dropped through our mailbox. They seem to be getting fancier and glossier as more Indian restaurants vie for the same customers. These menus have provided us with some good laughs (‘motor panner’ and ‘doet coke’ for instance), and encouraged me to think that I could make good money as a menu proof-reader. Nevertheless, a quick glance and the menus reach their end in the recycle bin.

Today, however, we decided to sample from one of Surbiton’s finest. We are spoiled for choice, with 4 Indian restaurants on our high street alone, and several more just around the corner. We went with the second oldest Indian restaurant in Surbiton, assuming that longevity in this fickle market meant quality.

This particular restaurant seems to cover all the bases, with food from all the major regions of India. This is usually cause for suspicion on my part – I imagine a kitchen with large bottles of ‘curry sauce’ labelled with a particular region of India, and a chef who glops a spoonful of any given sauce onto chicken, fish, lamb, or vegetables. Suspicions aside, we ordered a Mangalorean fish curry, an eggplant dish with a mysterious name, saag paneer (spinach and paneer), and a lamb biryani. The additional British quirk is that biryani always come with a complimentary order of vegetable curry. This seems strange, since biryani usually is so flavourful on its own that I can’t see the need for a curry to accompany it.

I am pleased to say that the food was great, particularly the fish curry, which tasted authentically South Indian, although it could have been spicier. As you can see, the food didn’t all look the same, wasn’t that greasy, and everything didn’t taste the same either! Never fear, we’ll still be cooking, but at least now we have an alternative to Village Pizza on days that we really don’t feel like slaving over a hot stove.

Other people’s shopping

One of the things I like most about going grocery shopping (admittedly, there aren’t many of them) is finding a shopping cart, a shopping trolley, as they’re known on Greenwich Mean Time. The particular chain of supermarkets we choose to frequent (let’s call it chain “W”) very conveniently has little clipboards on its carts to which you can attach your shopping list. I find reading through discarded shopping lists a curiously voyeuristic form of entertainment. Glancing through people’s scribbled lists seems somehow a little more personal than sneaking a peek at your fellow shoppers’ chosen items at the checkout. More than their food habits, you can tell whether they were in a rush when they wrote the list, what their choice of scrap paper is, whether they prefer pen, pencil or felt tip, whether they’re the kind of person who crosses off items as they grab them off the shelf, and other interesting insights into their shopping strategies. I have thus resorted to conducting an unofficial poll of other people’s shopping by stealing their discarded shopping lists. I get a mischieveous sense of glee when I spot a cart that has someone’s scrawny piece of paper with their list of scribbles on it. I quickly claim the cart and discreetly put the list in my pocket.

Most of the lists are short, with fewer than ten items on them. That in itself is strange, because ten items can easily fit in a basket, which enables you to use the faster checkouts. Convenience items predominate the lists; milk, bread, eggs and cheese feature prominently. Starches are the dominant food group, particularly pasta, potatoes and rice. Some people encouragingly make lunch for their kids to take to school (“bananas, apples, peanut butter x 2, childrens yog+yog drinks, choc dig./jaffas”), but then sadly disappoint by feeding them rather questionable items at home (“spag. shapes, Bessie Mash x 2, waffles”). Most of the lists are such that you can hardly make a decent recipe out of them, even though you could make it lots of times (“mince lamb/beef, tin toms x 8 [times 8?!?], chick pea x 4, green lentils x 2″ sounds like a lot of stew to me). Others have rather unmentionable items (“decaf, quorn, marg.”). One person wanted to buy a sofa, but then must have thought better of it and decided to buy soda instead. People buy “bog roll” or “loo roll”, but not “toilet paper”. And it’s good to know that people still like an element of surprise in their grocery shopping (“A little something for you”). Some parents have shopping budgets for their kids (“£6 for Freddy, £10 for Theo” – I’m curious to know what Freddy and Theo bought themselves with their allowance. I hope it was something worthwhile, because otherwise all they had to look forward to was garlic, chillis and kidney beans). A torn off bit of notepad paper appears to be the writing material of choice, although a few people use yellow stickies. But my personal favourite is a list written on paper in the shape of a curvaceous womanly figure in a pink flowery party dress from Lady Jayne Ltd.

I’ve often thought of leaving behind a list of my own (“pig intestines, eye of newt, raven’s claw”), although when I bother writing them, they’re invariably in some form of electronic gadget. But with the festive season fast approaching, I might be tempted to leave one with the most important list of all (“…. and a partridge in a pear tree”).