Bonkers Food of the Week

Hello again, I thought I'd continue my bonkers posts. They amuse me.

Today I want to tell you about some bonkers food, and not bonkers in a good way. This food truly is from the kitchen of Satan. I feel to truly communicate the full atrocious horror of this culinary curse I must set the scene a little...

So me and my lovely girlfriend Celia were on holiday in Xiamen in China (better known to us ex-imperialist westerners as Amoy) and having a walk around the pedestrianised island of Gulangyu. It was a lovely September day in late summer, hovering around the 30C mark and bathing us in balmy South China Sea sunshine, we'd eaten a lot of truly delicious food on our stay in a town replete with a vast array of fresh seafood. As you may have guessed I am apt to take an adventurous attitude to food. Sometimes so adventurous as to be a little like if a Kamikaze pilot decided to become a food taster. Needless to say this means I'm always on the lookout for weird and wonderful things. Thus it was that we spotted a fried article being sold on a roadside stall. It was a conical thing that had the look of a giant potato croquette, so to us it seemed like a win-win situation, a new and interesting food that surely must be delicious as it was fried and most likely savoury, perhaps even full of marine delights. Of course we had to try it.

The savoury assumption was reinforced by the lady smothering said apparent delight with ketchup. Yum, fried thing with ketchup, my favourite. So now we were ready and we both sank our teeth into this delicious treat. And then it happened. The possession. As I bit into it the crunchy texture and ketchup gave way to... Ice cream! Yes, ice cream. Suddenly the barmy surrounding darkened and my being was overwrought by a sensation of pure culinary dread. I will remind you that I am a man who will happily eat a fried spider and then say it just tasted a little too spidery by way of reaction. This food was no normal bonkers creation, it was a true collision of inappropriate tastes. It was like the hordes of Beelzebub himself had cottoned onto fusion cooking. Thankfully the taste was quickly exorcised from my tortured mouth by something altogether delicious from another stall, for Xiamen truly is full to the brim with tasty marine treats. I do not recommend this oddity to anyone who is faint of heart or, quite possibly, not from the seventh circle of hell.

I'm not sure what this conical food of Satan is called and I'm not sure if I want to find out. Perhaps someone braver than me can go out there and taste one again and find out the name. Personally, I think I'll stick to deep fried soft shell crab from now on.

Thanks for reading and please don't have any nightmares.

Bonkers Music of the Week

So, this being a music and food blog I should obviously do a bonkers music of the week post too. I want to introduce you to an old favourite of mine that is no longer being updated but is still available. Take a look at http://www.spannered.org/ which specialises in bizarre mixes from DJs like DJ Bus Replacement Service who apparently "travels to the end of the internet to assemble another platter of freshly polished audio turds". Er, yes, quite. I really like 'Nam Shub's Spannered Sitars', a mixture of electro and crazy sitar covers of, amongst other artists, Nancy Sinatra. Odd and highly listenable. There are various mixes by Jerome Hill, founder of the Don't record label and probably one of the most eclectic DJs I've ever listened to. Given how varied his sets usually are you can imagine how nuts some of it gets on a website that specialises in providing us with "audio turds" and "the audio equivalent of ice cream with pickled onions". There are also mixes by Kid Kameleon (mad mash up stuff), The Heatwave (a Bristol dancehall mash up outfit) and Bobby Corridor (a hip hop selector), amongst many others. One of my old favourites is this mix (http://www.spannered.org/radio/1357/) by Word the Cat, a highly interesting mixture of bass focused music and, at one point, Nepali lok pop. I said it before and I'll say it again: er, yes, quite. There are also some more normal mixes, albeit still very different and well selected for a really individual sound, these include various hip-hop, dancehall and dance music mixes that come from slightly closer to the Milky Way. 

If you like it odd and interesting I definitely recommend getting yourself there and downloading the 100+ tracks and mixes. Oh and, by the way, they're all free! Oh yeah. Thank you Spannered. 

Right, so please feel free to add some of your own oddity finds in the comments box. 

Bonkers Food of the Week

As I'm into esoteric stuff and generally like the more odd side of things I thought I'd start a new little weekly feature. I'm going to put one kind of food which struck me as unusual. Some will be utterly bonkers and some, like this one, just a little unusual. I'd really love it if people can add some of their own finds in the comments box, I always like to be introduced to odd things I've never heard of.

Anyway, so in my house we often eat sweet potatoes but we always cook too many. For this reason we decided to make sweet potato brownies. Right, so I also said "bleeeeurgh!" when I heard this, but they're actually really delicious and sweet, whilst being healthier (I assume) than the standard chocolate variety. It's actually a recipe from the Guardian. Here is the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/19/sweet-potato-brownies-recipe-lepard
They're very easy to make and very tasty, perhaps surprisingly so.

So, not very bonkers this week, but I'll try a little harder next week.

Thanks for reading and please add your own ideas in the comments, I'd love to hear them.

Malatang or pick and mix soup

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, but you know how it is, food to overeat, drink to overdrink as per usual at this time of year. Anyway, after writing my post about my favourite noodle joint I thought I should treat the more cosmopolitan food lovers out there to a description of another uniquely Chinese favourite of mine. This is something I don't believe will ever be successfully introduced here because of its complete disregard of anything even vaguely health and safety orientated, but there's a certain charm to China's somewhat ironically anarchic disregard for our kind of obsessively beauraucratic nit picking. Well, it does exist, but it's a lot easier to just ignore. Anyway, I digress.

The mysterious and steamy broth.

Today I want to tell you about Malatang, a lovely and cheap delight to be found on many a street corner in the Middle Kingdom. Malatang is a bit hard to translate as the 'mala' flavour doesn't really exist outside of East Asia, but it roughly translates as 'spicy and numbing soup'. Tang is simply the word for soup and mala means a spicy numbing flavour derivative of lots of Sichuan pepper and some other stuff (search me, perhaps one of my Chinese friends will leave a comment). The base of the food is a spicy and numbing stock and the rest is up to you. You'll recognise Malatang places from the massive metal cauldron belching out steam and the fridges full of various fresh and frozen Chinese things, anything from bean curd to squid to greens to those fried breadstick things you get (I saw you can buy them in China town in London now) to quail's eggs to... I could go on. What you do is go up, take a basket with a number on, fill up your basket with whatever you desire and give it to the nice man or woman by the cauldron. They then dump all your ingredients into an individual basket in the boiling brown stock of doom, which gets reused all day (possibly longer, I'll look into the possibility of carbon dating upon my return to China). To those of you who are squeamish, get over it, you're really missing out on a delicious stock that is at boiling point all day anyway, it's really delicious as long as the establishment hasn't gone too crazy with the mala flavour.

The fridges of magical Chinese ingredients.

This food takes a bit longer than some Chinese foods, so it could be anything up to six minutes, maybe even seven if it's busy. However, when it comes you're treated to an enormous bowl of soup for anywhere between about 5 and 20 kuai (50p-£2), you can usually then go and help yourself to as much fresh garlic, chilli, mala spice and chopped up spring onion as you like. It's a marvellous dish, essentially a pick and mix soup, it's also a great option if you're new to China as obviously you don't really need to be able to speak Chinese because it's all self-service. For anyone living in Hangzhou my favourite was opposite EF East school just south of Jiefang-Jianguo lu kou on the left, really nice broth and friendly staff, beer for 3 kuai a pop too, don't listen to the unbelievers, it's much better than the one by the hospital. Right, that's it for now, I hope I haven't made you too ravenous.

Drink, Shop and Do. We drank, anyway.

I thought I should update you with a quick post to follow on from our Azeri experience. After going to gorge ourselves on Azeri cuisine we thought it only proper to go and get some coffee, because falling asleep at lunchtime is just not the done thing. We went down the road to an establishment called “Drink, Shop and Do” (www.drinkshopanddo.com, 9 Caledonian Road, London, N1 9DX, tel: 020 7278 4335). I say establishment because it really is thoroughly modern in a hipster sort of way and thus rather hard to say exactly what kind of establishment it is. You wander in through what looks like a gift shop (with an adult section downstairs, just to add to the curious post-modernity of the place) and into an airy section with an arched glass roof in the back, where you find a bar/café sort of affair. Apparently it used to be a public bath house, which must have been a long time ago, because I don’t remember it and I grew up near there. It looks something like a cross between a bar, a coffee shop and a charity shop, which we were told is because you can in fact buy everything in there, even the cup you’re drinking from. It was certainly novel.

Here it is, from the deceptively small looking exterior.

We ordered a macchiato each, which was a bit pricey at £2.80; it also took quite a while. However, they were extremely good coffees and worth the wait and money, I believe they get all their coffee from a small supplier somewhere in London, clearly contributing to the excellent quality of the caffeinated delight we were served. I remember attending a short introduction to particulars of coffee at a university event once, where a specialist informed us that the way to tell a really good cup of coffee is that it has a certain sweetness even when you don’t add sugar. Well, that’s exactly what I found with this cup, it was special, and I drink a fair amount if coffee.

 The charity shop-cum-coffee shop-cum-cocktail bar interior.

I had a little scan of the menu and they had some really interesting cocktails ranging from £6.50 for the cheapest one, to a slightly frightening £9.50 for the most expensive one (maybe I’ve just been living in a ridiculously cheap country for too long). There were classics like Hot Toddies and more interesting ones like Christmas in Manhattan, a mixture of Buffalo Trace bourbon, mulled berries, Evan Williams Cherry Reserve and orange bitters. I always like it when I find drinks that have things I’ve never heard of in, I hope one day when I’m feeling flush I can return and sample some of these Dionysian delights. For those of you who are of a similarly curious bent, Evan Williams is a brand of bourbon and I think this particular one is a cherry liqueur version. One more interesting thing about this place: they do nights for over 18s in the evenings, things like classic dance music and indie nights, and craft activities of various sorts in the daytime, which I think are free. So, really a pretty conceptually modern place, if expressing modernity through mashing up lots of familiar concepts. Interesting stuff, a bit Hoxton yah perhaps, but interesting nevertheless and definitely worth a try.

  

 Evan William Cherry Reserve, sweet and strong no doubt.

Azeri Cuisine-great value food from Azerbaijan

My father has obviously missed me and my ravenous ways since I’ve been in China, he’s decided that now I’m back he wants to go on what can only be described as a restaurant safari. The safari started earlier this week at a very interesting little place known simply as ‘Azeri Cuisine’ on Caledonian Road in London (95 Caledonian Road, London, N1 9BT, telephone: 0207 278 0206). This place served food from Azerbaijan, which, even with my somewhat varied experience of international cuisine, I have not experienced, so I was pretty excited to try it. First I’ll just let you know a bit about Azerbaijan (what I know, anyway). Azerbaijan is a country on the west side of the Caspian Sea, north of Iran and south of Russia. When you walk into the cafe-restaurant (it’s only a small place) you’re greeted with an enormous picture of what the proud chef told me was Baku. Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan, nestling on the coast of the Caspian Sea. It’s been known in the past and is still very much known by the oil industry for its vast oil reserves, but is rather bad at distributing this wealth. In any case, it’s a pretty interesting part of the world, but not one you hear of that much.

Azerbaijan

“So, what’s Azeri food like?”, I hear you ask. Well, think sort of Turkish, but also Russian and eastern European. In fact, the menu was really interesting. It had things like borscht (Russian beetroot soup), grilled kebabs, various cabbage things and kotleti (look out for these in the plethora of Polish places in London) and even Iranian dishes like fesenjan (a dish with pomegranate and meat in-sorry for the spelling!). Something that will probably pull in a lot of customers during this time of cuts is the lunch deal, you can get a kebab with bread and rice or chips for £5.30 between 12 pm and 3pm, amongst various other things. I was curious about the more Azeri things, so I ordered various things from the standard a la carte menu. To start with, me and my father ordered Azeri Assorti, a mixture of pickles, some of which were homemade by the chef and his wife, and Blinis with mince and fried onion. The Azeri Assorti was a real hit for a pickle lover like me, there was pickled red cabbage, some gherkins and, most interestingly, some aubergine that had a really strong salty pickle flavour infused with a none-too-subtle mint kick. Very different. The blini were different to Russian ones, they were wrapped up a bit like a burrito with a tasty fried meat and onion filling, with a cumin touch. For those of you who don’t know, blini are small pancakes made using baking powder, which are often eaten with caviar, red onion and sour cream in Russia, so something of a delicacy. These were much more down to earth, less expensive and, as you’d expect, somewhat less delicate than their Russian counterparts. They came with a good amount of sour cream, served in a separate little bowl.

The Azerbaijani flag

For our main courses we had Dushbara and Kelem Dolmasi. Dushbara is a vegetable broth with tiny meat-filled dumplings and I found it a little bland, but a great winter warmer nevertheless. Kelem Dolmasi comprised of four large, steaming pieces of cabbage stuffed with fried meat laced with delicious spicy flavours, they were somewhat reminiscent of all-spice or cloves with cumin. I’d really recommend these dishes for those after a hearty dish on a cold day. Tasty, no-fuss, down-home ethnic cuisine-my favourite. We had an ayran each to drink (a yoghurt drink a bit like a salty lassi, but a little thinner, available in most Turkish shops). I asked the chef a few questions afterwards about the food and he was extremely friendly, the service in general was very good and the staff were all friendly, there was a real family feel to the place. The food was all served in courses and they brought all our dishes at the same time, so none of those problems you sometimes get in cheaper cafe-restaurant establishments. The meal was very filling and very good value at £29, which the proprietor gave us a £2 discount for, for no discernable reason other than that he was a thoroughly agreeable chap. If you’re on a budget but you still want a really good warming meal head down to this place. They also do grilled kebabs and other dishes to take away.

Kelem Dolmasi

Next post: I’ll tell you a bit about the coffee we had in an oddly modern place and a tasty fry up joint on Upper Street in Islington.

Muslim Noodles-A Little Bit More

                                             After having a chat with a friend about my last blog post I realized I hadn't really fully explained Muslim Noodles. For example, why do we call it Muslim Noodles? Well, as you may have guessed the owners are Muslims and members of an ethnic minority, although I'm not sure which one. If anyone could shed some light on this that'd be great. I'll just quickly explain this for those less savvy about Chinese ethnicities. China is roughly ninety percent Han Chinese, but there are various other ethnic minorities who come from other parts of China and look a little different to the Han Chinese. There are the Uyghurs from Xinjiang in the north west of China (it is, in fact, a semi-autonomous region, similar to Tibet), who, having read some stuff about there cuisine, I believe are the creators of the aforementioned culinary delight. I may well be wrong and, as I said, any information would be great. The amount of Muslims in China surprised me and their food is almost always delicious, including many kebab type dishes, stews and barbecue dishes. As you get further over to the west I believe the food becomes less and less “Chinesey” and more like something Middle Eastern, as you'd expect when moving towards central Asia and the various Stahns (Kyrgyztahn boarders China). Anyway, to get back to the point, and before I meander off on a geopolitical tangent. the people who make lamian are largely slightly less Chinese looking and are almost always Muslims, it is a typical Chinese Muslim cuisine.

                                                   

                                      The places I went to in Hangzhou were largely advertised as Lanzhou noodle eateries. Lanzhou is really in central China, but because so many people leave in the east in China this is, relatively speaking, in the west. I'll just take you through some of my favourite dishes, where the centrepiece is the noodles, but the food that goes with is often pretty tasty. My personal favourite is tudou niu rou gai chou mien (too-dough nee oo row guy chow mee en), which means potato and beef over noodles. There is usually some green pepper and onion in there, too. There is a certain way they cook it that makes it salty and delicious and it always comes packing a garlicy punch. However, I like it because as with most of the other things you can order none of the flavours become overwhelming and there is a flavoursome cohesion to every order. Another favourite is xihongshi jidan gai chou mien (she-hong-shir jee dan guy chow mee en), tomato and egg over noodles. This one is good if you don't fancy quite such an assualt of carbs and is a little lighter, however it really will only fill you up for six hours, as opposed to the eight of the aforementioned repast. As my vegetarian friend Ed discovered you can pretty much rattle off a list of any vegetables you want and they will usually cook them up with noodles for you, but there are always the pictures if you want to have a point punt. Pleasingly, they always come with a side soup, usually a clear broth, sometimes with some greens in (qingcai or ching t-sigh). For anyone who lives in Hangzhou, I thoroughly recommend the branch on Xin Hua Lu, near the Feng Qi Lu kou (junction). For anyone who doesn't, I thoroughly recommend visiting to sample this tasty local cuisine, it's delicious and probably fairly different to any Chinese food you've tried. That's enough about Muslim noodles for now, I think some musical musings might be coming next, although I do have lots of other tasty stuff to go on about, so we'll just have to see... 

 

A map of China, showing where Lanzhou is.