Thai Clam Pot

342. Thai Clam Pot (Low Fat)

Clams are surprisingly difficult to find. On Saturday morning, I asked Dad to take me to Prahran Market (the only place where you can ALWAYS find clams). However, he thought it was too far, and said we'd be able to find clams in Kew or on Victoria Parade (the Vietnamese district), both of which are much closer.

Well, there were no clams in Kew. (But on the upside, I did buy the most fabulous egg and bacon baguette at the wonderful Convent Bakery on High street. The baker also gave us a free loaf of light rye and a latté. Sweet!)


egg & bacon baguette (emphatically NOT low fat)

We then headed to Victoria Parade, and started looking at their fishmongers. There were mussels, crabs, pippies, all sorts of fish... but no freaking clams! It was only at the third fishmongers we visited that we found clams. I didn't think looked like clams, but Dad assured me these were clams - the kind that he used to eat growing up in Malaysia. And seeing as I was making an Asian dish, I thought they'd be appropriate.

So I took them home, and soaked them, then drained them, ready to use.


asian clams

This dish is pretty straightforward. Cook noodles in boiling water and set aside. Then heat through garlic, spring onion and dried chilli in a little oil, before adding sake and water, allowing it to boil and then chuck in the clams. I'm used to cooking clams until they open, so I hovered near the stove, watching the boiling liquid, waiting for the clams to open. 5 minutes passed, and not a single one opened. Shit. I got more and more nervous, until Dad came in and told me, "They're not supposed to open, don't overcook them!". Whoops. I guess I'm just not used to handling Asian clams.

So I quickly finished off the dish by taking the clams off the heat and adding fish sauce and coriander, and tossing the whole lot together.


thai clam pot

It was very tasty, although opening each clam individually proved to be a bit annoying. (This is ok if you're eating a big bowl of chilli clams with no accompaniment, but not when you're eating them with noodles.) Next time I make this dish, I'm sticking to ordinary vongole clams!

Fishy Fish

249. Red Mullet with Garlic and Rosemary (Fast Food)

You will see, from my photos below, that I did not use red mullet, but rainbow trout. I knew we wouldn't be able to get red mullet, but when we went shopping this morning, all the white-fleshed-red-skinned fish looked slightly dodgy. "Red snapper", "red fish", "pinky"... I had no idea what they would taste like, so I took the safe route and got my favourite, rainbow trout.

I choose to accompany it with a pared-down version of the noodles with spring onions, shiitake mushrooms and mangetouts. (And by pared down, I mean I used regular onions in place of the spring onions, and omitted the mushrooms).

As for the fish, you start by heating up some orange zest, rosemary and garlic in a pan with oil (I chopped them up using a processor) until sizzling, then frying your fish fillets on both sides.


Sauce

Then you remove the fillets to a warmed plate, and deglaze the pan with white wine or vermouth. Having neither white wine nor vermouth in the house, I used gin. Good old Beefeater gin. It worked a treat.


noodles + fish

Now, the fish didn't look too pretty because the garlic-orange-rosemary mixture went really brown in the pan. Perhaps this problem could be avoided if I were to use a non-stick pan instead of a cast iron one. The flavour was great, however. And the noodles were a great complement. Much like the rice in yesterday's lunch, we've been really missing noodles lately, and slurped them up like nobody's business.


Fish + noodles

Paris via Tokyo

As we can see from all my recent posts, my Low-Fat August hasn't been quite as low fat as I'd originally intended. But what I'm trying to take from the Low Fat chapter is not just the recipes, but also the principles for making quick, delicious, low calorie meals. This way I'll have a good repertoire of healthy dishes which I can turn to for quick midweek lunches and dinners, when I don't feel like tackling a brand-new recipe, and don't want anything too rich or fattening. Otherwise it'd be stuff like creamy pastas, fried fishcakes, and toasted cheese sandwiches every other night. Lovely, but deadly for the waistline!

For instance, last night I did the mushroom udon soup again, and slurped it up hungrily whilst at the computer. Much better than a take-away pizza!



I'm also in the process of making, again, the beef braised in beer, and this time in double quantities. We loved it so much! I think it could only be a good thing to have a hearty, tasty, low-fat stew, individually portioned, frozen, and ready to go. I've also got some vegetable curry in vegetable sauce in the freezer. (Actually, stay tuned for photos of my bulging freezer...)

Keeping in mind Nigella's principles of low fat eating, here's what I made for dinner tonight.

98. Braised Fennel
99. Poisson au Poivre

One of the tricks to sticking to low-fat eating, apparently, is to include lots of variety so you don't get bored. We don't eat, or even like fennel in the normal run of things, (you should have seen the look on my parents' faces when I told them what we were going to eat - and I'm not hot for it either), but this was divine! The fennel in this dish is sliced thinly, and cooked with a bit of stock in the oven. And it was great - the thin slicing and long cooking made it soft and tender, without that feral, strong aniseed flavour that undercooked or raw fennel has. Even the parentals were impressed with this!


Braised Fennel

The poisson au poivre is "a juicy piscine take on the bifteck bistro original". You can use any of the meatier fish varieties (tuna, swordfish, marlin, mahi-mahi etc), and then press crushed black pepper on the sides (which I crushed myself in a pestle and mortar), before grilling on a non-oiled griddle. I used swordfish, because tuna was strangely unavailable anywhere today.


Poisson au Poivre

As a side dish, I chose to do soba noodles (hence the "Paris via Tokyo" title of this post). Obviously, Nigella's Low Fat chapter is awash with soba, as is my general diet, whether or not I want to lose weight. I cooked them, tossed them through some bottled sukiyaki sauce, and sprinkled coriander over. This was basically the tasty beet greens with buckwheat noodles but without the feral beet greens to ruin the noodles. Again, having noodles tonight was about variety - we'd typically eat plain steamed rice as a side dish.


Soba noodles

This was a brilliant dinner. Bizzare cross-cultural mishmashes and connotations of tacky 80's fusion aside, the food was seriously good. The spicily hot fish contrasted well against the more subdued flavour of the noodles, as did the mildly-flavoured fennel. The meal overall was satisfyingly substantial, high in nutrients, low in fat and tasty. What more could you ask for?

Pink things

Tonight I tried yet another of Nigella’s three beetroot recipes from the Low Fat chapter. Given that we had a decent amount of last night’s shredded beetroot salad left over, we ate that as well. And seeing that both items were pink, I thought we should have a pink dessert as well (the rhubarb ice-cream that I made ten days ago). Who cares about the fat content? This meal was all about the aesthetic, and when it comes to bright colours, for me, too much is never enough.

97. Beet greens with buckwheat noodles

This dish is undemanding and stress-free – you cook up some chopped beet greens (which look just like rhubarb) in a pan, and toss in boiled soba noodles with bottled sukiyaki sauce. The noodles turn a fantastic shade of magenta.


Beet greens with buckwheat noodles

We’d never tried beet greens before, and now that we have, I can’t say we’re mad about them. The leaves are ok, but the stems (even the little, thin ones) have this really weird salty taste and feral woodsy texture. In fact, we ended up just picking out all the noodles and leaving most of the beet greens on our plates.

Onto dessert – remember when I made the rhubarb ice-cream? I loved the mixture so much I had a good ten minutes of serious, concentrated licking – no bowl, utensil or beater was safe. But I think something went wrong in the churning process, as the final result was slightly icy. Tasty, but icily hard. Perhaps a 40 minute period of ripening in the fridge would have helped, but there was no way we were going to wait that long. I served it with some leftover chocolate sauce (from the recipe for Poires Belle Hélène), which I made to go with homemade vanilla ice-cream seven weeks ago. And just to let you know, it was still good. So if you ever make this chocolate sauce, and for some reason, don’t finish it immediately, an extended stint in the fridge will do it no harm at all.


Ice cream

Mushroom Udon Soup

Did anyone else notice how bloody cold it was today? Apparently tomorrow it's going to be even worse. And of course, I decided to wear a skirt and heels to uni today, with a pathetically thin coat. Silly, silly, silly. All I could think of all day was coming home to a nice hot bowl of soup...

87. Mushroom Udon Soup

I've actually been putting off making this one, delicious as it sounds, because Nigella prefaces the recipe by saying that it's "the sort of supper I might make myself to get back on track if I've gone out and had pig's trotter - fat, cartilage and all - with mashed potato for lunch". This made me think that the soup would be too light for a proper meal, and would ultimately result in us raiding the snack cupboard for biscuits and chips later in the night.

How wrong I was. It's a Nigella recipe, there's no way in hell it wouldn't fill you up. We were all very satisfied, and warmed through and through. I just remembered, actually, the last time I made a noodle soup was for dinner after wearing a skirt out on a 15 degree day. Hah.

It tasted fantastic - the meaty mushrooms, the slippery noodles, the salty soup... and, it was simplicity itself to make - it only took about 20 minutes in total. The soup base is a mix of the dried shitake mushroom soaking water mixed with dashi powder, some soy sauce and sesame oil. Then you chuck in the mushrooms and udon noodles, and boil it until cooked. Sprinkle with coriander and nanami togarashi. Easy.


Fancy some slurping?

Restrain yourself!

Today was the day of my hands smelling feral. Late last night, I made a triple quantity of Seaweed and Noodle Salad, so that I could have a stash in the fridge for mid-week consumption.

84. Seaweed and Noodle Salad

This salad is made from cold, cooked soba noodles, with some seaweed (Nigella says wakame and arame, but we only had wakame) and various Japanese sauces tossed through. I tossed it together with my hands, as I usually do, but then had a super-strong sesame oil smell on my hands for ages. Yurgh!


Here's my lunch. (Yes, I took my camera with me to uni! And looked like a total gimp photographing my lunch, hehe). I ate it just before a Japanese class, appropriately enough! It's very much the type of thing I'd regularly make for myself to eat. We always have all the ingredients in the pantry, and I've made it, or versions of it, many times before. It's salty, slippery, cold, grainily nutritious and totally slurpable. In other words, brilliant!

On the bus home, I suddenly realised that I wanted something hot and hearty and strongly flavoured and decidedly non-Asian. (I mean, I do love noodles and broths and grilled fish, but sometimes a girl needs a break!) And I remembered... Nigella has a low-fat risotto! Yay!

85. Restrained Mushroom Risotto
86. Roast Garlic and Lemon Dressing

On the way from the bus stop to my house, I bought some mushrooms (dried porcini, Swiss brown, button) from our local greengrocer. And when I got home, the first thing I did was make the salad dressing. You have to wrap head of garlic in some foil with a little Noilly Prat, and roast it for an hour. Then after it's cooled a bit, you mix the soft garlic flesh with lemon juice. I squeezed the garlic out of the skin with my hands, and I also tossed the dressing through the leaves with my hands - it's very thick, and you need to use your fingers to coat the leaves evenly. So my hands still smell totally feral.


Garlic and Vermouth Dressing

The risotto is just your ordinary risotto, but with only a small amount of butter and oil, and no cream stirred through at the end. You start by cooking finely chopped onions in a pan, then adding the sliced mushrooms, then the rice. I was kind of worried when I first added the rice, beacuse it looked like there would never be enough rice for all that mushroom. However, throughout the cooking time, the mushrooms do their usual incredible shrinking act, whilst the rice expands voluptuously. Just as I expected, it took much longer to cook (40 minutes of constant stirring) than the recipe says, and needed double the amount of liquid. (Just like when I made the Pea Risotto). I used a Thai Knorr Shiitake Stock Cube, boosted with some dried porcini mushrooms soaking liquid.

It's absolutely gorgeous, full of deep mushroom flavour, and surprisingly creamy thanks to the starch that comes out of the rice.



This one's definitely becoming a regular dinner.

Low-Fat August: Day 2

Today's low-fat eating went well... (butter-free toast for breakfast, a salad and felafel roll for lunch, with fruit, coffee and yogurt in-between)... up until the time I was cooking dinner, totally famished, and inhaled two pieces of (again, butter-free) raisin toast. Now, I know that raisin toast isn't high in fat, but the fact that I let myself get almost gastric-pain-inducingly-hungry before dinner shows that I didn't space out my meals appropriately. Bad Sarah.

74. Braised Dried Shiitake Mushrooms with Soba Noodles (Low-Fat)

I totally love soba, and could eat them every day. Nigella's recipe says to cook the noodles according to packet instructions - not very helpful if you can't read Japanese. Lucky for me, though, that I do speak Japanese (yup, I'm doing honours-level Japanese at uni, thank-you very much), so I can read the packet. However, irregardless your ability to read them, I would still advise that you totally ignore the packet instructions, and go with this fail-safe method I skived from a Japanese cookery book. There is nothing in this world that is worse than a limp noodle.

Put water on the heat, and when it comes to the boil, add the noodles. When it comes to the boil again, pour in a cup of cold water. Let it boil again, then pour in a second cup of cold water. Once it boils again (the fourth time), drain the noodles and rinse with cold water. Easy peasy Japaneesy!

To braise the mushrooms, you have to soak them in hot water for half an hour, then stir fry them in a little oil, before pouring over the soaking water, some soy sauce, mirin and sake, and letting it simmer away until the liquid is evaporated.


Mushrooms Braising

I did screw it up a bit though - you're supposed to use two-thirds of the soy sauce for the mushrooms, and pour the remaining one-third over the soba at the end. Silly me was in a hunger-induced hurry, and poured all the soy on the mushrooms without realising. This meant that the noodles were bland, but the mushrooms were uber-salty. Like, so salty I couldn't feel my tongue anymore. My dad didn't seem to mind them though. We cut up the mushrooms into little pieces on the plate so that there wouldn't be such a huge salty hit with each mouthful. And anyway, they contrasted well against the noodles.

Nigella only suggests sprinkling over chopped coriander, but I felt that the dish was just crying out for some spring onions and nanami togarashi (Japanese 7-spice chilli pepper). I put the spring onions on the side, as my dad doesn't like them, and gave my mum extra coriander, as she loves it.


Capacious Noodles

I think this is an excellent meal for those trying to reduce their fat intake without feeling deprived. The noodles are filling, and the mushrooms are meatily substantial. I'm stuffed! According to Nigella, eating food with strong tastes (like super-salty mushrooms) makes you feel fuller for longer. If that's true, I'm gonna be full for a long while...

Low-Fat August: Day 1

So far, it's been going well. Here's what I've eaten all day so far.

1 bowl porridge made from 1/3 cup oats, water and 1 tablespoon golden syrup; 1 coffee with skim milk
1 skinny latte
1 baked potato with taboulleh (no butter, cheese or sour cream, sadly)
1 apple, 1 banana, 1 200g tub No-Fat Honey Creme yogurt, 1 tea with skim milk
Aromatic Chilli Beef Noodle Soup

The porridge and baked potato are what Nigella recommends for everyday low-fat eating. However, she suggests having a baked potato with 25g ordinary cheese - but there was no way I was going to ask the lady at Kebab Express to measure out my cheese, so I skipped the cheese and just went for taboulleh instead. Mmm... full of iron.

I haven't had any dessert yet, but I'm thinking that some more tea, an orange and some 0% fat yogurt will satisfy me whilst I watch Desperate Housewives.

73. Aromatic Chilli Beef Noodle Soup (Low Fat, duh)


Noodles!

There's not really that much to say about this meal, except it's delicious, and it's very much the type of thing I'd habitually cook at home for a midweek meal. It's Chinese egg noodles, in an aromatic broth (beef stock, ginger, chilli, garlic etc), with sugar snap peas and pak choi, with a piece of marinated grilled steak on top. The stock I used was Massel Beef-style Vegetarian stock cubes. The noodles are very filling and tasty, and perfect for day like today, when it's freezing cold, and I'm dumb enough to leave my house in a skirt. "Vanity over sanity", as DG said. The only problem with it is that it's a bit fiddly to make - I hate chopping and peeling ginger, yurgh - but I suppose the ritual of carefully considering and consequently making the food is all part of the templefood way.

Sunday Night Chicken Noodle

Dinner tonight came from the One & Two chapter. Nigella opens this chapter with a quote, and correspondingly, I will open this post by quoting her quote. Oh the postmodernity!

“‘Don’t knock masturbation,’ Woody Allen once said: ‘it’s sex with someone I love.’” (Lawson, 1998, p. 134).

References to masturbation. How fantastic! I knew this book was going to be right up my alley.

The One & Two chapter is devoted to recipes for one or two to eat. Tonight, it’s Saturday night, both my father and my brother are working, and it’s just Mum and I at home. Ordinarily, I would also be working, but I took time off work to study. (And the essay’s coming along, I promise!)

At about 5:45 this afternoon, I decided to get dinner happening. We had a roast chicken carcass leftover from lunch, some coriander and noodles from Wednesday dinner , and some choi sum sitting in the fridge…

11. Sunday Night Chicken Noodle

Now, I didn’t follow the recipe EXACTLY, but I’m still counting it as one of the 385 recipes. As Nigella says in the preface “Cooking is not about just joining the dots, following one recipe slavishly and then moving on to the next” (Lawson, 1998, p. viii). With this particular recipe, destined for solo eating on a quiet night, I think it’s more the idea than the actual ingredients, weights and measurements that are important. (And, as you’ll notice, I threw caution to the wind and made this on a Saturday night, not Sunday.)

If following the recipe properly, you would marinate a sliced chicken breast in sake, mirin, soy, dried chilli and garlic, then stir-fry the strips, before adding them to cooked noodles and soupy stock. I, instead, flavoured the stock with mirin, soy and chilli (we’re out of sake). I also soaked some dried shiitake mushrooms in there to boost flavour and add more meatiness, as the leftover chicken carcass was only scantily clad with meat. In our bowls I put briefly cooked noodles, choi sum and mushrooms, ripped up the leftover chicken, and covered it in the flavour-boosted stock. If you’re interested, it was Massel chicken flavoured vegetarian stock, which is wonderful, and MSG free. I garnished it with chopped coriander, on the suggestion of the recipe. We also added Japanese seven-spice pepper and had freshly chopped chilies in soy sauce on the side. This is the required side dish for any Chinese-style noodle dish. No arguments.


For one...


And for two...

Mum and I ate our wonderfully tasty, comforting and light dinner, as you can see, in front of the TV, watching Club [V]’s Top 10 Weekend Urban countdown.

4. Mariah Carey – We Belong Together
3. Mariah Carey – It’s Like That
2. Ciara – Oh
1. Amerie – 1 Thing

These songs and clips all rock. Amerie, especially, is gorgeous.

And then there was a re-run of the Ricky Jervais interview on Parkinson. I love Ricky Jervais! It was hilarious, we pissed ourselves laughing, and I have to get my hands on his Flanimals book!

I suppose I need no further justification of my deviation from the recipe, as the noodles tasted great, and I could easily eat them again. And again. But just in case, I present you with another Nigella quote: “real cooking, I can’t help feeling, always starts from leftovers” (Lawson, 1998, p. 460). I can’t help feeling that the goddess herself would be proud of our dinner tonight.

And it begins... Wednesday Dinner

I was going to kick off the How-To-Eat-Nigella-A-Thon with Squid with Chilli and Clams followed by Ricotta with Honey and Toasted Pine Nuts for dessert, from the Fast Food chapter. I had been going on about it for ages to anyone and everyone who would (or wouldn't) listen. And today, loads my friends were saying to me, “Ooh…looking forward to the clams? How’s the squid?”. I even got an email from England, "was thinking about your squid with clams all the way on the other side of the world, mmm!!". And so on. The plan for today was to go to the library at 9am, study all day, take the 3:30pm train to Box Hill to meet my mum, casually pick up all the ingredients for the weekend, and be home by 5, with plenty of time to spare before the 30 minutes (according to Nigella) required to make the dinner.

Hrmph.

Well, the study bit went according to plan (no, really!), mainly because none of my friends rocked up until 11 o’clock. And after an extended lunch and an unproductive, gossipy and giggly post-lunch study-session, I got the train, and arrived at Box Hill in a timely fashion. The only problem - NO FRIKKIN CLAMS. AT ALL. We went everywhere - Coles, Safeway, Fish Pier, the two Asian fishmongers - but couldn't find any! We managed to get the more obscure stuff on my list - like figs in a jar and duck breasts - but no clams. The figs we found at Athens Greek Deli, (I seem to have been developing a taste for Greek recently...), and we got duck breasts at a poultry shop. They normally don't sell breasts separately, but the butcher cut them out of two whole ducks, sold them to us at a bargainous $20/kilo and generously chucked in the carcasses for free. I'm already salivating, dreaming of the stock they'll make...

So two whole hours after arriving at Box Hill, finally our shopping was done, and we could come home. Of course, without the clams, I went to Plan B, which meant cooking what I'd planned for Thursday night's dinner instead...

1. Duck with Orange Salsa
2. Noodles with Spring Onions, Shitake Mushrooms and Mangetouts
3. Icecream with stem ginger or figs

Like the squid & clams, tonight's menu also comes from the Fast Food chapter, which means it's (allegedly) doable in 30 minutes. No such luck, I'm afraid. I wasn't really measuring - but I listened to Daft Punk's Discovery one and a half times whilst cooking - so just over an hour in total. The lengthiness of the whole procedure is mainly due to lots of fiddly chopping. It's not difficult, but it is time consuming. 5 chillies, 6 spring onions, 1/2 a red onion, 100g mangetouts (aka snowpeas), 240g shitake mushrooms, 2 oranges, fresh coriander and mint. PHEW! Nigella says it's "serenely manageable", but after a huge day of study and stressful shopping, I wasn't feeling very serene.

Thought to self whilst chopping: "Dammit, I'm starving, Dad's back from work, the duck's already done... and I get PAID to do this crap at work!"

Anyway, the chopping paid off in the end. Dinner was delicious. It seemed like a really strange combination on paper, but on the plate, and in the mouth, it all made perfect sense. Smoky mushrooms, crisp snowpeas, dense duck meat, the sharp and refreshing salsa... Mmmm... I was also concerned about 250g of noodles for 4 people - but it ended up being the perfect amount. Duck breasts are so rich and filling that less starch is required.


Noodles


Salsa


All-together - check out the colour combination! It brightened up my (cold and overcast) day!


Dessert

Sara Lee French Vanilla Icecream with random-Greek-brand green figs. Upon opening the jar, I was really hesitant about the figs, their incredible leathery blackness, sitting in thick sugary syrup, and was rehearsing apologies for my family in my mind... "It wasn't my idea, it was all Nigella... maybe figs in England are different from the ones we have here..." But those excuses were all uneccessary. The ice-cream was really good, and the figs were surprisingly edible. Well, more than edible - desirable, tasty, chewy, sweet, yum. Dad was really impressed. He said they tasted like some Malaysian candied fruit from his childhood.


Icecream with figs (By the way, they are green figs... if you hold them up to the light...)

As Nigella says, the figs and ice-cream are "just, delightfully, right after the zingily salsa'd duck".

I'm heading down to Victoria Market tomorrow. I need to get my hands on those damn clams!