Chinese New Year Dumplings
新年快乐！I previously posted a recipe for breakfast jiaozi (dumplings). In time for the Year of the Water Dragon, here’s a more traditional jiaozi recipe.
Mango Ice Cream
The first time I had mango ice cream was on a long-haul flight from China to the UK. At about 4am (time isn’t particularly fixed when you’re flying through 8 different time-zones) the cabin attendants brought ice cream to the few passengers who were still awake. It was a revelation, refreshing and fruity whilst still retaining the sweet luxuriousness of good ice cream.
British Chinese Custard Tart
Following the mass of chocolate mousse I made for a previous recipe, I had 12 spare egg yolks sitting in the fridge. Rather than use these for scrambled eggs or something simple (mainly because I was in a cooking mood) I decided to make custard tart, a traditional British dessert which is also very popular in China and Hong Kong.
Luxurious Dark Chocolate Mousse
This was prepared as part of a three course meal for a dinner party, the complete menu for which I will cover in a later post. Light but indulgent, this delicious chilled dessert needs to be prepared several hours before serving (or the day before).
Apologies for lack of updates
As the title of this blog suggests, I am a student; I’m currently bogged down writing coursework (and, for unrelated reasons, in China) and so haven’t been cooking much or had the time to write.
As a consolation here’s a quick recipe I wrote a while back but had been intending to hold back until I’d finished a post about the wonders of rice-cookers (which I was introduced to on my first trip to China).
Left-over Rice Pudding
No-one makes the correct amount of rice. Perhaps only spaghetti is more difficult to judge by eye; not once have I cooked rice and had the perfect amount, there’s always spare which often ends up in the bin. If you’re the same, don’t throw away your rice! Spare rice can easily be turned into a delicious dessert in the time it takes you to finish your main.
Left-over Pastry Palmier
Calling this dish a palmier might offend a pastry chef, but that is the closest relative to this dish, which is essentially a Swiss roll made out of pastry; and as the most pretentious of us will know, there’s nothing like using a French name for a dish to impress the people you’re serving it to. I chose to make a savoury version of this dish, but there is no reason you couldn’t use a sweet filling (reduce some berries or stew some apples to make a sauce and spread liberally over the pastry before rolling).
Pork and Apple Pie
Pork and apple are ingredients which beautifully complement one and other. Pork pies are delicious, apple pies are delicious, logically a pork and apple pie should bring the best of both worlds into a sweet and savoury pastry delight.
Perfect Pancakes
Note: the term ‘pancake’ does not refer to quite the same dish across the English-speaking world, this recipe is for British-style pancakes, though Americans might thing of these as closer to crêpes (as the smaller, thicker American variety uses a different recipe and has its own unique charms, to be discussed in a future post).
Pancakes are incredibly easy to make and to cook, and yet being able to do them well still elicits surprised approval from even the most experienced cooks. Part of the problem is that people are too bogged down by recipes and measurements and end up making a hash of their batter, leading to frustrating disappointment when cooking (well a certain level of disappointment since, as mere vehicles for their sweet toppings, outside of burning them black its hard to really screw up a pancake).
This recipe is very simple, I doubt that after reading it you will ever need to refer to it again as it follows an extremely simple ratio which can be scaled up or down depending on your need (and once people learn you can make perfect pancakes that need will be great).
Breakfast Hash Browns
Hash browns belong to that peculiar class of dish that one very rarely sees in the home and yet is prevalent in restaurants and cafés. Yet there is no reason not to make this delicious potato dish: the ingredients are already in every kitchen, the recipe is simple and quick and the end result is far more interesting than chips or fried potatoes.
