For the last several weeks, a group of young men have been coming around to our flat on Sunday mornings and beating each other with sticks for two hours in the abandoned second floor (there's an explanation for this that is less dodgy than I've made it sound, but this is a food blog so I'm not going to bother with it :D ) before coming back upstairs to revive themselves with tea and what has turned out to be an ever-increasing variety of food.
It started with snacks to accompany tea -- steamed buns, dumplings and stuffed pork rolls -- but one week, returning from a tropical holiday to the wintry climes of a Manchester January, I decided something more substantial was required and threw together some soy-simmered chicken with daikon and carrots (I was really craving oden, the Japanese brothy stew with all sorts of delicious root vegetables and other goodies, but nobody except for me likes those wobbly chewy things and anyway I don't know where to buy them, so I had to make do) and some leafy greens with ginger and garlic sauce. Since then, snacks have turned into full-on lunches, which is proving to be simultaneously an opportunity to exercise my culinary repertoire and test out new recipes, and a challenge for my ingenuity, as I try to cook something different every week -- even when I'm not there to prepare it at the time! The slow-cooker and rice cooker are getting a workout for their keep-warm properties, as is our new microwave.
Menus so far have included
- red curry chicken with pineapple; stir-fried vegetables with sweet basil and chilli; pan-fried pork dumplings (this would have worked better had I left explicit instructions, since in the absence of these nobody thought to put things in the microwave. Nonetheless, cold dumplings still appeared to be adequate, since the plate was empty when I came home...)
- slow-cooked beef stew; mashed potatoes kept hot in the rice cooker and green beans and carrots in the steamer insert on top
- gyoza; karaage fried chicken; green beans with sesame sauce; chashu belly pork with bok choy; Sichuan aubergine (the last was a real hit, with me and everyone else; I may never cook anything else again...!)
- slow-cooked beef rendang; green beans with chilli and garlic; choi-sum and poku mushrooms with oyster sauce (this time with appropriate use of the microwave, thankfully; cold poku mushrooms are a bit wrong...)
This week is an additional challenge, since (due to circumstances beyond just the usual Sunday stick-beating) there might be anything up to 13 people for lunch, or alternatively 9 for lunch and 6 for dinner. I've decided the best way to deal with this is to lay in enough supplies for lunch, with an additional backup dinner plan of a quick Thai curry, tofu & basil stir-fry and maybe a hasty trip to Chinatown for some char-siu to throw into a sizzling pan with some green vegetables and Peking sauce. The lunch plan, meanwhile, involves sweet and sour chicken; aubergines with black bean and garlic sauce; mapo tofu; babi kecap; gai-lan with crab; and crispy fish in Sichuan sauce... and maybe some buns and dumplings, for the sake of tradition.
At some point I should really get round to posting recipes for all of these things I now know how to make in a systematic and efficient way suited to having half-a-dozen or more people over for a meal on a regular basis. Maybe this Sunday I'll even remember to take photos!
