Liveblogging a dinner-party
Jun. 6th, 2008 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceWhat I really wanted, I wanted to take a photo of the fish-heads in their soupy stock and post that: but alas, no power in the camera. No pix.
Still, one word is worth a thousand photos, so this post is a bargain.
So far today, I have done First Shopping, which is local; I have made the basic stock for the soup; I have cooked a very great deal of rice, which I will fry from cold for dinner; I have made six little vanilla blancmanges; I have put Chaz'z Chinese Pork on to simmer v v gently for v v ever. [Chaz'z Chinese Pork is a tradition; I invented it - with a huge great hand of pork - when I was called on once to feed a dozen friends, and now I'm not allowed to cook Chinese without it, however inauthentic it might be. Actually it's not really, because I read a lot of red-cooked recipes before I devised this; but basically all I do is stick a large piece of pork on the bone into a stock-pot, cover it with water, add dark & light soy, rice vinegar, Shao Xing and rock sugar, and then cook it very gently for hours & hours. The fat goes gelatinous, the meat is so soft that you can pull it off the bone with chopsticks, the liquid is boiled down into a sticky sweet sauce, and nom-nom-nomming occurs.
At present, after First Revisions, the menu looks like this:
Slivered radishes
Smacked cucumber
Silver fish with chilli
Jiaozi
Fish soup
Ants climbing a tree
Chicken with chestnuts
Chicken with black beans (or possibly General Tso's chicken)
Chairman Mao's red-braised pork
Chaz'z Chinese pork
Bamboo shoots with ground pork
Vanilla blancmange with saffron sauce (not strictly Chinese - at all - but hey...)
Still, one word is worth a thousand photos, so this post is a bargain.
So far today, I have done First Shopping, which is local; I have made the basic stock for the soup; I have cooked a very great deal of rice, which I will fry from cold for dinner; I have made six little vanilla blancmanges; I have put Chaz'z Chinese Pork on to simmer v v gently for v v ever. [Chaz'z Chinese Pork is a tradition; I invented it - with a huge great hand of pork - when I was called on once to feed a dozen friends, and now I'm not allowed to cook Chinese without it, however inauthentic it might be. Actually it's not really, because I read a lot of red-cooked recipes before I devised this; but basically all I do is stick a large piece of pork on the bone into a stock-pot, cover it with water, add dark & light soy, rice vinegar, Shao Xing and rock sugar, and then cook it very gently for hours & hours. The fat goes gelatinous, the meat is so soft that you can pull it off the bone with chopsticks, the liquid is boiled down into a sticky sweet sauce, and nom-nom-nomming occurs.
At present, after First Revisions, the menu looks like this:
Slivered radishes
Smacked cucumber
Silver fish with chilli
Jiaozi
Fish soup
Ants climbing a tree
Chicken with chestnuts
Chicken with black beans (or possibly General Tso's chicken)
Chairman Mao's red-braised pork
Chaz'z Chinese pork
Bamboo shoots with ground pork
Vanilla blancmange with saffron sauce (not strictly Chinese - at all - but hey...)