Food adventures - a new shop!

I recently came across a new world food shop at the opposite end of Exeter to the one I usually frequent.  I think it's nominally Turkish / Persian but I didn't get a chance to have a proper look inside.  However I did snatch these quick photos on my phone - not sure what all these things are but I'm excited to have a proper look around inside!

Gong Xi Fa Cai & some more food adventures

Happy New Year – it’s the Chinese year of the Snake. Wishing us all well for the year to come.  :-)
Yesterday I took a friend around various of the world food shops in Exeter. She’s wheat intolerant so was very happy to find certain items like Sorghum flour (apparently she has been hunting this down for 2 years!) and it was fun to show someone around the Exeter I know. As we went in many food shops it was kind of inevitable that I would emerge with a few more random items for me to try out on the Chap the Chap and I to try together. I had also recently bought a few things from my local Chinese supermarket for snacking purposes so thought I’d share them here.

The 'truly authentic' Chinese curry (*snort*) I'm planning on having tonight, just to try, out of curiosity.  In that way that sometimes you crave cacky white processed bread which you normally wouldn't touch with your wholegrain barge pole I have a curious fondness for the Chinese curry you get in some takeaways.  I know, I know - I'm sure it's laden with badness but hey - I like it.  I'm going to use a couple of Quorn fillets in place of the chicken breasts suggested and see how it turns out.
The fortune cookie I'll open to see what this year of the Snake holds for me.
The tins of 'Braised Eel' and 'Mince Prawn in Spice' I thought could be interesting but have yet to try and these are what I got yesterday.

However - I did want to share the things I have tried with you and here they are. 
The item on the left is dried bean curd.  It's pressed into something vaguely reminiscent of tofu but with flavour.  It has a slightly rubbery; although tougher than for example - raw mozzarella, texture that the Chap really didn't like but I do.  I eat these as a snack at my desk at work or chop them into noodles for lunchtime.  The one's I got professed to be barbeque flavour but were spicy with some chilli in and rather tasty I thought.
In the centre top we have some Tom Yum stock cubes - these are invaluable to add to cooking rice I find.  I've been on a bit of a tom yum kick for over a year now and show no signs of tiring of the zingy hot and sour flavours.
Below that is a 'hot mug' (literal translation) from a new (or new to me anyway) Polish deli that's sprang up at the top of town.  My Polish being totally non-existent I purely went by the pictures and used google translate once I got home to double check.  This is apparently 'cucumber with croutons' flavour but as the picture suggests - it's pretty much gherkin flavour.  Which sounds a bit wrong but I found surprisingly nice even with the 'creamed' edge.
Then on the right we have a pure spawn-of-the-devil (in my opinion) item.  'White Sesame Sandwiched Fish Snack' is kind of what it says.  Dried out fish pressed out with some sesame seeds in the centre cut into thin strips.  The texture is foam rubber.  The taste is that kind of nasty that means every couple of days you have to try it again just to confirm that yes - it really is that minging.  Some perverted part of your brain insists on telling you that you just can't have remembered it correctly and that nothing can be that hideous.  Pungent strong fermented fish taste isn't really my bag so these have been relegated to feeding the cat.  Who seems to enjoy them, the little freak.  So at least one of us is happy.  :-)
So - what does this year hold for me?

Hmmm....not sure what that's about. 
A prosperous 2013 and year of the snake to you all then.

Travel via food

As it seems like it may be a few months yet before the Chap and I can think about a holiday this will have to do for now!

We had a fab Indian buffet at work yesterday lunch time - just £5 for all this!  There was also a Chicken Kerala curry option which I didn't have but here we have naan breads, raita, rice, Aloo Gobi, Saag Aloo and Tarka Dahl.  Yum!!!  I was fairly stuffed after all that.  This was cooked up by our Cafe manager who is 'demi' Indian himself - although passionate about supporting English cricket.  [Why??  It's soooooo dull...]  Anyway - he did good with this spread in aid of our corporate charity.  [Isn't that an awful phrase?]

Today at work we visited another part of the globe with this rather delish rum cake that a collegue brought back from her holiday in the Caymans.  Although it looks like it's going to be very heavy it's actually a light sponge with a lovely but not overpowering flavour of rum through it.  Nom nom nom...  I wonder where we'll go tomorrow...  :-D

Seaside bimble with a forage thrown in

Well in contrast with the excess of the food festy we took a little bimble along the coast the previous week from Exmouth round to Sandy Bay and picked up some rather more frugal foodie goodies.  The weather was glorious, the sea - er - bracing!  [Mighty nippy.]  All in all it was a thoroughly restorative day for someone cooped up with hurty eyes for too long.  Found various shells, some dog whelks and one full size whelk which we stashed in the cool under a rock and failed to find again on the way back!  [Darn those pesky rocks all looking the same!]  I loved the colour of this little crab shell though.

We had taken along the River Cottage 'Edible Seashore' guide and having carefully perused the pages on mussels decided we'd collect a few of decent size to try.  I must say it's a tiny bit thrilling to be doing so when you consider mussels in a pub or restaurant are perceived more as a luxery item with price tag to match and here we were getting them for nuppence - the best price!  Do be aware though that you will need a 'sacrificial knife' once you get home to deal with them.  No - I don't mean for any dodgy offerings to some formless deity of your choice but a knife you don't mind getting very blunted for the purposes of pulling off the *beards and scraping off any barnacles.  The knife I snapped the tip off of getting into oysters after last years food fest does me nicely!  Having got a plastic bag from the local plastic tat / buckets 'n' spades type shop [we were woefully underprepared apart from the book having both forgotten to pick up anything to put any foraged goodies into] we collected a decent handful of mussels and some Sugar Kelp seaweed.  According to the book of words it's good flash deep fried as a kelp crisp - you can tell the difference from regular kelp (which can also be treated this way) as it has wavy edges and a bumpy look whereas regular kelp is flat.

Now - mussels can contain grit as they're filter feeders.  (This is why it's very important indeed you only get them from clean water areas and at certain times of the year which I'm not going to tell you thereby forcing you to look it up yourself.  I take no responsibility for any wild food misadventures, only for my own!)  Containing grit means you need to 'purge' them - soak them in aerated salt water for several hours with or without oatmeal (apparently it can speed the process) before cooking.  If you're going to cook them in a sauce like a classic moules marinière this is important as grit in the dish is a real killer to the enjoyment of great food.  We however; due to time constraints amongst other factors, opted to cook them in plain water letting any grit fall into the pan then shelled them and used them in a fish pie.  Chap and I did taste one each 'straight' as it were and they were delicious.  Sweetish as really fresh prawns can be, a delight to eat knowing we'd scooped them from the waves mere hours before.  We'll definitely be repeating this experience though we'll have to wait now until after the summer as this is when they spawn so you shouldn't pick them.  Apparently they are biggest in Autumn after their summer feeding and before they lose weight over winter so it'll be a treat I'm looking forward to already.

*I learnt from the book that the 'beards' or 'abyssal threads' are made from iron the mussel extracts from the seawater and used to be woven into cloth called 'mussel silk' which such luminaries as Caeser and Ghengis Khan used to wear!  Cool huh?  [In case you hadn't picked up on it yet I am a lover of the odd random and/or esoteric fact or three.]

Oh and the kelp?  Er...we kinda forgot about it so the taste of Sugar Kelp crisps remains to yet delight our tastebuds, or not as it may be.  (We had to throw the seaweed away.)  We will gather some again another time though.  I know - my bad.  :-(  Even free food wastage annoys me!  :-D

Adventures in food - Dried Squid

Bet you're going 'ick' right now eh? Here in Exeter we've got a fair few Chinese, Oriental, Indian and general World Food shops. Having booked off a half day last Wednesday for the abortive IT system switch over (now delayed for a week) and the Chap having been rained off we spent a greater part of the afternoon poking around several of these shops. It's fascinating and often much better value than buying these ingredients in English stupormarkets. Even if you don't fancy some of the more exotic offerings they're especially good for big packs of noodles or rice - works out a much more frugal way of buying these basics as well as things like soy sauce. We ended up with potato based noodles, dried shrimp, shrimp paste, dried squid, water chestnuts and some 'pickled' veg. [I think the 'pickled' bit here is something of a misnomer, at least sometimes. These packets come in a wide range of veg combos with chilli etc added.] Then we looked up what to actually do with the squid! :-D We decided to make a general stir fry with veg, noodles and the squid. This is how it went:

Dried Squid Noodle Stir Fry

Straight potato noodles - approx 1/3 - 1/2 pack

1 dried squid - soaked in water overnight, water changed then soaked for the day*

1 onion

2 carrots

Pack babycorn

6 Mushrooms

Half pack green beans

Half tin (small one) water chestnuts - sliced

0.25 pint veg stock

Pack pickled veg - ours was a kelp and bamboo shoots mix

Splash (big) fish sauce

Splash soy sauce

2 big tea spoons Tom Yum sauce in 0.25 pint hot water

Generic veg oil for stir frying

Sesame oil (if you have it)

These noodles take 8-10 mins boiling according to the packet so we boiled them for a little under that, taking into account that they will be added to the wok again later; drained them and put them on one side. Note here - they stuck together evilly after draining - apparently I should have added a little sesame oil during cooking to prevent this much like you would oil to pasta. [I don't know the proper name for these but check the picture if you want to find them - they end up looking a bit like glass noodles once cooked but don't in the pack.]

Drain your soaked squid and rinse well under running water to ensure no dirt could be left on. It was still fairly tough feeling so we decided to chop it into smallish strips - about 0.5 - 1cm wide. I just used the kitchen scissors, think this was far easier than using a knife would have been.

Heat the veg oil with a little sesame oil for flavouring.

Chop onion and add. Chop rest of the veg and add, stir frying.

Add packet of pickled veg (if using), veg stock and squid.

Add approx 2 tbsp fish sauce [sorry for the approximate measures here but chap did this bit and didn't measure like I would!] and less of soy - maybe 1tbsp-ish.

Mix Tom Yum paste into a little hot water (if you have sauce instead of paste you may not need to do this) and add to the wok. Continue cooking for a short time until veg are nearly cooked to your liking [bear in mind they really should crunch in a stir fry - at least a little bit] then add the noodles and stir to ensure they are evenly coated in sauce and bits.

Serve. [We're 'not very good at quantities' type of people so this made enough to easily feed 4, or 2 and 2 lunches for the next day!]

Hmm - well I'm glad we tried this but simple answer - we're not going to bother with dried squid again. [Any takers for the second one in the pack?] Small pieces were ok but the texture was rubbery, reminiscent of the limpets we had before I blitzed them, only not as nice! Any pieces that were a little larger took a lot of chewing - they did not have a nice mouth feel to me and made me feel slightly icky. Not recommended! that said the general flavours in the sauce we came up with here were nice - just leave out the dried squid!!

*Dried squid smells, no 2 ways about it. Expect your kitten friend to be climbing the cupboard next to you as you prep the squid for this dish. Frankly he may well end up getting the second one, suitably soaked and chopped into treat size portions. Bleargh.

:-( I just can't seem to get the stupid spacing and formatting of this post corrected - down to having manually retyped the whole post. Pah - enough!

More loveliness and adventures in food

Realised I hadn't shown my beautiful olive bowl set to the wider world yet. I originally bought one of these for my parents about 5 or 6 years ago for xmas and have wanted my own ever since. Theirs is a cobalt blue though; which is actually the colour I'd normally go for but this one was so gorgeous it just edged the lead. Made by these people, and I'm seriously considering asking if they'd do me a mug I love the colours and glaze effects so much. It was my first buy of the festival and cost £10 which for a handmade delight like this I think is pretty good. I know I paid more than that for my parents one all those years back from a local gallery. Always better to buy direct from the artisan if you can.

In addition to my cave aged cheese previously mentioned I also got smoked cheddar from Quickes Traditional - they of the monster cheese in the post below. They're based just outside Exeter so a very local product. I like the taste of smoked cheese but so often the cheese is that slightly 'plasticy' type (like Edam) and I'm not a big fan of it. Next up I got some Cornish Blue cheese - one piece for me and another two at the request of friends. This company had a new product this year which was pate made with their blue cheese and either pear and walnut or fig. I went for the pear and walnut option, after tasting some of both of course. :-)

The other thing I got was a couple of oysters. I've never had them before and although there was a company at the festival last year shucking them and selling them to eat right there I didn't really want to do it with an audience in case I really hated the thing and felt like I had to spit it out or something terrible like that. I wanted to buy one, take it home, work out how to get in the damn thing and eat it in the privacy of my own home. Anyway, I ended up with 2 by accident because the lady (wife of the fishmonger) wasn't sure of the cost and when I went back at the end to pick up my one oyster (they kept your purchases on ice for you) she'd overcharged me so they had given me 2. Hmm - wasn't sure what'd happen if I hated it though.

Well - if you've never opened your own oyster they are a git to get into, they really are. I had checked online of the best way to do it, wrapped a tea towel round my hand and carefully tried to gain ingress. One broken off tip of knife later... However, I managed in the end and ate one straight and the other with a splash of lemon. Do you know what? I'm still not sure about them. I just can't decide if I like them or not. I think I had quite massive preconceptions of the texture before I tried them and this had coloured my judgement (negatively) to such an extent that to make an objective assessment eludes me. I think I may have to try again, I'd like to grill one and try it cooked as well.

The last lovely thing I had at the festival (along with a couple of pints) was a rather fine 'Mushroom & spinach with hazelnuts & white truffle oil' pie from the locally based Tom's Pies. It was mightily good I have to tell you - should you be in a position to lay your hands on these it's a 'double thumber'* from me.

Well, you may have gathered I'm quite fond of cheese, think I'm well stocked for a fair while now though!

* 'Double thumber' - a phrase my friend invented meaning a double thumbs up. I like it. :-D