migrant|roo

I'm doing some big bike rides again this summer!

This weekend Oli and I are cycling from Manchester to the Peak District. Oli works for British Cycling and has 2 meter legs, so I'm expecting to die. Hard.

I'm also taking part in the London to Brighton ride for the British Heart Foundation, and on that ride I'll have the excellent company of POKE! There are about 12 of us doing it which should be great fun.

If you'd like to sponsor us, which would be really appreciated, you can do that here:

Rob and Dave, a couple of old Uni friends, swung by to stay with us this weekend which was really awesome. Awesome and full of long afternoons in the pub, loads of cooking and loads of Guitar Hero.

I cooked Vietnamese chili, salt and pepper squid - which is becoming a real favourite - and chicken with chilli and lemon grass. Cooking it was a bit of a haze; no photos I'm afraid, doing it after hours in the pub plus the whirlwind I'd creating in the kitchen, and Guitar Hero duels were a little too distracting.

Sunday started slowly (with a hangover) but good coffee and eggs on potato farls got us moving soon enough. Moving enough to somehow end up in an oriental supermarket shopping for lunch.

Pork and Prawn Gyoza

• 50 frozen gyoza wrappers
• 200g pork mince
• 12 large raw peeled prawns, finely chopped
• 6 finely chopped spring onions
• Half a finely chopped chinese cabbage
• 6 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 1 large piece of ginger, finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon of caster sugar
• 2 tablespoons Kikkoman soy sauce
• Dash of rice vinegar

Lots of chopping eh? I had lots of help in the kitchen from Jo, Dave and Rob luckily! Mix it all up and you're ready to roll (I fried a test gyoza off to test the seasoning).

The gyoza wrappers were frozen, but by the time they'd been out for 30 minutes or so they were easy to handle.

We learnt quickly that dry hands really help, so that the wrappers don't stick to your hands. Stick a bit of the pork and prawn mix (not too much), and then use a bit of water around the edge to act as glue to seal it. Squeeze it close, and line 'em up.

We made 50. Less 1 that was the test, and 1 that was put down because of severe deformity.

It might seem that 48 gyoza is a lot for 4 people, but as soon as we cooked half and started eating it was pretty obvious that we weren't going to be able to stop until they were all gone ;)

I wonder if I'll ever get bored of cooking Asian food..

I made a pie today.

In fact, it was a birthday request from my Dad who had been craving a traditional chicken and mushroom pie - he got one for his birthday!

I used chicken thighs (poached for 40 minutes in stock, then carefully and lovingly de-boned and diced) instead of breast to ensure the chicken didn't go dry, and it worked really well. The filling was essentially a bechamel sauce (but with more chicken stock than milk) with sauteed mushrooms, tarragon and chicken.

Shortcrust pastry unashamedly bought off the shelf. Here's the beast in all it's glory - fed 6 people easily.

Served with chunky chips, roast butternut squash and thick gravy.

There was something satisfying about making one big "thing" that everyone shares, and it was fun to make something a bit more rustic and English after 2 weeks of south-east Asian cooking too.

Vietnam was undoubtedly my favourite country when we went around the world. A big reason for this was the food; I fell in love.

All this made the fact that I couldn't find a good Vietnamese cookbook even more disappointing, until now:

The Secrets of the Red Lantern is now my favourite cookbook. Ever! It's not just a cookbook, it's a beautifully presented story of one family's escape from the Vietnam war, leading eventually (I won't spoil the story) to The Red Lantern, a revered Vietnamese restaurent in Sydney.

We'd invited Flo, Tracy and Monkey over for dinner on Saturday night, so I thought "Hey! Why not cook 4 dishes from this fantastic new book?".

Lesson #1

Vietnamese food, although quick to cook, is not simple. There is an elegant simplicity to the approach of each dish; fresh herbs, fresh vegetables, fresh seafood - do you see the pattern? However, there is a lot of preparation involved, and I spent 4 hours in the kitchen frantically chopping, soaking, folding, tearing, picking, slicing, coating, marinading.. phew!

Lesson #2

I'm not going to cook four dishes I've never cooked before when hosting a dinner party. Thankfully, Tracy and Flo were 45 minutes late, but even so, I was shattered and the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it!

Lesson #3

Don't skimp on quality of ingredients. I know this might seem obvious, and it's something I try to do myself but it's worth mentioned here, if only because I'm feeling a bit smug. We made a huge effort on Saturday afternoon legging it around the city trying to find everything we needed totally fresh (not frozen or jarred if we could help it) and I think it played the most crucial part in the quality of the meal.

So, lessons over, how did it go? Well, at 5pm you I wouldn't have believed it, but by 7pm we were eating a really, really delicious, authentic tasting meal complete with home-made dipping sauces.

There's a downshot though - I was so stressed, snowed under with cooking that I didn't take many good photos. In fact, I didn't even get any photos of some of the dishes :(

Vietnamese Summer Rolls

A favourite of mine from when I was in Vietnam, these ended up being 10 out of 10 on the authenticity-scale, but it didn't come free; 15 rolls took me over an hour to make.

Deep-fried squid with salt, pepper and chilli

NO PHOTO

I've never deep fried anything before, so I was really worried about this. Luckily, we got some freshly caught squid which I sliced into thin strips so they'd cook quickly, then coat in egg-white and work in potato starch (heh, that was easy to find..). They cooked in hot oil in about a minute, whereupon I tossed them in sea salt, fresh cracked black pepper, red chillies and 4 slices, fried spring onions.

It's hard to explain the disbelief at how good they tasted when I tried them!

Rare steak and glass noodle salad

This dish had about 30 ingredients! Even the marinade had 10+ ingedients, but it was all worth it. I cooked the rump steak on a really hot griddle for 3 minutes each side and sliced it ultra thin. The salad was essentially a herb salad (basil, thai basil, corriander, perilla and mint) with glass noodles, red onions and cucumber, dressed (a mix of soy, garlic, corrainder, sugar and fish sauce blended together) and finally garnished with roasted peanuts.

The result was so fresh tasting, an absolute explosion of flavours.

Chicken with chilli and lemongrass

Another favourite of ours from Vietnam, I learnt the secret to cooking this one (aside from chopping the lemongrass really, really fine) was to let it cook longer than you think. It's not a stir-fry, it needs time for the sauce to really come together (I deglazed the wok in the middle, too) and for the onions and garlic to caramelize.

I'm so pleased, I feel like I've finally got a crack at mastering Vietnamese, one of my favourite cuisines. I learnt a few lessons, but I'm not put off at all - just totally exhilerated by that most fantastic cookbook.

I've actually got an excuse for the couple of weeks silence around here - I was on holiday!

In Surfcastle, I think I've found a place I'll go back to over and over, year after year.

Before I go on - please check out my Surfcastle 2008 Flickr Photoset/album - it speaks volumes, more than I could in this post.

It's a big, beautiful old house in the village of Baleal, which happens to be one of the top surf spots in Portugal, if not Europe.

What makes Surfcastle isn't just the location or the perfect surfy house - the people who run it are completely awesome.

Our surf coaches for the week, Dan and Ginjes were so helpful and so keen to help us improve and coach us almost one-to-one. There are heaps of surf camps that do lessons of 50 people plus, but not the Surfcastle guys. We had Ginjes and Dan between 6 or 7 of us most days!

Joao, Elfie and Laura were the perfect hosts, making sure we were extremely well fed and looked after.

The whole experience was a little bit perfect to be honest. A tiny, quiet village out of tourist season. A really hard but addictive new sport to learn. Beaming sunshine away from cold, dark England. Most of all, meeting some absolutely amazing people who just want to kick back, have a little fun and surf.

As far as the surfing itself goes, I love it! I got the hang of it slowly but surely, but it's definitely he hardest sport I've ever turned my hand to. The constant paddling, watching the waves, balance and timing make it almost impossible to nail in the beginning, but as I touched on earlier we had two brilliant coaches who worked hard to make sure we understood how to nail it.

So by the end of the week, we were exhausted from the sun, beer, partying and most of all surfing - there's nothing like coming home from holiday feeling knackered by wanting more.

It won't be long before I'm back at Surfcastle, and that's a promise!

A few months ago a small team of us (Karen, Nico, Tom and myself) at POKE built a new website for the excellent Ottolenghi restaurant.

As a "thank you", Yotam and his team at Ottolenghi kindly invited a large mob of POKE food-heads across to Leith's Cookery School for a Saturday morning lesson in mediterranean and Isreali cooking.

It was really, really nice (but also a bit weird initially) to socialise with Pokers outside of their two natural habitats: the studio, and the pub! Everyone was buzzing and it was a brilliant morning - everything was perfectly organised and the recipes were absolutely delicious (I've cooked them all since the course at home).

I tried to get some decent photos, but it was a bit manic with all the cooking - here's the best of the bunch:

The hardware

Knife skills

Red onion, cucumber and dill salad

This might look plain, but it's far from it. We salted the cucumber after scooping the seeds out to get them to release a lot of water, giving them loads of crunch. The dressing was a mix of vinegar, sugar and dill - the vinegar really took the edge of the onions. This is going to be eaten a lot this summer :)

Chicken and courgette burgers

I've always been scared of burgers - no more. It was an extremely wet mixture before cooking, my nerves were jangling.. but the lesson is to trust the professionals; after 2 minutes in the pan they firmed up enough to flip and the rest, is delicious history.

The Meal

All together, along with my favourite dish of the day: the bulgar wheat, caremlised onion and feta salad. You can see it in the background, unfortunately I was too busy faffing around cooking to get a proper shot of the bulgar salad on it's own.

Messy dessert

Raspberry and passion fruit mess, made with the infamous Ottolenghi meringues! I managed to coax a few meringue secrets out of Yotam too ;)

A fully brilliant day, capped off with a few pints in a local pub and a sleepy, sunny, gentle journey home.

Like most London-workers, I've become a serial sushi eater. I've only ever tried to make sushi at home a couple of times before, enjoying limited success.

A couple of weeks ago when Monkey and Rob came to stay for the weekend I decided to give it another go, but this time I was going to buy the best salmon fillet I could find. After a bit of hunting around on that Sunday morning with Rob, it turns out the best we could find was also the biggest. So I made a shitload of sushi!

The salmon was an organic skinless fillet from Waitrose, and I picked up some nori sheets too. I didn't have any sushi rice so I used unwashed (don't laugh - not washing keeps the starch in making it more sticky) basmati rice.

One thing nobody tells you is that when making sushi (especially a lot of it) the rice gets absolutely EVERYWHERE. It sticks to your hands, gets trodden into the carpet, in your hair - everywhere. I find having wet hands makes it much easier to pick up rice without it all sticking to your hands.

Rolling was good fun - the first one was shit, the rest were good. My knife was just about sharp enough, but making sushi really makes me want to splash out on one of these bad boys :)

Big fish, sharp knife

Attempt #2 at rolling - looking good

All rolled

The spread (well, half of it..)

Cut rolls

It's rare that I eat so much sushi that I feel completely full. This was one of those times. We ate, and ate and ate and there was still a massive slab of salmon left over.

I've just uploaded some photos of our trip to Centre Parcs with the lovely Monkey, Rob and Lotte.

Holidays should technically be restful and offer an opportunity to recharge, but I guess we needed someone to remind us of that because we've all come home more exhausted and broken than when we left!

5 days of: bike riding, wall climbing, golfing, ping pong-ing, badminton-ing, jumping off very high things, rapids swimming, pool shooting, drinking, BBQ eating, sauna sweating AND dance classing have taken it's toll - we're all feeling tired, beaten and bruised; yet somehow all extremely happy at having shared a truly awesome 5 days together.

I think we'd all forgotten how much fun it is to be around each other, and how mental we go when we are :)

A happy holiday and shitloads of happy memories - cheers Jo, Monkey, Lotte & Rob!