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* Go to the recipe for Kung Pao Chicken
One of the dishes we returned to time and again when we were visiting our friend Cristy in Beijing a few years ago was the popular Gong Bao Ji Ding or Kung Pao Chicken (also called Kung Po or Gung Po chicken). Traditional Gong Bao Ji Ding is a spicy Sichuan dish, the westernised version of which is often very different from the authentic Sichuanese version. I’m sure there are many variations of the dish within China, as well. But it’s not usual to add other vegetables like onions, peppers (capsicum) or cashews (or even pineapple?!).
I like to call it Gong Bao Ji Ding, because it has such a lovely ring to it, and apologies to Mandarin speakers the world over for my terrible pronunciation. Perhaps, as I’m erring towards attempting to cook an authentic version of the dish, I should also be trying to pronounce it correctly. But the truth is, I simply don’t know how.
There are very few main ingredients in Gong Bao Ji Ding – just chicken, peanuts and spring onions (green onions), really. But, as with many east Asian dishes, the complexity is in the many flavourings. Continue reading ‘How to make Kung Pao Chicken’
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Go to the recipe for Bread and butter pudding
Our friend Anthony brought round one of those panettone things on Christmas Day. In the end not a lot of it got eaten – we had a decent spread lined up already, and the panettone was kind of a last-minute whim on Anthony’s part.
For those not familiar, panettone is a kind of domed bready cake, often containing dried fruit and other goodies. It’s usually risen with yeast as opposed to baking powder. Panettone is a centrepiece at Italian Christmas tables and seems to be becoming more popular in other countries.
So Christmas came and went, as did Boxing Day, New Year’s, and the thing was still sitting there in its box, with only a few slices taken off. Continue reading ‘Panettone pudding recipe – a twist on bread and butter pudding’
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Go to the recipe for Humble rum balls
Go to the recipe for Lenny’s faff-tastic wonder balls
It’s a good idea to have a few snack-like goodies prepared for the Christmas period and rum balls always do the trick. Our friend Angie mentioned she’d made a batch to her Nana’s recipe so Waz thought he’d follow suit.
They are based on Weetbix or Weetabix, a cereal bar made out of wheat flakes, and include condensed milk for sweetening. Instead of Weetbix, if there’s no such thing where you live, you can use a plain graham cracker, digestive biscuit or similar cookie. Continue reading ‘How to make rum balls: two ways, humble and posh’
Published on
November 26, 2010 in
Cakes, breads and baking, Chicken and poultry, Cooking techniques explained, Cooking videos, English traditional, Favourites, Indian, Pasta, Quick and easy, Sauces, Vegetarian and Video recipes.
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Go to the recipe for Pasta with white truffle
Go to the recipe for Eggs in cocotte with white truffle
On “schoolnights”, when everything happens at helter-skelter pace, it’s always a rush to get home from work, throw a meal together and do the day’s housekeeping before crashing into bed. If I’m lucky Waz has been on an early shift and we can share the evening duties.
So on the weekends we really like to give a lot more time and attention to creating lovely meals that we can enjoy eating at a slower pace.
I thoroughly respect the ideology of the Slow Food Movement – begun in 1986 to celebrate and enjoy local and regional cuisines. So when time permits I love to create meals that embody the Slow Food philosophy of creating the simplest of dishes, with the highest quality ingredients.
Chef Michelle and I recently treated ourselves with a whirlwind weekend trip to the centre of the white truffle universe – the Alba truffle festival in Piemonte near Turin, Italy. We ate a fantastic truffle meal at a Slow Food restaurant with some luscious local Barolo wine. We couldn’t believe our luck the following day when, while roaming the Alba hills, we ran into a local truffle hunter who sold us some white truffles that his little dog had just dug out of the ground. Continue reading ‘How to cook with truffles’
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Go to the recipe for Swiss roll, aka jelly roll
Swiss roll – or jelly roll to the Americans and Canadians – is what Lenny likes to call a store cupboard cake. Like my Mum’s teacake, this is baking at its easiest. You’ve probably got most of the ingredients already, and the results are sure to win you a disproportionate amount of praise from your guests. Continue reading ‘Let the jelly roll: Swiss roll recipe from Waz’s Nana’
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Go to the recipe for Christmas duck
Let’s talk turkey. Actually let’s talk about something else this Christmas. Let’s talk turkey alternatives.
This is a first for Crash Test Kitchen. We’ve never done a Christmas episode before. So we thought we’d focus on two of the basic elements you want on your table: crispy roast potatoes and a lovely bird.
But instead of turkey, we’ve chosen duck. Continue reading ‘How to roast a duck, the slow and tender way’
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Go to the recipe for hot and fast roast chicken
People do fuss over a roast chicken, don’t they? Doing all sorts of things like draping bacon over the fleshiest bits to keep them moist, mucking around poking seasonings under the skin, stuffing all sorts of things inside them to add flavour, even insisting that you have to roast a chicken breast-down in the pan and then flip it over part way through cooking.
In our opinion, if you keep the cooking simple, getting a good result can be reduced to one decision: buying a decent chicken in the first place. There’s been a lot of publicity about chicken welfare lately, with the focus being on battery laying hens and intensively reared, fast-growing meat birds that can hardly stand up by themselves.
In our house we haven’t gone down the full free-range route, but have settled on buying slow-growing birds that are fed better food in more spacious barns endorsed by animal welfare authorities. In the UK the scheme is called RSPCA Freedom Foods and no doubt there are equivalents elsewhere in the world. Continue reading ‘Our roast chicken recipe: hot and fast’
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A few weeks ago, on a (typically) miserable London winter’s day, I was at home by myself and at a loss for what to have for lunch. The pantry (or store cupboard as the English call it) was pretty much bare and all I had in the fridge was a limp bit of broccoli, the dag end of some parmesan and a few dregs of cream which weren’t quite off.
I boiled up the broc in a bit of water to which I’d added some liquid stock, blitzed it in the blender and added salt, pepper, parmesan and cream for what was a surprisingly delicious repast. I couldn’t believe my luck – I’d stumbled upon the recipe for a yummy, warming lunch from a few ingredients that you might just have in your fridge. Continue reading ‘Brocolli soup with left-handedness’
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Lenny is a whiz with fried rice. Last time she made it I was well impressed, to the point that I would eat it over stuff from a Chinese restaurant any day.
And that’s saying something. I reckon it’s really hard to replicate the flavours of your better-than-average Chinese takeaway. Maybe it’s down to MSG, which in some Asian cultures is literally known as “taste” (oh, if only you could buy good taste in powdered form). We’ve got nothing against MSG, really – it’s either in the food we buy or it isn’t – but we don’t have it in our kitchen, and don’t have any idea how, or how much of it, to use. Continue reading ‘Rice to the occasion’
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Wow! I was interviewed as an authority on food podcasting for the Guardian Unlimited newsdesk podcast this morning and can’t believe how nervous I was. I hope they managed to edit together something sensible from all my babble. You can find the interview about 16 min 40 sec into the bulletin.
Loads of stuff I forgot to mention – like how we’ve been in Time magazine, and how we’re cited in Stephanie Bryant’s new book Videoblogging for Dummies.
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Anyway. It’s been a while since we posted an episode – listen to the GU podcast and you’ll learn that it’s partly because our cooker/stove/oven was broken, and getting it replaced was a bit of a nightmare. Also we’ve been travelling again, and work life has been keeping us busy. But we’ve kicked back into gear and, to coincide with the Guardian interview, here’s an episode in which we make a simple teacake.
This video was previously posted incomplete, but it’s now the full episode, so if you saw “Part 1″ please watch again.
Now, about teacake. As the name suggests it’s the perfect accompaniment to a cup of your favourite leaf tea, and is as much a part of the Anglo-Australian baking repertoire as scones and sponge cake. Continue reading ‘Cinnamon teacake’
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“Welsh rarebit” or “Welsh rabbit” was one of those dishes I’d always wondered about, along with “toad in the hole”, before moving to the UK.
Apparently its name is originally a bit of a slight on the Welsh – who were (many years ago, I’m sure) considered so inept they couldn’t catch a rabbit for dinner, so they had to settle for cheese on toast. In an early example of political correctness the name was adjusted to “rarebit”, supposedly taking a bit of the sting out of the insult.
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There’s more to good rarebit than just slices of cheddar plopped on bread and stuck under the grill (broiler, if you prefer). The recipes vary, but common elements seem to be a good cheddar, some Worcestershire sauce and either beer or milk. Continue reading ‘Pulling a rarebit out of the hat’
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Sometimes you just need comfort food. I had never pictured that packet of peas in the freezer as anything other than a quick way of padding out the numbers in a meat-and-three-veg meal, or a source of temporary relief for a wrenched ankle.
Recently, though, Canadian friends and Crash Test Kitchen devotees Shel and Christie visited from Edmonton, the place where CTK had its beginnings. We got nattering about food (as we do) and Christie revealed one of her quick and easy comfort cravings: peas and feta.
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It doesn’t sound like it would set the world on fire, but seriously, it goes really well together. Lenny’s addition of crusty garlic toasts makes a meal of it. Continue reading ‘Easy peasy feta cheesy’
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It seems Lenny has a latent sweet tooth. In the past she was not really one for desserts, but more and more she’s turning out cakes and confections. This simple chocolate sauce based on just four ingredients has become one of her staples.
Our mate Chef Michelle gave us the recipe, handed down from her mum. You combine milk, sugar, cocoa and butter over heat, and whisk gently until it bubbles itself into a velvety and perilously rich topping. Tip it straight over ice cream and wolf down.
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Crash Test Kitchen is all about improvisation, so we slapped together a cherry and brandy maceration to create what Michelle dubbed “black forest chocolate delight”. Actually, she came up with “black forest” bit and I embellished it. Continue reading ‘Revealing our (chocolate) sauce’
My mum would often make rice pudding when I was a kid. Though I loved the pudding, I would scrape off the skin with my spoon and plop it on mum’s plate, who made an ostentatious show of eating it while I curled up my nose in distaste.
Lenny was making risotto a while back and couldn’t find arborio rice, so bought some “Italian pudding rice” instead at a corner store. I insisted, though, that it wouldn’t work, and went out an ultimately successful mission to find the right kind for risotto. That left us with this packet of pudding rice, which Lenny has finally put to use.
In our modest cookery library she found a recipe for “nursery rice pudding” and went to work, also grilling some pineapple for a topping. Continue reading ‘Rice pudding with pineapple confusion’
Every Saturday I sit down to the task of writing out the weekly grocery shopping list. It starts off easily with the staples: bread, milk, fruit, white truffles …
But then comes the tricky part: what to eat for dinner for the next seven days. Sometimes inspiration hits and I easily come up with seven tasty, nutritionally balanced dishes with a combination of ingredients that’s both affordable and at least slightly adventurous. And that yields just the right amount of left-overs to pop into a plastic container for tomorrow’s lunch.
Other times I enter into a flight of fancy that Waz might have some ideas for the week’s dinners: “Waz, can you suggest something for dinner this week?” Typical reply: “Twice smoked duck’s liver on a bed of wilted sea kale with smoked maple dressing.” Or, alternatively: “Fish.”
Yeah, thanks Waz. Continue reading ‘Ready, steady, spaghetti: Puttanesca pronto’
Published on
March 8, 2006 in
Cakes, breads and baking, Chicken and poultry, Cooking techniques explained, Cooking videos, Desserts and puddings, English traditional, Favourites, French traditional, Quick and easy, Sauces, Vegetarian and Video recipes.
We all want one of those chef’s blowtorches, don’t we? You know, the ones that you can use to blacken a capsicum (sorry, a pepper), blister a tomato … or make creme brulee!
I’ve had a serious addiction to this oh-so-unhealthy French dessert for years now – probably since I saw the movie Amelie, with that pixie-faced leading lady who rates “cracking creme brulee with a spoon” as one of life’s greatest pleasures.
Most restaurants have it on the menu, and I’ve eaten all sorts of variations – fruit flavoured and the like – in different parts of the world. Continue reading ‘How to make cracking creme brulee’
Rhubarb. To me it’s always been more a synonym for nonsense or babble, or a gap-filling nothing vegetable in the garden, than the deliciously tart and easily prepared treat it turns out to be.
We went to the Borough Markets with a chef friend on Saturday and no doubt the rhubarb we bought is a super-organic non-GM wind-powered dolphin-friendly variety.
You can spend hours at the Borough and we really should get some footage down there for a future episode. I’m sure I can overcome my fear of being clocked by a falling 25kg wheel of gourmet cheese. Continue reading ‘Rhubarb’s your uncle’
Well, we’ve moved out of our apartment, left Edmonton, and now we’re “homeowners”. That “home” being Gus the Bus, our mobile Crash Test Kitchen, which we’re driving across Canada on the trip of a lifetime.
We had to move out of the flat a week before we left town (we decided to stay for the Edmonton Folk Festival) and our friends Ian, Jen and their little boy Noah kindly put us up in their basement. So as a thank-you I made them my famous crepes, and Lenny whipped up a delicious blueberry sauce.
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Len came up with a simple recipe on the spot, and you only have to watch Noah in the video to see how much he enjoyed it! Continue reading ‘Boy meets blueberry’
I was doing some web research after our sausage excursion to Calgary and was disturbed at the extent to which the corporate sausage machine has been keeping an eye on our snag tastes.
I’ll elaborate, but first a little on this episode of CTK. We prepare a simple dish that for want of a better name I call “sausagey pasta”. We hadn’t cooked it for a while, so our memories were a little fuzzy on the exact list of ingredients. A bit of Googling and some head-scratching, though, and we came up with a recipe.
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But back to the sausage evil empire. This company called Devro has broken our habits down to pie charts and line graphs. Apparently 31% of us want our sausages straight, but 66% don’t care whether they’re straight or curved. Of more concern, 55% don’t know what’s on the outside of a sausage – natural casing made of gut, or that synthetic stuff we mentioned in the last post. Continue reading ‘Your sausage habits exposed’
So what do you want in a sausage? Are you content with a cellulose or collagen tube filled with anonymous, homogenous mystery-meat paste containing who knows what?
If you’re like us, you demand sausages filled with real ingredients that you can see, taste, feel and smell. Not to mention the texture — and when you bite through that natural sausage casing, a really good “snag” should hit you with a burst of flavour and aroma.
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For a long time, our sausage benchmark was set by Tony’s Super Meats in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia. I remember Tony entered the annual Sausage King contest for the first time a few years back and blitzed the competition with his continental creations. Continue reading ‘Blessed are the sausage makers’
Rule number one of crepe making: there’s NO SHAME if the first one’s a failure. Rule number two: when the crepes hit the table, GET IN QUICK!
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For years, I’d made my “pancakes” according to a simple recipe: one cup of flour, one egg, one cup of milk. Lenny and my friends thought they were pretty good. But I suspected the results were a bit heavy, a bit tough. Not what you could really call crepes.
Then, while we were in the UK, I grabbed one of Delia Smith’s recipe books off a friend’s shelf. Or maybe I saw her cook crepes on her TV show. Anyway, dear old Delia turned my world upside down. My basic ratio went out the window, butter was added, and the result was a much lighter, much more delicate pancake than I had ever produced – something that could truly be called a crepe. Continue reading ‘The great crepe debate’
Our fondest memory of this dish is when we made it for our good friend Georgie’s “birthday week” party a couple of years ago. Much wine was drunk and much delicious, tender chicken saltimbocca was eaten.
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The chicken breasts are sliced in half (horizontally – ah, maybe you’d better watch the vid) and pummelled mercilessly, rendering them more tender than an ardent lover’s first kiss. (Too much attempted poeticism, Waz?) Continue reading ‘Beating the breast’
Published on
April 18, 2005 in
Cakes, breads and baking, Chicken and poultry, Christmas recipes, Cooking techniques explained, Cooking videos, Desserts and puddings, English traditional, Quick and easy, Sauces, Vegetarian and Video recipes.
Our guest for this instalment of Crash Test Kitchen is our old mate Dave.
Now Dave is a bit of a dark horse, it seems, when it comes to matters of the kitchen. Just recently, after all our years of knowing the lad, he declared that he knew how to make a cheesecake.
And not just your fridge-set cheesecake, mind you – the full-blown baked variety. So Lenny and I found this recipe on the internet, supplied the ingredients and set Dave to work. Continue reading ‘Dave makes a cheesecake’
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Chicken breasts, simmered in soy and sake (thats “sak-eh”, i.e. rice wine). It’s a fast, flavoursome and DEAD SIMPLE dish we found in Donna Hay Modern Classics.
Now some people say a lot of Donna’s stuff is style over substance and her exquisitely photographed books are just an excuse for “food porn” (who says it? Okay, wesays it!). But this recipe is a gem. Just a handful of ingredients and none of them terribly esoteric (c’mon, star anise and sake aren’t THAT hard to find!). Continue reading ‘Soy for the “sake” of it’
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The supermarket was having a special on frozen jumbo prawns, de-veined and in a split shell. Standing there in the aisle, I had a vague recollection of a vermicelli noodle salad with a chili lime sauce.
We’d made it a few times, so I just grabbed the ingredients I could bring to mind, headed home and threw them at Lenny (who promptly threw them back at me).
This was actually the first cooking video we shot (you can tell by the amount of “Uhh, umm, aah” coming from my mouth – it seems Lenny is the natural presenter out of us two). Continue reading ‘Don’t come the raw prawn’
How to cook with truffles
Let the jelly roll: Swiss roll recipe from Waz’s Nana
How to roast a duck, the slow and tender way
Our roast chicken recipe: hot and fast
No-fuss fish pie
Classic bolognese
Portuguese custard tarts recipe (pasteis de nata)
About the soufflé
One chicken, three ways
Bones about it: Beef stock from scratch
The fun rolls on!
Cinnamon teacake
Perfect Steak … in Time for Christmas
We’re on a (cabbage) roll
Your sausage habits exposed