Kim Chee

We had a wonderful late harvest in November of Savoy type cabbages and large Winter Radishes which supplied the makings for a European version of Kim Chee, the essential fermented cabbage pickle of Korea and other Asian countries.

The pickles I made 2 months ago are now reaching a peak of flavour and crunchiness and I've been enjoying them, simmered for a minute in a little hot water as an instant hot and sour soup for breakfast. It's wonderful stuff, full of flavour and low calorie but I suspect that Mr. Stripey Cat might have a thing or two to say about body odour when he gets back from his most recent trip away.

Anyway, the most important part about this posting is that you don't need to worry if you can't get Chinese cabbages and mooli radishes, the brassicas of Northern Europe will rise to the challenge.

Take a large firm cabbage, I used the one in the picture above, something fairly leafy but still with a good tight head, then clean off the slugs, mud and withered leaves. Remove a few of the large outer leaves and reserve in the cool while you prepare the rest of the vegetables.

Cut the cabbage head up. You can segment it, make large slices, divide it into quarters, squares, whatever you fancy really as long as the pieces aren't too small and still look appetising. Slice stems and the thick ends of leaves into thin sections or remove altogether. Put it into a large bowl and pour over a brine made from 125g salt to 500ml water. This is strong but necessary to wilt and soften the leaves for the next stage.

Cover the salted cabbage, put a light weight on top to keep it pressed down into the liquid and leave it overnight or for as much as 24 hours. Turn the cabbage in the brine a couple of times if you remember. Next day, the cabbage should be soft and pliable. Squeeze out as much brine as possible with your hands and set the drained cabbage to one side.

Peel the winter radish(es) and cut away any damaged parts or very rooty bits. You need about 500g of the prepared vegetable. Cut it into matchsticks shaped pieces.

Shred a bunch of spring onions (or use shallots or green onions). Clean and crush several cloves of garlic and grate some root ginger, about an inch long piece should be sufficient but have more if you like it.

To make the Kim Chee hot there are various options. Best is to obtain some Korean chili powder, you'll need about 3 tbsps. but this will make it rather hot. Or you can do what I did and slit two or three green chillies and add them to the mix with a couple of tablespoons full of paprika. Or you could crumble dried red chillies in to taste.

Finally you need about a tbsp. of sugar. I don't think any more salt is needed at this point but I did add a couple of tablespoons of shoyu.

Mix the flavourings together and then add them to the cabbage and radish. If your cabbage is still in big sections make sure the mixture gets in between the leaves.

Pack everything into a stoneware or plastic container that can be tightly sealed. Kim Chee needs to be under a slight pressure as it ferments to keep the pickle submerged in its liquid. Cover the top of the pickle with some of your reserved cabbage leaves and fit a plate or lid into the top of the container. Then use something like a full can of beans in a freezer bag (to keep beans and cabbage clean) as a weight. Or you can scrub some stones or whatever, improvise. Seal tightly, not so much for the pickle but to protect your kitchen from the smell!

The pickle needs to ferment at room temperature for four or five days. Over this time the vegetables will exude moisture and the liquid will rise in the pot to cover the mixture. The liquid will be a bit bubbly, don't panic, this is what you want. The pot should be turned and rotated a few times to make sure the juices comes into contact with all the surfaces in the pot. After five days refrigerate to slow the fermentation and start to eat it.

Use a clean pair of tongs each time you remove a portion and replace the wrappings and weight to keep the rest of the pickle covered with juice. It will keep for months.

Pressure

One of the cooking gadgets I've never been particularly enamoured with is the pressure cooker. They're scary, they hiss, the weights wobble and just sometimes they explode with a fountainous jet of blistering hot steam and foam before bits of smashed potato and beans rain down like pumice from Etna across the kitchen.

Added to which, the most likely form of this WMD found in my youth was made of aluminium. The current thinking on aluminium is that there's little to worry about in normal cooking procedures but many years of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) have done their work well. I won't use aluminium pans in my kitchen.

Still, times have changed. Although science is sporting a new theory on the role of aluminium in Alzheimer's disease, the FUD has produced many more affordable products of stainless steel, technology is cool and global warming has renewed everyone's interest in reducing fuel used in cooking. It hasn't? Well, it should have done.

Besides, there was a stronger motive at work on my reluctance, I needed a method of heat sterilisation for another project (see the other blog eventually) and in the absence of money for an autoclave my needs were bringing me to the conclusion that I'd have to give pressure cooking another go.

I did a bit of research on the web and although I could buy aluminium pots in styles reminiscent of my earlier possessions for less than £25 my heart became set upon the



Kuhn Rikon from Switzerland. The reason for this was mainly that the reviews all mentioned how quiet it was compared to older fashioned designs. That was enough for me but at prices approaching £100 for the six litre model it was something of a gamble. Luckily, the gamble has paid off, it really is the quietest pressure cooker I've ever managed to stay in the room with. There is no weight but a little valve fixed into the dome of the lid which pops up to position one or two and can be maintained there by controlling the heat of the cooker. The pan works on all heat sources including induction hobs and spare parts like gaskets and safety valve fittings are available. It's also pretty sturdy and nicely finished.

First cooking attempts, a rather scanky chickpea and tomato soup, weren't excellent by any means and I don't think I'm ever going to enjoy using it but it does what it says on the box and that's all anyone can ask.

Warm Salad

We've been trying to get more leafy greens into our diet and last night Mr. Stripey Cat put together a fantastic warm salad pretty much off the top of his head. There are pictures but not on my camera, if they become available I'll add one to this post. UPDATE *** PICTURE IS NOW HERE ***




The idea of a warm salad is not so much to have cooked greens, the salad leaves are still raw and uncooked, but to add some hot ingredients and most importantly a warmed dressing so that there is added flavour, a little wilting of the greens and a harmonious crunchy whole to tuck into. This isn't really very seasonal but a quiet longing for summer is setting in the house and we really felt we deserved a change of pace.

In the salad last night we had a big bowl of ready washed mixed salad with added finely chopped celery and some spring onions chopped and mixed through, some oven roasted baby plum tomatoes, a few cubes of boiled potatoes, some toasted cashew nuts, a small square of tofu, chopped, marinaded in soy sauce and fried and some wholewheat bread croutons.

After frying the croutons and the tofu sequentially in some good oil enhanced with a few drops of toasted sesame seed oil, some finely chopped garlic went into the pan with some ground black pepper and fried for a few seconds and then the whole lot was deglazed with some red wine vinegar and poured over the prettily arranged salad. Delicious.

Overheard at the Supermarket

A woman and her nursery aged sprog joined the rather long queue for the checkout behind me, the little boy possessively clutching a French stick in a bag.

His mother said " I really really don't want to buy that for you, wouldn't you rather have a Kinder Egg instead?".

Thai Green Curry

Something of a standby in our house - quick and easy made with a commercial Green Curry paste bought from the local Chinese supermarket. The flavour is nowhere near as complicated as a curry made from first principles but for a supper that's tasty and ready in 20 minutes it's pretty good.

Soften an onion and plenty of chopped garlic in a splash of light vegetable oil, I use peanut oil for oriental cookery but sunflower or rape oil would do. Olive oil gives the wrong flavour.

Prepare sufficient vegetables - your choice, here I have used potato, carrot, celeriac and aubergine but peppers are good, peas or beans, even bamboo shoots or cauliflower are possible. Make sure the veg. is all cut into pieces that will cook in the same time.

Stir these into the melted onion/garlic mixture then add the Curry paste. It's very hot so don't add too much, we find two teaspoonfuls are sufficient for a curry for two people. To enliven the bottled sauce I also add, if I have it, a teaspoonful of grated root ginger, another of finely chopped lemon grass bulb and a couple of dried kaffir lime leaves. A pinch of dried basil is another addition that can refresh the flavour.

Stir this into the vegetables and their oil, then add coconut milk. Thai curries are always served very liquid, almost soupy so add plenty of liquid, somewhere between 300ml and 400ml is about right for a generous curry for two. Canned coconut milks vary considerably by manufacturer and origin. If you think your coconut milk is very concentrated thin it down so that the coconut flavour isn't overpowering.

Allow everything to simmer, stirring occasionally until the vegetables are cooked but not mushy. We often add cubed tofu towards the end of cooking, if added too early it tends to disappear into the sauce.

At the end of cooking add the juice of a lime (or lemon) and a good dash of a light soy sauce. A few fresh coriander leaves make a nice garnish.

Thai rice is slightly sticky unlike basmati but any rice is a good accompaniment, we had long grained brown rice with ours.

Let's get started on the year, then

If I could be said to have any resolutions for the new year at all regarding this blog it would to be to try to keep it regularly updated with interesting recipes and snippets. Nearly two weeks in and nary a smidge of a speck of a smell of a post.



What I have been doing is reading other people's food blogs, almost obsessively, to see what makes them interesting, popular or useful. Frankly, in fact, to see where I'm going wrong. I find I'm only returning to a few of them time and again, and these are the bloggers who write very simply, with snippets about their lives and pets thrown in.

One place I do go nearly every day is Hannah's Country Kitchen. I don't actually go there for the cooking, as Hannah's style is replete with meat, eggs and cream, nothing for the vegan there at all. The entries are usually very short but she manages to find something to say every day, which makes clicking on her link a worthwhile exercise. Of course, to get readers to her blog she had a huge head start on most of us, as she was a finalist in Masterchef. Masterchef is one of the very few television programmes I make any effort to watch and although it's the most arrant tosh, just like all reality telly programmes, has some insights into cooks and cookery that are intriguing.

Would I go on Masterchef? I'd give that a considered yes. I'd rate my vegan cooking to stand up to any competition from the animal chompers but I suspect that the prejudice shown by meat eaters towards the veg*n diet would ultimately defeat me. Even the occasional vegetarian that slips through the selector's net seems to have a very hard time - no concessions are allowed so ethics have to be suspended in some tests and inventiveness stifled in others. The judges are actually pretty conventional when it comes to what they want to see on their plates with a sort of 'where's the meat' cliched reaction when faced with a vegetable based dish.

Mr. Stripey Cat and I have discussed having a veg*n only based competition but think that would be to remove veganism from the mainstream whereas our aim is to make it at least as popular as other cuisines. We'd like to create our own vegan restaurant and have it become as famous as the Fat Duck or Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons. I'd have no trouble with the cheffy attitude either! And if that's not to be, then we'd like at least a bit more choice when we go out to eat, which means making other cooks and chefs aware and gaining their help.

The new series of Masterchef has just commenced and the first week's contestants weren't great as far as one can tell from the small screen. We wonder just how much of the selection process is driven by the exigencies of making good television and how much by the quality of the cooking, but we'll continue to watch because food is worth study.

Happy New Year

Just wanted to make sure that there was a posting today - part of my New Year's resolutions to at least try to keep a presence on this blog.

Mr. StripeyCat bought himself some fine new grinding equipment for Yule - this isn't actually it but a cheaper rig bought to take the rough edges off before getting down to the precision work - and that means I have sharp knives at last!