Given that it’s already, oh, mid April and the skies are light and fluffy and sometimes blue, and temperatures have already soared into the high 20s and it’s definitely shirtsleeve weather, I fear that the title of this one is a terrible misnomer.

It isn’t though. I’m just a terrible, terrible procrastinator.

[ETA: I've just edited the title so it's less confusing! It used to be visibly part of the Eating My Way Through Winter series; now it's just in the category]

You see, this has been in my drafts folder since last November.

My drafts folder, I might add, is ridiculously plump with unfinished posts.

This one? This is actually the third time I’ve hauled it out to write up. The previous two attempts were just me going on in really vague terms about how crappy I was feeling and how hard it was to write about pumpkins without letting my malaise seep into the text.

Which is tedious as hell to those who are not emotionally invested in my life.

Like, all of you.

The pumpkin scones themselves were baked, photographed and eaten about two months ago.

I was going through a rather brutal and cataclysmic change in my life at that point, which I dealt with through lots of creative experimentation with pumpkins and squash.

See the size of the ones you can get at the market up the street? The one in the photo below is the size of a small toddler.  You have to really whack at it ferociously with a massive cleaver to cut it into roast’able rings. That one made a ton of scones, parathas, curry, mash, fritters, and hash.

I roasted it in slices, ring by ring, rubbed with olive oil and whatever spices took my fancy. The paneer curry spice mix my aunt sent me ages ago was my favourite. My Moroccan blend from a spice shop in Fes was also amazing.

Would you believe, this thing cost me about a buck in the market…

I’m doing much better now and so don’t need to rely on the catharsis of hacking up a poor defenseless gourd to feel at least somewhat sane.

I am, however, still buying smaller segments of gourd from the market and making wok parathas to go with whatever soups or stews or random leftovers find their way into the fridge.

I don’t normally do two recipes in one post but I figured I might as well in this case. After all, you just need to roast up some pumpkin and, lo! You have the makings of two really awesome- and yet not at all the same- quick breads!

Let’s just start with the base: that massive orange gourd which may be a pumpkin or may be a squash, but I’m not actually certain. My literacy skills aren’t up to snuff enough to decode the characters for those.

I hacked off about a pair of 2cm thick rings from a gourd that had the approximate circumference of a person’s head. I have no idea how many cups or grams it was. The scone recipe called for 1/2 cup of canned puree. The paratha recipe is more about proportions and texture rather than measurements. Roast up a big wodge, if you fancy. You can always use it up. It certainly won’t go to waste.

First, cut off the peel, including the pale inner rind. It’ll be hard to mash up if you don’t. Don’t forget to scoop out the seeds and sludge.

Here’s one of the gourds I hacked up for roasting. This is actually 2 rings of sliced pumpkin, cut in half and lined up in a row for dicing.

Next, toss it all in your favourite spice blend and some olive oil.

I used this one and it was lovely

Roast it all in the oven until soft enough to mash.

I let mine go for about 40 minutes on 180C. I should note that I use a rather inconsistent toaster oven so if you have a real one, you will need to adjust accordingly.

Mine looked like this after I roasted it

Alternately, you could pan fry it until soft.

I did this a few times as an experiment and it was really good, but I prefer the taste of it roasted.

Wokked gourd!

This is the roasted pumpkin, below.

See how awesome that looks?

You could eat them like candy, I swear.

When cool, mash those suckers.

I have officially moved up in the world and am now using a real spud masher instead of my old standby, the puny fork

See? Mashed gourd! No need for canned pumpkin here!

Please pardon the hair. I was too busy mashing pumpkin to tame it.

Right then. You have mashed orange stuff. Grand.

Now for the scones.

The recipe originally was gleaned from here.  I am indebted to them for it. These are wonderful scones.

The Ingredients

This was my first chance to take a photo without clogging my poor phone with fat and pumpkin and flour.

Dough ball before the patting.

The scones, before I ate them all

The Parathas

This is one I made up, because I had an unfinished bowl of mashed pumpkin glaring at me every time I opened the fridge. I didn’t have the energy to spend the afternoon blending butter into flour for scones so I decided to rework my old wok chapati recipe.

This is the same and yet totally different.

Yes, parathas make an excellent snack on Chinese trains!

You need:

1. Er, mashed roasted pumpkin. I’ve also done it with roasted garlic mashed into the mix.
2. Enough flour. Maybe a few cups?
3. Some salt. Maybe a teaspoon.

I’m being difficult here.

Not on purpose, mind. It’s just, as I noted above, all about proportions. And your flour might have a different consistency or your mash may be wetter or dryer. It depends.

Start with about 2 cups of mashed gourd.

Put it in a bowl that will accommodate it plus the flour you’re going to add. I recommend a mixing bowl, cake batter sized. Ignore my tiny one, below. I had to move it into something much bigger.

Add the tiny bit of salt. Stir.

Start spooning in flour a bit at a time, stirring it in until it’s totally mixed in.

Just keep adding flour until you stop adding flour…

Then keep adding flour and mixing it in until, well, it’s all the consistency of dough.

At some point, once it starts reaching the full-on dough stage, you’ll need to trade the spatula in for hands so make sure they’re nice and clean.

What you’re looking for is a dough that is soft and malleable but no longer sticky. Think fresh pasta or tortillas. If you give it a quick trial knead, it shouldn’t leave little sticky orange pumpkin stains on your counter top. If it’s still sticky, keep adding a dusting of flour until you can comfortably knead it.  Then knead it for a few minutes until it’s lovely and smooth and resembles a baby’s bottom.

Form it into a nice little dough ball and let it rest in a ziploc baggie in the fridge at least an hour. I usually let it go over night. It can last up to about 5 days (or longer- I’ve always used it all up by then). It gets more glutinous and elastic as the days pass so I recommend leaving some of the dough for later as it’s well worth the wait.

Cooking the parathas!

Aren’t they lovely?

Get out your wok. These can be made with or without oil so make sure the wok is already well-seasoned. Preheat it on lowish on a gas stove. I don’t know about electric ones. Just the centre flame. Anything else seems to burn the paratha before it’s cooked.

Oil it if you want. I found that Sichuan peppercorn infused soybean oil is remarkably tasty for this one. Use about a table spoon, if you do.

Pull off a golf ball knob of dough and roll it out into a thin disc on a floured surface. With floury hands, pick it up and let it be stretched a bit more by its own weight, rotating it like you’re a pizza chef in an old skool movie about Naples. You want it to be thin, but not stretched so much that it breaks (obviously).  2 or 3 or 4 millimeters is good.

Toss it into the wok, and after giving it 20 or so seconds so get its bearings, give the wok a bit of a shake, like you’re about to flip a crepe. You just want to make sure the paratha isn’t stuck.

Cook it on the first side until little brown bits show up on the bottom. Get the egg flipper out to check for those. It takes about a minute.

Flip it. Wait about a minute. Bubbles will start to appear on the surface. This is good. You want bubbles. These make the parathas light and airy rather than heavy and dense.

Give it a flip back onto the first side, let the bubbles form again, and remove from the wok after about 20 or so seconds. Place cooked parathas on a clean tea towel to cool. If you put them on a hard surface, like a cutting board, they’ll sweat and get sticky and gross.

Repeat as needed.

For more details on working with wok flat breads, see my tortilla tutorial here.

This one was topped with home made yogurt and sauteed Chinese greens with garlic. Phwoar.

This is going to be a new series, if I can get my act together.

At the moment my act is very obviously not together, but more about that later.

I’ve decided that the best way to deal with an unwanted winter is to ignore it entirely, to stay in bed as much as possible, and to bake as if I was in a place full of trees, fresh air and lovely white blankets of snow, rather than in a huge city where the daily pollution readings declare it Unhealthy and where it doesn’t tend to snow but it sure loves to be cold and damp.

This obviously means I need to bake more. I need to make more warm and happy comfort foods. I need to totally regain all of the  8kg I lost doing that detox back in October. I’m nothing if not diligent.

This is what my life has been like for the past several weeks: I’ve been away every weekend for work, up in freezing Jinan in Shandong, then to Nanjing last weekend, where traffic meant I had to spend my non working hours crammed into their crowded subway cars, and I’ll be back there again this weekend for more fun. I’m pretty fried.

And then there’s my day job, where they’ve only just realized that when I say my office heater doesn’t work that it really doesn’t work. I wear coat, gloves, scarf indoors at all times. My back and neck ache from having cold muscles all the time.

And then when I finish my class on Monday nights, it’s nearly impossible to get a taxi way out there in the suburbs that can go into Shanghai, so I have to take a local taxi to the nearest metro station then travel for an hour and a half beyond that to get home (2 line changes and a 25 minute walk in the dark).

I’m tired and cold.

A few quick photos to illustrate, before we get to the warm and lovely spice bread.

Line 5, Shanghai metro, around 8:45pm. At least it isn’t crowded.

My seatmate on the train to Jinan got some rest at least.

How busy have I been? Here are my receipts for my travel expenses for work this season.

Coconut Spice Bread

I’ve been using coconut milk in my coffee for a few months, so I have a decent stash of it in the cupboard . This recipe calls for regular milk but the coconut adds a lovely flavour and aroma.  I added a bit of freshly ground cloves and a bit of dried ginger as well, which was lovely.  I also painted a light glaze of brown sugar and the last bit of the milk (cream, actually- it was the last thick bits) onto the baked crust after I took it out of the oven. Again, unnecessary but lovely.

This is the recipe I used.

I had to miss a few photographic steps of the procedure because my hands were too full or too doughy. Bear with me on this. The bread is lovely and worth making.

 Ingredients:

• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup water, warm
• 3 tbsp brown sugar, packed
• 2 tbsp butter, soft
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp active dry yeast
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp ginger
• 4 cups bread flour

Ignore my scrawls. This was the spice mix I used.

Ah, magically everything has come together! All the ingredients have been added, except the flour, which was only getting started. That was added cup by cup, stirring carefully, getting myself totally covered in dough.

Ignore the wine glasses. Focus on the rising bread. I let that go for just over an hour because the kitchen was most certainly not a warm place.

Um, yeah, again, ignore the wine. Hey, look at how much it rose in just an hour in an icy kitchen!

After stirring the risen dough a dozen or so times in the rice cooker insert, blorp it out into your baking pan. They called for a casserole dish. I don’t own one. This would have to do. Let it rise again. About 30 minutes.

I baked it at around 190 degrees for an hour. I’m not sure if that’s equivalent to 375F but it was close enough. Note: my oven is so small that the top of the loaf was so close to the top elements that it started overbrowning after only 30 minutes. I lightly balanced some tin foil over the top to prevent it from becoming Cajun blackened bread. I baked it for just under an hour. Like, 55 minutes.

This is what it looked like after I took my Chinese calligraphy brush and painted the top with brown sugar sweetened coconut milk.

I ate a slice before it had even cooled. Beautiful with raspberry preserves.

And then I decorated the bears for Christmas.

Anyway, it’s still noisy this morning and I’m tired and it’s Monday.

It’s also grey and grim and cold, as is to be expected here at this time of year.  I really should get a stock photo for this, to put on every post between now and next April.

Here’s one:

Today’s forecast: dire, with a chance of grim extending to the weekend. Highs of meh, with a projected low of get me the hell out of here.

So I got it into my head that instead of hiding under the duvets and weeping inconsolably for the next 4 months, I ought to resume experimental cooking.  If I keep my eyes on the prize (like, cake?), I won’t have to look out the window.

Our winter is shaping up to be quite similar to previous ones here, where we mostly just go to work, hibernate, and emerge only for treks out to the markets so we don’t starve to death, or to restaurants to soothe our SAD-deadened nerves with food that someone else cooked for us.

Or, as the case was this past weekend, where we still have to cook it ourselves. Hello, Sichuan hot pot!

Tofu skins are the best.

As I may have mentioned before, it’s turning into cabbage, gourd and sweet potato season here. If you head up into northern China, you’ll find giant, round cabbages stacked like firewood in residential areas. Shanghai is less extreme, with slightly more dainty stacks of frilly savoy cabbage perched alongside forty kinds of bok choy.

All the veggie sellers out on the street are flogging a combination of those three staples, with bundles of cilantro or skinny celery as bookends. I intend to make the most of this bounty, although I’ll admit I’m not a huge fan of any of them.

I put a call out to all my friends, asking for suggestions for what to do with cabbage, aside from sauerkraut. The Polish contingent in my life voted overwhelmingly for a) bigos and b) cabbage rolls. Lacking the sauerkraut needed for the bigos, I went for the stuffed cabbage.

But which version? Polish? Irish? A bit of both?

I ended up with a slightly muddled version, culled from the contents of the fridge. I realized too late that we were all out of onion, but that we did have chives. Practically the same, really.

What I threw in, randomly

1. 1.5 heads of small, white Chinese cabbage
2. olive oil for sautéing
3. 1 head of garlic, minced
4. 1 stalk of celery, finely minced
5. 3 stalks each of chopped chives and cilantro
6. 1 branch of chopped fresh rosemary
7. 1 cooked potato, mashed
8. 500g of lean ground beef (way too much, it seems, as I had a lot left over- I’d recommend going for 250g)
9. 1 egg
10. Several shakes of that odd pre-grated parmesan in the green container
11. Salt and pepper, a few shakes of hot paprika
12. Oh, and some marinara sauce. We caved and bought a can from the import grocery store. Usually we simmer our own for hours, from scratch, but given the cabbage roll project ahead of me, I could be bothered. Hello DelMonte Traditional!

The Process

I have no idea what ‘cleau Vegetalle’ are but they looked like cabbage.

It was at this point I realized we were out of onions so I cunningly disguised the celery as one.

See, I sauteed the celery with the garlic, as if it was actually an onion. A brilliant disguise. No one will ever know.

Blanch the cabbage for a few minutes in boiling water to make the leaves pliable enough to wrap around the meatballs. I was efficient and boiled the potato at the same time.

Drain the cabbage and let it cool, or else you’ll burn your fingers. Not that I learned that through experience. Oh, no. Definitely not.

Throw everything together- the fresh herbs, the hypothetical onions, the sauteed garlic, the mashed potato, the egg. Mix it all together with your hands. Remember acutely why you were vegetarian for 15 years.

My cabbage leaves were really small so I needed 2 leaves to wrap each little meatball. I made the balls about 1″ by 1.5″, a bit like kofte. Wrap them like mini cabbage burritos.

Put all your mini cabbage burritos in a baking pan or cake pan or casserole dish or whatever you have that’s appropriate. Make sure the edges are high enough for you to pour tomato sauce over the rolls without overflowing.

Happy times with cabbages!

Here’s the canned sauce poured over the cabbage rolls. Look at how smooth and shiny it is compared to my usual sauce! Also, note the Chinese foil behind it. It sucks. Don’t buy it. All it does it rip when you don’t want it to.

I put it in the oven on 180C for an hour, with about 40 minutes of that time covered in foil and the remaining 20 uncovered.

Look! It worked! I made nice things with cabbage!

If only I could just stay inside today and drink wine and eat cabbage rolls…

Hey, anyone want to swap my cooking services for full sponsorship? I’ll feed you if you take me to Mexico until winter passes…

I popped by here yesterday to update my plug-ins and noticed I hadn’t done anything in two whole months. You’d think I was starving to death or something.

Which I was, for a while.

After we came back from a gluttonous week in Hong Kong in early October, I sentenced myself to a 30 day detox, cutting out everything that was fun in the universe: no grains, no dairy, no sweeteners (not even honey), no starchy veggies, no nothing. I lived on veggies… and veggies and tuna and coffee and grilled chicken enlivened by the spice rub I brought back from Morocco.

Somehow I survived.

I didn’t do much inspired cooking though. Certainly nothing worth noting here.

Oh, hey, look, it’s another freaking tuna salad!  I can’t wait to document it for posterity!

Oh, no, wait. Never mind.

Anyway, I’m back. I’ve dusted off the oven and prepped myself mentally to regain the 6 or 7 kilos I lost over the past 2 months. After all, it’s winter now and I need to be ready for  the long, unpleasant season of hibernation. Shanghai is bad at winter.

See?

Today’s forecast: dire, with a chance of grim extending to the weekend. Highs of meh, with a projected low of get me the hell out of here.

We don’t get snow or frost or sparkly bright blue skies with crisp cold air. No, no. Shanghai is more subtle than that. We get grey, damp, oppressive clouds that are so vast that they might as well just be a big, grey, chilly lid over the city. And the rain! It will likely rain 75% of the days between now and April.

Since we are south of the Yangtze River, buildings are not legally required to be heated or insulated, so we will be damply cold, both inside and out, with everyone wearing big coats and scarves during staff meetings and at dinner. If the heat is somehow on in a building, it will be counterbalanced by the windows being flung wide open for fresh air.

I’m not kidding. I wish I was.

Anyway.

One thing I discovered during my month of being dairy-free was that coconut milk is awesome in coffee. I’m not sure if 3-4 coconut milk lattes a day still qualifies as a detox but at least I wasn’t having dairy. Because, you know, dairy is evil or something. Yay me.

Back in Dubai, I drank camel lattes. These are better.

Shall I remind you again what we are up against here for the next several months?

At least I’m not walking in this.

Above is my commute. This is why I’m reintroducing dairy, sugar, grains and martinis back into my diet. You would too.

They’ll take care of the situation.

My new hobby has been staging laser-cat invasions of things that annoy me. It’s cathartic.

Anyway, the food.

One of the perks of my new(ish) job is that they feed us. This has also led to a reduction in the amount I’d been cooking in the past few months.

If you’re curious about the Chinese food that Chinese people actually eat in China, here are a few examples.

Eggs and tomatoes, with greens and a metric tonne of rice.

See those little corn-like thingies? Those are crack. They’re like a bizarrely addictive Chinese version of tempura, made with sweet corn kernels.

Also, even back during my detox month we could still safely go out for dinner because a lot of the dishes are totally compliant with the brutal restrictions I self-imposed.

Below: bean jelly noodles with chilies, garlic cucumber, pickled french beans with chilies and pork.

Jelly bean noodles!

Anyway.

Even though I didn’t actually need to, I decided to bake today. It’s a grim and crappy day and I wanted something lovely to accompany my pot of coconut coffee.

I decided to make biscuits. Or as the recipe calls them, butter dips. Because you dip them in a half cup of melted butter before you bake them.

Like I said, I’m making up for lost time (and weight) after that detox month.

Here’s the recipe, gleaned from a site I stumbled upon yesterday. They’re in Vancouver (my homeland!) but they’re originally Malaysian so they’ve got an intriguing outsider’s perspective that I relate to.

 Butter Dips (AKA Straight-Laced Granny Biscuits)

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese
• 3 green onions, finely chopped
• 1 cup 2% milk
• 1/2 cup butter

I couldn’t leave well enough alone though, so I added the dregs of our treasured jar of jalepenos, minced, and a rather large bundle of cilantro from the street market  (because they sell it by the bushel) instead of green onions. I also used very very aged crumbly white cheddar. I used coarse kosher salt.

The jalepenos were still in the fridge. That cheese cost nearly 60 rmb for the small block. Almost $10! Holy crap!

Here are the additions I made, below. I’m sure the onion would have been nice but we were all out and I was too lazy to go down 16 floors to buy them from the veggie guys on the street.

Chop chop chop. I think using the giant cleaver may have been overkill.

Below is the last of the recipe photos that actually turned out. I think that the low, grim, grey light in the kitchen wasn’t conducive to good photography. You’ll have to imagine what comes next.

In the rice cooker insert, I mixed together the dry ingredients (flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, a few grinds of black pepper), then added the cilantro, chilies, cheddar. Mix them up nicely.

Everything after this point was covered in flour.

After they’ve been mixed, slowly add the milk, stirring it all in until it forms a dough ball. Tip the dough ball out onto a floured cutting board. Knead the ball 10 times or so, tucking all the stray bits of dough back in.

After it’s nicely kneaded, roll it out until it’s about 2cm/1″ thick and cut it into 1 inch squares. Since mine had rolled out into a rough circle, I had some weird isosceles triangle shaped pieces, but they worked out just fine.

Get the oven up to 450 degrees, or 230C. I had to crank my little toaster oven up to the max. I definitely burned off some of the dust from the months of neglect.

While it was pre-heating, I put the half cup of butter into the cake pan I planned to use and melted it in the oven.

When the butter has melted, haul it out of the oven and start adding your dough squares. Dredge the squares in the butter as you add them. Make sure all sides have been dunked.

My pan was too small for all my dough squares, so I added another one, but using olive oil instead of butter. They turned out quite pale but still tasty.

Bake for 25-30 minutes.

Look! Biscuits soaked in butter, nicely browned!

They smelled like heaven, dipped in butter.

And you can see the pale, olive oil ones on the left, below. They were still delicious.  Hopefully I won’t eat all of them before lunch.

And then there were (eventually) none. I started out with 27…

I had originally planned to eat them with the leftover soup that was in the fridge, a lovely experiment that had started as a hearty Lanzhou beef broth but then mutated over the course of the day into an Italian wedding soup, with white beans and a massive bag of baby spinach.

See? They’d go so well with that soup!

I made this yesterday.

With these, I may just be able to cope with winter. Just.

I’m not, I admit, one of those pretty food writers. I’m not talking about me and my bad hair and naked face and un-manicured nails, mind you- I’m talking about my food styling abilities, or lack thereof.

I’m also not good at pretending that things turned out okay.  Like that time I made those Suzhou hockey pucks. Or the biryani that was a bit, well, stodgier than anticipated.  Or the crackers that weren’t quite as crackery as hoped. As long as it’s on the high end of edible, I’ll post it, looks be damned.

Look, irregularly lumpy scones!

Which is why I’m writing about my Great Crockpot Bread Experiment.

Which, well, didn’t go quite as planned.

I had done my research. There are a lot of recipes out there telling you how to make bread in your crockpot.  Very detailed ones from reputable cookbook authors, ones with hundreds of cheering comments at the bottom.

I was going to do the ultimate laowai baking experiment: baking bread in China without an oven, not even a tiny, crappy toaster oven. I had already made cake in a rice cooker and wanted to take it one step further.

Bread! YEAST bread!

Yeah, no.

Let’s start with the dough, which was actually the successful part of the experiment.

You know how I like to keep a ball of Xinjiang noodle dough in the fridge for tortilla/pasta/chapati emergencies?  I thought I’d add a yeast dough stash to my repertoire.

This 2-loaf, no-knead dough rises for a few hours at room temperature, then can hibernate in the fridge for up to 3 weeks, getting fermentier and glutinier over time. The texture of my first loaf (actually pull-apart buns) was quite different from the loaf I made from the remaining dough a week later. Both were awesome but in very different ways. The first was light and fluffy, the second denser, chewier.

I stored the dough in my rice cooker insert in the fridge, with a plastic bag shoved over the top to cover it. In the recipe (<— see link), they used a sealable Tupperware container. I couldn’t find any the right size though. So, plastic bag and insert it was.

No Knead Refrigerator Yeast Bread

• 3 cups warm water (if in China, use bottled)
• 1.5 tablespoons yeast (I used instant but the recipe calls for active– both fine, apparently)
• 1.5 tablespoons salt (I used kosher)
• 6.5 cups of flour (I used 6 but they were slightly heaping)

The Process

Pour the warm water into your container.  They say to add the salt first but I added the yeast because I wasn’t paying attention to the instructions.  Give it all a stir.

I made an approximate, incomplete map of Australasia with my yeast!

Add the flour and spatulate the hell out of it until all floury pockets have been mixed in. Doesn’t take long.

Well, now I can see a few fluffy bits of flour that I missed…

Cover it and let it rise for about an hour and a half to two hours. I let mine go for 2 hours. Considering there was no sugar in the mix to feed the yeast, I was amazed by how much it rose. By the end of the 2 hours, it was up to the rim of the insert.

Below is where it was after only an hour.

Apparently these yeasty beasties feed on hypothesis.

After letting it rise for a few hours, you can shove it in the fridge and forget about it.

I retrieved mine a few days later. I decided I wanted to make pull-apart buns in the crock pot. Because, you know, research told me I could.

The idea was that you line the insert with parchment paper, blob in an appropriate portion of dough (half of this recipe), turn the cooker onto high (which isn’t high by stove standards, but rather by slow cooker standards) and let the whole thing go for about 45 minutes to an hour. The crock pot would slowly heat up, and the dough would do its proofing and baking at the same time.

The cookbook experts swore by it.

This was when I was still optimistic.

My lovely little buns baked for a total of 15 minutes before I heard the ping.

Whoops. My bad.

So, yeah, that didn’t quite go as planned.

I yanked the parchment paper and uncooked dough out of the unhappy crock pot, marched into the kitchen and turned the toaster oven on to 180 degrees and shoved the whole lot in without pre heating.  They resumed baking for the remaining 45 minutes they were meant to be in the crock pot.

The oven buns. They are dented because the crock pot insert imploded into them.

The other half of the dough stayed in the fridge for about a week. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it.

Then I was sent off to Hefei on Saturday, so I decided to make a proper loaf of bread so I could at least have something to eat besides crappy instant noodles on the 4 hour train ride.

This is the one I made a week later out of the rest of the dough that had been locked in a stasis pod in the fridge.

I baked it at around 180-190 degrees for about 40-45 minutes, though after the fact I read that 30-35 minutes at 230 makes for a better crust. Whatever. It worked.

It actually turned out really well.

See?

Well, I’ll be… it’s actually kind of attractive.

While I’ve been blathering away over yonder about mops and Chinese demolition sites, I’ve been neglecting to talk with y’all about food. Because I have been cooking, believe it or not. And baking. And blowing up the kitchen. Daily!

I just didn’t have the time or energy to take the pictures and blog about it.

Since we got back from Morocco, I’ve spent nearly every weekend being shipped off to 2nd and 3rd tier cities around the East coast of China for work (in addition to my Monday-Friday job, so yeah, hello exhaustion).

The last thing I felt like doing in my rare free time was uploading photos of mashed bananas.

This recipe is a two-parter: banana bread and banana bread pudding.

The first one was sent to me in an email by my mother back in August, when I was having a supremely bad week (I forget why, but if it necessitated an email containing my childhood favourite banana bread, it must have been fairly rough). It’s from our Harrowsmith cookbook, which is well thumbed and streaked with batter.  They have really good oatmeal cookies too, for the record.

 The second was to use up the aforementioned banana bread that I couldn’t actually finish (Doug doesn’t like banana bread) and it was starting to go stale. I decided to attempt to use semi stale banana bread in a bog-standard bread pudding recipe. It worked. Yay!

The bananas used in the recipe were nicked from my hotel room in Nanjing, where I had been shipped off to for two weekends in a row. There are only so many complimentary bananas that a gal can eat, especially when she’s not actually a fan of fruit. If they left me a plate full of cucumbers and peppers, I might be more appreciative.

Hello soulless room and purveyor of fruit!

This is what happens when you give me a huge supply of free fruit:

Yeah, it’s like Andy Warhol’s album cover for the Velvet Underground and Nico. Two weeks later. You know, once the bananas had turned black.

Like I said, I’m not big on casually eating fruit. Apples tend soften and turn mealy in my presence and bananas go black and shrivel up.

Which is why all my hotel fruit tends to eventually end up in crumbles and cakes and loaves. Because then it isn’t really fruit anymore. It’s cake. And bread. And crumble.

The recipes are both very China friendly, providing you have a toaster oven that can go up to 180 degrees C.

I bought the floppy red loaf pan in Canada because I was tired of using the disposable ones I found here. The ones I insisted on washing and re-using endlessly because, you know, I grew up during the Depression. I also wash and fold my used aluminum foil and Ziploc baggies, and  hoard twist-ties from bread bags. If you look in our closet, you’ll find three years worth of old newspapers, because you never know when they’ll come in handy.

Just kidding.

Maybe.

Anyway, this is the recipe my mother sent me, along with the modifications we have made to it over the past few decades. I didn’t use walnuts. I used regular Chinese sunflower oil. I used that weird Chinese brown sugar that is reportedly good for, um, women.

Mine baked for just over an hour but could have gone a little less- it was starting to get a bit dry. It really depends on oven temperatures. Apparently mine runs a little hot.

For the record, 2 hotel bananas, nicely blackened (see Velvet Underground cover above) equalled 1 cup of mashed banana.

Yummy Harrowsmith Banana Bread

The Assembly.

Get your stuff assembled. Dry stuff first.

Flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt. And spice if you have any- nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon have all been tried at one time or another.

I added a little nutmeg, but you don’t have to.

Stir it all together, de-lump as needed.

Get the wet stuff ready: sugar, eggs, oil, bananas.

Why yes, I do buy my eggs by the bag.

Sugar for your lady bits, madam?

I broke my yolk. Bummer. This was supposed to be a prettier picture.

Beat the eggs with your fork. Whup whup whup.

Add the oil (or melty butter) to the whupped eggs. Beat more. No need to make meringue, mind you. Just incorporate. Like an oil and ova mind meld.

Add the sugar to the oil and egg mixture. If in Shanghai in summer, don’t forget to try to beat the lumps out of the humid sugar.

My lovely lady lumps.

Peel your over ripe, neglected bananas and mash them up in a bowl with your fork. If they’re as over ripe as mine were, you could probably do it by the power of suggestion alone.

Add the banana mash to the egg-oil-sugar mix.  Give it a stir.

Add the resulting unphotogenic blend to you dry ingredients.

Add the nasty banana mix to the dry ingredients and try to pretend it looks appealing.

Mix it all together until there are no more hidden pockets of poofy flour.

Spatulate it.

Preheat the oven to as close to 180C as you can.  I lightly dusted my loaf pan with flour but I’m not sure I needed to.

I like silicone in my bakeware. Sexy.

Bake it! Bake it real good!

I use the oven rack as a cooling rack. Just slide everything out and rest it on something slightly elevated (like a gas stove burner).

And then proceed to be so busy that you fail to eat more than a few slices before it starts to go stale.

Which leads to the second recipe.

Banana Bread Pudding!

You need: eggs (2), milk (2 cups or one small 500ml carton, which was fine), brown sugar (maybe 1.5-2 cups, approximately, depending on your sugar– Chinese date sugar isn’t very sweet), vanilla (or, say, vanilla steeped in gin, 2 tablespoons), butter (about 2 tablespoons, melted).

Basically, you can’t go wrong if you just do 2 for everything.

Cube that bread!

Cram the cubes into a cake pan. Not too tight, mind you, as you’ll be adding liquid.

Butter, milk and banana bread: What more could one ask for?

Melt the butter and let it cool down a bit. You don’t want it to inadvertently scramble the eggs.

Beat the eggs until well incorporated. Add the lukewarm melted butter.  Add the gin. I mean, the vanilla. Glug glug glug.

Mmmmmm junipery.

Add the sugar. Beat the lumps out as much as possible.

What I could find in our cupboard: ginger sugar and date-pepper sugar.

Add the milk and beat again.

I failed to get all the lumps out. Summer is a terrible season for sugar in Shanghai. Lumps the size of golf balls.

Pour the egg-butter-milk-gin-sugar mix over the banana bread cubes. Do not recoil in horror.

Get the oven going at around 180 again. Bake it for about an hour. Maybe just over an hour. Again, it depends on the oven.

Mmmmmm milky, lumpy banana bread!

This is what you will get:

It smells like happiness.

I ended up eating that for breakfast (and dessert) for several days. It was gorgeous both heated up and still cool from the fridge. Brilliant with a cup of tea.

It’s been a very hot,  busy summer, much of it nowhere near a kitchen to call my own.

We were in Morocco for a month, which was lovely in spite of the fact that it was 46 degrees in the shade AND Ramadan for most of the time we were there. Whoops.

Anyway. I’ve been back in Shanghai for nearly three weeks now and have yet to dust off the oven and check to see if it even still works. Poor thing. I’ve made chili and tacos and a ton of wok tortillas, but those aren’t new things so I can’t exactly re-write posts for them just for the sake of it.

This one… this is one I made back in Canada just before I left, but never posted.

Why?

Because I royally screwed it up.  Kind of. I made Suzhou pork hockey pucks.

You know, the Canadian interpretation. Like, say, chop suey or bison fried rice.

Apparently my skillful light touch and intuitive cooking skills don’t apply to pastry.

I love Suzhou mooncakes. In China, however, it isn’t worth the energy to actually make them at home because they are so good, so fresh and so cheap here.

For the past two mornings, on my long, hot trek out to the Entry-Exit Bureau in deepest, darkest Pudong to renew my residence permit, I’ve stopped at a tiny stand at the bottom of our street to buy a little brown bag containing exactly two mooncakes, still hot and flakey and filled with lovely, juicy, umami seasoned ground pork, fresh from the oven. 6 kuai (under a buck) for a very solid breakfast.

I was too busy eating them to take pictures, but below is one I took a few weeks ago when I was actually in Suzhou. See the little red stamp on the ones below? They stamp their mooncakes, yes. Much more low key than all the fiddly crimping and dough-engraving that goes on with the classical lotus paste and duck egg filled Cantonese style ones that are exchanged (and then re-gifted and re-gifted, like fruitcake) during the mid-autumn festival (coming very soon).

Given my fondness for them, I decided to add them to my list of experiments when I was back in Canada. I used a recipe swiped from my lovely friend Fiona, who actually attended a cooking class that showed her how to make these correctly. If you look over at hers and actually follow her directions, you’ll be fine.

Here is her basic recipe.

I think I doubled it or tripled it because we were going camping and I had planned to feed my extended family with them. Which I did, but with caveats. Like, hey, don’t forget to peel off half the dough before you eat it!

This was me, camping, feeling sorry for myself. Or not.

To make 8 mooncakes (Fiona’s correct instructions): 

Dough: 120g of wheat flour, 45g of pork lard, a teaspoon of maltose syrup, and enough hot water to make a soft dough. Knead for 10 minutes. Then make a second dough from only flour (80g) and lard (50g), no water, and knead it well.

Seasoned pork mixture: 1tsp each of salt, sugar, sesame oil, light soy, dark soy, rice wine, finely chopped shallot and finely chopped ginger mixed with 100g of fatty minced pork.

Roll the first dough into a square shape. Place the second, waterless dough in the centre. Fold the edges over the dough ball to make a square packet.

Now roll onto a rectangle about 15cm by 25cm, and fold each end of the rectangle into the middle, like folding a letter into thirds. The folding is what helps establish the flaky layers of the pastry.

Now roll this rectangle into a large square, about 25cm across. Roll up the square into a cylinder. Cut or tear the cylinder into 8 equal pieces. Take each piece and roll it into a rough disc, 10cm across.

Roll it into a small ball and place in the centre of the pastry disc. Now fold the pastry edges around the ball and pinch together so it is completely sealed. Gently roll it to return it to ball shape.

The sealed side goes underneath and the top should look smooth and rounded.

220 degrees C for 20 minutes.

Easy, right?

My recommendation? Look at how much dough I used per mooncake and use, say, half of it. And knead it less. And don’t inexplicably dunk your fresh from the garden grated garlic (which I used as I had no shallot) in a bowl of water, corn starch and sugar (used inexplicably instead of the maltose, which was supposed to go in the dough not in the pork).

I have no idea why I did that.

Let’s start with the right stuff. Garlic and ginger!

The Filling

So fresh that the garlic skin was still tender and moist.

Grating ginger and garlic

Oh look, fake maltose!

Now, let’s put the garlic in the faux maltose!

(Note: I strained out the garlic, rinsed it off, then started again. Garlic, ginger,salt, sugar, sesame oil, light soy, dark soy, rice wine all got mushed into the pork and left in the fridge to marinate overnight. Smelled lovely.)

The Dough

Lard, flour, fake maltose and enough water to make a dough.

The dough, before it became coherent and cohesive.

A bit more water was needed.

Kneading it. Maybe too much. I’m used to making bread. I throw my whole body into it and may have, um, overworked it a tad.

 Rolled out.

And then make the second dough that’s just flour and lard and place it in the middle of the first dough.

Look at how lardy and pallid it is—

Make a dough packet, folding the lardy dough into the main dough and wrapping it up like a  Christmas gift. That is, if you tend to gift wrap lumps of lard and flour using gift wrap made of lard, flour, water and sugar water. That would be a really nasty Santa Claus.

Fold it over and make layers. Roll them out, fold them over, etc, etc.

But… er… don’t stop there.

Here’s my first screw up:

Oh, hey, let’s stop reading the instructions and just roll out a rectangle of dough and put meat balls in the middle of each one!

DON’T.

Just don’t.

Pucks. Hockey pucks.

Do this instead. Take your rectangle of rolled out double dough and roll it up into a tube. Because that makes more layers. And layers are GOOD.

This was my second attempt, using the remaining dough.

Now cut up little sections of this dough snake  and roll them into little balls.

Flatten out the little balls and fill the flattened discs with spiced pork mixture. Seal with a crimp and a kiss, as you wish.

Egg wash then bake.

Yum.

Not quite the same as the ones I get for 3 rmb each on the streets here in Shanghai, and certainly lacking the flair of the little red stamp, but the second batch I made using the dough snake and thinner dough discs worked out quite nicely.

As for the first batch, just peel off half the dough and eat them like an open faced mooncake. Call them Scandinavian or something.

Except not really.

If you are anything like me, your tones will be so inconceivably wrong that you could say it every day for three years and still only get it right half the time.

And I do get practice saying it. We eat spiced deep fried eggplant slices, stewed umami eggplant fingers with sizzling red and green peppers, dry fried green beans with long melty lengths of lightly spiced eggplant with just a hint of pork crumble. At home, I’ve baked it and fried it and breaded it.

When I lived in Turkey, I lived on it.

And the thing is, until a decade ago, I thought I hated eggplant. I loathed it, in fact. It was on the list of things I told people I didn’t like, alongside all sorts of fungus and organ meats.

What I failed to realize, however, was that 1. I just hated those big spongy bitter eggplants normally sold in Canada and 2. I hate big spongy chunks of poorly prepared eggplant.

Those little tiny thin Asian and Turkish purple-black eggplants, properly sauteed or baked slowly and drizzled in olive oil? Those I like.

This recipe is astonishingly easy to pull together and really quite tasty, even for those who think they hate eggplant. It’s not at all spongy and it’s not at all bitter. It tastes even better, reheated over a propane camp stove three days later, eaten plain with a spoon in little unbreakable bowls in the wilds of Vancouver Island.

This is, as the name says, simple homestyle eggplant (家常茄子 – jiācháng qiézi). This is comfort food.

The Recipe

500 gr Chinese or Japanese eggplant (equal to the 3 ones I bought)
150-200 gr ground pork (about a cup)
4 cloves garlic
3-5 dried red chilies (to taste)
3-5 Tbsp soy (to taste)
2 tsp corn starch
water
cooking oil
chili sauce (optional, if you like more than just the dry heat)

Note: I almost made this other one which looked really yummy but didn’t have all the ingredients. If you do, check it out. It looks lovely

I started by marinating the minced pork overnight. One teaspoon each of soy and corn starch. You could probably just do it for an hour, if pressed for time. Mince some garlic while you’re at it. I also threw together my corn starch paste (1 teaspoon cornstarch dissolved into 3 table spoons of water- use your fingers if you like. Works best). You’ll need all three at hand when you prepare the eggplant.

The garlic, the marinating pork and the cornstarch paste: my Chinese mise en place

Assemble your eggplants.

I just guessed their weight at the supermarket and look- spot on!

Prepare the eggplants by chopping off their heads.

Cut the headless eggplants into little odd shaped chunks by chopping off the side at an angle and rotating it and doing it again. It’s a bit like sharpening a pencil with a pocket knife. This maximizes the open insides and minimizes the skin.

They look a bit like this.

This would be 500g of eggplant chunks.

Heat the wok until rather hot, then add 2 tablespoons of oil. You want to heat the oil to nearly smoking (but not quite).

Throw the eggplant into the hot, oiled wok and toss it around a bit to get the oil all over. Think oil wrestling.

When all the pieces are lightly coated in oil, turn the heat down to medium high. This is a real bugger to do properly when you’re on an electric stove. I brought it down to medium and it was fine. Any higher and the smoke alarm would have gone off.

After a few minutes, it’ll look like this. Stir it every so often to prevent sticking. The eggplant pieces will become softer, more translucent, and will lose their sponginess as they cook. I think mine took about 5 minutes.

This is what it looked like when I tossed it out of the wok and into a side bowl to wait for the rest of the dish.

If you like heat, adjust dried chili levels accordingly. I added about 4 super hot Thai ones.

Sautee the garlic and chilies in some new oil in the wok.

Add the marinated pork. Break it up into little chunks so it will become nice and crumbly as it cooks.

See, it’s getting nice and crumbly and mincy.

Throw the cooked eggplant back in with the crumbly pork mixture, swirl in a few blorps of soy sauce (I put in about 3 teaspoons) and any hot sauce you might be brave enough to add. I personally like the very pure Hunan chili paste. Toss in the corn starch mix at the end to thicken it all up and make it soft and shiny.

We took ours camping. It reheats very well in a cast iron fry pan over a propane camp stove. Just so you know.

This recipe is one I made last week, before we drove up island to the Comox Valley for a week. Our culinary excursions here have consisted of reheating things we had made earlier on the tiny propane burner in the tiny little camper.

For the record, eggplant with minced pork (to be posted when we get back) reheats fabulously.

This is a whole other deal, though working within the porky paradigm. This is one we have eaten many times in Shanghai, though I have to limit my intake as Doug’s less of a green bean fan than I am. If I could, I’d live on spicy minced pork with green beans (and eggplant!).

It’s very easy to make and the prep can be done in instalments. Do a little bit, walk away, come back later and do more. Assemble and cook when you’re ready.

It goes well as a side dish or as a main dish with rice. We actually chopped up the leftovers into little pieces and used it to fill fresh Vietnamese rice rolls (you know, the discs that you soak briefly in warm water to soften), along with fresh cilantro, vinegared onions, scallions and a squeeze of fresh lime. Gorgeous. There are no photos of this because we ate EVERYTHING.

They call these dry fried string beans in English in the recipe (technically it’s dry stirred- gān biān 干煸 - whatever that means) but they’re actually fried in oil, which isn’t exactly parched.

Go figure.

I kind of want to call out a square dance with this one, but with a hearty sìjì dòu instead of a do-si-do.

Ladies and gents, I give you pork ‘n beans. Kind of.

Gān biān sìjì dòu 干煸四季豆

Ingredients

500 gram long green beans (se dou/snake beans work best)
100 gram ground pork
20 gram leek/scallion
20 gram garlic
30 gram pickled ya cai (or substitute with pickled radish/zha cai)*
10 gram dried small shrimp (xia mi)
dried chilies (optional)
soy
wine
corn starch
sesame oil

Notes

Now, as you can see, the recipe given is all metric. I hauled out our kitchen scales for it. We have all mod cons here in Canada. If you are limited to cups and spoons, I figured out that 100g of minced meat is about 1/2 a cup, roughly. For things like the garlic and whatnot, I roughly calculated it as 50g per half cup, chopped. Thus, most of them were about 1/4 cup, though I bumped up the garlic factor.

I omitted the small dried shrimp because I freaking HATE dried shrimp.

The pickled veggies were found in Chinatown. If you can’t find them where you are, you could probably use any other similar concoction. To be honest, it tasted a lot like thickly sliced sauerkraut.  My guess is that these veggies are fermented rather than straight up pickled.

Start by marinating the minced pork in the soy, wine and cornstarch. I let mine go over night.

Rinse your beans. Mine were the length of a small child. Cut them into 4cm lengths (approx)

The pickled Chinese veggies.

I used slightly more than a 1/4 cup of garlic. In fact, I used half a head. Oh, and for reference, this is the pickle packet.

My garlic cup over runneth.

Mince everything up finely.

We had no scallions in the garden so I used garlic chives and the last garlic shoot remaining.

My mise en place, Chinese style.

Get your wok out and heat about 4-5 cm of oil in the bottom until bubbles form around an inserted chopstick. If you plunge it in, vertically, the bubbles will rise up along it when it’s hot enough. It’s quite a trip.

I was using a rather frustrating electric stove so had to heat it on quite high then quickly turn it down to medium once the bubbles appeared to prevent boiling. It’d be easier to control on a gas stove.

Carefully lower in some of the beans. You don’t want to over crowd it as it’ll lower the temperature.

I used this many beans at first, but found you could do twice as many at a time with no problem.

Fry the beans until they’re slightly white and wrinkly. Just a few minutes. The oil will appear to be boiling but it’s actually the water in the beans that’s bubbling.

The wrinkly fried beans look like this. When done, strain, drain and pat them dry with a paper towel to remove the excess oil.

I added a lot of crushed dried chilies…

From the garden, dried chilies.

About 3 or 4, crumbled up.

Sautee the pork, garlic and chilies until dry and crumbly in the wok. Add the scallions (or rather, garlic chives and lone garlic shoot). Stir. Add some soy and wine to taste. Add the pickled veggies at the end. Stir.

Add a little sesame oil just before you remove it from heat.

Remove from the heat and set aside.

Clean out the wok, add fresh new oil, and heat to nearly smoking. Add the beans and pork mix and stir stir stir. You’re just heating it up, not cooking it again.

Isn’t that pretty? Yum.

This is quite possibly the best broth in the whole universe. Except, perhaps, for a fine Tom Yam with all the bark and twigs still nestled at the bottom of the bowl. This one has its own mighty collection of bark and twigs, and plays the role of hearty autumn and winter to Thailand’s fierce summer in the Cartesian dialectic of soup broths.

This is a broth that will make you pick up the bowl and sip away at the broth until it’s gone, leaving only a few stray chili seeds at the bottom, long after the noodles and greens have been spooned/chopsticked away.  The rich beefy scent, umami’d up to the hilt with soy, garlic, star anise and cinnamon, needs to be brought up close to your nostrils as you sip. The chilies and garlic will sternly resolve any colds you may have stubbornly residing in your system.

Keep a few Tupperware containers of this stuff in your freezer for a cold, rainy day, then note how your mood significantly lifts after you heat up a bowl of it. Seriously. This stuff is mood altering, up there with crack and bath salts.

I had made a few experimental versions of this broth back in Shanghai, after trying to piece together exactly what went into it. I knew there was definitely cinnamon, beef, garlic. Lots of garlic. Beyond that I wasn’t sure. I experimented but didn’t quite get it right.

Then I found this.

Somebody did the work for me.

Ladies and gents, I give you the super secret recipe for one of the loveliest broths ever. It comes with its own built in meat (convenient!) and is best served with a splash of dark vinegar and spoonfuls of chili paste, and some fragrant greens (cilantro, scallions) and perhaps some blanched bok choy. A fried egg on top is also a good thing.  See the examples here.

This one, if you were to go into one of the Lanzhou noodle joints, is what you’d call 青菜牛肉拉面 (qīngcài niúròu lāmiàn), or beef pulled noodles with veggies (aka the bok choy).

The Broth

Serves 6

• 1 teaspoon oil
• 10 scallions, cut into 1″ pieces (I didn’t have any when I was making the broth, turned out fine anyway)
• 10 garlic cloves thinly sliced (I used 1.5 heads of rather huge garlic from the garden)
• 6 slices of ginger smashed  with the flat side of a cleaver
• 1 1/2 t chile bean paste (Togan Jiang) (I couldn’t find this so I threw in a few dried Thai chilis)
• 2 cinnamon  sticks (primarily use cassia in China)
• 2 star anise
• 1/2 cup light soy sauce
• 2 lb chuck steak, trimmed and cut into 1 1/2 inch cubes (I used about 2/3 of a roast- the kind that’s tied up with string)

The basics for the stock. Note the scale of the garlics. These mothers are HUGE.

I roughly chopped the garlics and sliced the ginger into discs.

A little garlic. Just a pinch, yeah?

Toss the ginger, garlic, cinnamon, star anise and chilies (or chili paste) into the hot wok with a little  oil and swirl it all around for a minute to release the flavours. If you have the chopped scallions, add them too. I didn’t have any so I have no idea how they work out at this point.

Toss in oiled wok for flavour

Deal with the meat stuff.

I can’t even fathom buying a kilo of beef in China. For one, I’ve never seen that size sold; for two, it’d seriously break the budget.

So cheap! So big! My god! How decadent!

With the beef cubed, move the lovely fragrant barks and twig mix over to your preferred soup cauldron.

Fragrant spices go here

Throw in the beef cubes and add about 9 cups of water and half a cup of soy sauce. Bring it to a boil, then cover and simmer 1.5 hours (or 2 or whatever- just watch that the water doesn’t evaporate too much).

So shimmery with happy cow oils!

After it has simmered on low long enough, you’ll want to separate the chunky bits from the brothy bits. I used a pasta strainer, pouring everything out into another biggish pot, catching the detritus (and beef) in the strainer.

I tossed the ginger, cinnamon and star anise, mashed up the garlic and chilies and added them back to the broth, and moved the beef cubes to a bowl to cool.

Run the broth through a strainer to get the meat and spices out

The beef will be very hot so let it cool a bit before you start to trim it.  I cut off the fatty, gristly, tendonny bits. Don’t trim it before you make the broth though, as these scary bits contribute a lot of the flavour. Give them to the cat after you’ve simmered the soup.

Tidy up the beef bits, cut off the fat (if you don’t like it), slice out the tendony bits.

Thinly slice the beef. You don’t need much. One cube per person should be more than enough.

Thinly slice about one 1″ (2cm) cube per person.

Garnish your soup! I like green onions, green chilies marinated in rice wine vinegar, cilantro and bok choy. When you’re making the noodles, you can also blanch the bok choy in the boiling broth for a minute or so before serving.

Oh boy, toppings!

Here’s the broth with noodles, served simply, for those days when you just want something light…

The simple version

And here is the full meal deal. Don’t forget to add the splash of dark vinegar and the chili paste. They add magic.

The Super-Sized dinner version