January Challenge Day Ten - you are what you eat

Today's challenge: Make or share a recipe for a dish that you consider as part of your culture. It might be from a country you come from, or something that's been passed down in your family. It might just be something you always eat on a Friday night so it feels like your culture. Whatever it is, share it with others today.

FOOD! This challenge made me smile when I read it this morning. I think a lot about food and creativity; as an artist I often feel so insecure about my creative abilities, but put me in a kitchen and I am confident, comfortable and happy to experiment and fail. How do I find that confidence in the rest of my creative work?

My mum is from Malaysia, where food is a MASSIVE part of the culture. To the point where it's an accepted greeting to ask "have you eaten?" when you meet a friend in the street, where elsewhere people might ask "how are you?". So a part of why I smiled this morning reading the challenge was that I didn't know where to begin with recipes... 

As it turns out, I've done a lot of cooking today, because I am visiting friends tomorrow who have a new baby, and I want to bring something to stock their freezer. I've made a chicken curry and I've also made some dal, and I shared some of the latter for dinner with some friends who needed a bed tonight. But I'm going to talk about rice, because rice is the bedrock of my food culture. I remember at one point in my childhood, my mum stored the giant sack of rice she would buy in a bin that looked like a small oil drum. We ate a lot of rice. 

I make my rice in this vintage rice cooker, which was a wedding gift to my mum in 1971. She brought it to me in her hand luggage on a visit from Malaysia, because I mentioned casually that I was thinking of buying a rice cooker. It could provide hot rice for twenty, no problem. I feel like I've got a proper chinese kitchen now that I have a rice cooker.

We've been buying a nice brand of Korean rice - lovely plump short grains, that clump together pleasingly so we can eat our rice with chopsticks. I mean, there is a time and place for basmati and other long grain rice, but it is not the rice I was raised on.

Tonight I used two mugfuls, to feed three of us and still have some leftover for fried rice another day. I washed the rice in the bowl of the rice cooker, rinsing it three times until the water started to run clear. I saved the rice water and watered my houseplants with it, as my mum does. I added water to the rice for cooking at a ratio of two mugs of water to one mug of rice. I also added a knob of butter, which is not something my mum would do, but I think it helps prevent the rice sticking to the bottom of the pot.

I put the lid on the rice cooker, plug it in and press down the button. Then I open a window in the kitchen, because otherwise the room fills with steam and I let the rice cooker work its magic. 

a heart tale in the telling

(based on true events)

You left your heart in my fridge.

That didn't seem right,
and I thought, hey,
you might want it back,
so I cycled round to yours
with your heart in a plastic bag
in that old black milk crate
on the back of my bike.

At first you were glad to see it.
But then you forgot about it,
don't know why -
you might've been busy.
And your heart started to go off
and it started to smell
and it didn't look right
and even the neighbourhood cats
wouldn't touch it
when you left it in the backyard.

And your heart was a sorry sight.
Sitting in the dirt,
covered in flies.

I thought that maybe I should've kept it.
That maybe I'd have made better use of it
than you.

This story ends like no other:
(I can't make this shit up)
you pulled the car over
you kept the engine running
while I threw your heart
into a bin
outside the co-op on Splott Rd.

afternoons in the kitchen are some of my favourite afternoons.

I'm cooking a Chinese New Year dinner for some friends tonight. If I were doing this properly, it would be ten courses long, but I don't have the know-how or, more importantly, the stamina to spend that long in the kitchen.

One of my friends can't eat wheat and doesn't eat meat, so he'll miss out on the dumplings. At least that means I can stuff them with pork!

We're also having fried mee-hoon, bak choi with fried egg tofu and a soy/honey/garlic sauce and chinese cabbage that I'm going to stir fry with chillies, peanuts and Szechuan pepper.

For dessert I've made a wheat-free cake: orange and almond, topped with an orange-cardamon syrup. I thought I'd go with oranges, for prosperity.

I'm looking forward to dinner, but I always enjoy the cooking just as much; I've been alone in the kitchen, it's been snowing in flurries outside, Tom Waits has been keeping me company. Days like these are therapeutic.

January is for eating vegetables.

Happy New Year!

I had a good festive season. Christmas day was passed with the Clown, the Alpha Couple and my sister. The Clown and I spent most of the day in the kitchen, which is where we both love to be. We had a trio of birds: duck stuffed with a partridge (yup, you read that right - death was the least of the indignities suffered by that duck) and a pheasant on the side. This after eating a stuffed ox heart the night before. 'Tis the season to feast.

I generally enjoy new year's eve better than Christmas though, and this year was no different. Perhaps it's because I haven't yet found a new Christmas tradition of great personal significance. I've got the memories of childhood family Christmases, which I treasure. But what do you do when you're older, don't have any children for whom you might want to recreate that childhood Christmas, and have no connection to or interest in either the commercial or religious version of the festival? I'm far from being a dirty hippy, but I love that the season is a celebration of the winter solstice. It's my favourite solstice, a reminder that winter is not so long and the days only get lighter from here. Much better than the summer solstice, which leaves me thinking: WHAT? HOW? It's only just got warm!!! So my plan for next Christmas is to find some way to reconnect to that hope: that the night is never as long as it feels, and even in the depth of darkness there's a promise of the spring to come...

Back to new year's eve, my third in Cardiff, which is impressive considering I only moved here in September. I spent the evening with, well, everyone really. We started at our house with a good riddance ritual and then split into two parties to head into town. I was part of the Second Annual New Year's Ghost Train, an idea the Clown had last year. We dress in white, deck ourselves with strings of lights, and then cycle through town, arriving at the centre in time for the fireworks. Next year: more lights and more elaborate costumes. From town, we headed to a circus party across the river, and then from there (we really shouldn't have been on bicycles by this point) back to the east side of town to yet another party. I was a relative light-weight and packed it in at 4 a.m.

And now it's the first few days of a new year. My body craves exercise (5.5 miles running yesterday) and, as an indication of just how much festive feasting I've been enjoying of late, I've been having odd fantasies about steamed broccoli...

No broccoli tonight, but a break from meat: butternut squash curry and spiced red cabbage on the side.