Culinary Skills 101: Culinary Fridge Raiding

The ‘raid-the-fridge’ technique to cooking isn’t just a culinary skill to master; it’s a way of life without which… well, if I were you I’d be questioning my very existence right now. One of the few joys of not having flown the nest for the mouldy corridors of Uni Halls (What? That’s not the corridors? Wow…Students stink) is that the Fridge of Mum and Dad is constantly stocked with something. Half packets of edamame beans; draw after draw of fresh veg; blocks of butter; enough spices to keep even the taste buds of a Delhi-national satisfied; a Mary Berry worthy selection of baking essentials; hardly touched bottles of liqueurs and wine (which I use for cooking … honest…); pasta in an array of shapes and sizes (but no shells I noticed. Tuttut Mother!); lines of hoisin, soy and sweet chilli – and all this before we even begin mentioning the cheeses, eggs, meat, and cooking equipment! There are major benefits to having parents who like to cook and, more importantly, parents who know how to cook.

Take the other day as a prime example. I was hungry. And my parents, with their fridge of luxury and all the care and consideration of loving, doting parents, couldn’t be bothered to cook for me. I know! Selfish, right?! But all was not lost. I am, after all, a Fridge-Raiding Ninja Chef. In true Lurpak-Cooking-Up-A-Rainbow (if you haven’t seen the advert click the link, it will have you humming like a loon for the rest of the day!) style, I set about chop chop chop chop chop chopping onions, leeks and courgettes, dice dice dice dice dicing some garlic, and boil boil boil boil boiling some peas and beans. Pan fry in a table spoon of rapeseed oil, douse with pepper and sprinkle with salt, and you have yourself a meal – of sorts! Adding a splattering of lemon juice and mixed herbs can make me ever so grown up and using chilli with paprika makes for a spicetastic creation (you can tell I’m a baby of the 90s: ‘Spice Up Your Life’).

Obviously you can get more creative than this given an availability of ingredients.

Fridge-Raiding is by no means a culinary trait unique to this Ginger Nut; the bubble-and-squeak (named so due to the bubbling and squeaking sound the dish makes whilst frying) is a left-over staple that has a history dating as far back as the 1700s – granted the meat to veg ration back then was biased towards our ancestors more carnivorous pallets. Bubble-and-squeak is a go to for using up any cooked potatoes. Nigel Slater, the King of Veg and with a food stock worthy of a Fridge-Raiding champion, is the best at explaining how to make a bubble-and-squeak feel less like a mess of combined leftovers and more like a carefully constructed meal to tantalise taste buds. Cooking with leftovers should not be boring! I view leftovers as an opportunity for food up-cycling, but instead of embellishing vintage frocks with sequins and glitter, embellish your leftovers with flavour, with love, with care. You never know, you might even make something fantastic. Nigel Slater is pretty good if you’re looking for leftover inspiration; his tortilla omelettes are foodporn at its best but all chefs have incorporated elements of the Fridge-Raiding technique into their cooking; Jamie’s Fifteen Minute Meals rely on the individual having a pre-stocked stock cupboard of cooking goodies (Fridge-Raiding is not only cheap, but quick!) and Nigella’s signature move is silkily strutting to the fridge and grabbing some ‘divine’ ingredient you simply must have in stock (Nigella, honey, hate to break it to you, but we don’t all keep frozen muscles and pig’s ears in our freezers).

But if you are entirely new to this Fridge-Raiding phenomenon, but can see the value in wasting less and cooking more with the ingredients you do have in stock, there’s an app for you (when is there ever not?!)! Recipes by Ingredients is a free app allows users to search for recipes based on the ingredients they have available, cooking time, allergies, servings and calories and Su Chef is another free app with the mantra ‘Use what you have at home to find thousands of recipes’. Equally there are websites out there (my favourite is BBC Good Food’s Storecupboard due to the reliability of their recipes) which provide the same service for absolutely nothing. While recipes are useful to have, especially if, like me, you struggle with savoury cooking somewhat (it’s just not the same as baking is it?), it is important to remain flexible and open minded, there are things you can change in a recipe, flavours you can add. Never fear customisation, Gok Wan has said it before and I’m saying it now. Know your taste buds and use Fridge-Raiding as an opportunity to develop an understanding of what flavours work together, to develop a pallet that you like. Go crazy! Fridge-Raiding is essentially free, after all!

The Ginger Nut xx

Cardiff’s Arab Avenue: Shaam Nights

City Road in Cardiff always gains mixed reviews – go Google the road now and your screen will be engulfed in Food Hygiene scare stories and vivid descriptions of the Asian and Middle Eastern-takeover of this traditional thoroughfare within the City. With it’s countless grill houses, Shisha bars and halal food stores, City Road lives up fully to The Hungry Welshman’s nickname for the street: Arab Avenue.

But… If great, cheap Middle Eastern food is the result of a battle lost to ‘invading immigrants’, then here’s to more battles lost! In fact, let’s surrender now and eat moutabal!

I don’t want to get into a political conversation outlining the pros and cons to immigration and am not particularly keen to address the possible issues caused by the lack of social cohesion in zones such as these – there are, undeniably issues. For the sake of this blog, I’m keeping it light, like lip-pursingly tangy lemon-and-sumac-drenched fresh fattoush salad, and dense, like sticky, mouth-coatingly-stodgy, semolina hareesah cake slices.

Food is food. And life is food. And I like Arabic food.

Having discovered it is often cheap to eat like an Arab whilst travelling Europe (Norrebro in Copenhagen is a hotbed of all-you-can-eat Arabic buffets and falafel stands!), we came home with Baharat-acustomed taste buds and a constant craving for hummus (how very European of us!). THW suggested Cardiff’s Arab Avenue, and I didn’t take any persuading!

I feel at home in places like this – I told you! Emirati-born baby: and in Dubai, Arz Lebanon has earned the title of Favourite Restaurant with Al Arab coming a close second on account of it’s awesome spinach-filled pastries!

 Shaam Nights is were we ended up feasting that evening. The smell of the grill had us pressing our noses against the window like children, and the intricately decorated and decadent interior of this Syrian restaurant sealed the deal. We would be eating here.

Although early in the evening, Shaam Nights was already a hub of dinning Cardiffians (apologies if this terminology is incorrect!). There was a real mix of people, a true mix of cultures. Next to us was a large group of medical students enjoying a gory goss about bloods, guts and medical fatalities (you know what these doctors are like) over Mix Shish and Lamb Kufta. To our right were three elderly women, tucking into plates of fragrant Chicken Kabsah and noshing on sticks of Kebab Halbi. They were washing it down with rainbow fruit cocktails. I want to grow old like that! And of course there were Arabic families in there too, one sharing a massive platter of drool-worthy food.

I bullied THW into trying the ‘Polo’: fresh mint and lime juice. Zingy! We started with Fattoush – what else? This sour-but-sweet, tangy-yet-tasty salad is a must and Shaam Night’s Fattoush did not disappoint! The crunchy bread pieces, soaking in the vinegar-y dressing, were a hit with THW. The Shaam Nights Mix Mezza was generous, particularly if you’re as fond of dips as we both are. The Babaganoush actually was babaganoush rather than just the dressed up moutabal most British Arabic restaurants throw in front of you. Babaganoush is to die for. If you haven’t tried it, you must! It’s an aubergine dip normally encrusted with jewels of pomegranate. It may not look the most aesthetically pleasing of dips but, trust me, it’s the best. My Dad would disagree with me on that one; he prefers the smokey flavour of moutabal. Shaam’s moutabal must have included yoghurt curds or something similar, the slightly sweet taste was unlike anything I’d experienced before. If you’re in the mood for freshly cooked Arabic Naan then Shaam Nights probably isn’t your best bet. Bread lovers should head to Lilo’s for their moreish, warm, Naans cooked in traditional domed stone ovens.

THW had Uzy Surar as his main and the little parcels of minced-lamb-saffron-rice and-cashew-nut filled pastries looked great. I had the Okra with rice, which I knew was a mistake as I placed the order. Okra, unless fresh, goes sticky and slimy and weird. Seeing as the UK is hardly and Okra hotspot, Okra here is never fresh. I had a bowl of slimy-tomatoey yuck and trying to swallow something of that consistency was a little unpleasant. The flavours were great though. But next time, stick with the grill I think!

 The menu at Shaam Nights is impressive and no matter what your preferences are I am sure there is something there for everyone – if not, dinner is on me! The ambience (posh word) is lovely and the staff were incredibly attentive and charming – THW, normally a tight arse with money, even contributed to the tip which is utterly unheard of!

The price is cheap for the quality and quantity of food you get- it was £15 each when we split the bill and we were both well-and-truly stuffed; we didn’t so much walk out as waddle. The restaurant is versatile: it could serve as a location for a hot romantic date what with the beautifully furbished interior, or as a lazy-day food stop, or as a destination for carb-loading before hitting the town for a Saturday night of getting well and truly sloshed (obviously no alcohol is served within Shaam Nights). It is great.

And to top everything off, on our way out we were handed a 10% off voucher for our next visit. Like we needed any incentive to come again!

The Ginger Nut xx

Miss Noodle Pop’s Favourite Thing…

‘Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things’

Just like Julie Andrews was undecided about what exactly was her favorite thing, all human beings are built up of a series of favorites. I love horses, I love fencing, I love the exact moment the tip of my foil hits my opponents breast plate scoring me a winning point, I love the smell of fresh lavender in the garden…but when asked, on the spot by my big sister what my favorite thing was I answered cake. Cake.

I was eating a slice of amazingly moist victoria sponge at the time and this may have influenced my thoughts a little but still. I answered cake and I shall continue to talk about cake. The king (or Queen) of foods.

The word ‘cake’ has a long history (it’s of Viking origin!). The first cakes were very, very different from what we eat today. They were quite bread-like and sweetened with honey, nuts and dried fruits. Fruitcakes and gingerbreads were probably the most practical choice for a Viking baker – these foods can last for many months (even now a Christmas cake is meant to be baked months in advanced and topped up with lashing of alcohol to ensure that the family get well and truly sloshed just from noshing down one slice – I’m not entirely sure that’s the real reason but shh).

The first round cakes with icing were baked in Europe in the mid-17^th Century. To this day Europe and places such as North America, where European influence is strong, remain the centre of cakes. No other language has a word that means exactly the same as the English ‘cake’. The continental European gateau and torte generally contain higher proportions of butter, eggs and enriching ingredients such as chocolate (they should, as a general rule, be eaten as close to the date they were produced as possible, which is different from more traditional British cakes, some of which get better with age!). Gateau and torte are also more pastry-like in their composition. So for all those patriotic Brits out there, this one is ours. Cake is ours…kind of.

The famous saying, ‘let them eat cake’, is claimed to belong to Marie Antoinette, who made the statement upon learning that her people were in poverty and had no bread. But the saying itself is likely to be much older! Another version of the same saying: ‘Why don’t they eat pastry?’ is attributed to Marie Therese who was born more than a century before Marie Antoinette. Both these French women could potentially have been suggesting that the poor resort to brioche as a source of the nutrients they would otherwise obtain from bread. Rich French men and women used brioche as a bread-substitute, it being sweeter and all the more enjoyable! Depending on your opinion of France and the ability of its inhabitants to actually demonstrate human compassion, the two women could have been being kind, suggesting that if the bread was no good they should offer the poor some of the good sweet stuff.

Today the varieties of cakes are immense and the number of things that call themselves ‘cakes’ even moreso! But Jaffa Cakes are actually not misleading their customers. Jaffa Cakes are technically classified as cakes, not biscuits! To prove that the orange-y jelly bites of goodness are cake-like in texture, and to avoid a 17.5% VAT tax in the process, McVitie’s baked a special 12-inch Jaffa Cake to demonstrate the Jaffa Cake’s undeniably cake-y texture. They won the case!

Cupcakes (designed, in my opinion, to be the perfect size for consuming within one mouthful – or at least attempting to!) are not called cupcakes because of their size. The term ‘cupcake’ was first used in the late 19^th Century for cakes made from ingredients measured by the cupful. An 1887 recipe book asks bakers to remember this simple sentence: ‘Miss Steele made some cup-cake to-day’. She put a cup of butter and two cups of sugar within the mix. The world record for eating cupcakes stands at 82 in six minutes.

Before you go off thinking I’m a cake-obsessed nut-job, I do not like all cakes. I have a preference and I side with Miranda on this one, responding to a bite of cake with ‘My goodness that’s moist’ is always an indication of a good cake. Some might disagree and that is perfectly fine. Cake is personal. And sometimes seasonal. And sometimes circumstantial (my brother always has chocolate cake for his birthday, and suggesting he might want something different is sacrilege, but any other day he’s likely to reach for a Lemon-drizzle over a Chocolate Fudge). No matter what, cake is about celebrating, weather it be birthday, sporting success, congratulations, or merely celebrating life in the corner of a coffee shop on a rainy weekday morning. Cake is joy.

I know I love baking cakes because I can share the enjoyment with other people. There is nothing better than watching someone tuck into a cake you made. If it’s a recipe you created or improved upon: bonus points! Cake is good for the soul and it doesn’t have to be carrot (although carrot cake is my Dad’s fave) or corgette, or rhubarb, or any of the other beautifully whacky health creations for it to have positive effects. Cake is good for the soul. Let everyone eat cake.

In the words of Emma Stone (no matter what her hair colour may be now or naturally, she will ALWAYS be ginger in my eyes):

‘You’re only human. You live once and life is wonderful so eat the damn red velvet cupcake!’

 

Best dishes,
Miss Noodle Pop xoxo

Chai Tea Latte

We hit Malmo and what was the first thing I did in Sweden, being a lady of elegance and style? I ‘chundered everywaar’. Bit of an exaggeration but I did cough up a delightful little pile of phlegm at the top of the Central Malmo train station staircase. Chest-infection-ed out, my body, taste buds included, went into ‘sick-in-search-of-comfort’ mode, which I will continue to argue is an actual thing.

We spent a couple of hours exploring the city, me getting my Geek on and quoting ‘The Bridge’ at any appropriate moment – and let me tell you, any moment is appropriate! I’m pretty sure I annoyed The Hungry Welshman somewhat…probably because not even watching a season’s worth of episodes back to back has left me with any knowledge of the Swedish language whatsoever and thus my ‘quotes’ are limited to ‘Tak’. The Oresund Crossing became ‘Tak Tak’ Bridge, Malmo became ‘Tak Tak’ City, and the Police Station was Saga’s ‘Tak Tak’ house. Hearing ‘Tak’ that repetitively is enough to get on anyone’s nerves. After your typical afternoon of mishaps and mini-adventures, the most notable being that all the ATMs in Malmo were not functioning (watch this space for an economic downturn!), we went into the first coffee shop we stumbled across: Wayne’s Coffee.

I ordered a Chai Latte. I don’t fully understand the reasoning behind this decision, perhaps something to do with instinctively reverting back to child-like flavours when ill. With it’s spice-infused frothy, creamy milk, topped with powdered cinnamon, a Chai Latte seamed like the ideal choice. My slight lactose intolerance mattered not at this point in time, I was in Malmo and if I wanted a Chai Latte, I was going to have one!

And that was how my complicated love affair with Chai Lattes began.

I’d only experience Chai Latte once before from Tea Junction near Lamcey Plaza in Dubai. A colleague from work at the time had insisted I try her favourite drink and who was I to refuse the option of experiencing an entirely new flavour? At Tea Junction, the Chai concoction lacks the frothy milk and is described on the menu as a Chai Tea (confused yet?). What arrived was thick and full of strong powerful flavours. I suppose my pallet isn’t quite sophisticated enough to appreciate the deep flavours of this more traditional drink. It was nice but a little overpowering, for me, an unadventurous Cappuccino-with-sugar drinker. But a Wayne’s Coffee Chai Latte!? Yes!

I had two Chai Lattes back-to-back that day. And yes, the lactose did eventually catch up with me and result in an eventful trip to the toilet and a couple of stomach cramps on the train back but It. Was. Worth. It.

I had another in a coffee shop in Norrebro in Copenhagen the next day and have since tried the Costa Coffee version in Dubai. All very nice. All Chai-tastic. But none compares to Wayne’s Coffee. Wayne, whoever you are, thanks!

The Ginger Nut xx

 

Beginnings

Getting started has got to be the hardest part right? Choosing what to bake: hardest part. Picking what you want to eat: hardest part. Selecting where to go to eat: hardest part. There’s a certain uncertainty about beginnings and that makes them a little bit incredibly scary.

Maybe let’s start here: Hi, I’m Molly and for all intensive purposes I am the Ginger Nut. I am terrible at grammar, feel free to mock, and I love travelling (picking where to go: hardest part. Knowing where to stay: hardest part, I’d go on but I’m sure you’d stop reading if you haven’t done so already). I travel a lot, probably because I’ve moved around a lot. But something that’s struck me recently whilst traveling through Europe and whilst living in the UK these past couple of years, is that cheap, good, accessible food is hard to come by (which kind of defeats the object of accessible). Before the age of eighteen which is when my friends started driving and we all began attempting to build a life entirely independent of our parents (if you’re at that psychological stage, my best advice is give up now! Unless you’re willing to don an apron to cook, brandish an iron, and make spare money a thing of the past just stick by your ‘rents, you love them really), you live life oblivious to the true price of food.

Food is expensive!

When you’re young, you have the luxury of being able to take for granted the true price of food. There’s stuff in the cupboard when you fancy a snack. Someone is paying for your school lunches. Come dinner time, all you have to do is eat what’s put in front of you or even if you do have to cook for the family, the ingredients are purchased with money that most certainly did not come out of your own stash of ‘hard-earned’ cash.

Recently my own blissful unawareness bubble burst. I started travelling without my parents – how incredibly grown up of me, I know. I simply ooze sophistication I assure you. And with grown-up travels comes grown-up budgeting. The Hungry Welshman and I agreed, before setting off on a two-and-a-half week European adventure, that we would eat sensibly, eat healthily, eat affordably, and eat with the intention of experiencing everything we sought out to experience. Budgeting should not mean having to limit yourself to boring tastes, particularly when travelling.

And thus begins this food blog… On the mantra that experiencing flavoursome foods need not cost the Earth and neither should good honest food.

Don’t get me wrong at this point, the food discussed on here will not be the cheapest available especially seeing as this shall lean more towards eating out rather than eating in. It is, after all, a food interest blog because I am interested in food, and I know you lot out there are too.

Here’s to beginnings!

The Ginger Nut  xx