P: Sandy was complaining she hadn't eaten Chinese for a week and felt like eating something sour so I thought I'd try cooking Sichuan hot and sour soup. I decided against a seafood or meat version and opted for vegetarian instead. Monkey head mushrooms are pretty meaty and to these I added regular Chinese dried mushrooms, wood ear fungus and bamboo shoots. The actual soup is really just stock (turkey stock in my case; made from leftover turkeys from Sandy's Christmas catalogue shoot), black vinegar, soy, sugar, salt, white pepper, chilli oil and Sichuan pepper. And some spring onions and sesame oil added at the end of cooking. It took a lot of tweaking to get the right balance of ingredients but the end result wasn't too bad. Not quite up to Min Jiang restaurant standard but OK for a first attempt. We ate the soup with stirfried chilli chicken and stirfried baby kailan.
Our fridge is full to exploding. Sandy's been shooting Christmas catalogues for a local supermarket chain so we have turkeys, turkey steaks, roast chickens, whole hams, cheeses and fruit cakes coming out of our ears. Luckily downstairs has taken some turkey, ham, chicken and cheese. Sandy's other colleagues have also taken food back, as have the supermarket staff. They obviously can't resell this produce so at least it is being eaten and not chucked as often happens. I'm going to be taking ham or roast chicken sandwiches to the office for another month.
1 comment:
we got sprinkled by ham too.. thanks very much! it was delish!
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