Alan's Place

I may have said this before but we are very partial to Asian food.

One of our favourites is Peking (or crispy) Duck. Now it is very easy to send out for a takeaway or buy the heat and eat versions from supermarkets, but it is much more satisfying to make it yourself; apart from the rice paper rolls which we brought from the local Chinese supermarket.

This is a mixture of a couple of different recipes putting together, in my view, the best way to make the duck and sauce. Serves two just nicely.

Ingredients:

• 2 duck breasts
• 1 teaspoon Chinese five spice powder
• 1 tablespoon honey or agave syrup
• Spring onions – shredded
• Cucumber – Use a potato peeler then cut into matchsticks
• The Sauce
  • 1 teaspoon sesame oil
  • 1 tablespoon groundnut (peanut) or sunflower oil
  • 6 tablespoons hoisin sauce
  • 5 tablespoons caster sugar
  • 1 tablespoon soy sauce – preferably dark
  • 1 tablespoon cornflower

Method

1. Place the duck, skin side up, on a rack over the sink and pour a kettle of boiling water over the skin – pat dry
2. Preheat the oven to 180c/160c fan/gas 4
3. Mix the honey and five spice and brush it all over the duck – let it dry for a bit then, if you have any left, brush over the rest of the glaze.
4. Place duck in to a roasting tin and roast for 25-35 minutes – you don’t need any oil as the duck fat will provide that for you
5. Whilst waiting for the duck add all of the sauce ingredients, except the cornflower, in to a pan over a medium heat, and stir together with 100ml water. Heat until it starts to boil. Mix the cornflower in a tablespoon of water then remove the pan from the heat and stir it in to the sauce mix. Back on the heat and stir until the sauce thickens to your taste. Allow to cool.
   1. Note: these ingredients will give you enough for a couple of uses. I bottled half of it in the empty hoisin sauce bottle.
6. Once the duck is done to your liking put it on a board to rest for a while then slice or shred it.
7. Enjoy it

Take care out there folks

21c and Sunny so time to mimic the lunch we like when in Mallorca. The only difference is that we would normally have it in a café in Alcúdia, whilst today, we sat at our decking table and I was cooking a beautiful Tortia de Quesso with fries and salad, accompanied by a glass of wine.

A couple of things I’ve learnt about cooking an omelette:

• Throw a large pinch of ground pepper in with the (in our case 3) eggs and whisk well with a fork – a whisk tends to make a mess in my hands.
• Cook on a medium heat and resist the temptation to turn it up when it seems that it isn’t cooking fast enough.
• Don’t flip the omelette – you’ll end up with it overcooked and dry.
• When the top is still slightly runny, add the cheese, and any thing else you want, to one half, then fold the other half over the filling.
• Leave it long enough to melt the cheese – you can flip the whole over at this point if you want.
• Enjoy the magic

The weather report says tomorrow should be warm and sunny and then it’s back to the normal British weather for the Easter weekend

Stay safe out there folks

I’ve enjoyed my foray in to cooking over the last few months. I have found it to be a nice change from my day job of software development; very relaxing, except for that hectic part at the end when you are trying to get a number of dishes, all with different cooking times, on to the plate at the same time.

To encourage me in my endeavour the Boss brought me a number of cooking books, mostly Asian/Chinese due to my liking of the wok and our liking of that cuisine. I returned the gesture by buying her an electric wok and a new set of cooking utensils. The idea was that using two woks would make it easier to get different dishes on the table at the same time.

Now the purists out there will probably tell you that woks should be used on a gas ring but we don’t have one of them. I can tell you that they work pretty well on our induction hob and the electric one is really good too for a £33 bit of kit – the heat control is very good.

It happens that one of the cookbooks Mary gave me contains a recipe for Nasi Goreng. This is an Indonesian style fried rice dish that I first tasted when I was out in the far east back in the 1960’s and really liked, so I christened the electric wok with it. Nasi Goreng can be a little pale on the eye in it’s basic form and I like a little colour on the plate, so I threw some peas and diced carrot in with the rice and chicken recipe to brighten it up. Boy did that bring back some memories – and it tasted good enough for Mary to clear her plate.

Needless to say this week has been an Asian cuisine experience.

Next week it will be back to a varied diet starting with a couple of Italian style dishes on Saturday.

Stay Safe folks

Well that was a successful weekend’s cooking.

As I said in the previous post, Friday’s carbonara was a great success.

The boss gave me a gold star for the Mediterranean dinner on Saturday. She has always turned her nose up at the vegetables when I’ve had them whilst in Mallorca; she has never liked courgettes and has never been keen on cooked peppers; but she cleared the plate. I think it was the honey and extra virgin olive oil coating that did the job.

Last night we were going to have mushrooms stuffed with bacon and stilton as a starter. Unfortunately the mushrooms didn’t look that appetising when I started to prepare them, and I didn’t want to take the risk; so we made a change to prawn cocktail. That’s when we found out we had used the last of the 1000 island dressing. You know that tomato relish I spoke about in the last post? turns out that adding mayonnaise to a couple of spoonful’s made a close substitute.

Then came the main course; The Hawaiian Pork. The only changes I made to the ingredients were to use dark soy source (use light if you have it to get that orange look), and we couldn’t get canola oil, so I used groundnut oil to brown off the joint. We can back up the comment at the top of the page; that was a plate licking meal*. The sauce, a little darker than shown in the link picture, was like nectar.

Oh, and I made a loaf of bread, which also turned out well, so I can have left over pork loin and pickle sandwiches for lunch today.

*I can’t be alone in wanting to lick the plate when I’ve had a great tasting meal. I know it is not polite, but to me it is the highest compliment you can pay a chef, if etiquette didn’t get in the way. And yes, I will admit to doing it if the boss isn’t looking; or, alternately, surreptitiously running my finger over the plate to get that last taste if I’m not in one of those places that give you a bread roll. For some reason my kids get annoyed at me because their kids lick the bowl – can’t think why

Stay safe folks