A weekend of baking madness...

Since I've returned from China I've been baking crazy. As I've mentioned in my earlier posts, we had a pretty shitty oven in our apartment, that was essentially a grill, and I couldn't make much more than cookies or flatbread. My attempt at a victoria sponge cake ended up like this, two frisbees sandwiched together by jam and buttercream:

I also remember having to go to at least 5 or 6 shops to try and get all the ingredients, trying to find butter and icing sugar was like, well, I'm rubbish at analogies, but it was bloody difficult!

My favourite ingredient of the moment is pastry. Choux, sweet, shortcrust, puff...you name it I've been making it. I try to always have some in the freezer, so I tend to make it in batches. That way I can whip up a pie or a tart at short notice for dinner or dessert- okay, I know I sound like a right domestic wifey woman, but who doesn't want to eat treacle tart and apple pie all the time?!

Another foray into baking- delish treacle tart

So one weekend, one of my rare weekends off from work, I went a bit nuts. It was meant to be a trial run for the Christmas gifts I was making for people (I went complete domestic goddess this Christmas and made presents, mainly because we couldn't afford to buy any), but kinda spiralled out of control. Ironically, and this is always the way, the practice gifts I made worked much better the real gifts that I actually gave to people. Why is that?! Whenever I make something for the first time, it always seems to come out surprisingly well, but the next time I do it, it never turns out as good as the first time. Grr! Anyway, I'm babbling. Here's what I made. By the end of the weekend it was safe to say that Dave was full to bursting and I had a lot of work to do on the Wii fit.

As well as shortcrust pastry, a mandarin cheesecake and some cheese straws, I made...

Pesto - for Saturday's pesto pasta

Puff pastry-

Chicken and green bean pie - using some of the homemade pastry!

Caramelised red onion chutney-

Ring doughnuts and sea salted caramel shortbread -

...and a gingerbread house

And the finished product for Christmas...which, although twice the size and complete with candy canes (which were a bugger to make!) and gingerbread people, still didn't turn out as well as the first one...

On coming home...

This is just a little update on what I've been upto since I've been back...

We arrived home a week after my birthday in late October. We had just been on a pretty sweet adventure through three countries, and had spent a brilliant year living it up in China, putting our 'career lives' on hold while we travelled around, dabbled in Chinese, drank and ate like it was going out of fashion and met some great friends in the process. Why on earth were we coming back? It's a question I still ask myself now sometimes. Well, we had to come back eventually and we were really missing our family and friends back in the UK, plus it was about time we stopped dossing around and cracked on with sorting out the career situation. All viable reasons of course...but the main reason? I'm not saying I missed food more than my family and friends, but...well, it was certainly up there.

As much as I loved Chinese food, and miss it immensely, I constantly thought about the food back home while I was away. It wasn't necessarily even British food that I missed, but the diversity. Chinese cuisine is as varied as a whole continent's worth- a topic which sooner or later I am sure to discuss- but there's still a whole lotta world out there to eat. Many of the Western ingredients and cuisines in China are expensive to get hold of and a lot of the time just aren't any good. I dreamt of sumptuous French pastries, moules marinères and steak frites; sun dried tomatoes, pesto and lemon flavoured olive oil; chorizo, iberico ham and gambas pil pil; of chicken and asparagus pie, roast lamb and lemon tart. And cheese, glorious cheese! Brie and comté, manchego and montgomery cheddar, feta and chèvre...you get the picture. Ooh, and wine! That's another story...

Just some of the things I missed while I was away...and have subsequently made.

You can imagine therefore, that in the first week of my return to the UK, I positively feasted on everything in sight. My first supper was soft goat's cheese spread on hot, buttery toast, which was lush, the goat's cheese one of a few ingenious gastronomic gifts from my Dad, and was followed by a mountain of similarly delicious foods, warm fresh bread, bacon sandwiches, steak and chips, crème brulée, sausages and mash, my Nana's Sunday lunch, and strangely, a lot of corned beef pasties from Greggs.

I'm telling you, living abroad really does make you miss Greggs. Who'd have believed it!

Skip ahead a few months, and I have thankfully curbed my eating habits slightly (otherwise I'd be the size of a house), but my love of cooking will always be a threat to my figure. Devout of a decent oven in China, I have resorted to baking like crazy, and cooking whatever I wasn't able to in the Far East, from Italian to Middle Eastern, and classic British to French. I'm currently working at a luxury food hall in London (most people know but I won't mention it in case I get one of those lawsuit thingys), where I'm essentially a glorified shelf stacker, but it's good experience for my future in food, the perks are good and I do get good discounts on very yummy and expensive produce.

And so another chapter begins in my persuit of exciting foodie adventures...

The blog is back...again.

The blog is finally back, and this time, it's here to stay. I'm determined. My departure from the land of the online diary was not enirely intentional, of course; Chinese internet restirctions prohibited me from either accessing or posting from around May onwards. I have since returned from Shanghainese paradise back to the kingdom of the unexciting (the UK) and have been hindered by work constraints, tiredness and a serious dose of 'i'll do it later' syndrome.

My plan was to update the world on my gastronomic highlights since I last posted, from the last few months of Shanghai through to our amazing adventures beyond. We started in Southwest China and the Tibetan borderlands, where our tastebuds were treated to Yunnanese fried goats cheese, the forgotten dishes of Chinese minority tribes, and anything made out of yak (butter, cheese, meat, you name it) and then travelled into the heartland of one of China's most renowned cuisines, spicy Sichuan, where we savoured fiery Sichuanese street food, dared to try a mind blowingly hot-hot-hotpot, and feasted on so many of the amazing dishes I had tried to recreate at home, but of course here, they were much better.

The mouthwatering spicy-sweet Tian Shui noodles in Chengdu

...their fiery hotpot on the other hand will leave you positively gasping for water

A tibetan speciality- salty sweet yak butter cheese, not dissimilar to parmesan in taste, and delicious spread on steamed breads

After a farewell stopoff in Shanghai we continued to nomadic Mongolia, where our diet basically consisted of mutton, and maybe the odd potato here and there (if you were really lucky, a carrot). There was so much mutton in fact, that by the end of our 7-day trip to the Gobi desert, our clothes stank of the stuff. Still, thousands of years of living off the same staples have allowed the Mongolians to perfect their cuisine, and the simple, hearty food of stews and dumplings always went down a treat and left us hungry for more.

Mongolian buuz- steamed mutton dumplings

We then continued by train through to Russia, which saw us living off sausage, bread, chocolate and ketchup for 5 days and landed in Moscow, our first taste of Europe for over a year, which I celebrated by gorging myself on the continental breakfast buffet in our hotel, and reading the Financial Times. In Russia, we stuck to what Russia knows, sampling pancake after pancake of various fillings (goat's cheese, ham, beef...all were delicious) and borscht.

Russia's unmistakable borscht- beetroot soup topped with sour cream and dill

That's pretty much a summary (at least in cuisine terms) of what we did on our travels until we returned home. I intended to document this all with shit loads of pictures and a notebook almost full of yet-to-be-typed-up posts to bore you all with, but alas, a thieving imbecile nicked it all in Mongolia (along with passports, money, etc.) so you've gotten off lightly! So instead, I will fill the world in on what I have been upto food-wise since I've got back, and update with previous posts when I feel like it. Ooh, and I obviously didn't take these pictures, they are all thanks to flickr and creative commons.

Enjoy!

Restaurant Reviews

Here are the last few restaurant reviews I did in Shanghai, for the unimaginatively named bestfoodinchina.net website. I got to eat some amazing food, both Chinese and otherwise, through working for these guys and of course, the best thing about it was that I got to eat for free! They are...

Favola - A whimsical Italian restaurant at Le Meridien Hotel, which provided me with a much needed fix of Italian dishes and authentic ingredients

Sichuan Court -A flavoursome- albeit slightly lacking in spice- meal at the Hilton Hotel, from the heart of this fiery province in the heart of China.

Kathleen's 5 - A beautiful restaurant housed at on the roof Shanghai's iconic 1930s racecourse clubhouse, providing magnificent views over People's Square. Standard fine dining of little portions on humongous plates.

Brasserie Alyssa - Great Thai food tucked away among Shanghai's labyrinth of restaurants and bars in Taikang Lu, with super cocktails to boot.

Lounge 18 -Situated on Shanghai's spectacular Bund, Lounge 18 was a welcome change from the pretentious cuisine usually found in this part of town, serving up fairly simple but perfectly executed classic dishes.

Sibilla Café- On the ground floor of Bund 18, the building which housed the previous restaurant, was this fairly standard yet chic lunchtime haunt, which dished up panini, salads and desserts , with a rather large price tag attached.

Yum Yum Lisboa & Lisboa Restaurant - These two fairly oddly named restaurants brought Macanese cuisine to Shanghai with its moreish rice dishes, some slightly bizarre flavours and a pigeon head to boot.

I've just been reading back on the blog posts I wrote while I was still living in Shanghai. The food looks so lush! And so cheap! London has nothing on this! Arrrrrrrrg. Nostalgic, much?