Tamarind and Thyme

It’s going to be a quiet night in for us tomorrow. Hope you have a great time planned and have a happy new year!

Yesterday was my brother’s birthday and I chose this year to purchase everything I needed to have Chinese steamboat at home. One tabletop burner, a few canisters of butane, one Japanese donabe (I also wanted to use it for other dishes), and one trip to the supermarket at Oriental City later …

… and steamboat! Also known as Chinese hotpot. If you don’t have a tabletop burner, there are electric steamboat pots available or you can even use an electric rice cooker, as many Chinese students know!

Gather together all your ingredients - we had beef balls, fish balls, thinly sliced beef and pork, Spam, firm tofu, Chinese leaf/cabbage, choi sum, and enoki mushrooms. Of course, you can toss in many other things - fish fillets, prawns, squid, chicken, homemade meatballs, scallops, potato slices, and many other vegetables!

In my family, we like to use plain water to start with as all the ingredients cooking in there will leave you with a delicious broth at the end. Other people use broth or you can shake things up with a tom yum soup base or a Sichuan chili and spice base (find readymade packs at your local Chinese market). You can cook noodles in there or crack in an egg or even stir in cooked rice at the end to make a kind-of porridge, in the Japanese style. We chose to just drink up the thick, sweet broth at the end of our meal. Dipping sauces are quite popular with the cooked food too - we had chili oil and a Japanese yuzu and soy sauce. With a potful of rice in the rice cooker, there was plenty of food for the three of us.

Set the water to boil and add in the raw ingredients as and when you’re ready. Then fish them out when they’re cooked. It’s healthy, it’s a great social dinner, and it’s easy. Go steamboat now!

This year, I was determined to fit in a bit of holiday baking. Rather ambitiously, I was hoping to make a batch of something each and every night of the holidays; more realistically, I ended up baking two lovely treats. Firstly, thank you to my friend Mirna for her family’s recipe for Vanilla Crescents - these were crumbly and full of vanilla and butter. Very nice.

I followed a Martha Stewart recipe for these chocolate crinkles (she calls them crackles). I think they would have been more snowy looking if I had used proper granulated sugar and not caster sugar. Either way, they were much better the next day when they got a chance to become more chewy.

I still hope to find some time to bake these beautiful Austrian raspberry shortbreads over at Smitten Kitchen - I love the idea of grating the shortbread into the pan for lightness. So did you do any holiday baking? And if so, what have you made?

I think I need to go on a diet or something. After a hearty lunch on Christmas Eve, we had another hearty dinner on Christmas day. Sirloin steaks covered in black pepper and mushroom sauce, goose fat roasted potatoes and purple sprouting broccoli. No turkey for us! Hope your Christmas lunch/dinner was also good!

I have to share this amazing torró, one of two, from my friend who brought it over on Christmas Eve. While traditional torró is based on almonds, these were mainly chocolate and the one pictured below was filled with ganache with cava and little cubes of fruity jelly. Amazing! If you’re interested, they were from La Rosa de Jericó in Valencia.

Merry Christmas, one and all! I hope you’re with loved ones (I’m missing my father who’s on the other side of the world but thank goodness for telephones) and even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, I hope you’re enjoying the few days off!

We had Christmas dinner a day early, when there’s still public transport in London, with a friend who was able to make it over. Catalan chicken, fried potatoes, cavolo nero, chipolatas wrapped in bacon, and amazing turró from Valencia for dessert…my stomach is going to explode!