Long Distance Dosas

I am a loner. I don’t like teams. I don’t like groups. I don’t like clubs or organised anything. People who know me fight with me about it: ‘Oh, but you are so sociable, you love company, honestly that’s complete rubbish!’. They have me wrong. I have vestigial manners and some reasonable chat- that is all. Those traits are not the same as being a ‘joiner’ or a ‘team player’.

This explains why I like running – although I might also like running for the physical metaphor of escaping from everything. My life is not hard, but like most people’s lives, it has been tricky at times -so running for me is a precious chance to think and escape. My runs are the times when no one talks to me, no one asks me for anything and I forget all the tedious chores and assignments and needy people, lurking like feral dogs, waiting to devour my day.

In addition to being a loner, I am very uncompetitive. I never compare myself to other people as I think it is a waste of time. I am happy when others achieve and am only really interested in how I am doing in relation to my own abilities -not to those of my peers. Competitions are not really my thing, but despite this, I do enrol for long distance/trail running races. The reason? Because I am female.

Being a woman is okay most of the time, apart from menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, bridal clothing, bikini waxes and passive aggression. But one large disadvantage I find, being a woman, is feeling safe when I run alone. It’s so incredibly boring to run along a busy road in daylight, and yet, the moment I dive down a cattle track into barren countryside or pad along the soft curving paths of a dark pine forest, I start to imagine terrifying thoughts about being chopped into pieces and stowed in a suitcase. Which takes the shine off. ‘Oh you should find a running buddy or join a running club’ people say to me. Read the first sentence of this post again.

So, long distance running competitions are a compromise. Lots of kind people in Hi-Vis jackets hold up traffic, hand out glasses of water and sponges and clap encouragingly. There are other people running too, but they aren’t talking to me -which is perfect. They are for the most part team-players and competitive sorts, utterly focused on shattering whatever personal record/age-category-time they have as a goal, or reaching some collective brilliance to bring glory to their running club. Some of them are charming, some rude -the types who push and shove and look desperately towards the finish line with a mad light in their eyes. I have also seen men urinating down the legs of their shorts whilst running, desperate to lighten their bladders and shave a few seconds off their times. It’s all a tiny bit weird, but as long as they leave me alone, and I get to run through the fields without being murdered or chased by a nutter, then things are good.

Serious runners talk a lot about diet. Before these races there are usually groups of lean onesie-wearers, shovelling bananas down their throats and comparing shot sized bottles of nasty energy drinks which will propel them across the finish line. I don’t do that, as I loathe bananas and those drinks taste utterly revolting, but I do listen to the speedy skinnies when they talk about pre-race nutrition. Most of them advise lots of pasta for dinner the night before a race, and a jam sandwich on white bread for breakfast on the day – a good base of carbs which will keep supplying energy, but won’t upset stomachs. Pasta is a bit dull, and I can’t eat a huge amount of it without getting bored. Potatoes, on the other hand, I can do in huge heaps-especially when they are laced with Indian spices and wrapped in a crispy chick-pea flour pancake, and dipped in some sweet sticky mango chutney (for extra velocity). So this weekend, before a half marathon, I shall be feasting on potato and chickpea filled dosas. I might even have one for breakfast too. Here is the recipe:

Do The Distance Dosas

Real dosa pancakes should be made from a complicated fermented batter which is time consuming to make. These ones are not as lacy and beautiful as the proper thing -but they are easy, quick-to-make and delicious enough to stuff down quite a few. The dosa batter uses my beloved gram flour (the chickpea flour used to make onion bhajis)  spiked with some naughty mustard seeds for texture and a bit of a kick

Do The Distance Dosas

Pancakes

250 gram flour

1 tablespoon mustard seeds

pinch salt

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 pint cold water

Place the dry ingredients into a bowl and combine. Gradually add the water and stir with a fork to break up any lumps, set aside until needed.

Filling

1 can cooked chickpeas, rinsed and drained

250g potatoes, cooked peeled and cooled

1 teaspoon dried chilli flakes

1 reasonably weak green chilli, deseeded and chopped

3 medium sized tomatoes, skinned, deseeded and chopped

1 onion diced

2 cloves garlic minced

1 tsp curry powder

1 tsp honey

juice of one lemon

Heat some vegetable oil in a saucepan, add the curry powder and chilli flakes until they begin to smell delicious. Add the onion and garlic and cook for three minutes. Then add the potatoes, green chilli, chickpeas, tomatoes and honey and cook until the tomatoes have broken down and formed a thick sauce. Add the lemon juice, cook for another minute before seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.

When ready to eat, put a little vegetable oil into a frying pan and heat. Add a good spoonful of the batter to the pan, tilting it to cover the bottom. Cook until bubbles appear (just like any pancake) then flip over carefully and cook for a few seconds longer on the other side. Add the filling, while the dosa is in the pan and then wrap the edges of the dosa over and cook it gently on both sides. Remove from the pan using a large fish slice, and be careful as it’s all a little fragile. You should get about 6 decent sized dosas from this recipe. I can normally eat 3 -so adjust accordingly if you are feeding a crowd.

Serve with delicious mango chutney, a sharp fresh chutney made from finely diced onions, cucumber, tomato, chilli and coriander, spiked with lemon, or a cooling raitha made from plain yoghurt and chopped fresh mint.

It’s January! Let’s Get High!

 

Natural sugar rush…

One thing I love about being alive, is the ingenuity of my fellow human beings in discovering mind-altering substances. From licking toads, to smoking banana skins, chewing bark and snorting dried insects – I admire my fellow man for his intrepid innovation in the pursuit of blissful oblivion.

I can only imagine how excited our ancestors must have been, when they clapped eyes on their first Sumac tree. With its strange, furry antler-shaped buds, each promising a mysterious collection of dark red berries, primitive man must have been getting his prehistoric version of ‘the cluck’ on, at the thought of what exciting mental adventures eating this weird fruit could generate. Perhaps he would travel to the future and meet generation after generation of his progeny. Maybe the Gods would appear to him in a vision and tell him the secrets of the universe. Or possibly, his tastebuds would be excited by a delicious sour and pungent powder which would become the perfect accompaniment for a number of Middle Eastern dishes.

Sadly for our prehistoric Rude Boy, but happily for me -it was the third option. Sumac is one of my favourite ingredients in the world. With an almost citrusy flavor, a sourness that puckers the lips and leaves a faint trace of smoke, sumac is that red stuff you find sprinkled over fattoush -the delicious tomato and bread salad found on most Middle Eastern menus. I decided to give sumac a tough job to do -I needed it to tame the sickly sweetness of my least favourite gourd -the butternut squash.

During January I find I have to listen to a lot of ‘health’ chat. People give up drinking, start running, or hula-hooping classes and restrict their diets in various ways. I have heard a lot of people going on and on discussing how they are going to give up sugar for a whole month. I got a box of very nice chocolate mints for Christmas, which I am currently working my way through, so I shan’t be joining them -but in solidarity with the sugar free crew, I have created a recipe so high in natural sweetness, that after a plateful of this, my healthy buddies will be climbing the walls like toddlers after a packet of skittles.

This recipe teams butternut squash with delicious nobbly chickpeas. Further sweetness is added by sultanas soaked and made plump by a bath of lemon and ginger tea. Onions are sautéed with dried ground spices, the dish is finished with a blitz of lemon juice and then a generous sprinkling of delicious non-mind-altering sumac adds another more complex layer of sourness. It’s totally vegan-so anyone pursuing Veganuary can enjoy this too.

Mind-Altering Butternut Squash and Chickpea Tagine

I butternut squash, peeled, deseeded and cut into 1 inch cubes

3 small fierce onions -the type which make you cry like a bitch as you chop them

1 can chickpeas, drained

2 handfuls of sultanas soaked in a mugful of lemon and ginger tea

1  teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Juice of one lemon

1 heaped teaspoon sumac

pinch hot chilli powder

Place two tablespoons olive oil into a large frying pan, add the cumin, chilli powder and cinnamon and heat until fragrant, Add the onion and cook over a low heat until translucent. Add the butternut squash and chickpeas and turn them over until they are coated with the onion and spice mixture. Add the sultanas and their soaking liquid, cover the pan with a lid, turn the heat down and cook until the squash has softened, checking regularly that the pan is not dry, and adding a little water if necessary. Add the lemon juice, season with plenty of sea salt and taste. Finally sprinkle the tagine with the sumac, serve with rice or flatbreads – or just eat a delicious, sweet bowl  of tagine all by itself.

Cicero’s Soup

Cicero was a very boring orator who droned on and on about awful legal things. He had a couple of natty tricks with language: making points in threes and inventing neologisms. It actually makes me feel slightly teenage and angry to think about it, because I loathed studying him at school. The most interesting thing I learned about him was that he was named Cicero, because his nose looked like a chickpea. (Cicer is Latin for chickpea).

I don’t believe anyone’s nose actually could look like a chickpea. Chickpeas are round with strange nodules. If I had to pick a body part to correspond with a chickpea, it would not be a nose. You  might have a facial wart like a chickpea (it would be awfully unfortunate, but possible). A belly button could look like a chickpea, just, if the midwife had been a bit ham-fisted. But noses, even darling little button ones, never look like chickpeas. They could look like a pear, or a mushroom or a rather malformed sausage. I think Cicero was one of those truly dreadful people who desperately wanted a nickname so he could sound popular and came up with something really stupid, off the top of his head.

I have made chickpeas into a very delicious soup, not very subtly adapted from Jamie Oliver’s early book.I have added white wine and lemon to the original recipe, simply because the soup was too mealy and Welsh without it. Leeks and pulses on their own are good and warming and filling, but they do make me feel like a sheep with a big soggy fleece, wandering about in the fog on the Brecon Beacons. The addition of a bit of vino and lemon makes the whole thing feel more Mediterranean and sunny. Cicero himself would approve

Cicero Soup

5 leeks

1 can chick peas rinsed and drained. Or cook them yourself from dried little pellets if you are insane.

A couple of cloves of garlic

2 tbps butter and 1 tbsp olive oil (replace the butter with equal amount olive oil for non-dairy)

1 huge glass white wine

4 cups of vegetable or chicken stock

The juice of 1 lemon

salt and pepper to taste

finely chopped parsley to sprinkle

Wash the leeks by slicing them lengthways and rinsing until all the sandy and gritty bits are gone. Slice into rounds. You are going to blitz this, so don’t worry too much about how the slices look. Cut them reasonably thinly though. Crush the garlic.

Melt butter with the oil in a large pan over a low heat. Add the leeks and garlic and fry gently until they smell lovely (about ten to fifteen minutes). Add the chickpeas and stir gently making sure they do not stick. Add the wine so it sizzles a bit, then add the stock, cover and turn down to a low simmer.  If you like a really thick soup, don’t put all the stock in. You can always water it down later. Cook for another ten minutes, turn off the heat and puree  the soup roughly in a blender.

Return to the pan, season and add the lemon and parsley. Reheat and serve

Marine Mensa

My sister and I love the television. We loved it as children and would happily watch anything, including the testcard, or the Welsh channels we had, as we lived near the border (neither of us speaks Welsh, unless you count yelling ‘Tidy’ in a cod, Welsh accent). Nowadays, as she lives in Ireland and I live over here, we don’t get to ‘share’ a lot of TV but she keeps me up to date with what is happening on Made in Chelsea.

Since I moved to Hong Kong, I don’t get to watch television as much as I would like,  because most of the English language channels are utterly dire. I can’t bear ‘Torchwood’ or ‘Monarch of the Glen’, which is what the BBC seem to churn out, day after day, and Starworld’s tedious ‘How I met your mother” and other moronic sitcoms make me want to take strong medication. I remembered my childhood forays into Welsh language soap opera ‘Pobol y Cwm’, and holding that thought, headed for the National Geographic channel in Cantonese.

Nature programmmes are the best things to watch in a foreign language, as it’s pretty self explanatory what is going on: A snake is lurking. A little boy is playing near the snake. Boom! The snake swallows the little boy (at this point in all languages, the narrator’s tone of voice will become more animated ). Fishing programmes are pretty straightforward too. There are two choices: catch a fish=elation and lots of pulling and tugging on a line, or don’t catch/lose the fish=great disappointment and trudging home.

One thing I do insist on watching in a language I speak, is anything about octopuses and squid. I am completely obsessed with them – these unholy looking creatures, with beaks and tentacles and great big eyes, that can move swiftly and solve problems. I’m not generally keen on very intelligent animals – I loathe gibbering, poo-flinging monkeys and am not impressed by gaping, squeaking dolphins, hanging around showing off to humans.  I watched a documentary about the octopus, where it not only learned how to get through a complicated, plastic, transparent maze, but also remembered its route, and was able to teach another octopus to crack the maze too – demonstrating  short term and long term memory, communication and observational learning. You may recall Paul the octopus, made famous during the 2010 football world cup, who could predict the results. The only reason octopuses haven’t all marched on to land, seized power from humans and bankrupted the bookmakers, is because of their solitary nature and short life span. If they were to form a proper society and last longer than six months, we’d soon be their calamari.

Cuttlefish and squid are brighter than their other sea dwelling friends, but are quite a lot dimmer than the octopus. I feel it’s a bit rude to eat a creature that would probably beat me in a pub quiz, so I give octopus a wide berth, but have no qualms about cooking squid. They don’t look as exciting as octopuses – pale, sea ghosts, with non-suckery tentacles. Squid are efficient, exellent predators and have some communication skills, but unlike the octopus, you don’t see them on TV, unscrewing jars and using tools – they just hunt in packs and aren’t quite as gormless as goldfish. This lower intellect, together with their very good nutritional statistics (really high in selenium, copper and B vitamins), makes them perfectly acceptable cooking ingredients.

Although we are currently on a typhoon warning, and the teeming rain outside makes me feel more like making stew than salad, I am going to give you the recipe for a beautiful, summer squid dish. It’s good if you are feeding people on those palaeo, or atkins type diets, as there is plenty of protein and not much in the way of carbohydrate. I have made it with chick peas, and also with white haricot beans – both are great. I have made a vegetarian version, where I subsituted 6 hard boiled eggs for the squid, and that was very delicious too. If you are making the veggie version, then dress the pulses with all of the oil and lemon and leave to marinate, hardboil the eggs, slice into quarters and add them just before serving.

Summer Squid Salad

600g squid – cleaned and sliced into rings. Leave the tentacles whole.

Juice of 1 lemon

100ml olive oil

2 cans rinsed and drained beans (chickpeas or haricot are best)

1 large bunch parsley, finely chopped

1  tbsp paprika (smoked if possible)

2  cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced

1/2  red onion cut into very thin slices

Place the chickpeas and red onions in a bowl. Sprinkle with paprika and dress with half the lemon juice, parsley and oil. Stir well and leave to marinate.

In another bowl, place the squid and garlic slices. Pour over the lemon juice and olive oil and leave to marinate for at least half an hour. You can even prepare this the night before and leave it covered in the fridge.

Heat a frying pan and when hot, add the contents of the squid bowl. Turn the heat down to medium and cook gently until just tender. Pour the contents of the frying pan into the bowl with the chickpeas and stir well. Season with salt and pepper and dress with the remaining parsely. It is best eaten while the squid are still warm but it does keep for a day or two in the fridge.