How to survive on real food on a student budget

Baked beans--The sad symbol of student life?

I posted a salmon dish earlier, but it's not a fish I have often just because I am a student living on a budget and yet still opts for free-range eggs and meat and fish that's not farm raised and fed antibiotics. Yes, it is possible and I think I even spend less than the average student here actually.

Tip 1: Cut out your processed, packaged foods. They not only do nothing for your health, they rack up quite a sum of money in your grocery bill.

Tip 2: Get your groceries from the farmers' market. You get locally grown vegetables and fruits and happily raised animals, at pretty reasonable prices. Most of the stalls that aren't certified organic still keep to very good farming standards, just that they can't afford the organic certification.

Tip 3: Opt for the lesser cuts. I love using offal. They're actually richer in vitamins than the rest of the animal and so so cheap. I also love using the less popular cuts like the pork trotters and belly, which are so much more flavourful and become so meltingly tender when you slow-cook them.

Tip 4: Similar to tip 3, buy the less popular fishes. You not only help to prevent over-fishing so it's a more ethical choice, you get your dose of seafood and their omega3 fatty acids goodness for a much cheaper price! And there is nothing wrong with using canned fish, especially since you get extra calcium from eating the soft bones.

Tip 5: Look for what's on offer at the supermarkets. Most of what I cook is based on what's currently in season (and hence, on offer). That's fun also, because it forces me to get creative with what I have!

This is part of Real Food Wednesday, Simple Lives Thursday, Pennywise Platter Thursday.

My Windowsill Garden

It’s officially spring! I was rudely reminded of the fact when I woke up on Sunday to find that I had ‘lost’ one hour. I still don’t get daylight saving, isn’t it just a lie to yourself, but on a larger scale? Anyway. It’s spring! And spring is the time to get planting! You can’t get more cheap and local and organic than planting your own.

I wish I could do that Jamie Oliver/ Nigel Slater thing of popping out of their kitchen into the garden and picking all the herbs and vegetables and fruits they need and throwing them into their food. I can’t, of course, because I live on the 6^th floor, in a London flat half the size of my mum’s bedroom in Singapore. But also because I have the opposite of green fingers, or at least, I’ve never tried growing anything other than mung bean sprouts for primary school science.

But I have a brilliant gardener of a flatmate (: Who says there’s no reason why we can’t try that out with smaller plants which take very little space to grow and require little attention, most herbs for instance.

Those are the little pots on my windowsill. That’s purple basil, coriander, mint and chilli (of course).

Look at the coriander which was sown a bit earlier!

It’s a lot of fun rotating them so they face the sun and watching them grow from nothing to a little something to a bigger something. Go get planting too!

This is part of Simple Lives Thursday.

Reflections and Blog Self-Challenge

I have been blogging for 3 months now. Wow is it really only 3 months? I feel like I've shared and learnt so much since I started. Sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time blogging to an audience that just isn't there, but most times, I'm just really happy to be in the kitchen and then share my foodie adventures. And occasionally, I get really really happy when I see a stranger from the other side of the world commenting that they liked my post.

Still, I feel like my blog is lacking something that makes it really special. There are lots of real food bloggers out there, but mostly based on western recipes, and that's what I've been doing too, probably because it just seems easier to share them with the real food community.

I've been thinking of my background, the food that I grew up with, and how special that in itself is! Food in Singapore is full of colours and flavours and mouthwatering spices and comforting aromas. There are blogs about Malaysian/Singaporean cooking, but not with a real food focus. So it works out brilliantly! I hope to make use of my blog to be more in touch with the fabulous food culture back home, and for anyone who reads/follows my blog, I think you can find recipes for real food that's different and exciting.

I still want this blog to be about my adventures in the kitchen, trying out new recipes, new techniques, and I believe it still can be. Food in Singapore is full of flavours from different cultures- Indian Malay Chinese Eurasian, and more interestingly, the mix of these cultures e.g. Peranakan to come up with very distinctive yumminess. Of course, being in London, I'm heavily influenced by the seasonal produce around me, the British celebrity chefs haha, and those free recipe leaflets or newspaper cutouts. I'm not going to stop myself from trying those out. I'm going to try them out AND THEN challenge myself to inject a little bit of asia (especially southeast asia) or just be inspired, but I'm not going to force it.

So, what does this mean? Nothing really, I still stand strong in my real food beliefs, and I'm still going to do soups with celeriac and other "odd" British vegetables, but I'm just going to be sharing a lot more Chinese (real Chinese home-cooking is quite different from those deep fried spring rolls in takeaways), more Indian, Malay, Peranakan, and quite possibly a bit of Indonesian, Filipino, Thai, Korean etc. Oh I'm suddenly missing home again!

Crispy Honey Roast Pork Belly with Onions (Marco Pierre White-adapted)

I'm a nerd when it comes to what I love. I google and research and spend all my free (yes I lie. fine, I confess. even when I'm supposed to be studying.) time on it. It being food. And I have my cooking idols too, and like any fan girl I watch all the cooking shows they do. Everyone knows the usual famous British chefs, and I love them all too, but I recently discovered Marco Pierre White. He's the original British celebrity chef, the youngest chef at his time to be awarded 3 Michelin stars, and our favourite Gordon Ramsay was trained under him. He hwas actually quite hot, albeit 20 years ago. He still has that bad boy charisma and humour to send me gushing to disinterested friends (and sisters) hee hee hee.

Watch him talk about pigs and fat women and then watch the pleasure he takes in cooking, then come tell me I'm being a fangirl. Anyway, that second video practically made me salivate and I knew I had to go roast a pork belly.

There are many different tips out there on getting the perfect roast pork belly with crispy crackling. I'm going to try them all out, not all at a go duh, but definitely a to-do thing, along with testing out the different velveting methods for perfect Chinese stir-fry meat, so keep checking back ;)

For now, I followed Marco Pierre White's recipe, but had to make changes to the roasting times and temperatures, and the glaze because people have commented it's too sweet and really quite unnecessary. i.e. What I really got out of his recipe are his tips for really crispy crackling for a roast pork, like rubbing oil over the scored skin first. A little disappointed in my new favourite chef ):

Crispy Honey Roast Pork Belly with Onions

300g pork belly, skin-on (originally 1 kg, but, I'm not feeding a whole family here.)

generous sprinkling of sea salt, black pepper

clarified butter (or you could use oil. don't use sunflower like he said.)

2 small brown onions, halved, skin-on

2 bay leaves

sage leaves (which I didn't have)

cold water

For the glaze

1 tsp coriander seeds

(2 star anise, which I didn't have)

1 tbsp honey (his recommended amount is really too much)

80 ml of water

Method

1. Pre-heat oven to 160 degrees celsius.

2. Score pork belly skin (my butcher did it for me!). Rub the clarified butter or oil over the pork belly skin.

3. Pour some cold water into a roasting tray, then place the pork belly on a roasting rack over the water. Roast for 2hours at the bottom rack of the oven.

(My crackling didn't become crispy, so I turned the heat up real high to 220 degrees celsius for an extra 20-30 min.)

4. Meanwhile, bring the ingredients for the glaze to a boil and let it simmer and reduce till you get a syrupy consistency.

5. When the pork belly is done, leave it aside to rest in a warm place (It's important to let all roasts rest. It makes all the difference really. This allows the juices to return to the meat. Some chefs even recommend letting it rest for the same amount of time the meat cooks! hmmm.)

6. Over medium high heat, melt some butter and fry the halved onions, cut side down. A few minutes later, add the bay leaves, just to brown slightly, before transferring to an oven for about 25 min.

7. Boil to reduce the tray of water (plus collected porky juices/fat) by about a third, till you get a nice gravy sauce.

7. To serve, glaze the crispy skin with the honey reduction. Cut the pork belly into thick generous slices, arrange the roasted onions around it, and drizzle the meat juice gravy over.

Such a rich roast would go really well this a sharp and sweet Braised Red Cabbage with Apples, and if you don't want to do the honey glaze plus gravy, I think a Celeriac and Mustard Sauce would be brilliant too.

Crispy skin, juicy meat, with the flavour and richness of the fat running through the pork, and then that caramel sweetness of the onions and honey! Come share my joy and salivate together!

Crack

Cut

Crunch

This is part of What's On Your Plate?, Real Food Wednesday, Pennywise Plater Thursday, Frugal Food Thursday, Simple Lives Thursday, Fight Back Friday and Hearth and Soul Blog Hop.

Would you rather have worms or chemicals on your vegetables?

Just a random question. Which brings me back to a random day at the start of winter, when I came back home happily from a new farmers' market, with very very cheap organic kale. Suspicious? No, really, these exist, and you support your local farmer at the same time.

HOWEVER.

This bag of kale had hidden surprises.

So, once I got home I happily announced my prized find, opened it, to discover--worms! And not just one, but I saw at least five. Everyone who knows me know I have a phobia of such creepy crawlies-- spiders, worms, ants even, and butterflies are just caterpillars in disguise. I scream, hide under the blanket and come close to tears. So, imagine my horror! Good thing for me, my lovely flatmate bravely came to my rescue and washed these creatures off the kale in the sink, then tossed the "drowned" worms into the bin.

Then we both happily went out, each on her own business. I came home first, and started chopping vegetables for dinner, and then turned round to toss the odds and ends into the bin-- and saw a fat green monster right at the bin. ?! They didn't drown?! At a loss, I just turned back to my vegetables, praying that monster stays put till my flatmate returns. 5 min later, I turned round to check--phew still there-- then almost screamed when I saw a fat black one the size of of my finger on the floor. I did the bravest thing I could do without coming too close to it-- I threw a box over it. There. At least it's caged up. And I went back to my vegetables (I know I'm weird, but the worm was also directly blocking my way out of the kitchen. And chopping vegetables is calming.) 5 min later, I turned round to check again, and saw the wretched creature outside the box, crawling all over it actually. That was it. I hopped past it (yes.), found the insecticide and sprayed the 2 worms so much that another little one I didn't notice near the bin also curled up and died. (I didn't breathe until I opened the windows.) My flatmate came home and was very proud of me.

And that was it. The day I overcame my fear.

And despite still shuddering when I just think about that day (not exaggerating), I'm glad I know my vegetables weren't smothered in that same scary chemical I used to kill those worms.

The Secrets to a Chinese Stir-fry

Whenever people think of Chinese food, they naturally think of stir-fries. It's like the equivalent of Chinese cooking, but I think there's so much more to Chinese food. A lot of effort goes into the food, all the careful steaming to get everything done to perfection, the braising, the slow-cooking for tender and flavoursome food. It's not all quick, easy stir-fries. Chinese restaurants in Singapore (and in China I assume) are so so different from the Chinese restaurants here which serve up MSG-laden sticky and oily deep-fried food.

That said, a good Chinese stir-fry is not that easy. Even with the exact same ingredients and recipe my stir-fry can never match up to that of my favourite tze-char stalls in Singapore. I love cooking and finding out about food, to the extent of a nerd actually. So here are the compilation of tips from surfing a lot of forums, watching a lot of Youtube and master chefs, and Saturday Kitchen on BBC iplayer.

1. High heat!

Sauteeing slowly over low-heat doesn't sear the meat and vegetables the same way, and everything needs to be done fast, which brings me to the next point

2. Fast!

It's not always the more the better, in this case, more time is not better. It always amazes me how much time goes into the prepping of the ingredients but the actual stirfry is over in a matter of minutes.

3. A wok

The heat distribution of a wok is quite different form that of a frying pan. It's where you get that wok hei, that smoky depth to the food at tze char stalls or restaurants. Also, because it curves in at the base, you can "deep-fry" garlic, shallots and ginger without having to use much oil. I don't have this ): I will always be inadequate. Boo.

With meat, I've always wondered how Chinese chefs get the meat so tender and juicy despite the fast cooking on high heat. So anyway, Ken Hom revealed the secret to this on the recent episode of Saturday Kitchen:

4. Velveting

You coat the chicken or whatever meat pieces in egg white, cornflour and some rice wine, before cooking in warm (forums say hot. but the Ken Hom says warm..) water or oil, take it out before it's cooked, because it'll continue cooking on slowly, and that add it back to the dish at the end for a final heatshock. I was so fascinated I trawled the forums and found out some people use baking soda instead too.

So, it goes like this

For about 500g of meat, let it marinade for 20-30 min in:

1/2 tsp baking soda OR 1 eggwhite

1 tbsp cornstarch

1 tbsp Chinese rice wine (shaoxing/huadiao)

1/2 tbsp or so of oil (I'll use sesame oil)

any other flavouring agents like soysauce etc.

2 tbsp of water/stock (for beef esp, apparently because beef will absorb more water when cut)

I like the idea of parboiling in water, so you get a lighter dish than using oil to parcook. I've tried chicken cooked this way before I almost thought it wasn't cooked because it was so tender! But I'm not sure if it'll work with beef?

Future project: Experiment with all the techniques (baking soda/eggwhite, water/oil, warm/hot), using different meats, then do an update someday ;)

5. Slicing

For meats like beef, slice against the grain, and slice thinly.

Tip: Partially freeze it so the meat stiffens up and you can go real thin diagonally easily.

Ah I know I'm weird, but I really enjoy doing research like this.

Working at a farmer's market!

I've been looking for a part-time job for the longest time, and I've mainly applied as a waiting staff at all the famous restaurants, so that I can learn more about good food, and of course, there's always staff perks ;) I haven't been very successful though, it just isn't that easy to find a job in London. Then recently I got a reply from London Farmers' Market, about a job as market manager! Oh it's the best job ever, I never even thought I would get this job out of all the jobs I applied for.

I firmly believe the secret behind great food lies in the care and ingredients that go into the food. I love spending that extra time and effort on real food, I love picking out fresh, local produce and daydreaming about the food I'll make with them. Now I get to take it one step further and get to know the farmers and producers even better. I had a lovely chat with the milk lady who told me how cute buffalos actually are, and the apple guy about how lousy my shoes are, and the pork man about cheap trotters. Makes waking up at 5am on a cold blustery rainy Saturday worth it (:

Also makes me more determined to get my shopping done at the Farmers' Market instead. It's so much better knowing where your food comes from. Would you rather go for conventional, local, seasonal produce from a producer you know, or organic, imported producer you hear about on the label? I used to fall in the latter group. I think I'm a convert. No more oven-dried cherry tomatoes in winter.. but it doesn't mean I can't enjoy them still, it's just that I'm going to put more emphasis on what nature has offered us this season.

Anyway, it's not only about eating real foods, but food that's right for you as an individual, and that changes according to the season too. (I've been reading up a bit about Traditional Chinese Medicine, it's worth looking into for anyone interested in how our food relates to our body, because TCM believes in nutrition as the first line of rescue/defence, not medicine. How true is that!) So, while we're still in the midst of winter, I'm going to prepare more warming stews and leave the cold salads for summer!