Roasts and redundant cooking capacities

I am in the UK this week with my children (Adrian is in Hong Kong working). Adrian promised them that they could come back to Ilkley to visit their friends. This promise was part of the whole moving negotiations and post-move efforts (bribes?) to get them to stop being angry with us for kidnapping (their term) and forcibly moving them thousands of miles from their customary lives (both literally and in a figural way). To facilitate this visit we are staying in a lovely, self-catering apartment in an old Victorian confection on the edge of Ilkley Moor. There are great views; invigorating walks; easy access to the town; pigs, chickens, and rabbits in the garden; and things to do inside when (note I do not say if) it rains. It is a comfortable, rather than stuffy, one bed-roomed flat in the daylight basement (so plenty of light). What is particularly nice, however is the fact that there is a reasonable kitchen. Personally, I think it is the provision of kitchen facilities that makes self catering preferable to hotels--that and the fact that you don't have to vacate when the maid wants to come in as there is no maid. I am planning to make the most of this kitchen opportunity. Ilkley has some lovely ways to provision food, as I have suggested in my academic writing, and I intend to make the most of them!

Strangely what I have come to realize on this trip are a couple of things about myself and my relationship with food--or maybe it is my food capacities. Firstly, I have come to understand how difficult it is for me to cook in Hong Kong. While you can really get pretty much anything you want, you do pay a price for it that, quite frankly, puts me right off. I absolutely refuse to pay the equivalent of £15 (about $20 US) for what I view as a rather scrawny chicken. I was in the Otley (UK) Waitrose tonight with Simon and saw a HUGE chicken in the cooler. It looked a bit alien to me as I had forgotten how large British chickens can be--yes I know the conditions under which many are reared and am aware of the environmental/genetic/hormonal acrobatics that go into producing chickens like these large breasted creature that are on sale--but golly I would love to find something vaguely similar for a reasonable price in Hong Kong.

While I did not buy the above chicken, I did buy a lamb shoulder that I plan to slow cook in the oven this weekend. When you cook it on a low heat, with some liquid such as canned tomatoes and wine, and covered with tin foil for several hours it comes out falling off the bone, slightly sticky, and oh so tender and lovely. I am really looking forward to this. I shall make some roasted potatoes and maybe some broad beans to go with it. Again I was able to purchase this shoulder for about £11, where the equivalent in Hong Kong would have cost me easily £35. While what I have purchased is English lamb (this is Waitrose after all), I could have probably gone to another store and gotten New Zealand lamb for less. It is the NZ lamb that one gets in Hong Kong, which makes me more indignant as HK is closer so why is the lamb three times the price--must be something to do with the fact that the Cantonese don't really eat much lamb. Of course maybe they don't eat it because it is so bloody expensive, or the fact that in the south of China it is too hot for sheep and so it isn't part of the tradition. They do eat about everything else though. The story here, however, is that it is very difficult to roast things in Hong Kong. One buys small amounts of the meats one might roast and either cooks them as a stir fry or grinds them up with a bunch of other things (and parts) and puts them into a dumpling of some sort.

This brings me to my second self-observation. Eleven years in the UK was enough time for me to learn to eat like a (middle class) British person. I really struggled (as I am now in HK) when we first moved to the UK with the food and the way it is made available in the shops (note I say shops here not grocery store). There was none of the Mexican ingredients that I had come to rely on in the US, there was no Tuna Helper, there were no Lipton's fried onions (which is really only an issue at Thanksgiving when one wants to make Green Bean Casserole), and the Peanut Butter was wrong. Ironically, I can get all of these things much more easily in Hong Kong (with the exception of Tuna Helper--is that even around any more?). But now, since living in the UK, I long to cook roasts with the accompaniments. Indeed I only learned how to cook roast chicken and lamb and roasted potatoes since moving to the UK. But I got good at them and I came to like them and now I miss the chance to make them. AND I have forgotten how I used to cook in the US. I am sure I have the techniques still, I just have forgotten what I used to make regularly. I found myself so easily whipping up a mix of eggplant, broad beans, and black pudding on toast for my dinner tonight, something that just wouldn't have happened easily were I in Hong Kong tonight--no black pudding or broad beans and the eggplants are the skinny Japanese kind--Thank God the wine is not difficult to find. I've become a good cook in the UK, but am having to learn all over (for the second time) how to cook where I live now.

This is not to say that I am not learning to cook with what is available less expensively in Hong Kong. There are some wonderful fish, greens, and noodles. Part of my difficulty is that many of these ingredients are not listed or illustrated in my many cookbooks. While I have added to my cookbook collection, I find that these books are mainly written for an English speaking audience that does not live in Asia, and as a result, many of the ingredients are not these local foods. This makes sense from a commercial perspective as many of those from the ex-pat community in Hong Kong have live-in helpers who do the cooking and shopping for them, so such a cookbook would not be too useful in this context. Thus the bulk of the potential audience are those who would actually find it difficult to buy these strange fish and odd cuts of meat that can be found in the markets in Hong Kong.

This technical difficulty is compounded by the taste preferences of my family. My children pretty much refuse to eat the local food when it is cooked for them. Mind you, they are of an age where they pretty much refuse to eat anything I cook for them, so no real stress there. Adrian and I, on the other hand have come to realize that we actually prefer a little more spice and flavor than what is typically in Cantonese food. This means cooking Tai or, my favorite Vietnamese food. I have a recipe for a salad with palmetto (a milder, larger form of grapefruit), Chinese cabbage and crab in a fish sauce, lime, chilli dressing that is wonderful. Likewise I do noodles once a week. But I would like to branch out a bit more. Recently I also ate in a Hunanese restaurant. Hunan province is in the north of China and is based more on corn than rice and has stronger flavors, but is not so hot as Szechuan food. I had a roasted eggplant (Aubergine) dish with lots of garlic and a bit of chilli that was absolutely wonderful. I have been unable to copy it however. Something key is missing from my attempts. I think it might be a quest!

In the mean time, I am once again struggling with the intersections of contextual knowledge and design that is spatially specific. Unfortunately as time plays into this, I'll probably reach a stage of proficiency, and at the same time end up replacing rather than expanding my cooking/food knowledge, just at about the moment we decide to move countries again. This will, of course involve (re-)learning how to provision and cook in our new environment. Indeed, in ten years time you may find me writing about my longing for bok choi and complaining that I can only find one kind of soy sauce rather than the 3 or 4 kinds that my recipe calls for (yes this is a feature of Chinese cooking). Whatever happens, I am sure I will enjoy trying to get to grips with this new food environment.