Llamadas 2022
All posts by Martin
Feria Tristán Narvaja, Montevideo Feb 2016
Five-Two Mushroom Soup
For Lesley-Ann
Makes 4 hearty dinner portions that won’t leave you hungry. Total calories for the lot is 900, so each portion is 225 calories. Or, you could have 2 dinner portions + 3 lunch portions, giving you 150 calories for lunch. Freezes well, obviously.
Ingredients
- 1 onion (135g)
- 1 stick celery (90g)
- 240g chestnut mushrooms
- 1 tablespoon (15 ml) sunflower oil
- 40g red lentils
- 150g yellow split peas
- 15g dried porcini (or other wild mushrooms)
- 3-4 cloves garlic (15g)
- 15ml dark soy sauce
- salt, pepper to taste
Directions
Use a large saucepan.
- Chop onion and celery finely, fry on low heat in oil until golden (10 mins).
- Chop mushrooms into small pieces and add them and the garlic and fry for 5 mins or so more. The mushrooms should release liquid, but if it all starts to stick and threatens to burn, add a bit of water.
- Wash yellow peas in 3 changes of water. Add to pan. Add enough water to cover and then about as much again. Bring to a simmer. Add red lentils and dried porcini.
- Cook until the peas are tender (30-45 minutes, depending on the hardness of your water).
- Use a wand blender to buzz it up to a consistency that’s to your taste – I like to keep a bit of texture in it rather than it being perfectly smooth.
Panama and Colombia 2013
Senegal 2012
A few random pics from our stay in Senegal
Van der Vens visit Oxford 2012
Photos from when Lucy and the Spirit Children visited us in 2012
Malaysia Jan 2012
We are the bourgeois climate refugees! Fleeing the European winter for a trip to Singapore, Penang in Malaysia, and Koh Lipe in Thailand.
Scotland August 2011
We drove up via Cumbria/Northumbria to stay by Hadrian’s Wall, but surely the strangest part of the trip was the Lonach Highland Games. We were particularly taken by the Qualifying Heavies.
Red-cooked pork recipe
Famous from the UEP Supply Chain Design team weeks for two years running. Following many requests, here’s the recipe in all its simplicity. It was tempting to give the quantities to serve 20, but a more family-sized serving is more practical.
The recipe serves six normal people (with some veg side dishes), or four hungry supply-chain consultants. You may think there is far too much soy sauce, but the quantity is correct. It mellows in the cooking process and the other ingredients take up the salt.
Ingredients
- 1.5kg pork belly
- 100ml dark soy sauce (I use Kikkoman)
- 450ml water
- 1 heaped tablespoon sugar
- 5cm long chunk of root ginger, peeled and thickly sliced
- 3 pieces star anise
- 60ml dry sherry or Chinese rice wine (e.g. shaoxing wine)
Directions
- Cut the pork into strips about 1 inch by 2-3 inches. You will need a very sharp knife to get through the rind. If your butcher has scored the rind, go with the flow of the score marks and that should make it easier.
- Bring a large pan of water to the boil and blanch the meat for 5 minutes. Drain and rinse the meat in cold water. This helps keep the sauce clear.
- In a clean casserole, put the blanched pork and all the other ingredients. The water should cover the meat – add more if necessary. Bring to the boil then turn the heat down low as possible and cook uncovered for 4 to 5 hours. The timing is very forgiving, but you will need at least 4 hours for all the stringy tissue in the pork to break down. Check regularly that the water is not running low and top up with boiling water from the kettle.
- Just before serving check for saltiness and sweetness – it sometimes needs an extra teaspoon of sugar or a dash of soy. Don’t do this until the very end though.
- Serve with plain rice and a veg dish. As the pork contains lots of soy, I usually cook the rice without salt to accompany this dish.
After the blanching stage, you could also do this in a slow cooker, in which case the water should be boiling when added to the pot. This would cook quite happily for 8 hours.
Snow tour of Britain December 2009
Yes, our famous tour of the frozen North. Winter is coming… if only we’d known.
First we went to Durham (this was before the snow) and stayed in the fantastic Victoria Inn. The snow started falling while we were in Edinburgh. Things were serious by the time we reached Aberdeenshire.
Even in the snow, Huntly Farmers’ Market was great.
There was an informal folk session at Lynn and Richard’s Christmas Party – more of this at the Tin Hut in Gartly.
Back in England it wasn’t much less snowy. We stayed at the Mardale Inn, which features in Withnail & I, of course.
