let me just say that beef, carrots, celery, coconut milk, thai red curry paste and ang zhao (fermented red wine lees, or something equally unromantic-sounding - english is such a butchery at times) is an awesome combination.

the only thing more awesome than that right now would be beef satay and ketupat hot off the satay grill.

also, song que on kingsland road is THE PLACE for vietnamese food. mmmmm

i love how everything rises to this fever pitch and then suddenly retreats leaving a great big gaping emptiness where revision notes and textbooks used to be.

obviously naturre abhors a vacuum, but sleep alcohol and food fills that hole up pretty good. as does just pottering around in my pyjamas till 4 in the afternoon.

now it’s off into town to get, amongst other things, sesame oil, dried mushrooms, tau kee, tau hu and tau pok. oh, and maybe peanut sauce too if they have it (because i’m too lazy to make my own). i’m very excited about what i’m going to do with it all.

there shall be celebrating this weekend, squeezed in just before the 15 day window is up. i’ve told everyone to bring food or wine and mandarin oranges, so even if we run out of food, at least we’ll be drunk and our hands have something to do peeling oranges.

chocolate flavoured vitasoy here i come!

ok dudes.

so yesterday i had my property law and practice exam, and i blitzed through it like a house on fire and finished with half an hour to spare. half an hour. i thought i’d missed out a 25mark question so i had a full-on panic-flip attack, and then realised that i’m just much too intelligent for the exam. *smirk*

right.

and then we had hainanese chicken rice for dinner at the best friend’s. maaaaan i missed chicken rice. no one believed me when i said wee nam kee sells great chicken rice. everyone can tell you about boon tong kee, but that is so populist. i prefer my wee nam kee, thankyouverymuch. we had to make do with sambal oelek (from tesco’s no less, impressed c’est moi) with garlic and lime as a stand-in for real chicken rice chilli. like my grandma makes, a bottle of which is living in my fridge for special occasions. mmmmm…

and we made the chicken from scratch. none of that prima chicken rice paste nonsense. ok, well, not exactly we. i was sous chef, chopping up the garlic and ginger and eating goat’s cheese on jacob’s crackers in-between soaking the chicken in ice-cold water and giving them the best massage ever in sesame oil. but, without my assistance, it would never have happened. i am/was integral to the process, okayyy.

it’s such a shame that my boyfriend doesn’t eat meat. most of the great stuff i remember from my grandmother’s kitchen involves meat in one form or another, so you can say that it rather cramps my style. no matter, meat is not essential to south-east asian cooking. it’s time to find a recipe for kick-ass sayur lodeh.

being gluten- and lactose-intolerant, eating and drinking and grocery shopping is complicated.

most people don’t understand what gluten is, and so i simplify matters by telling them that i can’t eat wheat or flour. then they sort of blink really slowly and ask me to repeat myself.

but it’s not just wheat. it’s oats and barley and rye and a great big number of other grains that are suspect. gluten is the protein in grains that make the dough springy and spongy, so highly tensile bread products like bagels are basically gluten factories. even when it’s not in bread or bread-products, gluten still gets into everything somehow or other. even corn flakes and soya sauce.

and even though being lactose-intolerant is a much easier concept for people to understand, apart from big coffee chains and/or more upmarket places that cater to a more upmarket crowd, non-dairy milk is hard to come by if i’m thinking of drinking some coffee. furthermore, i’m not too big a fan of soy milk anymore, which makes the hunt for a cup of coffee with rice milk not made by me and which i’d be willing to pay good money for even harder.

it also makes being invited to dinner parties a nightmare, because i have no idea what they’re going to make. pasta? pizza? cous cous? falafel? noodles? gravy? sauce? cake? biscuits? custard? cream? ice cream? and i don’t think it’s polite to refuse food that someone’s cooked for me. and it makes me feel like a twat calling someone up the day before and telling them that i’m gluten- and lactose-intolerant and expect a special meal for myself.

it’s hard enough at my dinner parties to make separate dishes for non-/meat-eating guests and it’s just one ingredient. can you imagine if someone was making pasta in a cream sauce, with a chocolate cake for dessert, for 7 other people and i was the only one who had to eat something else?

anyway, as hard as it is, i’m rather thankful that up till now i’m only still intolerant of gluten and lactose, and not allergic. i won’t die or break out in hives or have a severe physically manifested reaction if i do eat things that contain gluten or lactose. i indulge in ice-cream sometimes, and i eat sandwiches for lunch when there’s nothing else available, and i really love pasta. it also means that whilst i might not be doing the best thing to my body and my hosts toilets, i don’t absolutely have to eat a special meal by myself when i go to dinner parties.

and i’m really lucky to be chinese and have a natural tendency towards the eating of rice and non-creamy things. the things i can do with rice. i eat it steamed, cold, warm, in salads, with other dishes, baked, in soup, as porridge, etc. i can eat rice for all 3 meals in a day.

it’s also probably a good thing that supermarkets are realising the potential (financially) of gluten- and lactose-free foods, and so i can get things like rice spaghetti, rice milk and gluten-free breads and flour quite easily. the organic shop round the corner also has a wide range of things that are gluten-/lactose-free.

but probably the best thing that comes out of all this is the fact that with these special dietary requirements, almost all convenience foods are no longer attractive to me because whilst they may look real pretty on the box, the ingredients list just makes me go ‘eurgh’ at the wheat flour and ‘eurgh’ at the milk and then ‘eeeurgh’ at the nutritional information panel. as a result, out of necessity, i buy lots of fresh ingredients and cook most of my own meals and end up eating pretty healthily incidentally.

usually, i love shopping for food.

today, i went to iceland (the supermarket, not the country) because i just wanted something to shove into the oven, ignore for 20mins, and eat. but whilst walking around the store’s too narrow aisles, its haphazard display shelves, it’s rows upon rows of too-cheap-too-be-possibly-any-good-for-me food, it’s fridges full of ‘re-shaped’ or ‘re-formed’ meat and fish and readymeals, i felt claustrophobic and sick to my stomach.

i put down the tub of yoghurt i’d picked up, and literally fled the scene.

i hate iceland.

it’s really cheap and supposedly good value for money, but the quality of the food is so poor that i’d rather eat plain rice and pork floss than have to buy my groceries from there. and the weird thing is, the fresh vegetables are more expensive than in other places, but the meat products are at rock-bottom prices.

now, either they’re seriously cutting their profits, or the meat isn’t really meat but mechanically retrieved bits of carcass, offal, skin, bone and marrow (or worse).

yuck.

this is why whenever i buy meat products like sausages, i examine the labels and ingredients list as if my life depended on it. my mom warned me against sausages and luncheon meat because of their high salt and sulphite content that supposedly lead to cancer, but i’m not bothered by cancer-causing sausages, really. i’m more concerned with avoiding eating hoof and eyeball.

and this is why i try only to buy meat-meat. and also why i often have to think twice about buying mince-meat, even though i really seriously crave meatballs or wontons or burgers. you never know what goes into the meat-grinder.

*shiver*

anyway, enough of this meat evangelism.

i’m starting to become this crazy food fascist and its scaring me. i need to stop watching television programmes and reading books by hugh fearnley-whittingstall, nigel slater, anthony bourdain et al.

despite the inarguable better-ness of fairly priced and seasonal food, they are making my bank balance look very undernourished.

* the iceland slogan is ‘that’s why mum’s gone to iceland‘. geddit?

can i just say, that i absolutely love bak kut teh, and why i don’t make it more often since those spice-packs are so readily available, i really don’t know.

i’m still waiting for my rice to finish steaming, and for my pork-ribs to get tenderer, but i’ve had some sneaky sips and ohmygod i love love love!

the ribs are the biggest i’ve bought so far EVAR - they’re longer than my 15cm ruler - and i only just about managed to manipulate them into my cast-iron pot (i figured since i didn’t have a claypot, cast-iron would be an adequate replacement). i bought these ribs from a butcher at broadway market, and it’s highly likely that these are from a much older pig than those from the supermarkets. i’m quite pleased about that - not just because i get more rib, but i just like the thought of a more developed pig.

i scoured all the fruit and veg stalls at the market, but none of them stocked watercress (i know they’re not in season, not particularly popular in england, but still, a girl could hope.). that was a terrible disappointment, and a great gaping hole in my perfect pork-rib soup dish.

so i went to the toilets in The Dove and had a good cry.

no. i didn’t. instead i walked into broadway books and bought (1) my name is red, by orhan pamuk, (2) the mandarins, by simone de beauvoir and (3) freakonomics, by steven d. levitt and stephen j. dubner. half my book tokens used up, another £20 worth of books to go!

i really like broadway market on cold and bright saturdays. i like it even more with a cup of coffee, croissants and a paper.

this shit is scary!

i’ve known about the ability of soya to mimic hormones for a long time, but it never really registered as a health risk because i’m chinese and we eat tofu and drink tau huay and dip everything in soya sauce.

but fermented soy and non-fermented soy are two different things, eh? like wine and vinegar, potato and vodka, etc.

so, yeah. lactose- and gluten- intolerant as i am, i have had to switch to rice milk. and it’s surprisingly good. not as chalky as soy milk, and very light and easy to digest. i might have to try other brands, but so far i’ve been drinking Rice Dream Original, and it’s been pretty good-going for the last month or so.

the difficult thing is finding cafes and coffeeshops that serve rice milk, and also finding rice milk substitutes for cream and yoghurt, because there isn’t that big a market for such stuff (as compared to soy ones) since most people immediately choose soy over milk if they’re lactose-intolerant, and so most coffee places have the soy option, but nothing else. same story with cream and custard and yoghurt.

i think i’ll have to visit the organic shop to check out their full rice milk selection, and if their collection seems paltry, the internet is my next best friend.