China – Shananigans Blog

Shananigans Chongqing Chicken

Some of my regular readers don’t eat red meat and have been asking for more recipes using chicken or fish. This Chongqing Ji Rou is especially for you Siobhan and there are more chicken recipes to come.
Chongqing is a mountainous city that lies east of the capital of Sichuan Province, Chengdu. It used to be part of Sichuan Province but is now a separate municipality. It’s one of the so-called “huo lu” furnace cities, like Turpan in Xinjiang Province which I visited with Shan’s family last summer. The response of residents to summer heat and humidity is to eat even more chillies and Sichuan pepper than their neighbours in Chengdu.
According to local lore the Chongqingers look down on the people of Chengdu for being lazy and out-of-date in their eating habits, while the inhabitants of Chengdu regard Chongqing food as coarse and crude and in need of the refining touch of Chengdu chefs. Chongqing Chicken – Chongqing Ji Rou – is a simple dish but what it lacks in complexity it makes up for in colour and flavour.
I had Chongqing Chicken in the China Sichuan restaurant in Dublin a few months back and loved its authentic ma la, hot and numbing flavours. It contained diced chicken pieces seasoned with coarsely ground Sichuan pepper and mixed with chunky cashew nuts and lots of dry and fresh chilli. The large pieces of dried Chinese chilli topped the serving dish and added texture and colour. The dish packed a powerful and delicious punch – just enough chilli heat perfectly balanced by the numbing and addictive Sichuan pepper, the chicken succulent and tender.

Chonqing Chicken — China Sichuan’s Chongqing Chicken

Dried Chinese chillies from Sichuan, sometimes known as “facing heaven” chillies because of the way the plants grow, are a lot milder than their more fiery Thai cousins but they are not intended to be eaten. Chinese people pick them up with their chopsticks, suck any sauce that adheres to them and pile the discarded chillies shells in a neat pyramid beside their rice bowl.
I couldn’t find a recipe in any of my Chinese cookbooks so this is my attempt at recreating Chongqing Chicken at home based on what I know of the principles for creating a Sichuan stir-fry that I learnt at Hutong Cuisine in Beijing. The results were pretty close to the original and went down well in our house last night. I could probably have used a little more dark soy sauce to deepen the colour but that’s a matter of taste. I made it with chicken thighs as I prefer the flavour and texture of the meat. It’s a particularly quick and easy dish to prepare.
Shananigans’ Chonqing Ji Rou

Chongqing Chicken — Shananigans’ Chongqing Ji Rou

Ingredients:

A good handful of cashew nuts
2 chicken breasts or 4 chicken thighs
1 tbs light soy sauce
1 tbs of Shaoxing rice wine
A pinch of salt
A thumb sized piece of ginger
3 cloves garlic
1 tsp of Sichuan pepper finely chopped
1 spring onion
I large fresh green chilli
A handful of Chinese dried red chillies
A dash of dark soy sauce
A dash of Chinese black vinegar
A pinch of sugar
Vegetable or groundnut oil

Preparation:

Roast the cashew nuts on a baking tray in the oven at 180 degrees C or dry fry in a hot wok until golden. This should take no more than 10 minutes but keep an eye on them as it is easy to burn them.
Meanwhile dice the chicken into small pieces (about 2 cm cubes). Mix first with salt and light soy sauce and then with the rice wine and let rest in a dish while you prepare the other ingredients.
Finely dice the ginger and garlic.
Finely chop the Sichuan peppercorns.
Finely slice the spring onions, separating the white and green parts.
Finely slice the green chilli.
Break the dried chillies into pieces about 2 cms long and discard any seeds.

Cooking:

Heat some oil in the wok to over a medium heat.
Fry the minced garlic, ginger, spring onion whites and Sichuan pepper for a few moments until they soften and the fragrances are released, being careful not to burn them.
Increase the heat to high and add in the marinated chicken and stir-fry over high heat until cooked (about 3 minutes).
Add in the spring onions greens and green chilli and stir-fry until heated through and the fragrance is rising from the pan (you don’t want the green chilli and spring onions to lose their texture).
Add the dried red chillies and cashew nuts and heat through quickly.
Add a spash of dark soy sauce and Chinese vinegar to darken the colour and a pinch of sugar to taste.
Serve with steamed rice.

Xinjiang Lamb with Cumin and Red Onion and Memories of Urumqi

Car seat… Check
Travel cot… Check
Buggy… Check
Random impulse buy of two outfits for 3 – 6 month baby boy from Next… Check
Purchase of four books of Adam’s Amazing Adventures by Benji Bennett to read Dermot to sleep… Check
Shan’s Irish entry visa… Check
Shane’s Beijing resident’s permit and visa to return to China… Check
Lively 3 month old grandson… now in possession of Chinese exit visa and Irish passport and watching his bags being packed to travel to Ireland for the first time this day week… CHECK!!

Impulse purchases — Dungarees on impulse

A big “thank you” to my Twitter friends who helped me borrow the equipment needed. We will be poised and ready to welcome the three of them home next Saturday. We can hardly contain our excitement. 🙂
Meanwhile it’s strange the way food can evoke memories and cumin combined with lamb is a case in point.
Cumin is grown in Xinjiang province, the vast north western province of China where Shan comes from, and where the Muslim Uighur street vendors use it whenever they cook their trade-mark lamb kebabs on portable barbecues. For me the distinctive aroma of cumin and lamb combined will be forever associated with our first trip to visit Shan’s family.
The other night I was playing around with a lamb version of Fuchsia Dunlop’s recipe in her Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook for beef with cumin when the scent of the cumin, mingled with sizzling red onion and lamb and flecked with ginger, garlic and chilli, plunged me back into a backstreet in Shan’s home town in Urumqi, Xinjiang province one hot, dry night early last July.
That day we had visited Tianchi – Heaven’s Lake which is perched at an elevation of 2,000 metres above the gobi desert plains below and lies 112 km east of Urumqi. A place apart, Tianchi deserves its Chinese AAAAA– level scenic spot status and its brochure description “like a shy girl deeply encircled by mountains you can even not find another one like it in the heavens and the world.” It also deserves, and will get, a blog post all of its own. Tianchi freezes over in the winter so it is only accessible in the summer months and is fed by the snows as the ice melts.

We had trekked for more than 2 hours up 2,500 steps and over a distance of about 7 kilometres to finally come over the crest of the mountain to the vista of the beautiful lake with its backdrop of snow-capped mountains. I had marvelled at the stamina of Shan, who was in the early stages of her pregnancy at that stage, and her little 5 year old niece Xuen Xuen who had matched us step for step.
It was 9.30 pm by the time we arrived back to the outskirts of Urumqi. Our driver asked, through Shan, what we felt like eating for dinner and having worked up an appetite on mountain air we said anything served with a cold beer (Shane and I had the simultaneous thought that we supposed a burger and chips would be out of the question!).
Our driver took us at our word and whisked us into Urumqi city centre through the rush hour traffic. On a bustling summer evening, this city of 4 million people was growing on me, revealing its own haphazard charm. Suddenly we were on a back street, just metres from the heart of the city, with run down apartment blocks on one side and a ramshackle building on the other which housed a pop-up restaurant on the ground floor spilling over on to the street and serving only kebabs (“chuan’r”) and beer.

This was one of those places you would never find without insider knowledge, or if you stumbled upon it it’s most likely that you wouldn’t risk eating there. It doesn’t have a name but it was our driver’s local and, during the summer, the eating and drinking goes on there until the early hours on plastic tables strung along the side of the street. The young couple who run it come down from further north near the Mongolian border for the summer months and build up their reserves from the takings to survive the harsh, bitterly cold winters.

Our driver brought us inside to pick our chuan’r and they were dusted with a spice mix of cumin and chilli, cooked on barbecues outside and brought on platters to our table with large bottles of beer – water and tea were not available.

The selection of chuan’r for our table of 10 included: duck pieces, whole small lake fish, squid, crab sticks, chicken wings, chicken stomach, chicken pieces with soft bone, blood (a kind of black pudding), courgettes, green beans, leeks, aubergines, potatoes bread and of course lamb, all dusted with spices. The vegetables and bread were sliced thin like crisps and cooked over the barbecue.

The Gao family — Xuen Xuen and her Mum and Dad enjoying the food

This was delicious food, zingy fresh, all char-grilled without oil and an experience of street food we would never have had without local insight. As the sun finally set and the scent of cumin and chilli wafted across to us on the night air, the Chinese chattered on around us and the cold, weak beer lulled us into that particular sense of peaceful wellbeing that only healthy exercise followed by a good meal can produce.

Eating out Urumi style — Eating out Urumqi style

At the end the owner simply counted up the sticks – long ones for meat, medium ones for fish and short ones for vegetable and calculate the total bill at 2 or 3 RMB per stick. The bill for the lot, for 10 people including beer came to around €35.
Before we left, the owners insisted on having their photos taken with us as the first westerners ever to eat there while the other locals wanted to know all about us. Ireland is now very popular in that part of the city of Urumqi and in a small village near the Mongolian border.

So in memory of that magical evening in Urumqi and with thanks to Fuchsia Dunlop for the inspiration, here’s my recipe for lamb with cumin.

Lamb with Cumin – zi ran yang rou

Ingredients:
Continue reading

Stir-fried Beef with Tianjin Preserved Vegetables and Leeks

A quick post this as my quest continues to find new ways of using lesser known cuts of meat to prepare weekday family meals, Chinese style.
Bavette of beef was one of the cuts I discovered at the Butchery Demonstration given by James Whelan Butchers in Avoca Food Market, Monkstown. It comes from the flank or belly muscle of the cow and I first used it to make Hunan Style Crispy Beef. I was blown away by how well this relatively cheap cut responds to fast stir-frying with minimal marinading and I wondered if it was a fluke.
So in order to test the theory that almost any Chinese recipe requiring fillet or sirloin beef can be made with bavette, I decided to adapt a recipe from Ken Hom for stir-fried fillet beef with Sichuan preserved vegetables which features in Exploring China – A Culinary Adventure. I haven’t yet found Sichuan preserved vegetable in Dublin but I have used Tianjin preserved vegetable – dong cai – as a substitute. This salted mustard green is sold in squat earthenware jars and is readily available in Asian food markets and some speciality stores. It keeps for ages so a jar goes a long way. The 600g jar costs €1.75 in the Asia Market in Drury St., Dublin.

I have used it before in the vegetarian version of fried green beans and I love its crunchy texture. It is very salty and it should be rinsed well and squeezed dry before use. I also had a leek left over from the weekend when I cooked Short Beef Ribs Chinese style. And so the dish below was born.
Stir-fried Beef with Tianjin Preserved Vegetables, Leeks and Noodles

Monday night Stir-fried Beef with Noodles

Serves 2 – 4
Continue reading

Short Beef Ribs with Red Cabbage and Fondant Potatoes

You’ve got to love Twitter. This week I ordered a “selection box” of cheaper cuts of meat from James Whelan Butchers to practice what I learned from Paul Flynn at the Tannery Cookery School last week and by attending the Butchery Demonstration at Avoca, Monkstown. So I had ordered a ham hock to make terrine, bavette of beef for stir fries, pork cheeks to try replicate a dish of Paul’s that I love and a Jacobs Ladder – short beef ribs.
Now I’ve only used short beef ribs once before to make the stock for my Wagyu hotpot using a recipe from Audrea of Tastefully Yours but I was curious to see if there was another way of using the cut that would get even more value from this tasty meat. So I put out a Friday afternoon appeal on Twitter and several of my friends came back with suggestions – Aoife, Imen, Helena – all with interesting recipes.
One suggestion caught my eye. It was from Tom Walsh the Head Chef at the Samphire Restaurant at the Waterside, Donobate. I haven’t met Tom and I haven’t yet visited his restaurant but I love his philosophy – classical French cuisine with a modern twist, supporting businesses in the community and sourcing all ingredients locally including meat, vegetables and fish and preparing seasonal menus, making the most of what is available at different times of the year. Samphire, a wild shoreline, vegetable growing on the doorstep of the restaurant perched on the beautiful coastline of north Dublin, provided a name that resonates with the place and the approach he adopts. It’s also one of my favourite ingredients and sums up the search for the authentic and the local which influences my own amateur approach to cooking.
Anyway Tom’s suggestion for the Jacob’s Ladder went something like this:
“Get it into a nice marinade of hoisin with chilli added and some stock. Bed of veg. Nice bit of garlic.”
“Slowly cooked at 120 – 140, covered so it’s basted for a long period until tender.”
“After cooking, can be roasted up to give a lovely robust and meaty flavour, texture. Some fondant potatoes and red cabbage #goforit.”
So go for it I did and, in the process, I came across a recipe for DongPo Pork in Exploring China a Culinary Adventure and I tweaked the braising liquid in that recipe for my Jacobs Ladder.
According to legend, Su DongPo was an important official from Hangzhou who was sent pork by his grateful people. Hangzhou is a city on the Yangtze River Delta about 180 km southwest of Shanghai. It is located in an area of great natural beauty and has been one of the most prosperous cities of China for over a 1,000 years. Being a nice guy, DongPo instructed his cooks to prepare the pork, share it with his workers and serve it with rice wine. Somewhere along the way the message got garbled and the cooks added the wine to the dish. And so this classic dish was born, of which there are almost as many variations as there are Chinese cooks. My version below uses beef instead of pork and a higher concentration of hoisin sauce. It is delicious.
Twice-cooked Short Beef Ribs (Jacob’s Ladder), DongPo Style

Red Braised Lamb Stew

The arrival of Shan’s Mum in Beijing from her home in Urumqi in Xinjiang Autonomous Region has brought back memories of our visit last Summer to that intriguing area. I will be writing of some of our experiences there over coming days.

Food display — This and That Satisfactory Supermarket

In Urumqi and throughout the region the influence of the Uighur people, who are Turkic speaking Sunni Muslims, is very evident. Lamb dominates the local diet and the nomadic history of other Turkic minorities who live in the area – the Kazakhs and the Kirgiz for instance – is also evident in the food which has echoes of east and west. Their noodles and dumpling link them with the wheat flour – mian – eaters of northern China, with its resonances of Italian pasta. Their spice stalls sell all my Chinese favourites like Sichuan pepper and star anise but also cardamon, cinnamon, cumin, saffron and other aromatic flavours more commonly associated with Central Asia and the middle east and there are raisins and other dried fruits in abundance
They love their tea but their nomadic heritage is evident in their fondness for yoghurt and other dairy foods. These dietary preferences have influenced the Han Chinese too. Shan’s Mum’s breakfast tipple is milky, salted tea. Their vegetables include carrots, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, cabbage, peppers. Their golden naan bread makes you feel you have stumbled into a Persia of another era. This is a melting pot of cuisines with its own unique characteristics.

Lamb biryani — Lamb biriyani served with yoghurt

That first day we spent there we had lunch in a Uighur restaurant beside the “This and That Satisfactory Chain Supermarket” – lamb kebabs with sesame seeds – chuan’r – a biryani rice dish with lamb and a dish of lamb with pasta like Shan’s Xinjiang spaghetti with lamb. We washed it down with a yoghurt drink and, of course, tea.
Continue reading

Crispy Chilli Beef

Every now and again I am about to write a blog post about one aspect of Chinese cooking and I get diverted by another idea. This is one such occasion.

Since we returned from China in early July, Chinese takeaways have been banned in our house but there’s one particular dish I’ve had a hankering for recently. When I used to give in and order takeaway, crispy chilli beef was alway a favourite, because of it’s rich, tangy flavour, but no sooner would I have eaten it than I would regret it as the heavy batter settled on my stomach and my wheat intolerance kicked in. Recently I’ve being thinking of ways to give this takeaway staple a lighter, Shananigans makeover and, after several half-successful attempts, I finally got it right a few nights ago.
I’m not sure of the origins of this dish – I suspect it’s not pure Sichuan or Hunan but a European adapatation. While this may not be as healthy as some of the dishes I cook, I would be confident that it’s a lot lower in fat and carbohydrate content than some of its takeout counterparts and it certainly passes the taste test, with no added MSG or gloopy sauces.
I love shopping in neighbourhood shops and, on weekdays, when I am commuting in and out of the city centre of Dublin, Donnybrook is a perfect staging point on my bus journey home. Dunnes of Donnybrook, recently awarded Star Shop of the Year by the Associated Craft Butchers of Ireland, and Roy Fox Gourmet Food can provide, between them, all the meat, vegetables and condiments I need. Roy Fox is particularly good on stocks of Asian spices, sauces and noodles and carries many of the items I usually have to seek out in an Asian Market – a boon for those daunted by the overwhelming range of stock in those markets.

Credit where due at Dunnes of Donnybrook

So on the way home from town I picked up a few excellent fillet steaks from Fintan Dunne and my vegetables from Roy Fox. This is what I did with them:
Shananigans Crispy Chilli Beef – Xiang ciu niu rou pian – 香脆牛肉片
Serves 3 – 4
Continue reading

Chairman Mao's Red-braised Pork

Let me start by saying I love this dish, with a passion. There is something about the unctuous golden fat and the carmelised, melting pork which create a taste sensation – umami at its best. I didn’t think it would be possible to create such aromatic magic in a relatively short time with a cut of meat – belly of pork – that often requires long slow cooking.
It was Joanne (@dudara) who first alerted me to the cuisine of the southern Chinese province of Hunan and suggested we seek it out when we were in Beijing last June. Hunan is the region Mao Zedong came from. It is a region of bold, spicy flavours, fond of its chillies, and the fiery food seems to shape the spirit of its inhabitants. We didn’t manage to track down a Hunan restaurant in Beijing but, when I got back, Joanne encouraged me to get hold of of Fucshia Dunlop‘s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, a seminal book on the food of that region.
When I was in London recently, she pointed me in the direction of Ba Shan Restaurant at 24 Romilly Street, London W1. Sometimes referred to as Bashan, it has a menu of Hunan dishes and is a sister restaurant to the nearby Sichuan Bar Shu. Fuchsia Dunlop advised both restaurants on their menus and Ba Shan features a number of dishes based on those in her book. See Jay Rayner’s review here.
Laoise (@cuisinegenie) joined me for dinner and we tried Chairman Mao’s red-braised pork which is one of the signature dishes of the region. The recipe below, which features in a Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, came from Mao Anping, a nephew of Chairman Mao. Mao Zedong loved this dish and allegedly ate 2 bowls of it a day to keep his intellect in shape, insisting on it being prepared for him in Beijing.
The Chinese like to attribute medicinal properties to every dish but, to me, this is just aromatic, sticky, treacly and delicious. I was determined to try it out myself and the result was sublime. I actually prefer the recipe below to the version I tasted in Ba Shan which may have been adapted for restaurant use.
Now three months into the blog, most of the recipes I post are Shan’s or my own but, when I started out, I asked Fuchsia Dunlop’s permission to re-print a few recipes from her books. I hope that sharing with you this particular recipe, which is just too perfect to mess with, will encourage you to buy the book which is packed full of Hunan delights.
To make the dish I used a beautiful piece of Irish belly of pork, chosen for me by Fintan at Dunne’s of Donnybrook, Dublin 4 which was recently awarded the Star Shop of the Year by the Associated Craft Butchers of Ireland.
Chairman Mao’s Red-braised Pork – mao shi hong shao rou – 毛氏红烧肉

Chairman Mao's Pork — Chairman Mao’s Pork

Lamb and Vegetable Stir-fry

A couple of my posts recently have been about special occasion food that requires a bit of extra effort, long, slow cooking or (sometimes) expensive ingredients, such as the last post Shananigans’ Wagyu Stew.
But the joy of Chinese cooking is the ease with which you can use cheap and readily available ingredients to whip together, in minutes, a tasty stir-fry that tickles your taste buds on a miserable autumn evening. So I’m posting this recipe as an example of how you can use up left-over vegetables to produce a nourishing weekday meal requiring little or no meat.
Yesterday I had friends to dinner and, as one of my guests can’t digest spicy food at the moment, I made Shan’s Xinjiang Spaghetti with Lamb, using peppers instead of chilli and mange touts instead of green beans, as I couldn’t find any Irish green beans over the weekend. So tonight I had a small amount un-cooked lamb left over and odds and ends of vegetables. The recipe that follows is something of a cross between Shan’s Xinjiang Spaghetti and Irish Vegetable Chow Mein. Play around with it, using whatever you have to hand, but remember what Shan has taught me – the importance of having a variety of colour and textures on the plate to get a range of nutrients and to excite the palate.

Shananigans’ Lamb and Vegetable Stir-fry – yang rou chao shu cai – 羊肉炒蔬菜

Serves 2 – 3
Continue reading

Wagyu Steak Naoki Style

“The Summer Palace is a sprawling imperial encampment of temples, pavilions and halls set in a park around the vast Kumming Lake. The imperial family once used this wonderland of noble follies as a summer residence. If the weather is is fine, a visit here can make for a memorable day…” Thus said my favourite guide book to China from National Geographic Traveller (and by the way I strongly recommend National Geographic Guide Books for those who would rather a traveller than a tourist be). We had missed it on our winter visit to Beijing 5 years ago, so last July we set out with Claire and Mike, 11 km north west of Central Beijing, expecting something like this:

Instead we endured one of those misty, smoggy Beijing days when it was hard to appreciate fully the beauty of the place.

A murky day at the Summer Palace — A murky day at Kumming Lake

I somehow doubt that the Imperial family of old would have tolerated the smog of Beijing extending to their summer hideaway. All the same the elaborate Marble Boat and the views from the Pagoda of Buddhist Fragrance conveyed a sense of the decadence and sumptuousness of the glittering playground it must once have been.

We had hoped to visit the restaurant at the Aman Resort at the Summer Palace which had been recommended to me by Twitter friend @paulshoebox but we didn’t manage it this time around.A few weeks ago I cooked @Pat_Whelan ‘s very special Wagyu beef from his herd at Garrentemple, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary for the first time,. The meat is high in omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids as a result of its intense marbling. It is also significantly lower in saturated fat and higher in healthy monounsaturated fat making it far healthier than any other breed of beef available on the market. The beef is dry-aged for a minimum of 21 days.Before deciding how to prepare it I did lots of research by Twitter and I finally settled on making a Shabu Shabu hotpot which was very successful. But there were those, including Shane’s foodie friend and restaurant reviewer Carl Hayward in Beijing, who felt a better way to treat this delicate and precious beef would be to pan fry it as a steak.
Last weekend we were celebrating, long distance, the official marriage of Shane and Shan in China so I decided it was a sufficiently special occasion to be an excuse for purchasing some strip loin Wagyu steaks on line from James Whelan’s Butchers. This time I decided to use the method Carl learned when he attended a cooking class with, and subsequently interviewed, Japanese chef Naoki Okumura who, as it happens, is the executive chef at the Japanese restaurant in the Aman Resort at Summer Palace. Carl’s interview was published in That’s Beijing and you can read it here. Continue reading

A kind of a wistful post – YMing, Soho, London

This isn’t quite the post I intended uploading while here in London. You see I have two ready to go – one about my second attempt at cooking @Pat_whelan ‘s famous wagyu beef and another from my daughter Claire about her and Mike ‘s visit to the famous Red Lantern Vietnamese restaurant in Sydney (it’s called delegation).
But yesterday Shane and Shan got officially married in Changchun, Jilin Province, China. In a manner reminiscent of the trip to Bethlehem, they had to travel there, an 8 hour fast train journey north of Beijing, to register the marriage because that is where Shan went to university and counts as her place of residence. I’m waiting for Shane to recount the full, entertaining story of the bureaucracy involved.

Shane & Shan’s official marriage cert photo

And while this was really only a formality – they were already married in their hearts and the real celebration of their union will be with one helluva a party in Ireland late next year – we all still felt the emotion of it when the moment came and it was hard not to be there. He is my baby after all and it only seems the other day that I could never imagine him out of my sight and now here he is, all grown up, married, and shortly to be a father himself.
So tonight I found myself alone in London, after attending a meeting near St Paul’s Cathedral, and it seemed appropriate to mark their special occasion with a meal in a Chinese restaurant here, one that specialises in the type of north-eastern cooking that Shan has been trying to teach me and which can’t be found in Dublin.

St. Paul's Cathedral — St Paul’s Cathedral

I did my homework and, thanks to Cuisine Genie (Laoise Casey) who lives here in London with her Mr. Moustache, I got a recommendation for YMing in Greek Street which had been reviewed back in 2000 by the famous Matthew Fort of the Guardian. While I was at the airport in Dublin at lunch time I sent an email to the restaurant to see if I could get a table at 10 pm tonight for a quick dinner and, yes, I did mention that my son had married in China yesterday. I got an immediate response from Christine Yau, the proprietor, to say they where looking forward to seeing me.
By the time my meeting was over I was tired and wondered should I just head back to the hotel for an early night but I took a taxi to Tottenham Court Road, the journey enlivened by the cabbie explaining to his girlfriend via his hand-held mobile, that he had nearly collapsed and fainted over his steering wheel a short while earlier… not re-assuring.

The cabbie dropped me at the corner of Greek Street and I liked YMing on sight – its duck egg blue exterior and it’s clean, fresh lines. The restaurant was quietening down after a busy night and a large party were just exiting. Christine wasn’t there but William, the head waiter, greeted me by name like an old friend and planted a glass of pink champagne in my hand before I was in the door.
I asked William’s advice on a simple appetiser and he suggested a mixture of cauliflower and prawns with garlic and chilli as a starter. I had a eureka moment with this as the flavourings – the hint of Sichuan pepper, balanced with chilli, garlic and spring onion, the cauliflower and prawns lightly battered in potato flour then quickly deep fried had EXACTLY the same effect on my tastebuds as the Sichuan Seafood Duncannon style which is my recipe included in Goodall’s Modern Irish Cookbook to be launched next week. I would never have thought of cooking cauliflower florets this way but the crunch of the cauliflower was perfect with the light crisp batter and the sour, salt spices, so far from the soggy, watery cauliflower we have sometimes been served in Ireland. I think, just maybe, I could reproduce this dish.

For a main course I had Fiery Young Lamb served with rice laced with fresh mint – the mint cut the fiery heat of the red and green chillies which were scattered generously through the thin slices of lamb. Only the yellow pepper was safe to eat. A fresh and delicious dish.

I had had enough by then but William insisted on a little chocolate – a chinese looking concoction which was quite delicious arrived at my table and it was…. drumroll… deep fried Mars bar. Hardly authentic Chinese but a lot lighter than your usual Mars bar and sure… I was celebrating.

it was getting late by this stage and the last few customers were drifting off. I asked for the bill and it was presented with a flourish and it was… zero… just a smiley face :-)… courtesy of Christine Yau. I hadn’t expected or wanted this and their generosity of spirit made me cry. The four or five staff left on duty gathered around to smile and nod and wish me well (and advise me on the safe tube station to go to).
For me, the last few days have been about welcoming our lovely daughter-in-law Shan into our extended global Irish family. In that moment in YMing I realised the reverse is also true. I have suddenly become part of a global Chinese community where family is important and where the ties that bind extend beyond borders, beyond continents even, into the interconnectedness of race and culture and where they appreciate the importance of ritual and of marking the occasion.
Thank you YMing.