I Made Food!

I made roast broccolini and so can you

Roasting is this culinary magic trick that makes everything taste fantastic. I’d like to try a roast roast chicken, I think that would be amazing.

Take a bunch of a vegetable. In this case broccolini, which is a cross between broccoli and Mussolini. Don’t wash it, but just rub the dirt and bits off. You could wash it but then you have to dry it and who has time? 

Throw on a baking tray, sign your name with oil and add the obligatory salt and pepper. Whack in a fairly hot (220-ish?) oven for 20 minutes, or until the sprout bits are almost too cooked and the stalks are crispy and tender and a little brown. 

Eat all of it. I had it with pasta and a tomato sauce, but it’d be lovely with just a squeeze of lemon. Lemon is another magic trick that makes everything taste a little better. By my logic—unimpeachable as it is—a roast lemon would be something to write home about.  

So good you won’t even know it’s a vegetable.

Inspired by this.

I made smashed cucumbers and so can you

If you want to impress someone you could call them pai huang gua.

I never used to like cucumbers or pickles for that matter. But one brave day I actually ate the token cheeseburger pickle as opposed to flinging it away like a leprous insult. And from there I embraced all things pickled. How could you not—crispy, vinegarie, gorgeous. Eventually I started to like cucumbers, through the gentle indoctrination of the other, although mostly when they’re with something—in a salad, as a cool sauce, or as they here, as an awesome side dish. 

You take however many cucumbers you want. One? Twenty? This is the fun bit: cover them with something—I use a plastic chopping board—and then smash smash smash them. They’ll split open, as I suppose I would were I brutally assaulted. Chop them up into little peices. Pop in a mixing bowl, add a sprinkling of salt and leave them for the amount of time it takes you to count up to 1800. 

Return! Your cucumbers need you. They are needy little things, but you are a kind cook and perhaps a sensitive lover. Drain off all the gunky salty water. Now! Make a dressing: finely sliced hot red chillies, lots of smooshed garlic, a few tablespoons of rice wine vinegar, some sugar and finally a few splashes of sesame oil. Mix this up and let it hang out. Then pour on the assaulted cucumbers and serve. 

Really great. Sweet, spicy, vinegary, even a little nutty. They go well with anything, such as a ham, colby and tomato toasted sandwich 

Recipe from Fuchsia Dunlop’s ‘Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook’. It has a red cover, so it must be good. Hunan province sounds tasty.