The other day, I got an email from my web host telling me that I was about to auto-pay for another two years. I pay a shocking amount of money to keep my various dormant blogs alive, so I probably should at least attempt to do something with them- something I have failed to do for the past 7 or so years.

I have decided to justify this ridiculous and pointless expenditure by starting a project wherein I attempt to document what I have been doing during the past year of Plague Time. Namely, baking obscure yeast breads based on recipes found in the deepest, darkest corners of the internet’s international food blogs and YouTube videos.

Some are in English, some are parsed using Google Translate. Some are videos with dubious subtitled translations.

I really like the murkiness of communication. The vague and unfamiliar tools, resources, methods, points of reference.

The ones that measure ingredients in water glasses and sugar spoons.

The ones that state ‘bake in a tandir until ready’ without any qualifying information.

The ones that say to add flour until the dough is not too sticky- but also not too hard. Similarly, knead the dough until it is the proper consistency.

One of the breads I have been experimenting with quite extensively has been the Uzbek non– ‘non’ being basically the Uzbek word for bread, along the lines of a South Asian naan. To say non bread, then, is to be redundant, along the lines of chay tea or pilav rice.

It also does not mean, as I have had to explain repeatedly, that it is a non-bread, a bread that is not bread. It is a non. It is a bread.

There are apparently many kinds of non, and the vagueness and variability of the recipes I delved into led me down all sorts of curious, experimental paths.

Some have water. Some have milk. Some have sugar. Some don’t.

Some have whole wheat flour, in part or entirely. Some have a mix of several flours, or just bread flour.

Some add chunks of unnamed animal fat in the mix.

Some are brushed in egg or milk or oil or butter.

Some are topped with sesame, some nigella seed, some mashed raw onions in egg yolk and yogurt.

Some are as broad as a large, fat pizza, and some are divided up into (almost every time) 4 smaller boules.

They all look like enormous plump bagels whose centres weren’t quite pushed through, where the dough in the middle is squashed down brutally with firm fingertips and pin-pricked by a chekich bread stamp into pretty patterns. My bread stamp is still in the mail (Uzbek Post is very slow in plague times) so I’ve been using fork tines with varying results.

My favourite version comes from a website that no longer exists. Aside from the unfortunate inability for me to give properly linked credit where credit is due (thank you, silkroadchef!), it’s no loss- the inscrutable recipe went something like this (paraphrased):

Uzbek Nan Bread (2015)

Ingredients: flour, warm water or milk (unspecified quantity of dry to liquid, noting ratio roughly 1.5 to 1 by weight or 3 to 1 by volume), yeast, sugar salt.

Directions: Add flour to bowl, make hollow. Fill hollow with yeast, liquid, sugar, salt. Stir and wait for froth. Knead 10 min. Rest 40 min. Knead briefly and shape into round (how high?? how wide??). Rest 15 min. Shape into Uzbek non shape. Bake on preheated stone at 200C.

https://silkroadchef.com/2015/12/14/uzbek-nan-bread/ (domain currently expired)

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Uzbek Non

Variations on a theme: A detailed overview of how to make Uzbek non, drawn from a dozen conflicting internet sources.

Keyword Baking, Dough, Uzbek, Yeast Breads

Author MaryAnne

Ingredients

• 600 grams flour Bread flour works best for me, but a mix of all-purpose and atta also works.
• 400 grams warm water Warm milk is also an option, or a mix of both.
• 2 tsp yeast Dry or instant yeast both work- around 7 grams.
• 1 tsp salt Around 5 grams, for those weighing things.
• 1 tsp olive oil Oil is optional but nice.
• 1 tsp sugar Somehow the sugar has been optional, depending on the recipes I've used.
• Enough oil, melted butter, beaten egg or milk for brushing
• Nigella seeds or sesame seeds for topping

Instructions

• Add flour to bowl and dig a well in the centre.
• Pour liquid, yeast, salt, sugar (if using) and oil (if using) into the well and give it a tiny stir so a little flour gets mixed into it. Let it sit for around 5 minutes.
• Mix the liquids into the flour, then knead it for 10 minutes. Set a timer, put on some music, and knead until it feels smooth and stretchy.
• Let it rise until it is doubled. This may take any time between 40 minutes and 2 hours, depending on your room temperature. In winter, it takes my dough 2 hours, sitting on the hot water tank.
• Preheat oven to around 220°C — though I have had it at 200° and 240°, variously. If you have a cast iron flat-pan or a baking stone, put it in now.
• Place risen dough on a floured surface and shape it into a round- or, alternately, cut it into 4 smaller rounds. Press the round down gently with your hand so that it is about as thick as your wrist. Let the round(s) sit and rest for 15 minutes while the oven and baking stone heat.
• Press an indentation in the centre of the flattened ball, leaving a ridge the width of the length of your thumb(ish). Poke lots of tiny holes in the indented centre with a fork- or with a chekich, if Uzbek Postal services are working properly. Brush with beaten egg or milk or oil or nothing. Sprinkle with sesame or nigella or nothing.
• Bake for 15-20 minutes. Let cool before tearing into them.

Reference list (abridged)

• Food 52

• My Ginger Garlic Kitchen

• Instructables

• Natassja Can Cook (video)

• Eat the World (video)

• Mazar Cuisine (video)

A few weeks ago, my schedule at work changed unexpectedly.

I work in the English for University department at an Australian university and I normally teach five days a week, four intense hours a day, between 8am and just after noon. One group sees me Monday and Tuesday and the other group is stuck with me for the rest of the week. The workload is a bit mad: my super duper advanced groups produce a lot of long, complicated writing that needs to be marked and redrafted and remarked.

So. Much. Marking.

And then there’s the brain-bending planning needed to get Confucian-educated kids ready for Australian tertiary studies. My level is the last level they need to pass before entering their degree programs.

I am the Gatekeeper.

I’m also the designated course contact for the super duper advanced classes so all the other teachers hover around my desk at all hours, asking what they should do next. Macrame and square dancing are always sensible options, I inform them sagely.

I did that solidly for a year and a half, until three weeks ago, when the timetable mysteriously dropped my Wednesday to Friday classes for the new term and I was allocated a desk job creating online vocabulary games, waiting to see if anyone called in sick (I was also on designated cover duty).

Waiting.

From 7am, when we drove in, until 6pm when I was free to leave.

Typing.

Drinking coffee.

Waiting.

Drinking more coffee.

Typing

My centre of gravity lowering and expanding and seemingly gaining exponentially in mass, moment by moment.

Sitting at my desk all day made me restless. I opened up a Morning Pages account and tried writing 750 words every day. I tried running up and down the five flight of stairs every hour. I drank too much coffee. I walked in loops around the office, looking for people to have a quick, nerdy chat with.

I was going stir crazy, with nowhere to channel my nervous energy.

And then, two weeks into the new term, we got two weeks off for Tet.

And everything pretty much stopped.

And I’m at home, with a shuttered city outside and an ongoing need to actually do something.

Hence, this sudden series.

Cooking!

Seriously- yesterday, I made chapatis, breaded cajun chicken strips and marshmallow brownies; today, I made what started out as pierogies from scratch, and turned into something resembling spicy veggie samosas au style polonais. 

I made pierogies here before, back in my Shanghai days, back when everything was made with Northern Chinese black wheat, a wok and a lot of substitutions. I think my original ones were made using the Xinjiang noodle dough recipe that I used for everything.

Six years later (6!!!!!), I’m revisiting pierogies.

And this time, I actually looked up how to make Polish pierogi dough.

This is roughly what’s in the Polish dough (adapted slightly, due to my coarser atta flour, which sucks up water):

• 3 cups of flour (I used atta flour)
• salt (I used a large pinch, close to a teaspoon)
• 1 cup of boiling water
• 1/4 cup of cold water
• A few glugs of oil

I failed to carefully read their instructions, due to the fact that Thwack had me up at 4am today, and instead of gradually adding and mixing the ingredients in a methodical fashion, I just threw it all together at the same time, adding extra water until the consistency felt right.

You might want to just follow their recipe, if you’re not sure what I mean.

I kneaded it for 12 minutes, as they said somewhere between ten and fifteen is ideal. It was sproingy and baby’s bum-like, which is great.

I jammed the doughball into a Tupperware container and put it in the fridge to rest while I made the filling.

Here’s where the Poles lost me.

Sorry, Poles.

Because we came back from Mui Ne in the early evening on the night before Tet, most shops were shut and our fridge stocking options were very limited.

I had no cabbage, no cheese, no cottage cheese.

I did have potatoes and onions.

So I started to make potato and onion pierogies.

See this, above? That was a dozen photos and a thousand words. Also, 34 pierogies, with half parboiled and loaded into the freezer for another day.

I’m keeping my brain busy.

I may be able to get through Tet- and possibly this term- with sanity intact if I decide to just do a ton of cooking and writing.

Today is the blissfully silent, empty first day of Tet and Saigon has emptied out and shut down almost completely, with the ever-banging construction sites falling silent and the manic roads looking pleasingly post-Apocalyptic. Pollution levels have dropped from Hazardous to Mildly Dangerous and the skies are blue.

Lunar New Year in urban Vietnam, as it was back in Shanghai, is a brief but lovely respite from the relentless relentlessness of this corner of the world.  After the 24+ hours of endless fireworks (and ensuing housefires) had abated, Shanghai always resembled a movie set post-rapture city, devoid of people, bikes, cars, crowds, noise. It was the best time of the year to be in town, off work, with a pantry (er, shelf) fully stocked and a freezer full of dumplings.

Here in Vietnam, everything will be shuttered between the 26th of January and 2nd of February, approximately, and every Nguyen, Uyen and Phuong will be back in their hometown (or a beach in Thailand, finances and family permitting) doing Tet things with family, extended family, and extended-extended family.

We went away to Mui Ne, about 4 hours away from Saigon by car, for a week before Tet, after having the peculiar experience of going on holiday to Vung Tau last year and discovering that although it’s a beachy tourist town, it still shuts down for the holidays. Even our hotel’s little restaurant locked its doors. No breakfast for the foreigners. Or lunch. Or dinner.  We learned our lesson and preemptively avoided the Tet Ghost World. Instead, this year we ended up in the wild West of crumbling, fishy Mui Ne (home of many ordorous fish sauce manufacturers!), surrounded by nihilistic Russians and fast-buck locals trying to make their last few Dong before the holidays.

I’m very happy to be home now, amidst the echoingly empty towers of District 7, with another ten days left before work resumes.

I have time to bake!

Today, I made chocolate marshmallow brownies. Yes, brownies. With marshmallows. And no, I didn’t make the mallows from scratch (that’s still in my drafts folder from 2012- seriously- the backlog here is ridiculous). I made this one from a mix.

Yes. Me. A mix maker.

However, this is different. We’re not talking Betty Crocker bullshit here.

This mix was a Christmas present from friends of ours from back in Shanghai, the fab, culinarily minded ones who inherited my vast spice collection and pasta maker when we left China back in 2013. They’re in Taipei now, and instead of teaching, one of them has branched out into the land of Doing Your Own Thing and has started up a business teaching people how to bake in tiny kitchens with tiny toaster ovens, with handy mixes to get them started.

Which is, I must say, fab.

So I made the brownies today. K is for Karen and P is for Patrick and they’re really good at this sort of thing. This is their website. 

Normally, I do everything the long, laborious, hard way- using weird, rough flours (on atta bender these days, as our choices here are limited to Vietnamese super-white micro-sachets of super-fine bleached nonsense or, well, imported 5kg bags of Indian atta flour), cakey and wet and dark Korean sugar, and all sorts of experimental fats and fat alternatives (yogurt and yam mash!). I like lots of mashing and kneading and fermenting. Things taste, um, wholesome and unique.

These brownies? They have marshmallows!!!

Here’s how you make them:

Luckily, we had stocked up on eggs and oil before Saigon closed its doors.

And within minutes I had this:

And then this:

And then this:

Yay, brownies with marshmallows!

Thanks, Karen and Patrick! I’ll be making your mulled wine and refrigerator pickles next.

XX

This post has been open in my tabs for nearly half a year. Seriously. It’s that bad.

This little sleepy southern corner of Saigon is the new land of the lotus eaters, with watermelon juice and pho replacing the druggy lôtos. The year is halved into hot and very dry and hottish and very wet, and the months seem to bleed into each other, with August feeling much like November, feeling much like April. The main difference demarcating the seasons is the fact that between August and October you are likely to be riding your little motorbike home through rivers up past your knees. Choppy waters on the highway.

It’s November now. Blue skies, puffy clouds, returned heat after the rainy season. I have no idea how we got here (it could be August, for all I know) or why I still haven’t posted this recipe. It’s very good. It’s very easy. I found everything I needed in the little supermarket down the road.  Saigon presents so few culinary challenges that I seem to be failing to rise to the occasion, unlike in Shanghai when I was constantly trying to figure out how to work around the supply system.

I’m off sick from work today. It feels like mini-Dengue (less than the likely- Dengue I had in Hanoi) but is probably just a shitty flu. Breakbone fever, in the parlance of the settler folk of the early midwest. Apt. A day at home to be horizontal, achy, fevered and sleepy– and a day when I could actually be passively productive, at least until I run out of steam power.

Hence, this stunted post. Sorry.

Guys, dolls, here’s my much-tweaked recipe for chocolate zucchini loaf (or muffins, if you wish).

They bake well in a toaster oven and can be assembled with just a bowl and a spatula in a tiny kitchen with no counter tops. I balance my mixing bowl on one of the (unlit, obviously) stove top burners. None of those stupid Food Gawker blog posts that brag about how their recipe only has four ingredients, one of which is cake mix, and needs a stand mixer and a specific brand of (sponsored) coconut oil. Fuck that.

Here is what they look like. I cool them on the grill insert for the microwave, balanced on the cutting board which is balanced on one of the two (unlit) burners on the stovetop. Precarious but efficient.

Technically, this blog is (or was) all about my desire to attempt to recreate homey favourites in a tiny, basic kitchen in Shanghai, using only what I could find around me. That was about six years ago and, honestly, a lot has changed since then.

For one, I’m in Saigon (via Canada, UK, and Hanoi).

Two, I’m married, with a lunatic toddler and an MA in progress and a very full-time job at a university.

Three, I live in an expat bubble in the suburbs. A Korean bubble, but a bubble nevertheless.

Four, I can find pretty much anything I want in this city and it’s more likely than not that they’ll deliver it for free.

Five, after a year and a half in Hanoi with a part-time housekeeper/nanny who was a fabulous cook, I’m really, really enjoying taking over our tiny kitchen again. In Hanoi, I barely cooked, barely baked, barely did any of the things that used to propel me into a frenzy of inspiration and creation. Hanoi was not my best era. Let’s leave it at that.

Basically, my current incarnation is one where I have very little time but an unexpected burst of desire to actually get shit done and to try to do a million new things within a tiny window of available time.

I’m now cooking a lot. Seriously- a lot.

I’m experimenting with my old Shanghai standby- wok chapatis- adding grated tofu or fresh chopped herbs or roasted squash into the dough.

I’m experimenting with all manner of breads, yeasted and not. You should try my chocolate zucchini loaf sometime. You’d never know there was a ton of grated veggie in there.

I’m also working on mastering the hemispherically appropriate version of the suburban housewife special- the weeknight dish that is fast, easy and carby enough to put the toddler to sleep soon after eating.

This is what I came up with: the antidote to casseroles or spaghetti bolognese or whatever.

Crispy black pepper tofu and buckwheat noodles with sesame peanut sauce!

The Sauce

I start with making a biggish batch of the sauce on a Sunday afternoon. I keep it in a container in the fridge, alongside the heads of my enemies and lab experiments gone wildly wrong.

This is roughly what goes into it:

• Handful of unsalted peanuts (or peanut butter if you have access to decent stuff- we don’t)
• A few spoonfuls of sesame seeds
• Most of a head of garlic, peeled (obviously)
• A thumb of trimmed/peeled fresh ginger
• 2 tablespoons of water for thinning
• 4 tablespoons of soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons of sesame oil
• 1/3 cup of rice vinegar
• 1 tablespoon of honey or brown sugar or Hoisin sauce (it varies)

Unlike my Shanghai kitchen, my Vietnamese kitchen has a food processor, a magical Bamix that we brought over from England, so I no longer have to finely mince and blend everything tediously by hand.

Blast all of the above until it turns into something saucy.

That can all be put aside until you need it.

You can add fresh chilis or chili flakes as desired- we keep the basic mix pretty mellow so our two year old can eat it. I tend to add a ton of chili flakes to my own at the table.

The Tofu

For the tofu, you need one of those 400g plastic tubs of firm tofu. Drain it in a colander in the sink for half an hour or so, just so it’s easier to work with.

Cut it up into cubes or slices or whatever you fancy. I like little lego bricks, around 1cm by 2cm.

In a bowl, assemble enough cornstarch/corn flour to coat the container bottom about a centimetre deep. Grind about a tablespoon of fresh black pepper and half a tablespoon of sea salt. Bonus points if you can access the awesome Kampot peppercorns from Cambodia. You can also add a few tablespoons of sesame seeds if you like. Stir.

Throw the tofu cubes into the peppery floury mix and toss them about until lightly coated.

Get the wok out. Preheat it on a medium flame. Add some oil, a tablespoon or two, depending on how well seasoned your wok it (ours is so-so and needs more oil, generally). I like sunflower, but it doesn’t really matter.

Fry the tofu cubes til crunchy and golden brown, tipping them over regularly to cook all six sides.

Don’t crowd the pan too much. They get weird and soggy if you do. Blot the cooked ones on a paper towel.

They taste fine hot, lukewarm and cooled. They’re also fine the next day, though definitely best straight from the wok.

The Noodles

I buy buckwheat noodles from the Korean market up the road. You can choose whatever you want to use. I’m sure it’ll be lovely.

The Anti-Spag Bol

After draining the noodles, I throw in enough of the peanut sauce to coat the noodles but not so much that they become drippy and puddly and overly gloopy. Mix it all up. Make a lot- the mix is excellent cold the next day, straight out of the fridge.

Throw some peppery tofu cubes on top.

Add chilis as desired.

Eat.

Oh, and eat it again the next night, or for lunch, or for a snack.

It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

I didn’t cook for a really long time.

In Hanoi, where we lived for a year and a half, where I was housewife for a while, then back to teaching, I rarely cooked, rarely baked, rarely ventured into our minimalist kitchens for more than just coffee or breakfast muesli.

We had Ba, and Ba did our morning market shopping, rolling up to our enormous house in Tay Ho, then up to our tiny apartment in Truc Bach when we downsized, every morning at 8am on her rickety no-speed bicycle, our little packets of meat and veggies and fruit in the front basket. She started out as our morning housekeeper- the one who would help us to maintain a ridiculously oversized house surrounded by dusty building sites. When I went back to work full-time, she transitioned to morning nanny.

We had a housekeeper! And a nanny! Actually, we had three of them! Ba, Nha and Hung all took turns wrangling our lad after I went back to work and we both embarked on our possibly misguided MAs.

Them were the days, I tells ya.

Anyway, Ba.

Ba bought our market groceries at local prices (gringo prices were very different, even when well-haggled) and cooked for us, enough for a lunch and a dinner. Nothing fancy. Lots of rice and veggies. Comfort food from other people’s cultures: cabbage rolls, sweet Japanese curries, stuffed tofu, chicken soup, meatballs, spicy pork skewers.

I stopped cooking, just as I stopped writing, stopped painting,  and stopped doing a lot of other things that meant a lot to me, that used to be part of my own definition.

We moved to Saigon at Tet, transferred from the far north to the far south for work. We bade farewell to Ba and Nha and Hung in Hanoi and rented a little apartment in the south of the city, in the urban suburbs of Saigon where tower blocks loom over roosters, corrugated metal shacks, red roofs, barking dogs, canals.

There are leafy trees. There are a lot of expats, primarily Koreans. They like their golf and barbecue, so there are a lot of barbecue joints and golf shops. Nail salons too.

It’s a peculiar place to live, both generic and weird at the same time.

In the months since we moved here in February, I’ve been slowly returning to cooking. We reclaimed our kitchen, remembering that we actually like to cook and want to cook and don’t need anyone to do it for us (although it was nice to come home to).

We can buy pretty much anything here, so my old need to source replacements for home comforts is no longer necessary. No more weird Chinese substitutions. No need to be able to do everything in a wok.  We have an oven- small, but it bakes bread easily.  For a while, I was buying 5kg bags of Indian atta flour from the supermarket nearby and making endless no-knead loaves and big balls of chapati dough.  Mango loaves, banana muffins, zucchini cakes.

My current approach to cooking is therapeutic. A break from work, a break from studying, a break from a mad toddler.

Lots of experimental flavours, seeing what works with what. Western recipes, not so western recipes. Ones somewhere in between.

Below is one I made this weekend, an experiment in revisiting China while still messing with it.

Char siu eggplant-叉燒茄子. Not pork. Just eggplant, but I’m a fan of super melty umami Chinese eggplant. I’m also a fan of nice Cantonese barbecue pork.

Might as well marinate it and see what happens.

This is what I used, approximately.

• 1 large eggplant, sliced into 1 cm disks
• A bunch of garlic, mashed and finely chopped up
• Two tablespoons each of soy sauce, oyster sauce, hoisin sauce and honey (though I’d easily halve that next time- it was sweeter than I prefer).
• A tablespoon of rice vinegar
• A tablespoon of 5 spice powder (the one in the supermarket was a Thai brand)
• A bunch of blitzed up Sichuan peppercorns, for fun. Maybe a tablespoon.

This is what I did with it.

I marinated the slices for a couple of hours on the counter.  There was enough marinade leftover for a potential second eggplant. I ended up using it for some tofu we had. That was also really good, blitzed up with peanuts and garlic and ginger, but that’s another story.

I turned the oven on to 400F/200C, wrapped some lightly oiled aluminum foil over the drip tray and arranged the well-marinaded slices onto it. Baked in the middle of the tiny little oven for 35 minutes.

Easy peasy.

Everything was all browned and sweet and gooey. Eggplant candy, with a slight Sichuan numbing.

Next time, I’ll cut back on the sweet end of it and throw in more fire. I think it could definitely handle a load of chilis and ginger.

Loads.

A rather long while.

However, ever the optimist, I kept on paying my annual website hosting fees and renewed my domain name for nearly two years after I posted my last post here.

Since November 2013, when I last explained at length how to make sweet potato or pumpkin focaccia from deep in the western Canadian woods, I’ve lived in the midlands of England (where I had a baby and baked so much bread during our ten month sojourn that I started buying atta flour from the Indian grocer in 10kg bags) and am now in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Yes, back in east Asia- but without a wok.

No wok.

You can see why I’ve been reluctant to resurrect this blog without a wok in sight.

Wok or no wok, we do have the two big flame burners passing as a stove, and just last Sunday we bought a lovely new countertop oven, just like the finger-burning ones I had back in China.

I’ve even made three loaves of bread in it within the last 24 hours.

There is currently a lasagne baking in it as we speak.

The food situation in Hanoi, as it was in Shanghai, a mixed bag. Some things are easily found, others not so much.

After a few days of very frustrating, long, hot, sweaty searching, we finally tracked down baking sheets, muffin tins and loaf pans in the Old Quarter (apparently there is a whole street dedicated to such things)- something that was a bit more elusive and expensive in Shanghai.

Butter, basic cheeses and yeast and good olive oils are readily found here (not so much in China) but the vegetable and meat situation is a bit more tricky for the home cook, as our local supermarkets are crap and overpriced and weirdly stocked (and far and few between) and the wet market up the road is unreliable if you don’t get there by 7am to get the best stuff.

The meat is just out there on tables in the hot, hot sun and I am still hesitant to try any after mid morning. This is tricky when you’ve got work and family to tend to. The fresh herbs, greens and vegetables, however, look lovely at all hours.

Hanoi has renewed my faith in fresh veggies.

In the coming months, I have a mental list of things I want to try to make while we are here, using the ingredients I can source locally. We’re living in a fairly traditional little neighborhood full of street food stalls and the world’s smallest convenience stores (think: someone’s open doorway with a few random bottles and baskets full of stuff placed artfully around the steps), with a really good market across the lake. Ingredients are limited but not impossible.

Any suggestions or requests?

A few ideas I’m mulling over include: Turkish lahmacun and pide, more Mexican experiments, more soups, stews, breads, baked goods. We don’t have a slow cooker yet but I’m going to see what I can do with long, slow roasting.

It’s good to be back.

I missed you guys.

Well.

To begin with, a few things have changed since I last showed my floury face in these parts (see here and here and here for details).

For one, I no longer have my puny Chinese kitchen, the one with the toaster oven and two-burner gas stove and bugger all in the way of counter space.

I’m now working my craft from a larger but also minimally equipped kitchen in the wilds of rural Vancouver Island.

There’s an oven and a 4 ring electric stove and a reasonable stretch of counter space to work with. Bags of whole wheat and spelt flour are readily available and affordable; milk is less dodgy; yogurt is plentiful and unsweetened. I can buy ricotta in the shops. I have a few generations of humble, unmatched mixing bowls and a number of baking sheets and tins in various shades of well-used, well-seasoned blackness.

So there’s that.

I initially felt awkward with the idea of documenting my nearly daily forays into cooking and baking here as they most certainly were not being carried out in the titular wok.

Can a gal still blog about trying to cook in China if she’s actually cooking in Canada?

I had my doubts.

Then I started to think about it seriously.

What I’ve been doing here hasn’t been all that different from what I did back in Shanghai, which was to break everything down to its most basic steps to build up a western staple from scratch. Same same, y’all.

One of my current projects has been a continuation of a project I had started last year back in Shanghai, namely slow-rise, no knead breads.

Ages ago, I put up a basic focaccia recipe here, which I’ve been tweaking here with the inclusion of roasted, pureed sweet potatoes and yams.

I have also been taking the straight 24-hour rise bread recipes I tried to work with in my old crock pot (the one I killed with those aforementioned breads) and tweaked them to make something partway between chewy bread sticks and baguettes.

People who are in places with minimal access to western comforts and conveniences, rest assured!

I’m still chugging away in my quest to figure out how to make everything by hand in improbable places, even though I can easily drive into town to the enormous supermarket to get pretty much anything at a surprisingly reasonable price these days.

Why do I bother doing it the hard way?

Just in case. You never know when you might end up back in China or in the midst of a zombie apocalypse and have a hankering for some lovely fresh bread.

You don’t want to waste precious zombie-fighting time by spending all your time kneading dough or fishing out change for the zombie cashier.

Thus, I present you with two (or three, if you count the whole wheat as a separate bread) ridiculously easy no-knead yeast breads that are basically the same but completely different. Enjoy.

Bread 1: The basic slow-rise, no knead bread

This one was a revelation.

I first made the basic, all-purpose white flour version (see screenshot below).  However, after previously experimenting most disastrously with high-temperature, heavy-pot baking (and the resulting lump of charred brick), I changed the procedure somewhat.

See the recipe above? It’s gorgeous. In theory.

But if you don’t have a heavy pot to bake in or don’t fancy the risk of emerging with blackened giant hockey pucks, do what I did: before the second rising, divide the gloopy risen dough into 4 pieces, dust them lightly  with flour, then stretch them into little baguettes, about 30cm long, and place them on a slightly oiled baking sheet. Brush with a little oil; sprinkle on a little sea salt (or kosher or whatever you have). I inserted a half dozen halved cherry tomatoes, pressed deeply into the dough so they didn’t pop out during the second rising. Let them rise again for about an hour or two.

Bake at 475 degrees for 15-20 minutes.

Happy little breads!

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Let me show you something important about this no-knead, slow rise bread.

The dough.

I’ve only got a photo of the whole wheat dough I made, because I totally forgot to document the all-purpose white version.

This dough should be wetter, stickier, goopier than normal dough. If you’re used to making regular kneaded bread, this might feel weird. It needs the extra wetness for the yeast to develop over time and for the gluten to get all lovely and chewy during the long rising.

Extra legroom, if you will. Tight dough is unhappy dough.

I’ve found that the recipe on the website is a bit dry- maybe my flour is heavier? Maybe my well-water is dryer than city tap water?

I don’t know.

I needed to add about 50ml (for white flour) to 120ml (for whole wheat) extra water for my doughs to get the desired consistency. They should hold together in a rough, sturdy ball but still stick awkwardly to your hands when you touch them. You will need to wash your hands afterward.

Also, for whole wheat flour, double the amount of yeast to about .5 teaspoon (2-3ml)

This particular recipe produced two rather different breads, depending on whether you went whole wheat or all-purpose:

The all purpose flour produced lovely, chewy, dense, almost pretzelly mini-breads. They were gorgeous.

The whole wheat ones spread out a bit flatter than the all-purpose ones, and had a remarkably light crumb for such a heavy flour. Compared with the all-purpose ones, they were less chewy, less pretzelly. I’ve made them twice since, though, and they’ve been a fine accompaniment to the myriad of autumn soups we’ve been making.

Bread 2: The leftover yam focaccia

I’ve made focaccia before, both the regular and the no-knead versions. This one was an experiment carried out when I realized we had way too much roasted sweet potato in the fridge. It’s only a 3 hour rise (plus another for 2nd rise) so you don’t need to plan a day in advance.

The basic yamless focaccia dough is this:

4.5 cups flour (I used part whole wheat, part all-purpose)

2.5 teaspoons (10g) instant yeast

1 teaspoon (4g or 5ml) sugar (I used brown)

1.5 teaspoons table salt

about 2.5 cups of warm water

Let’s just pretend we’re starting out with the basic non-yam/non-sweet potato dough.

Throw all of the dry things together in a bowl. Give them a stir.

Don’t add the hypothetical water just yet!

Find enough cooked yam or sweet potato to fill a packed measuring cup (about 240ml).

Get your spud masher out. Or if you have a blender or food processor, get it out. We want mashed, possibly even pureed yam here. I used the potato masher for mine. Slowly start adding very warm water (not hot) to your yam mash, to make, essentially, a spud smoothie.

This will be the liquid for this dough.

And yes, it is orange.

And yes, if you only have a potato masher (as I did), there will be a few orange lumps. That’s cool. Add it to your dry mix and give it a good mixing with your hands.

When you’ve mixed it all together into the wet sticky dough you encountered in the basic bread dough above, cover the bowl and walk away. You’ve got about 3 hours to kill now.

We watched a significant amount of season 4 of The Wire and drank a pot of tea and ate lovely home baked cookies.

After 3 hours, tip your dough onto a 13-by-18 inch lightly oiled baking sheet. It’ll be quite loose, with some lovely long gluten strands holding it all together. Pull and stretch the dough so it fits the pan. It’ll be about an inch or so high.

Drizzle olive oil over it, about 30-45 ml (2-3 tablespoons). Sprinkle it with some crunchy salt (about half a teaspoon). Poke dimples all over the surface of the dough for the oil to pool lovingly in.

Put it aside and let it rise again for an hour while you go drink more tea and watch another episode of The Wire.

About half an hour before the second rise is finished, turn on the oven to 400F, rack in centre.

The focaccia will bake for about 30-45 minutes and should shake loose in the baking sheet when you give it a jostle. Mine was done in 30 minutes.

When the zombies come, you’ll at least have a happy tummy full of fresh, hot bread. It’s a start.

Given that it’s already, oh, mid April and the skies are light and fluffy and sometimes blue, and temperatures have already soared into the high 20s and it’s definitely shirtsleeve weather, I fear that the title of this one is a terrible misnomer.

It isn’t though. I’m just a terrible, terrible procrastinator.

[ETA: I’ve just edited the title so it’s less confusing! It used to be visibly part of the Eating My Way Through Winter series; now it’s just in the category]

You see, this has been in my drafts folder since last November.

My drafts folder, I might add, is ridiculously plump with unfinished posts.

This one? This is actually the third time I’ve hauled it out to write up. The previous two attempts were just me going on in really vague terms about how crappy I was feeling and how hard it was to write about pumpkins without letting my malaise seep into the text.

Which is tedious as hell to those who are not emotionally invested in my life.

Like, all of you.

The pumpkin scones themselves were baked, photographed and eaten about two months ago.

I was going through a rather brutal and cataclysmic change in my life at that point, which I dealt with through lots of creative experimentation with pumpkins and squash.

See the size of the ones you can get at the market up the street? The one in the photo below is the size of a small toddler.  You have to really whack at it ferociously with a massive cleaver to cut it into roast’able rings. That one made a ton of scones, parathas, curry, mash, fritters, and hash.

I roasted it in slices, ring by ring, rubbed with olive oil and whatever spices took my fancy. The paneer curry spice mix my aunt sent me ages ago was my favourite. My Moroccan blend from a spice shop in Fes was also amazing.

I’m doing much better now and so don’t need to rely on the catharsis of hacking up a poor defenseless gourd to feel at least somewhat sane.

I am, however, still buying smaller segments of gourd from the market and making wok parathas to go with whatever soups or stews or random leftovers find their way into the fridge.

I don’t normally do two recipes in one post but I figured I might as well in this case. After all, you just need to roast up some pumpkin and, lo! You have the makings of two really awesome- and yet not at all the same- quick breads!

Let’s just start with the base: that massive orange gourd which may be a pumpkin or may be a squash, but I’m not actually certain. My literacy skills aren’t up to snuff enough to decode the characters for those.

I hacked off about a pair of 2cm thick rings from a gourd that had the approximate circumference of a person’s head. I have no idea how many cups or grams it was. The scone recipe called for 1/2 cup of canned puree. The paratha recipe is more about proportions and texture rather than measurements. Roast up a big wodge, if you fancy. You can always use it up. It certainly won’t go to waste.

First, cut off the peel, including the pale inner rind. It’ll be hard to mash up if you don’t. Don’t forget to scoop out the seeds and sludge.

Next, toss it all in your favourite spice blend and some olive oil.

Roast it all in the oven until soft enough to mash.

I let mine go for about 40 minutes on 180C. I should note that I use a rather inconsistent toaster oven so if you have a real one, you will need to adjust accordingly.

Alternately, you could pan fry it until soft.

I did this a few times as an experiment and it was really good, but I prefer the taste of it roasted.

This is the roasted pumpkin, below.

See how awesome that looks?

When cool, mash those suckers.

See? Mashed gourd! No need for canned pumpkin here!

Right then. You have mashed orange stuff. Grand.

Now for the scones.

The recipe originally was gleaned from here.  I am indebted to them for it. These are wonderful scones.

The Ingredients

The Parathas

This is one I made up, because I had an unfinished bowl of mashed pumpkin glaring at me every time I opened the fridge. I didn’t have the energy to spend the afternoon blending butter into flour for scones so I decided to rework my old wok chapati recipe.

This is the same and yet totally different.

You need:

1. Er, mashed roasted pumpkin. I’ve also done it with roasted garlic mashed into the mix.
2. Enough flour. Maybe a few cups?
3. Some salt. Maybe a teaspoon.

I’m being difficult here.

Not on purpose, mind. It’s just, as I noted above, all about proportions. And your flour might have a different consistency or your mash may be wetter or dryer. It depends.

Start with about 2 cups of mashed gourd.

Put it in a bowl that will accommodate it plus the flour you’re going to add. I recommend a mixing bowl, cake batter sized. Ignore my tiny one, below. I had to move it into something much bigger.

Add the tiny bit of salt. Stir.

Start spooning in flour a bit at a time, stirring it in until it’s totally mixed in.

Then keep adding flour and mixing it in until, well, it’s all the consistency of dough.

At some point, once it starts reaching the full-on dough stage, you’ll need to trade the spatula in for hands so make sure they’re nice and clean.

What you’re looking for is a dough that is soft and malleable but no longer sticky. Think fresh pasta or tortillas. If you give it a quick trial knead, it shouldn’t leave little sticky orange pumpkin stains on your counter top. If it’s still sticky, keep adding a dusting of flour until you can comfortably knead it.  Then knead it for a few minutes until it’s lovely and smooth and resembles a baby’s bottom.

Form it into a nice little dough ball and let it rest in a ziploc baggie in the fridge at least an hour. I usually let it go over night. It can last up to about 5 days (or longer- I’ve always used it all up by then). It gets more glutinous and elastic as the days pass so I recommend leaving some of the dough for later as it’s well worth the wait.

Cooking the parathas!

Get out your wok. These can be made with or without oil so make sure the wok is already well-seasoned. Preheat it on lowish on a gas stove. I don’t know about electric ones. Just the centre flame. Anything else seems to burn the paratha before it’s cooked.

Oil it if you want. I found that Sichuan peppercorn infused soybean oil is remarkably tasty for this one. Use about a table spoon, if you do.

Pull off a golf ball knob of dough and roll it out into a thin disc on a floured surface. With floury hands, pick it up and let it be stretched a bit more by its own weight, rotating it like you’re a pizza chef in an old skool movie about Naples. You want it to be thin, but not stretched so much that it breaks (obviously).  2 or 3 or 4 millimeters is good.

Toss it into the wok, and after giving it 20 or so seconds so get its bearings, give the wok a bit of a shake, like you’re about to flip a crepe. You just want to make sure the paratha isn’t stuck.

Cook it on the first side until little brown bits show up on the bottom. Get the egg flipper out to check for those. It takes about a minute.

Flip it. Wait about a minute. Bubbles will start to appear on the surface. This is good. You want bubbles. These make the parathas light and airy rather than heavy and dense.

Give it a flip back onto the first side, let the bubbles form again, and remove from the wok after about 20 or so seconds. Place cooked parathas on a clean tea towel to cool. If you put them on a hard surface, like a cutting board, they’ll sweat and get sticky and gross.

Repeat as needed.

For more details on working with wok flat breads, see my tortilla tutorial here.

This is going to be a new series, if I can get my act together.

At the moment my act is very obviously not together, but more about that later.

I’ve decided that the best way to deal with an unwanted winter is to ignore it entirely, to stay in bed as much as possible, and to bake as if I was in a place full of trees, fresh air and lovely white blankets of snow, rather than in a huge city where the daily pollution readings declare it Unhealthy and where it doesn’t tend to snow but it sure loves to be cold and damp.

This obviously means I need to bake more. I need to make more warm and happy comfort foods. I need to totally regain all of the  8kg I lost doing that detox back in October. I’m nothing if not diligent.

This is what my life has been like for the past several weeks: I’ve been away every weekend for work, up in freezing Jinan in Shandong, then to Nanjing last weekend, where traffic meant I had to spend my non working hours crammed into their crowded subway cars, and I’ll be back there again this weekend for more fun. I’m pretty fried.

And then there’s my day job, where they’ve only just realized that when I say my office heater doesn’t work that it really doesn’t work. I wear coat, gloves, scarf indoors at all times. My back and neck ache from having cold muscles all the time.

And then when I finish my class on Monday nights, it’s nearly impossible to get a taxi way out there in the suburbs that can go into Shanghai, so I have to take a local taxi to the nearest metro station then travel for an hour and a half beyond that to get home (2 line changes and a 25 minute walk in the dark).

I’m tired and cold.

A few quick photos to illustrate, before we get to the warm and lovely spice bread.

Coconut Spice Bread

I’ve been using coconut milk in my coffee for a few months, so I have a decent stash of it in the cupboard . This recipe calls for regular milk but the coconut adds a lovely flavour and aroma.  I added a bit of freshly ground cloves and a bit of dried ginger as well, which was lovely.  I also painted a light glaze of brown sugar and the last bit of the milk (cream, actually- it was the last thick bits) onto the baked crust after I took it out of the oven. Again, unnecessary but lovely.

This is the recipe I used.

I had to miss a few photographic steps of the procedure because my hands were too full or too doughy. Bear with me on this. The bread is lovely and worth making.

 Ingredients:

• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup water, warm
• 3 tbsp brown sugar, packed
• 2 tbsp butter, soft
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp active dry yeast
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp ginger
• 4 cups bread flour