People sometimes ask me how I invent recipes, and the way it works is: I have to invent recipes because I am hungry, lazy, impulsive and wilful. There is simply no choice. I have to invent recipes because I need to know what I am going to have for dinner; I need to solve the dinner problem.
I don’t really like following other people’s recipes because I don’t like being told what to do. Also, they always have too much washing up; and they expect you to go to the shops; and they expect you to go to the shops without just caving and buying Marmite and bagels and Tangfastics. But then I am hungry, so I have to eat something; so I have to figure out what’s in the fridge and go from there.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and it is also a really spectacular way to get interesting with your cooking. Also, interested in your cooking, which is not always a given. And life is better when you’re interested in things.
I, personally, am incredibly interested in these noodles. More than that, I am incredibly interested in this sauce, which I believe- given further experimentation- will lend itself very well to a large number of purposes. It has peanut butter in it! It’s salty and punchy and will stain literally anything it touches! It has fermented beans!
While I was waiting for the fishfingers to cook I absentmindedly ate quite a lot of this sauce with half a cucumber, just slicing the cucumber straight onto the worktop and dipping directly into the jar. I feel it has great potential as a salad dressing, and a drizzle for crispy chicken thighs, and prawns with rice, and maybe also just as a regular condiment? I haven’t tried any of these things, but I will. It’s a really interesting sauce. It has a lot going for it.
(It was absolutely KO with noodles and greens and chopped-up fishfingers, which is where this is going.)
But, anyway, the way it works: so I am standing in the kitchen with the fridge open for so long that the fridge starts to sing the little fridge-song of discontent; and it’s when the fridge stops singing the fridge-song of discontent, because it thinks nobody is coming to help, that I take something out of the fridge and shut the door and look at whatever it is I have landed on.
This initial bit is often not very obviously inspiring because I very rarely find my fridge inspiring. When I see Nigel Slater on TV look in his fridge there is always a small exquisite number of things wrapped in wax paper. If something in my fridge is in wax paper, it means we have run out of clingfilm, and now the thing has gone fridge-y in the wax paper, and should be thrown away. Also in our fridge: some component of an emergency ready meal that is now out of date; six jars of marmalade; about two hundred lemons in varying stages of decay. I am exaggerating about the number of lemons, but not about the number of jars of marmalade. There are enough glass jars in our fridge that they take up one deep full shelf and all of the space in the door; and this is because when I am stressed I absolutely fucking love buying things in glass jars to make me feel better.
Yesterday I bought some chilli crisp oil from the Asian supermarket, and it really did make me feel better, even when I was just holding it on the bus. I went to work at the library for a while, and I was writing an article and helping the after-school kids check out books (yes you can have a go with the stamper! no you can’t have a go on my computer! yes I can order you the next nine Beast Quest books!) and I was thinking about the chilli crisp oil, and it was so sunny and nice I absolutely knew I wasn’t going to the shops again once I stopped work.
And I was just sort of turning it over in my mind, you know; trying to assess my unpromising fridge vis-a-vis the chilli oil, trying to remember if we had any tahini or whatever. I had this idea- I think it came from Hetty McKinnon’s amazing To Asia With Love, via Kate Young- that I would make some kind of tahini-broccoli noodle thing, and dress it with the chilli oil.
Anyway, we did not have any tahini, or any broccoli, so that was out; but I still had this idea. Also, suddenly I recalled that I had impulse-bought a mega pack of fishfingers, and when I recalled the fishfingers I became fixated on the idea of fishfingers. I felt sure that the chilli oil and the fishfingers would be important, and I checked out a bunch more books for the after-school kids, and also a bunch for myself, and I kept thinking: chilli oil, fishfingers, tahini but not, chilli oil, fish fingers, tahini but not? (And also that I really needed to eat a substantial quantity of vegetables due to my publication-week diet of bagels and butter.)
And this, basically, is how all good things start: you have this unpromising collection of stuff, and also nonetheless this weird impulse to make it into something else. You have this persistent worm of an idea that- if you can just arrange it right- you are going to wind up with something really good. Just you wait and see. Just wait. I will prove to you that it will be good. Having an idea is a little bit like being possessed; like sharing your mind with someone noisy and compulsive.
It is deranged, this. It is a deranged way to live. “I will be following this vague sense of something until it is there or I am not, good luck to you!” It is a life governed by instinct and desire, but an instinct towards and a desire for something that does not yet exist. It makes me feel like I am looking for El Dorado. It makes me feel thirsty and obsessive and tired. It makes me hungry.
I am always hungry for something.
My book is out next week, and it has been nearly four years in the making.
I always think, the week before publication: I will never do this again. And I always mean it, too.
Publishing books is even worse than writing them, because you’re supposed to like it; and I like being in my kitchen, and I like making food with people, and I like making people feel better about their kitchens, whatever it looks like. But I don’t love publication week. I don’t think anyone does. It is like putting your previous self on trial: do I still agree with you? Was that the smart thing to say? Is this still us? Why did we write this?
I can never remember, in publication week, why I write anything.
I was chucking out a lot of old notebooks the other week, and I found a note from June 2018 about the book I was hoping to write next. It’s the chilli oil, fishfingers!, tahini?, green for health? of publishing, this note: it’s a kind of messy half-page of solitary words and “not THIS obviously, but something LIKE this?” and ideas, and some bits in little bubbles to make sure I notice them later.
I was really surprised by this note, partly because I didn’t remember writing it, but partly because it is exactly describing the book I have written. This is weird because this book has been through three really significant revisions, and I thought- I really thought- had changed direction entirely. I really thought I had lost sight of the point, along the way, and it turns out that every change and tweak and shift had been bringing me closer to the story I had hoped to tell in the first place: a love story about my house, and my friends, and how I actually cook, i.e. by impulse buying stuff in glass jars, and also getting stuff out of the fridge and really staring at it for a long time. This is also how I write. There is a lot of impulse purchasing, and a lot of staring. And yet somehow we get there in the end.
So what I got out of the fridge this time was a very old bunch of pak choy, which was going yellow at the edges. It was unbelievably uninspiring but nonetheless I felt something there; and what I felt was- astoundingly- peanut butter.
I took out the peanut butter from the cupboard, and went back to the fridge. In the fridge were some fermented black beans, although honestly the jar was almost empty. There was probably a tablespoon of fermented black beans in the jar, and without thinking too much about it I put two tablespoons of smooth peanut butter into the jar and stirred it up a bit. It was quite chunky: I added a tablespoon of dark soy sauce, and a tablespoon of black vinegar, and then- remembering Hetty McKinnon’s tahini sauce- five tablespoons of water. I felt extremely like I was about to fuck it up, putting the water in, and I dithered, one spoon two spoons three four five, but I did it: and lo, when I stirred it all up it became this beautiful pourable creamy consistency.
I dipped a bit of old bread into it, and it was at this point I felt I might really have something. Not just a dinner something, but a “make this again” something; a real “weekday staple” of a something. I started making notes on the back of an envelope.
It needed some top notes, basically; and so I found some garlic and ginger and put them in as well: a grated single clove of garlic; about a tablespoon of grated ginger. A teaspoon of soft brown sugar to kind of balance out the stingy heat of the raw garlic. Then I started dipping a bit of cucumber in it, and did not stop. Sincerely: this sauce was so good.
I found some extremely old udon noodles in the cupboard (BBE last year, but they didn’t have anything except flour and water in them so I figured they would be ok), and got the fishfingers out of the freezer.
I put four fishfingers under the grill, feeling extremely daring- (if Nigella could do her bhorta, this surely was not such a stretch?)- and then, when they were done, I chopped them into substantial chunks.
I pulled the pak choy into leaves; and blanched them. If you haven’t ever blanched anything, here is how you do it: on the hob you need a big pan of very salty, oily, boiling water. On the side you need a big bowl of clean iced water. You put the pak choy in to the boiling water. You stir them around and count twenty seconds. They go very bright green and floppy. Then you take them out with tongs and put them in the iced water, and then you leave them there until you need them.
I put the expired udon noodles into the greeny pak choy water, and turned off the heat; and left them there until they had softened up and untangled into strands.
I drained the cold water off the pak choy; and the hot water off the noodles; and mixed them together in the still-warm saucepan, to heat the greens back through, without getting anything hot enough to get claggy. This felt correct.
I added the fishfingers. This did not feel correct, but I was too deep in to stop.
I added the sauce. The moment you pour a sauce onto noodles is the moment of truth, and I felt quite anxious about it. Cooking is such a gamble and I get so miserable when it doesn’t work.
And it worked beautifully.
The fishfingers were kind of working a bit like katsu curry, almost, in that crispy/soft/creamy sauce thing; and the soft white fish mellowed out the heat of garlic and the kick of the ginger and the punch of the fermented beans; and the noodles wrapped around the pak choy and the pak choy wrapped around the noodles, and the whole thing was vivid green and splashy orange and thrilling. Nothing was claggy, and nothing curdled, and everything was right.
I decanted it into a bowl, and spooned chilli crisp over the top; found chopsticks; took the bowl and the chopsticks and my envelope with the formula on into the sitting room.
And then I started writing.
I was too interested in these noodles not to.
I was too interested in talking to you, reading this right now, to not write this.
And that is the whole problem: I had the idea, and now I have to prove to you that it’s good by telling you about it. These noodles exist now; this idea exists, and now it’s your problem too.
But the thing about these noodles is this: they are also the solution.
They are the solution to the dinner problem. You are welcome.
I have a book out next week, and I would love it if you bought it.
