SD, ON's back in the pot pork (hui guo rou)

This is a delightfully rough-and-ready stir fry with a prominent black bean flavour suggested in Fuchsia Dunlop's Hunanese cookbook. It's best to use pork on the bone in some form - I used some pork chops and they worked admirably.

Best also to avoid parsimony with the beans here. I am sometimes over cautious in my allotting as they looks so potent but use a generous hand. The overall vibe is robust and farm-housey: whole cloves of garlic, big slices of ginger and the salty black beans.

• pork on the bone for two or three
• a small handful of back beans, a thumb of ginger and a head of garlic
• a couple of handfuls of some type of greens and/or spring onions
• soy sauce, sesame oil
• a couple of fresh chillies

Simmer the pork for a few minutes in some water (the first stage of cooking - it being 'returned to the pot' when stir fried). Remove and slice. This is the traditional Chinese method of removing impurities from the meat and partly cooking it before stir frying. I'm still on the fence with it to be honest but open to suggestions.

Peel the garlic cloves and slice the ginger thinly. Fry them both on a medium heat in some oil for a few minutes. Add the meat and cook until it has some colour.

Add the black beans, fresh chillies, greens and a few slugs of soy sauce and a little sesame oil. I used some super pokey home-grown rocket here which worked well. I also added some celery and pepper to turn it into a complete meal. Use anything you have to hand - FD presents the recipe as something a Hunanese mate of hers cooked for her and I guess it's a home-style dish unbound by the dogma of restaurant process or official recipe. Cook everything for another couple of minutes and it's done.

Very pleasing. It's not a very moist dish so it might be nice in future to have alongside some steamed aubergine or similar.

Red braised tofu (zhang gu ying you dou fu)

So. I'm still eating Szechuan and Hunanese food a lot. Maybe twice a week. As well as the recipes (generally from Fuschia Dunlop, but with some diversions into two or three other books I have) which I faithfully document on SDON I just do a general stir-fry with whatever is to hand. It's a great standby dish for week nights - take the vegetables you have in the fridge and chop. Fry some fermented bean paste with some chopped garlic and ginger for a minute, add the vegetables and cook briefly and you're done. Put a splash of soy sauce and sesame oil and eat with a pitta from the freezer (always have pitta to hand in the freezer - essential!) instead of rice and it only takes five minutes.

action shot of me chopping garlics

But it is nice to try 'proper' recipes. This one if from FD's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook.

• garlic, ginger, red chilli, soy sauce, stock, thickener
• tofu (book suggests deep-fried puffs)
• some veg (+ shittake mushrooms (optional))
• spring onions (obviously)
• red chilli

Fry the garlic and ginger in some oil and when fragrant add some stock. Add the tofu and cook for five minutes. Then add your soy sauce (a decent amount), chopped red chilli, veg and shittakes. Add the spring onions and thicken. Simple eh.

For a side side we had fried cucumber. The photo in the book (below) pairs them with purple perilla flowers but I just fried them in discs with a little dried chilli and a drop of vinegar at the end. Very nice. I included courgette too as it was lying around.

OK I admit I'm constantly jonesing for fermented bean paste, but to me this just wasn't as tasty as mapo tofu and the like. It was decent, and nothing a little chilli oil couldn't improve but not quite scaling the hights of some of the other classics. The cucumber thing is a keeper though.

Hunan beef with chillies and cumin

Cumin's not a spice that seems to pop up in much Chinese food. Hunan province, though, is on a similar latitude to northern India and Pakistan so maybe climate conditions are right there for cumin cultivation. Anyhow, in this dish cumin is combined with the familiar combo of chilli (lots of chilli), garlic, ginger, spring onion and a little soy sauce and sesame oil to make a wicked flavour in which the beef sits. I used minced beef which came out a touch fatty.

• beef
• fresh mild chillies and/or peppers of some kind
• garlic, ginger, cumin, soy sauce, sesame oil, Shaoxing wine, cornflour, chilli flakes, salted chilli
• spring onions

Take you beef and get into manageable pieces. Next time I will use some proper meat but this time I had some cheap mince. Marinate it in Shaoxing wine and soy sauce whilst you prep the vegetables. The green Turkish peppers/chillies (bit unclear exactly what the are!) shown above are perfect. They are spicy at the business end near the stalk but also have a good crunch and flavour akin to capsicum. Otherwise I would suggest a mix of big mild chillies and some peppers. Chop into smallish rings. Chop the spring onions and prep the garlic and ginger into matchsticks.

Brown the beef and set aside.

Fry the garlic, ginger and cumin in some oil. I suggest using these three things in equal measure. Sprinkle with chilli flakes. After a couple of minutes add the chillies or other vegetables. After another couple add the spring onions and meat and cook for a few minutes. Stir in a little thickening agent stabilised with some water. I use cornflour but there are a few options out there. Continue cooking everything together for a few minutes and season to taste with soy sauce and sesame oil. Add salted chillies if you want more heat.

 I used up a little cabbage here but I'm not sure it added much

The taste was  great. The cumin contributes a pleasing mustiness but does not dominate. I recommend having plenty of vegetables here, even up to two-thirds of the overall mass of food. I don't know if I added too much oil or it was the beef itself which was fatty but the food ended up being a bit greasy.

I adapted the recipe from Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook which details the food of Hunan province as her previous book Land of Plenty address that of Szechuan (or Sichuan). I like the book - it's a larger hard-backed book with more pictures that LOP. It has a pretty clear layout (essential) and the pictures are of the food and not of the cook messing around and laughing like in some books. Some of the dishes resemble their Szechuan cousins, whilst most involve different combinations of spices and procedures. Like its predecessor it gives an overall picture of a comprehensive cuisine with its own traditions, history, combinations and quirks.

Szechuan feast

peanuts on the boil

You need to eat with lots of other people to get the best of Szechuan food. All this food fed ten or eleven people.

Aromatic peanuts (lu hua sheng) are just raw peanuts boiled with fennel seeds, star anise, Szechuan pepper, cloves and cinnamon for forty minutes. A good thing to have on the table before the meal starts. There's a moments confusion when you bite into them and find they're starchy and glutinous and not crunchy but they are very nice and dead easy to do. You can taste the anise quite clearly.

Spring rolls were crafted by my expert co-cook from cabbage, carrot, spring onions, shiitake mushrooms, bean-sprouts and pickled bamboo shoots. Delicious, the mushrooms added a welcome chewiness and the bamboo crunch.

Steamed aubergine (hong you qie zi) is again, super easy. Slice the aubergine (I omit the salting stage often specified by cooks/books including FD and have never had any problems) and put in a steamer with any flavourings you like. We went for fermented black beans, pickled chopped chilli and dried chilli flakes (just Turkish ones) but you could of course go for ginger, garlic, chopped spring onions, pickled vegetables or anything you fancy.

before

The wonder of the steamed aubergine is its texture: nearly as satisfying as a vigorously fried version, but thirstily drunk on water vapour rather than oil. An unexpectedly sweet smell emanated from this. They exuded lots of liquid which took on a sugary, malty taste that combined well with the spice of the chillies.

after

Cucumber salad (qiang huang gua) was just cucumber with the middle scooped out dressed with toasted dried chilli, Szechuan pepper and sesame oil. I forgot to smack these!

Mopo tofu - we had Hunan style with shiitake but sans meat to accommodate vegetarian brethren/sistren.

these are about 70p from Chinese supermarket - get involved!

The recipe in FD's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province specifies no less that four different preparations of chilli - chilli-bean paste, dried chilli, fresh chilli and salted chilli. Amazing. Check a full recipe for mapo tofu.

all the flavourings ready for adding to the tofu

the finished article

Twice-cooked pork (hui guo rou) is normally done with pork belly I think. I had some fatty chops  described as Chinese chops or something similar (they were streaked with fat and not your classic bacon shape one) and used those. You gently poach the pork until it's just cooked, then cool. It's then sliced thinly and fried till the fat runs. Chilli bean paste, black beans, sweet wheaten paste (I used Hoisin which a guy in a Vietnamese supermarket in Dalston suggested) are added and then spring onions chucked in at the end. I also went for some red pepper too, which gives the dish a bit of colour. They'll need a few extra minutes to start to soften.

Veg-wise we had cabbage, kale and bean-sprouts stir-fried with garlic and dressed with toasted sesame oil and Chinkiang vinegar.

in a pretty pink bowl

All in all a lovely meal to have with friends.