Eco practices: 02 (Energy usage)

"Eco" here could be "ecological" and/or "economical".

"Energy" here could be gas or electricity or effort.

The Chinese style of cooking does not entail using an oven in general, especially in warmer, southern regions.

    In a nutshell, the historical reason for stir-frying being adopted is the shortage of fuel (firewood) in the earliest days.

    For those who are not that familiar with stir-frying, these are the main features:

    1. Cut up the food (meat and/or veg) into small pieces, so that the cooking doesn't require a lot of time (therefore fuel).

    2. The cooking utensil is ergonomically shaped for spreading the heat most effectively without using a lot of fuel (/ firewood) -- enter the wok.

    3. Heat up the wok really hot, throw in a bit of oil which will heat up in no time, throw the ingredients in and stir around for the heat to reach all bits, sprinkle some water onto this to soften the ingredients, add the sauces (soya sauce; bean paste; whatever).

    Of course, there's more to it than the three points above, but this blog is not about stir-frying, so I won't devote any more space to it.  (I'm also not good enough at cooking to do stir-frying justice in a blog -- only if it's in a tongue-in-cheek spirit...)

    When I became interested in Western baking at the age of 11, I had to organise my baking sessions so that the gas used for heating up this big box called an oven would be ergonomically utilised.  (My mother was already supporting a big family single-handedly.)  I had to make sure all the racks of the oven were loaded -- either bake at least two cakes or a batch of cookies as well.

    Long before even the energy price hikes triggered by the Ukraine War and now the recent developments in the Middle East, I was already adopting eco practices in my cooking routine and other aspects of living.  Here are some of them, in case you might be able to benefit from them (or the principles behind them).

    1. For heating:

I lived for 18 years in Belfiore Lodge (in Highbury, near the old Arsenal football stadium).  It looked like it'd come out of a Dracula film set but was an actual old Victorian house converted in the 1960s to four one-bed flats in the main house, with a wing of the same added at the same time.  No central heating.

My flat was laid out in a straight line:  living room at one end, bedroom at the other, with the kitchen in the middle.  Throughout the winter, unless it was a mild winter, I'd leave my oven on at the lowest level, which would take the chill out of the whole flat.  I'd also place a metal teapot inside for free hot water for my tea / coffee, as well as a pot of stew simmering away, with variations as the week wore on.

    2. For cooking: 

(i)  Go for stir-frying as much as possible to minimise cooking time (and therefore also fuel).  Cut up the food small, use a wok as well as a lid for keeping most of the heat in.  Switch off the gas x minutes earlier to let the residual heat do the rest of the cooking.  The x would have to be worked out by experience:  what kind of (and what size) meat or veg.  If you're fussy about getting the texture of your food exactly right (e.g., crunchy for stir-frying), this might not be the best practice.  I'm not a good cook, nor am I fussy about my food, so it suits me well enough.  As a low income earner, I'm happy to change my diet to suit my pocket.

(ii) I love Western-style thick soups.  They're an entire meal on their own.  The electric soup maker I have is set to 19 minutes for the whole process:  you just need to specify what you want it to do (smooth or chunky, e.g. -- the blending comes part way through, not at the end).  I've since discovered that I don't need 19 minutes because I cut up my veg very small, so now I switch it off after just 9 or 10 minutes.  It's very smooth even with only half the cooking time specified by the makers.  I shall try switching it off even earlier next time, and let the residual heat do the rest of the cooking.  Admittedly, if you eat this soup (about 4 portions for me) over different sittings, you'll still need energy to heat it up, but only enough to heat it up, not to cook it.  Soups (as well as stews and curries) improve when left overnight, so if you don't finish off the whole batch on the first day, you will have the bonus of subsequent helpings tasting better as well.

    If you want to interpret the "eco" in the title as "economical, you can make a big batch of a base recipe, especially if you get the ingredients cheap for some reason (the veg seller trying to get rid of them because of the summer heat, or closing for a long weekend), pot them up, freeze them, and eat them in instalments with varying additions.  "Economical" also in terms of time and effort energy (not just fuel energy) saved with a few instalments done in one cooking session.

Base recipe:  potatoes and onions; potatoes and tomatoes (I bought 48 egg-size tomatoes for a quid in 2003).

Additions for varying the taste:  chopped-up spring onion or coriander or parsley or basil or fresh chilli; cheese (different types); chopped bacon or ham or luncheon meat or spam; ground pepper (white is heavenly but more expensive); croutons (made out of bread that's not absolutely fresh -- more economy exercised here); anything you have around that needs using up or that you'd bought cheap (some kind of supermarket deal).

(From googling)  Quote central heating was not common in London flats (or British homes) during the 1960s; it was considered a luxury and only became the norm by the late 1970s or 1980s. Most 1960s Londoners relied on single-room heating, such as coal fires, paraffin heaters, or electric fires, leaving bedrooms and hallways unheated and often freezing. Unquote

Rubbish at experimenting (I) (Singapore / London)

As a tomboy and the youngest of five children growing up in a family with two aunts (one maternal, one paternal), three sisters, and two servants, I never had to do much by way of housework.  It was not until I got to 16 that my mother decided it was ridiculous for a girl (note: girl, not boy!) not to be able to cook at all at that age, so she got the servant to teach me to cook some basic stir-fry dishes.  

My first attempt at going solo, brought about by the servant’s day off, produced two dishes.  The stir-fried mange tout (/snow peas) were greasy, limp and dry, with burnt patches.  Greasy because I’d put in too much oil at the beginning.  Burnt, limp and dry because I’d added the water too late, and then too little of it.  The stir-fried pork and French beans came out with the meat rubbery (too much heat and cooked too long) and the whole dish swimming in too much sauce (over-compensated this time by adding too much water).  My siblings came home, took one look at the offerings on the dinner table, and suddenly remembered they all had dinner engagements.

At 12, I was impressed by Yvonne, only two months older than I, producing a jar of cookies, which she said were made by her.  How?!?  She said, “Oh, it’s easy.  Just follow the recipe.”  So, I started collecting recipes and managed to produce cookies and sponge cakes.  

Buoyed by my success, I decided to be more adventurous and try making doughnuts.  Yeast was on the list of ingredients, which I knew, in principle, was the agent used in making bread dough rise.  Where to get it, though?  There were only two Western-style supermarkets in those days, both downtown.  The local population didn’t tend to make dishes that required yeast.  Things that do, like steamed buns and bread, one would generally get in the shops, not make them at home.  

“Oh well,” I thought, “I’m sure excluding one ingredient wouldn’t make that much difference.”  I went ahead and followed the recipe, producing a lump of dough.  The recipe said to leave it in a warm place for it to rise.  In Singapore, everywhere would be “a warm place”, so I left it sitting on the kitchen table.  An hour later, the dough didn’t get any bigger, so I waited another hour, and still nothing happened.  “OK,” I thought, “I’ll help speed up the process,” and took the dough out to the garden and left it in the sun.  One couldn’t find a warmer place than directly under the sun, I thought, so I couldn’t go wrong.  I gave it two hours just to be sure.  At the end of the sunning session, I was left with a hot and rock-hard lump of dough.  Into the rubbish bin it went with a thud.  No further attempts at making doughnuts.

At 18, I went to secretarial school.  One day, a male teacher brought in a jar of an Indian snack — which I nicknamed “worms” after the shape of the pieces — made by his Indian wife.  I asked him for the recipe, which sounded really simple: flour, water, salt, curry powder; mix the lot together; press the lump through a colander, which will produce the “worms”; deep fry; et voilà, a delicious Indian snack is born.  (It is sold in England these days under the generic name of “Bombay mix”; the flour is gram flour, I now know.)  

I duly proceeded to make my own delicious “worms”.  The first mix produced a dough that was too runny, so I added more flour.  It became too dry, so I added more water.  That was too runny, so I added more flour.  This went on until I ended up with a lump of dough that was double the size of what I started out with.  Into the rubbish bin it went with a thump.  No more attempts at producing Indian “worms”.

I had my first taste of Spaghetti Bolognese in 1974 when Italian food first sprouted in Singapore (to my knowledge, anyway).  During my second year in Taipei, 1976, I’d go to the Italian restaurant in the Taipei Hilton regularly with Pete, the British geologist (he’s featured in the blog entry Ten dollar, ten dollar), and order Spaghetti Bolognese, visit after visit.  

So, it was only natural that, when I came to London in 1977, I should try and make my own.  (By now, the doughnut and Indian “worms” were not dim memories — they’d been completely forgotten.)  My culinary “skills” were limited to the few cooking lessons from the servant back in 1969.  I now applied the techniques she’d taught me.  

Trouble is: those techniques were for stir-frying.  The principles of stir-frying, in case you don’t already know, are (put simplistically): heat up the oil very hot (preferably until the oil starts to smoke), then throw the ingredients in.  

I did that for the bolognese, but added too much oil as well, so the minced beef went very crispy as it was basically deep-fried in a pool of very hot oil.  This time, I refused to bin it but crunched my way through the dish, telling myself, “You will remember this horrible taste and never reproduce it.”  It took me an hour, so unpalatable was the crunchy minced beef, but finish it I did.

Undeterred by the bolognese incident, I went on to try and make curry puffs.  They were commonly available from roadside stalls in Singapore, but not in London — no, I had not heard of samosas (the closest equivalent I can think of to curry puffs, only a different pastry) at that point.  I made the filling, which was a dry curry of cubed chicken and potatoes.  

Now, the pastry.  I didn’t realise the full significance of the “puff” element in the name of the dish, thinking it was just part of the name, so I mixed flour and water, and made the skins out of the dough.  The end product was a curry-puff-looking thing but the skin was so hard I had to use a hammer to break in.  I ate the filling, and into the rubbish bin went the outer casing with a loud clatter.  

People say one shouldn’t try out new dishes on one’s dinner guests.  In my case, I shouldn’t even try them out on myself!

(PS:  I have since discovered deep-frozen, ready-made puff pastry available in some supermarkets.  So, unlike the doughnut and Indian “worms” experiments, I have made further forays into making curry puffs, and even taught a child with dyslexia and dyscalculia to make some.  Whilst I cannot say I can run a roadside stall selling my curry puffs, they are fun to look at, the way I make them — like tropical fish with dorsal fins — and quite tasty.  Even if I say so myself...)

(Singapore, 1960s; London, 1977/78)