Wednesday 3 January 2007

No cheese please, we're Chinese

Welcome to my blog everyone!

Before the little I've written so far has any capacity to cause any bristling within any ethnic community, this is just my attempt at a food blog (flog). Since I live in France, and English is the language in which I express myself best, the name came to me naturally, being a take on the Frog & Rosbif pub in Paris, which is iconic to me in the way of intercultural harmony. I mean, two former colonial rivals comfortable enough with each other to name a pub thus without either item actually being on the menu? (frog - what the English call the French for their appreciation of frogs' legs; rosbif [roast beef] - what the French call the English for preferring their steaks well done)

Which makes me wonder about inverse food discrimination - name-calling based on things you don't eat... Maybe I live in a sheltered world, but I've yet to hear of a nickname for someone who doesn't like a certain kind of food. Here in Lille, I sometimes get second looks. Alas, it's not because I'm traffic-stopping material (well, depends on how desperate the traffic is, I guess), but the friendly ones will tell me that they don't often see Asians in cheese shops, much less cheese in Asian chops! Why's that? The rot (think roquefort, stilton, fourmes d'ambert and gorgonzola)? The smell (maroilles, Vieux Lille)? The lactose intolerance (all of the above?)? I couldn't tell them either! I'm in it for the taste, and perhaps subconsciously for the calcium, but that's all I can münster...

It never crosses my mind to look out for other Asians during my ruminations in the expansive cheese aisles, but for this very first post, I'd like to sign off with 2 pictures of my leek & gouda tart.


How to: Sautée about 1 kg of leek in salted butter until limp and set aside to cool. Dress a pie dish with a sheet of pastry (when I do make my own, it's with a mixture of flour and polenta, which never gets soggy!), garnish with leek, add cubed gouda (I used cumin gouda for this one), then pour over a mixture of egg and cream (2 eggs for every 150g of cream? it's all a matter of preference, less cream for a firmer tart) and bake in a pre-heated oven at 180°C for 30 minutes or so.


Variations: Blue cheese works just as well!

Body count: 0 (the eggs weren't going to hatch into anything anyway)

6 comments:

Melting Wok said...

oh no, this one looks better than the greek's spinakopita :) btw, chinese do eat cheese - the red bean curd thingy "nam yu, fu yi", the westerners called it cheezeee hehe, cheers ! :)

Shilpa said...

Hi melting wok! thanks for the compliment! haha, yes, my sis used to live in Seattle and she told me that tofu was called "soy cheese" there. I don't know, but that sounded less appetising to me! :) hope you don't mind that I've added you to my links!

Melting Wok said...

Thx for adding me, I was surprised when ur link does not show up in my list, then I realised that u added me wrongly ...html.index thing , you have to remove it, and just put http://www.meltingwok.com. Luckily I discovered u :)
Ok, you've motivated me to fry some good drumettes marinated with "nam yue" - Chinese red cheese aka fermented red beancurd haha, will cook up some and post it one of these days, thx for the reminder :)

Shilpa said...

Thanks for pointing out the mistake in the link, I've fixed it!

You have to point me to your post when you do make "nam yue" chicken. Is it supposed to be spicy, like what some people call "smelly" tofu? Sorry, but I don't know what "nam yue" is, but I may have eaten it in my lifetime, just under a different name! :)

Melting Wok said...

nam yue (cantonese) = fermented red beancurd, ring a bell ? Cheers :) You know where in Taiwanese cuisine, this is used a lot when doing water spinach stir fry, it's not spicy at all. The one you mentioned is fu yi ( cantonese ), for fermented white bean curd, where there's 2 version, one spicy, & one not :)

Suganya said...

Beautiful pic! Are those pics in yr banner taken by you, too?