4-Hour Chef – Lesson 4 – Union Square Zucchini

This was such a treat to make and my favourite cooking lesson of the book so far. I have made this about 3 to 4 times now as it is super easy, relatively healthy and easy to boot. The only ingredients you need are zucchinis, olive oil, garlic, chilli flakes and salt + pepper.

Step 1: Slice the zucchini into thin err…slices and mop up as much moisture as you can with paper towels. Tim Ferriss teaches us a neat trick for this lesson by suggesting we use a star peeler as a make shift mandolin. I was surprised at how well it worked.

Step 2: Heat up the oil in a pan, spear the whole peeled garlic with a fork (this acts as your cooking spatula – another neat trick) and add chilli flakes to the oil. Add half of the zucchini slices spreading each slice out as much as possible. Add lemon juice.

Step 3: After 2 minutes, push slices to one side and add the remainder. After another 2 minutes, mix the lot and remove from the heat. Season with salt and pepper as necessary and chow it all down quickly.

Verdict: This is really delicious and extremely easy to make. Great recipe for any extra zucchinis you have lying around.

Skills:

• using a star peeler – passed. Best skill learnt so far!
• saute – passed, since nothing got burnt

Bonus points:

• squash pappardelle +2 points – I did make this, but it didn’t turn out as planned, probably because I used butternut squash instead of summer squash as suggested. This involves using the star peeler to make thing strips of “pasta” from the squash, for a lighter, less carby version of noodles. Toss the strips in hot oil, with crushed garlic and lemon juice, and season with S+P. Add parsley and pine nuts / almonds to liven things up.
  

4-Hour Chef – Lesson 3 – Coconut Cauliflower Curry Mash

This was a great little lesson, resulting not only in a decent new skill learnt, but also a great new recipe.

As mentioned in the 4-Hour Chef, this recipe results in a dish that ends up with a similar-ish look and texture to mashed potatoes, which if you’re avoiding carbs, is a great alternative.

I hardly ever buy and cook white cauliflower because I find the taste pretty bland on its own, and I don’t know of any good recipes to liven it up – up to now. It also helps that this recipe is pretty easy to follow, with very few ingredients needed.

Ingredients

1. Cauliflower
2. Unsweetened coconut milk
3. Curry powder
4. Salt
5. Cashews (which I didn’t add because I’m not a fan of nuts in savoury food)

Cauliflower – check. Coconut milk – check.

First up, cook the cauliflower in 180ml of coconut milk (and cashews) for 20 minutes. It is a lot easier if you break the cauliflower up into pieces before hand (wrap in a towel and smash the stem against the table until it breaks into little florets).

Boil the cauliflower florets in the coconut milk…

Remove from the heat, add salt and a pinch of curry powder. Use a fork and mash until it has a mashed potato-like consistency.

…and mash!

Verdict: An extremely tasty and relatively healthy dish which definitely livens up the cauliflower! I will definitely be making this again in the future.

Skills:

• mashing – failed, I think the cauliflower could have done with more boiling (or maybe on a higher heat setting). It was just too difficult to mash up with a fork! I will need to practise this one again.

Bonus points:

• N/A for this week

4-Hour Chef – Lesson 2 – Scrambled Eggs

Right so I’m definitely more than a few days behind on my Tim Ferriss 4-Hour Chef cooking course and my next “class” update is well overdue. I will say that I have been progressing behind the scenes so it’s not that I haven’t been practising my cooking skillz, it’s just that I haven’t had the time to write some blog posts about them.

Lesson 2 was about scrambled eggs and how to create flavour combinations using various herbs and spices. This lesson, though simple, was really interesting as:

1. It taught me how to cook scrambled eggs properly! (it seems that it’s not just about stirring eggs continuously over a heated pan at high heat!); and
2. It introduced me to the use of new spices and how to pair them up with other herbs and spices. I’m looking at you cumin. You can laugh, but I really had no idea what cumin was before this. Following the need to buy this spice to complete this lesson, I have found myself really liking cumin and now use it in other dishes. Star student? I think so!

As suggested in the book, I tried recreating both the Northeast African and Middle Eastern tastes. The idea here is that eggs have a fairly neutral taste, so you can really teach yourself about herb and spice combinations by trying them out on eggs as you chop, change and mix your herbs and spices around.

For instance, back home in Malaysia, I would always always ALWAYS eat my eggs with soya sauce and white pepper. Always. That’s just what we do. I still do that now in fact. JD, who’s French, usually looks a little confused and appalled when I make my eggs that way. Stereotypically, he makes his eggs with cheese and herbs. 😛

For a Northeast African taste however, try using garlic, ground cumin and dried mint. For a Middle Eastern taste, use dried parsley and lemon instead. The book actually provides a reference table with various cuisines from around the world and how to create the flavour combination for that cuisine using 3-5 ingredients. Very interesting and very handy.

Maybe it doesn’t look that appetising pictured like that but that went down my pie hole in a flash! I think that was the Middle Eastern one, but who knows, it disappeared too quickly! 🙂

Verdict: Whilst I didn’t experiment by changing the ratio of my egg yolks to egg whites as suggested (to experience the change in texture and “creaminess” of my eggs), I thought that my flavour combinations experiment worked extremely well. The eggs came out nicely done and very tasty.

Skills:

• scrambling eggs – passed
• combining herbs and spices to create a specific flavour – passed, though this will be a long running learning process

Bonus points:

• N/A for this week

4-Hour Chef – Lesson 1 – Osso “Buko”

So let’s jump straight into lesson 1. Osso “Buko”. When I read that, I just thought, what the hell? Good luck to self if this was lesson numero uno. The more I read on about the procedure however, the more I realised that lesson 1 was actually about braising, or slow cooking as it were. Now that, I can do!

As with a lot of other slow cooking recipes, there wasn’t really a need to do a lot of prep before the “cooking”. I had ordered 4 lamb shanks as part of my last online grocery delivery, in addition to the cheapest bottle of white wine on sale, so that was the two main ingredients out of the way.

As luck would have it, this week also saw my first home delivery of my new weekly standing order of Abel & Cole organic fruit and veg. If you are not familiar with the name, these guys do a weekly home delivery service of organic food, sourced direct from farmers (delivery only within the UK). They also do meat, milk, yogurts and other kitchen staples, in addition to their more standard fruit and vegetables. As they focus on only sending across food that is currently in season in the UK, you do not get to choose exactly what goes into your weekly box, but you can tell them what you categorically do not want. Each box comes with a recipe to help you make use of all your food, in case you come across something you’ve never tried before and do not know how to cook. I’ve only had one delivery but am very pleased so far.

My first Abel and Cole Fruit and Veg box. I was pretty impressed and enjoyed my fresh, organic goodies. Bonus was a free veg cookbook and a giant bulb of garlic (I’m a sucker for freebies…).

But getting back on topic, this week’s box included some organic carrots and a free giant bulb of garlic which was just what I needed for this recipe. After some peeling of carrots and crushing of garlic, we were good to go.

Ingredients prepped. Ready to start.

The process basically comprised placing the lamb shanks on a bed of carrots, adding squashed whole tomatoes and its sauce, adding white wine and flicking some garlic on top.

Prepping the lamb shanks in the crock pot

I’ll put up my hand at this point and say that the recipe actually called for this to be oven cooked for 2 hours, rather than cooked in a slow cooker for 5 hours (which is what I did). I figured that since one (out of two) of the skills we were meant to learn in doing this was “braising”, a slow cooker was a suitable alternative.

This is what it looked like after 5 hours on “high”

Verdict: Yes, the dish came together, and the lamb was super soft and tender and went well with the carrots. However, personally speaking, I don’t particularly like lamb meat and find the taste and smell of it to be too strong (and not in a good way). I also don’t drink a lot of alcohol generally, and could really taste the white wine in this dish, which I didn’t really fancy. JD on the other hand had no such qualms and said he quite enjoyed it, so there you go.

Skills:

• braising – passed
• blade grip – failed, forgot to practice using the proper grip when cutting my carrots. D’oh.

Bonus points:

• zesting – a lemon. Though not onto the main dish, but into a bottle to be kept in the freezer for future use.

The 4-Hour Chef

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you will have ascertained by now that I am a pretty rubbish cook. I can just about follow recipes (even then, not 100% of the time), but have mostly found cooking to take too much time, with too much need for specific tools and a constant need to go to the grocery store to buy the necessary ingredients. It just doesn’t fit in all that well with my life schedule.

However, I am trying to change my ways and would like to do more quality cooking, and incorporate it into my life in a more sustainable way. This is due to a few good reasons:

• To save money – eating out in restaurants constantly in London is expensive
• To learn a new life skill – eating is a core part of life
• To improve my health by eating more healthily – eating restaurant food tastes great (most of the time) but it isn’t always super-healthy!
• To deepen relationships by cooking for others – I have been invited over to friends’ houses where they have cooked up delicious meals for me in the past. It would be nice to return the hospitality at some point in my life, as I believe food is a great bringer-together (yes, that’s a word I made up).

Enter Timothy Ferriss‘ 4-Hour Chef.

If you’ve chanced across Tim before, or have read any of his previous two books (4-Hour Workweek or 4-Hour Body), his latest book won’t need any introduction as you’ll know what Tim is all about.

For those who haven’t heard of the 4-Hour series however, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? I’ll leave it to you to check out his Wikipedia page and previous TED talk in your own time, but in summary, Tim is basically all about hacking life and finding the most effective shortcuts through work, the human body, cooking and basically anything else.

I’ve read all of his previous books, and though I may not agree with everything he says, I do always tend to leave his books having learnt something new or thinking about standard processes in a new way that I have never thought of before. I was therefore pretty excited to learn that he was going to tackle cooking for his latest book – we all know how much help I need in this area!

Having now had a chance to read through the first part of the book, I can tell you that (of course!), this is no ordinary cookbook. Tim spends a lot of time talking about the concept of learning and retaining information effectively, as he makes it clear that he wants you to be able to cook something from feeling / memory rather than always having to rely on recipes, something which I am well on-board with!

After months and months of this tome sitting by my bedside, I finally managed to complete the reading up to the part of the book that starts the cooking lessons, as it were. Happily, I even managed to act on what I read, what with the long Easter Weekend affording me a lot more time than I would normally have. Going forward, I thought it might be fun to document how I progress, and as with my running training, it will hopefully keep me accountable and spur me on to keep going with the “cooking lessons”.

What’s in it for you? Well you can laugh at my sorry attempts at cooking. 🙂

As an aside, but not wholly unrelated to this, I recently decided to replace by old wooden chopping board with this cute and practical Joseph Joseph Index Advance Large chopping board set. I know that people say you shouldn’t mix your veg and meat chopping boards. I’ll admit that I’ve never made a distinction between the two in the past, and touch wood, nothing major has ever happened to me to make this a cause for concern. However, going forward, I am going to try to be more aware of this, especially as I (hopefully) start experimenting with different types of meat and food more generally.

Organised cutting boards – I like it!

Are you excited? I KNOW you’re excited, so stay tuned…