When we laid out the kitchen, we wanted lots of counter-top workspace. That turned out well.

 As time passed, we bought more and more sauces, vinegars, cooking oils, etc. Before we knew it, a large section of the counter-top was taken up with storing this stuff. With everything crowded together, finding what I wanted was a real nuisance.

So we decided to get things organised. Wall mounted racks were an obvious choice, as they would free up counter space below. We ended up getting 3 racks as well as 3 wooden trays to hold stuff like cooking oils, salt, bottles of dried chillies and the like.

 As you can see, with everything lined up it is much easier to locate whatever I need. The smaller rack in the upper right hand corner of the photo is used for holding commonly used spices. The ones that I use less often are in a pull-out cabinet.

We did not go for the brand name racks; 1 rack cost twice as much as the total we paid for our 3 racks. Quality is good, and we figure even if the racks need replacement at some point, we are still way ahead by not paying so much.

No sooner had I published my Braised Pork Shoulder Article and Recipe than I came across a version done in the traditional style, with Pork Belly.

Happy days back then, but it is indeed correct that the traditional Pork Braised in Soy Sauce with Five Spice Powder, or Babi Kecap in Bahasa Indonesia, used pork belly.

I changed my recipe to use Pork Shoulder, albeit a fatty portion, out of guilt at the amount of fat in Pork Belly. Still, the writer makes a convincing argument that an occasional indulgence is OK.

What I especially like about her recipe is the inclusion of shiitake mushrooms. It adds a different texture to the dish, and rounds it off. An excellent idea that I will be adopting next time I cook this dish.

At left you can see a photograph of a mortar and pestle as you find in South-East Asia. It is made from granite that has been worked to a smooth finish for the grinding surfaces, and a rough finish on the exterior for safer handling.

It is medium-sized and that carries a couple of compromises. If I want to grind a lot of ingredients, it means multiple lots and possibly more time taken, but the plus is it is lighter to carry and wash.

If you look at the left-front surface, you will see a small knob-like protrusion which serves as a sort of mini-handle so that it is not so slippery when wet.

If you follow the link, you will see an example of a mortar and pestle in Europe in the second photo of the post. I suspect it is machine milled, but that is just a guess.

And if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a little crazy about traditional kitchen equipment, and the mortar and pestle is one such item.

A common question people ask is how long can leftovers be kept for. Well, as I go along I’ll pass on my personal experience on this, with a couple of caveats.

Recent dishes I have refrigerated and eaten are;

Frozen

Pork Vindaloo (from 2 weeks ago, still have 2 portions frozen)

Malaysian Beef Curry (from 4 weeks ago)

Braised Pork Shoulder (last week)

Refrigerated

Spare Ribs and Watercress Soup (eaten on the third day)

I re-heated all by microwaving. 

In all cases, keeping quality was fine. I did very slightly overdo the microwaving for the pork vindaloo, so there were some dry spots on the meat.

For the soup, the flavours matured somewhat, which was very nice. But with mature flavours, saltiness does become more apparent, so if you will refrigerate anything, go easy on the salt. That said, we do use very little salt at home and we are thus pretty sensitive to salty tastes.

Now the food safety part.

Caveats

1) I observe strict hygiene, so I wash my hands very often during food prep and cooking, and take care to avoid cross-contamination, ie knives, boards, plates etc used for raw foods do not come in contact with cooked food. Contaminated food is unsafe to keep.

2) Leftovers are promptly put into clean covered containers and as soon as cool enough, usually in 1 - 2 hours max, are put in the fridge or freezer as appropriate. They never ever sit out for longer than 4 hours (this is a very common limit on exposure at room temperature, unless you are an Eskimo at the North Pole), and if I forget to refrigerate and find them out the next morning, I discard without even sniffing the food.

All dishes mentioned are on my website - just go into the recipe page, enter the recipe name in the Search Box on the upper right corner and hit enter or click search. Easy as that.

Be economical, and be safe! 

Have you ever found that for whatever reason, you are way behind with your cooking and dinner (or lunch) is served late as a result? Not really talking about entertaining, but regular days.

We tend to have dinner rather late by local standards, 9.00 p.m. - 9.30 p.m. is fairly usual for us. That is a time when the neighbours are either already in bed or getting ready to go to bed, but for many reasons, it has become a part of our lifestyle.

The other day I was downloading files from my website as a backup, and the task took longer than I expected. Quite common for me when it comes to computers and internet stuff. A connection that seemed to drop periodically did not help, so I was sitting and ‘watching the grass grow’ as it were.

You know the feeling? It’s gone on so long you don’t want to cancel, but you are getting increasingly desperate because you need to be elsewhere. Well, that was me.

Despite my plans to start cooking at a certain time, I was late. Rush, rush, rush, mutter, grumble - dinner was served at 10.00 p.m.

As consolation, I told my wife about restaurants in Spain that open for dinner service at 11.00 p.m. She was a good sport about it all, which made up for my frustration.

And why did I think of this all of  sudden today? Well, my ISP had a nationwide service outage today, and I only managed to get online again (with the help of their tech support) at 5.00 p.m.

No, dinner will not be late, I’m off to start cooking now!

It has become a standing joke in our home that whenever my wife changes the dishwashing sponge, I will cook a dish with fresh turmeric root in it.

For those of you who have not used it, turmeric root will stain anything and everything it comes in contact with as soon as it is peeled or cut. Think saffron yellow as in monk’s robes and you get an idea.

So, hands, knives, cutting boards, blender, etc all get stained, and of course the sponge when you wash it. The stain on hands goes after a day or two of regular washing, the plastic blender container gets permanently discoloured and of course, the sponge never recovers.

So, when she changed the sponge, I got a special request to not cook anything with turmeric root in it this week. Today is Sunday, so from tomorrow I am free to cook whatever I please once again. Now it’s not deliberate mind, and I am in no hurry to use turmeric root; it’s just that so many South-East Asian dishes need it.

I recently popped in to the Central Chidlom Department store to have a look at the household department.

 I was pleasantly surprised to see a decent selection of good quality (read heavy-duty) bakeware. So, if you are on the lookout for this, you do have an option besides the Emporium Department store.

Both places have easy BTS skytrain access.

My smaller Smeg oven gets fairly regular use, and I have become quite comfortable with it by now. The only thing I wish is that I could broil with the door open, but it will not work that way so I do not have a choice.

With regular use, no matter how carefully, there is a build-up of oil and grunge on the top and bottom plates. Left and right are self-cleaning liners, so they are not a problem, but what gets on the top and bottom plates gets baked on really well, and cannot be wiped off with soap and water only.

My wife called the local Smeg distributor to enquire about the oven cleaner they recommend. The person who took the call had no idea what she was talking about. Next, my wife called up the sales-person who sold us all our Smeg equipment. She was quite helpful and suggested that as the equipment was still under warranty,we could get it cleaned by their service personnel. Sounded good.

So, my wife then calls the service department. Yes, of course they would be pleased to clean our oven, but we would have to bring it in to the shop where they would clean it. I nearly had a fit when I heard that. It’s a built-in oven and it took 2 strong men to lift it into position and hook up the wiring. Now they expect my wife and I to disconnect the wiring, take it down, and lug it in for cleaning? Talk about crap offers that are made for the sake of sounding good, with no real sincerity behind them - this definitely belongs in that category.

So, the oven was just getting more and more grungy. Looking at the local supermarkets for oven cleaner yielded nothing. Your typical family here apparently does not use an oven.

Finally, I was talking to my buddy about it and he mentioned that I could get it at the Villa Supermarket on Sukhumvit 33. Well, I had looked there before without success, but decided to try again since he was so sure. As yesterday was my weekly pub crawl day, I gave it a try on the way home. Yes, the supermarket is open 24 hours.

All the kitchen cleaners were on 1 shelf, and I could see BBQ cleaners, counter-top cleaners, sink cleaners, but no oven cleaner. On the verge of giving up, I gave a final try near where the detergents were, and on an upper shelf well above my head,  saw “Easy-Off” heavy-duty oven cleaner. The blurb “America’s #1 oven cleaner” caught my eye, but frankly it was the only oven cleaner available so it could be #2 for all I care.

So now I have oven cleaner. This is pretty caustic stuff and my buddy emphasised that I should be sure to wear rubber gloves when using it. I should have bought them last night, but I was so delighted to get the cleaner my brain shut down and I did not think of it. That or the beer was doing its job. Well, I’ve waited so long a few more days won’t hurt.

I’ll update on how it goes when I use it.

Well, I finally got around to grilling the great cuts of pork that I bought a while back.

As promised, you can see the photograph in the latest article, Cooking Methods and Cuts - Beef, Pork, Lamb, Chicken.

Now, I can think of Moo Ping and other great uses for it.

Looking for good quality cookware can be a thankless task in Bangkok, and possibly other South-East Asian capitals. Forget about smaller towns, probably no hope at all.I still recall visiting literally dozens of department stores, supermarkets and any place selling cookware in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore in a fruitless search for a heat diffuser or flame tamer. The quest only ended when my buddy went to the States and returned with 3 of them, which he apparently found with little difficulty.

My latest search has been for bakeware, roasting pans and the like. I had 3 non-stick pans of an imported brand commonly found in Bangkok, but they were not heavy duty and warped alarmingly when placed right under the broiler. Aside from putting some of the food closer to the broiler than the rest of it, it also meant any oil or juices pooled in one corner - not ideal.

The final straw came when I roasted tomatoes for soup, and when I was chopping them after roasting, I noticed a fleck of something grey coloured mixed in with them. I had to switch from my cooking glasses to my reading glasses to identify it, but it was just as well I did because it turned out to be a bit of the non-stick coating that had flaked off.

I know that there are no health warnings about non-stick cookware (apart from dangers to birds if over-heated when empty of food), but I am fairly certain this does not extend to eating the non-stick material.

I tossed the lot out and relied on Pyrex for a bit. OK for baking but I have read warnings about tempered glass cracking when right under a broiler at high heat, and did not feel like risking my Pyrex. It would serve me very well for other things.

I tried sourcing good metal bakeware from a couple of the Central Department Stores, a Tesco Lotus and Paragon Department Store, without any luck. Quite by chance, I popped into the Emporium Department Store, and in the cookware section found a stack of Master Class Heavy Duty Non-Stick Bakeware, all sizes and descriptions. Imported from the UK, they had a 20 year warranty.

I’m not too crazy about warranties in Thailand, after a backpack I bought with a lifetime warranty opened at the seams. I took that back to the department store where I bought it, together with the warranty card and proof of purchase, only to be told the distributor had ceased dealing with that brand, and I would have to send it back to the manufacturer at my own expense etc etc.

But at least if Master Class offer a 20year warranty, that would hold good in the UK, and could be taken as an indication of the confidence they have in their products. Plus, it did have a really solid feel to it, and a very nice finish.

I wound up buying 3 of varying sizes. I steered clear of the largest one as it would only fit in my wider rotisserie oven, not the smaller unit that gets the most frequent use. And the clincher was when my wife, usually very indulgent of my passion for all things food related, remarked that it was so large we would probably never see any real use for it. That was true enough, it could hold a huge turkey easily, and I doubt I’d ever be cooking one for a dozen people.

So, I am pleased with my find. Time will tell if it holds up to use, and I am extremely light-handed with my cookware.

My only disappointment is I still cannot find wire racks that fit in my Pyrex ware and these new roasting pans. The ones I see are either way too large, perhaps designed for a barbeque, or hideous high sided things that look more like they are meant to lower French fries into a deep fryer, rather than be used in a roasting pan.

Still, I’ll keep looking - might get lucky someday.

I’ve checked and Amazon UK sells Master Class bakeware. Amazon in the States has other brands, including Calphalon which is certainly worth checking out. I have some of their cookware which I find to be quite good.