I love food. What growing teen doesn’t.
Along with eating I’ve had a passion for creating dishes, first cooking up a feast and secondly literally creating dishes to be washed up, just NOT BY ME!!!
Recently I got into Chinese cooking. For my birthday I was given a hand beaten wok, Chinese cleaver, spatula, tons of essential cooking ingredients and this awesome book by an amazing chef Kwoklyn Wan called ‘Chinese Takeaway Cookbook’.
The kitchen I use to cook most of my food in is actually in my garden. I’ve got an old table to cut and prepare all the ingredients and a washing machine drum as my stove. The perforated stainless steel cylinder is great, it lets in lots of oxygen creating a mega hot flame making it perfect for Chinese Food. The hole where you put the washing in is the perfect size for my wok to sit on.
It’s wood-fired and to get a really quick high heat I use lots of little pieces of wood and then bigger slow burning logs for a long lasting lower heat. Cooking on a fire is confidence building, fun and just feels so much more rewarding and definitely adds a very distinctive taste of smokiness to it.
I’d never eaten Chinese takeaway before but just looking through this book I instantly knew I was going to love it.
The food looked incredible but the cooking style seemed even more amazing. Having everything prepared and ready to go, then right at the end a super busy frenzy of sizzling, bubbling, the sound chinking metal on metal as the spatula flips a wok full of chow main, and the smells are amazing, soy sauce, ginger, vinegar, five spice, hoisin sauce, sesame oil and oyster sauce.
A lot of the recipes in this book are meat or seafood. I love both but I don’t tend to buy either from the shops, I look to the wild. Spicy Hoi Sin Chicken, turned wild style, Spicy Hoi Sin Pheasant and so far I’ve made Crispy Shredded Chilli Pigeon, Venison Five Spice Ribs and Steamed Venison Bao Buns.
When I cook I let my character flow into the food so that the food mirrors me and my personality – on this occasion WILD.
That’s just the beginning. Prawns, I love them, but nowadays a lot of them are from South East Asia. But I have a brilliant substitute that’s way closer to home. These creatures live in the canals and rivers of Britain, are free to forage and sometimes are even bigger than king prawns. Even better, they’re labelled a pest and need to be culled, they are Crayfish. There are two types, the European and the American. American Crayfish are not native to the UK and are killing the European species. And so what better idea than to turn them into Kung Po Crayfish, Satay Crayfish and so many more flavoursome Chinese takeaway prawn classics.
I’m going to be making a cooking video soon, so watch this space. 🥡🥢
Junior Survivors 
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