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| Salmon poached in Lapsang Souchong tea with glass noodles and cucumber chilli dressing |
Happy New Year everyone! Sorry for the mouthful of a post
title, I couldn’t really find a way to sex it up (well, shorten it at least). Maybe
it’s my two week Christmas break and the fact that I have gravy and meat
practically running in my veins that has led to an inept ability to stir up any
sort of a witty sentence? Anyway, I’ve been itching to get back to Lolo’s
Little Kitchen as I’ve been up in Leeds with my family. Mama and Papa Lo
arrived from the motherland, and we’ve had a gout inducing couple of weeks
eating. It doesn’t help when your brother has a metabolism of a racehorse and
your parents want to eat ‘traditional’ Western food like fish and chips, scotch
eggs and full English breakfasts every day. That blueberry and pomegranate
muesli will have to wait.
In a rather depressing come down of fatty Christmas food and
sweets last week I was determined to try a few tricks for a bit of a cleanse to
my system. In traditional Chinese medicine, there isn’t anything that you can
take to ‘detox’, as it is too much of a shock to your body, but a more gentle
and long standing ‘cleanse’ is recommended. An easy place to start would be to
swap my copious cups of Yorkshire teas with Chinese tea. Oolong tea is great
for January, as it is full of antioxidants to help fight high blood pressure,
diabetes and liver damage. But more exciting than that, it promotes weight loss
by increasing your metabolism if you drink it regularly.
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| Sockeye Alaskan salmon complemented by a smoky Chinese tea |
In this recipe, all the ingredients have great health
benefits - salmon for its Omega-3 and vermicelli/glass noodles are made from
the starch of mung beans and are a healthier, lighter and gluten free
alternative to wheat noodles. Eating chilli helps lower cholesterol, improve
circulation and lowers blood sugar levels, and gives the vermicelli a punchy ‘POW’
in flavour with the ginger and cucumber. I’ve tried this recipe with Oolong,
and it works with green tea also, however recently good old Heston did a
Lapsang Souchong infused smoked salmon over the holidays for Waitrose. It has a
very distinctive smoky strong flavour (as well as many benefits of black tea) as
pine wood is used to smoke the leaves, and so has just enough of a festive
aroma to remind you of Xmas. I thought it was almost too smoky for an already
smoked salmon, but poaching a salmon fillet in tea works wonderfully. This
recipe barely needs any real cooking, it’s really simple (despite the overworked
title description).
