A free magazine from Wing Yip

Oriental Food Digest

The superb Wing Yip supermarket popped a free magazine into my shopping yesterday: The Oriental Food Digest (do you think the pun's intended?). On he front page there's an article about the Young Chef competition winners. The top prize was for: lobster spring rolls, and Asian quail with foie gras and asparagus with a rhubarb and plum wine reduction. That does sound a bit unnecessarily complicated, doesn't it?

Inside the back page are the photos. The lobster spring rolls make more sense visually, cut on the diagonal, there's a little bit of lobster and the flash of red that gives looks very good. There's plenty of green (I'd guess that's spring onion, coriander, maybe some chilli) and the bean shoots. I do tend to see spring rolls, of whatever variety (and they do vary from the big, robust and generally pretty oil-rich takeaway versions, to the tiny, see-through, lightweight Vietnamese-style ones full of crisp vegetables and flavoured with mint) as edible mops for soaking up various dipping sauces (these vary too: from the polystyrene pot of takeaway curry sauce, through any number of chilli sauces, to that fish sauce and lime juice mix). But as edible mops go, these didn't look half bad.

Asian quail with all the other stuff photos confirm that it's an overwrought chicken curry. I have a recipe book with a vegetable curry that includes rhubarb, which I imagine would give a nice bit of tart acid to the dish. I haven't tried it, so can't really comment on how well it works in practice.

There's some stunning photos of celebrations for the Thai and Tibetan and Iranian, New Years, and the Holi Spring festival in India. There's also a recipe reminding me to make that Tom Yum soup BLISS likes.

Why I don't chip in

At my last place it was almost a weekly event. “Have you signed the circulating birthday / wedding / newborn sprog / moved house / successfully renewed your season ticket or topped up your Oyster card card for so-and-so?”

Followed up by an email, inevitably saying: there's cakes in the kitchen.

I signed the cards, but I refuse to participate in the general excitement and to fork out for two reasons:

One: I did less than three months short of twenty years in one job, and left without any fuss whatsoever, just slipped quietly away and got on with moving on, not even a good luck card. Last day of service Sunday, first day in the new job Monday morning. There's no chrome-plated, ash-handled mounted axe on my wall.

Two: the whole cakes thing. Where do blokes get off on buying cakes? There's something deeply wrong there. Bacon sandwich (morning). Danish pastry? Definitely suspect. Get over there with Savile and Rolf, mate. Cakes? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Mini onion bhajes, prawn toasts, those little papadums? There's no end of possibilities that don't involve mutating into a member of the Women's Institute.

Actually, three: your birthday affects me how? Vic at Norbury always summed it up when senior officers tried to get all pally: “you 'aint any sort of mate of mine, you're just a LCC workmate”. I don't care if it is or isn't your birthday, or whether or not your wife's given birth to a smaller, even stupider version of you. Do your job. Don't try to stitch me up, make mine hard work, or interfere. Keep the cakes. I've signed the card.