Cook The Books

Gok Cooks Chinese: The Review

That’s a whole lotta Gok

Gok Wan is somewhat of an easy target. With all his hair flicking and shrieking of “you can do it, babes,” and grabbing of middle aged women’s breasts and forcing of housewives to get their thread veins lasered off, throwing casual insults his way is easier than taking your bra off and walking down a makeshift runway in a shopping centre outside Hull. For starters, he calls his fans Gokettes, and pictures of them in his glasses on his website form part of a Gokette’s Gallery. You’d think this blog post would write itself.

But I take people on face value, and having never seen more than ten minutes of How To Look Good Naked - and his new cookery show having not aired at time of writing - I have to judge ol’Gockles on the three times I’ve met him. I use the word “met” as casually as you might idly pick up a pair of his Specsavers specs, glance at their lilac frames in your hand and cast them aside, for on none of these three occasions would I have even registered on his consciousness.

The first was in Bristol, in 2006. I was on the cider boat with some friends, and after three pints of 7% Festival Proof Scrumpy the subject turned to one Mr Wan, who had recently become a TV phenomenon. “I can’t stand him,” I sneered, despite having never seen the show, though to be fair after that much Scrumpy I’d have held the same opinion of my own grandmother. Moments later, walking out into the sunshine, we were confronted with Gok standing on a street corner, looking long and lean and louche. “Hi,” I simpered, hoping he’d not been on the boat and heard my drunken diatribe. He beamed beatifically back. And that was the first time we “met”.

Then a few months ago at the Soho Hotel he held the door open for me with the sort of passive aggressiveness I thought only I was capable of. “Come on then,” he said meanly, tutting and sneering as I sheepishly held him up by walking through the doorway, past his angrily tapping foot, delaying him by a whole second and a half.

But only a couple of weeks later he flirted with me in the queue at Sainsbury’s. I got ID’d for wine (Best. Day. Ever) and he jokingly suggested he hoped he’d get the same treatment, and I made some remark about how hey, if they were asking me my age they clearly needed to visit his line of glasses in Specsavers, and he said that not at all, I looked very young, and we both laughed and smiled, and was that a frisson that passed between us? and all the time I was thinking about how he had been so rude when he’d held the door for me that other time and that all this charm was too little too late, but ooh, perhaps he was actually quite nice, and that well, I just didn’t know where I stood on whether I liked Gok or not.

But fortunately he has conclusively provided me with a concrete way to judge him – yes he’s got his own cookbook, entirely based on the Chinese food his dad, Poppa Wan, served in the family restaurant Gok worked in throughout his teenage years. “At last,” I cried, as it landed on my desk. “I’ll finally know whether I should flirt back next time I bump into him at the supermarket.” But just like my previous ”meetings” with the man, the results don’t determine a thing.

Gok’s Sesame Prawn Balls with Stir-Fried Cucumbers

Sesame prawn toasts are one of my favourite things in the world. They’re greasy and toasty and salty and surely make up at least half the wine glass full of fat that I once read in Metro is in every Chinese takeaway, but Gok’s version does away with the bread base and adds some stir fried cucumbers. It is also totally impossible.

Not pictured: the stir fried cucumbers, which by this stage I couldn’t be bothered with, or indeed any actual prawn balls

I followed the recipe to the letter. I chopped the prawns and water chestnuts finely, stuck them in a bowl with the sesame oil and mixed it all together. On Gok’s command I went to take an eighth of the mixture to form into a ball to roll in the sesame seeds…and it fell apart in my hands. “For Gok’s Sake!” I screamed. “This is the worst moment of my life!” My guests, over from Canada and expecting some top quality cuisine, rushed to help. “But there’s no binding agent,” they agreed. “There is no way this recipe could ever work.” I forwent the cucumber, cursing the name of Gok, and fried the prawn mixture as one. We ate it with a spoon, off one plate. Worst appetiser since the raw potato.

Gok’s Hot and Sour Soup

However, his Hot and Sour Soup was incredible. “Opposites attract!” begins his intro about why the two flavours work together, also neatly explaining why we would never get beyond the flirting-in-Sainsbury’s stage. With our glasses, love of scarves, and self esteem issues, The Gokster and I are as  one. I might marry him for this soup, however.

My version. Tasted as proportionately unlike vomit as it looked similar

Rich and dark, full of mushroomy goodness and tangier than Haribo, we all four licked our bowls clean. “And he doesn’t really even like mushrooms,” said my female guest about her boyfriend, staring at his empty bowl.

His Braised Aubergine with Pork

And then his Braised Aubergine with Pork fell somewhere in the middle. Served with his aromatic Wok Fried Beans it had an earthy flavour that came from the soy sauce and anchovies, but there wasn’t enough sauce – it lacked the oomph you’d expect from a man who talks to women about their breasts all day. “Yeah, this is fine,” everyone agreed, damning with faint praise.

And mine. Roughly as appetising as it looked

Of course, Gok being a former fatty there were no desserts in this book. We served ice cream and more booze instead, just like we were in a real Chinese restaurant. And that’s the problem with Gok’s endeavours. Flicking through it now, staring at recipes for Crispy Duck Plum pancakes and egg fried rice, I just want to order straight in from Deliverance, rather than make any of these things myself. It’s better than your average celeb-turned-cook cookbook, but he should have had the foresight to see that in an era where everyone’s a foodie, we really do need more than that. Perhaps he should have gone to Specsavers.

Cost of ingredients £27.35 (not including items already in store cupboard)

Appetiser * Shanghai Surprise, and not in a good way

Starter * * * * *

Main * *

Overall 5/10 It looks nice, and most of the recipes pretty much work…

Gok Cooks Chinese (Penguin, £20) Original Photography by Jemma Watts

Home Cooking Made Easy by Lorraine Pascale: The Review

Pot. So 90s.

I love the 1990s revival so much more than I loved the actual 1990s. Back then I sat in my room listening to Tori Amos albums over and over, marking passages in Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson about the beauty of true love, and getting frustrated about the episode of My So Called Life where Angela had a meltdown because she had one spot on her otherwise perfect visage. One spot. One tiny, almost beautiful spot. I should have been so lucky to have had only the one spot.

So with all these big 90s names making a comeback – Damien Hirst, Clare Danes, Faye Tozer – it’s nice to be able to actually enjoy them from my now relatively outward-looking maturity, rather than to be letting them pass me by as I sat at home making necklaces out of self-consciously kooky plastic beads I’d bought in Brighton, wailing along to The Cranberries.

And my favourite 90s star to have suddenly popped up is Lorraine Pascale. True, no one had actually heard of her back then – the internet had hardly been invented so how did anyone really know about anything – but she walked in a couple of Versace shows, shot a couple of fashion campaigns, and was probably once ignoring the canapés at the same party as Cindy Crawford, so all  her  press cuttings happily refer to her as a former supermodel and it’s convenient to pretend that that is what she is.

For on TV she’s natural, charming, unpretentious, un-smug about her perfect kitchen, perfect cooking, perfect life. You want to eat her food, be her friend, have her lovely smooth skin (some personal aspects of the 90s really will haunt me forever). She cooks easy food that looks almost as scrummy as her, serving it up at the end of each episode to a couple of pals, a less raucous and more current version of Jamie O.

But I interviewed her once on the phone. It was the day after the airing of the first episode of her second series, the viewing figures were in and she’d had something like 5m of us glued to her brand of easy domesticity. “I just can’t believe that many people are watching me,” she said timidly, overwhelmed by the sudden attention, as if she’d not covered billboards just  a few years ago (which, actually, she might not have done. Who knows?) “I don’t really have friends over for dinner,” she then went on to add, shattering the carefully curated image of her show. But I loved her all the same. Anyone who adds gorgonzola and breadcrumbs to pasta and calls it “Glam Mac and Cheese” is alright in my book.

 And as I knew I’d be cooking for four on the morning after two consecutive nights of larging it (as they said in the 90s), I needed recipes  to be as simple as possible. With her second book entitled Home Cooking Made Easy, I trusted she’d be my saviour.

And she was, disappointingly. I know this blog is much more interesting when the recipes all fuck up like here and here, but Lorraine was as good as her word – this book was, well, home cooking made easy.

The most painful part of the process was when my alarm went off at 7.45am. We had been at Attitude Magazine’s 18^th birthday the night before – it had been free booze from 7pm and one of the last things I remember is an unapologetic Harry Derbridge from TOWIE spilling a drink all down my boyfriend’s arm. Totally non-sober myself, Will had to forcibly prevent me from marching up to him to, in my words at the time, “fucking sort him out.” Will really is the yin to my yang.

Anyway, the pork had to go in the oven where it sat for six hours, leaving me time to make the starter, pudding, complain about feeling queasy and generally blame my hangover on my boyfriend, whose only crime was to ask innocently from the sofa if I needed any help.

Lorraine’s Herby Scotch Eggs

The Herby Scotch Eggs were vaguely fiddly, yet not remotely difficult. Hard boiled eggs covered in sausage meat, rolled in breadcrumbs and baked for my American readers (howdy) Luscious Lorraine (as no one is calling her)’s idea was to splat the sausage meat on some cling film (that’s Saran Wrap, y’all), stick the egg in the middle and bunch up the cling film to encase the egg in meat. Much tastier than they sound.

My version. On a hangover, you can’t really expect more

And it almost worked, too – only two of the four split open in the oven, and by the time we ate them, having smelt the pork wafting gently out of the oven for six long hours, it wouldn’t have mattered what they’d looked like.

LP’s Really Slow-Roast Pork With Crispy, Crispy Crackling and Garlic Roast Vegetables

As for the Really Slow-Roast Pork With Crispy, Crispy Crackling and Garlic Roast Vegetables, it was incredible, a piggy triumph, a silk purse out of a sow’s shoulder. “Pip, come and look at this,” Will said seriously from where I’d made him carve. “The meat is literally just falling apart.”

And mine. Phwoar

It tasted as succulent as it looked, and the addition of pears to the roast vegetables were a genius twist on apple sauce. Serving it up with Lorraine’s Red Cabbage with Pears and Garlic (a pair of pears, if you will), the lesbians we’d had over for lunch were suitably impressed. “It tastes like it has been sent from heaven,” said one, as if she knew anything about porking (boom boom). The crackling was as crispy as the double-use of the word in the title implied - so crunchy LP named it twice - and its fennel seed topping was deliciously bittersweet.

Lorraine’s Frozen Raspberry Ripple Parfait ‘Ice Cream’

Finally, after we’d lain in a meat stupor for an hour or so, rubbing our satisfied tummies for long enough to have massaged some room into them, I brought the Frozen Raspberry Ripple Parfait ‘Ice Cream’ from the freezer where it had nestled all day. My last memory of it has been cursing the tediosity (fuck you, you annoying squiggly red line,that should sooooo be a word) of pushing the raspberries through a sieve to make a puree, and the noise of the electric beaters hitting the exact same frequency as the wine-related roar in my brain as they whipped the cream and egg whites, but the drama was all forgotten as we gorged on this vaguely adult take on a childhood classic, as smooth and sweet as Lorraine herself.

My chopping board may not be as aspirational, but not bad, right?

So go on, follow another 90s trend and actually buy this book, as opposed to just googling for the free recipes online because you’ve gone all modern and stuff.  It does exactly what it says on the tin.

Cost of ingredients: £32.34 (not counting items already in store cupboard)

Starter * * * (but it tasted a lot better than it looked)

Main * * * * * (I can eat this every day, yes?)

Pudding * * * * * (Ditto)

Overall: 10/10 Please marry me, Lorraine

Home Cooking Made Easy by Lorraine Pascale is published by HarperCollins (£20). Original photography by Myles New