Jiao Zi (Beijing pork dumplings)

Some Jiao Zi pork dumplings, yesterday

The food of the gods! Easy, tasty, and you can freeze them if you make too many. Measurements quoted should produce 8-10 jiao zi dumplings. Preparation: 15 minutes. Cooking: 8 minutes. Satisfaction: guaranteed.

For the filling:

• 200g pork, minced
• Fresh coriander, chopped finely
• 4 or 5 spring onions, chopped finely (substitute for chives if preferred)
• A small piece of ginger, unpeeled and chopped finely
• Soy sauce
• Malt vinegar
• Soy sauce
• White pepper
• Sesame oil

For the casing:

• Plain white flour
• Cold water

Combine the pork, coriander, onions and ginger in a bowl. Add 5 teaspoonsful of vinegar, one teaspoonful of the soy sauce and a few drips of sesame oil. Add pepper if you like your dumplings on the spicy side!

Now put a pan of water on to boil.

Put about 250g of the flour in a separate bowl. Add a small amount of water and mix with your fingers. Keep adding water until you have a basic dough. Divide into pieces no larger than a 2p piece, and roll them into discs, taking care not to make the dough too thin; it should ideally be roughly a millimetre thick.

Now take a disc of dough, and place a teaspoonful of the pork mixture in the centre. Fold over to make a half moon shape, and press the edges together to seal the pork inside. Roll the pleated edges inwards to seal, so that the dumplings resemble tiny Cornish pasties.

When all the mixture is used up, place the jiao zi in the boiling water and cook for five minutes. Dry the cooked dumplings on a piece of kitchen towel or a clean cloth.

You can serve the jiao zi with any surplus chopped coriander, or with a sweet chilli sauce, or why not make your own dipping sauce by combining soy sauce, malt vinegar, chopped red chillies and chopped garlic. You may wish to fry them in a little vegetable oil until golden on one side (see illustration).

End of the line for National Express

So I see HM Government have finally seen sense and terminated National Express's franchise to run the train line from Southend to London Liverpool Street.

And not a moment too soon. National Express have failed on so many levels to deliver a service which could be deemed even vaguely satisfactory. I often can't get a seat on my evening train, while the first class carriages sit completely empty. The filthy carriages are littered with drinks cans and newspapers (most of which are discarded copies of the vile celeb-obsessed propaganda sheet Metro.) The toilets frequently overflow with sewage and toilet paper. The staff, already overworked as a result of staff cutbacks, were offered insultingly low pay rises this year, which led to strike action.

No money whatsoever appears to have been spent on development on the Liverpool Street line since its privatisation. Fare-dodgers walk through the station barriers with impunity. People travel with their feet on the seats, jabbering inanities into their mobile phones in spiteful disregard of the notices asking to respect fellow passengers, knowing that they will never see a ticket inspector. All the while, us regular commuters endure the daily grind by scrabbling for second-class seats with a third-rate provider.

And it's not like I haven't done anything about it. My letters of complaint to NX have been met with insultingly simplistic responses which were clearly cut-and-pasted from standard documents, while my suggestions about abolishing first class and freeing up the space for commuters were carefully sidestepped in their responses to me. Perhaps they thought I was joking.

I predicted that NX wouldn't last the course. There is, actually, a lesson to be learned here - the trains ought never to have been privatised in the first place.

The only real shame here is that National Express's other franchise, c2c, which has an exemplary track record, is also being stripped of its licence; a case of guilt by association, perhaps.

Look around you. Just look around you.

Just found this on my hard drive, and it still makes me laugh long and hard every time I look at it. Just realised I can blog straight from the so-good-it's-frightening Picasa, so forgive the repost but it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Normal updates will resume soon, y'all.