A quick post
Today I am unwell. I give you some d- ingredients with dignity and shall take myself unto my bed and see if I can sleep this off. See you tomorrow.
dark soy sauce - a wonderful, thick caramel-y sauce that is brilliant for cooking in meat dishes. Shake the bottle around to see if it is dark soy sauce - if it oozes a little but is not kecap asin (Indonesian sweet soy sauce) you’ve got it!
dashi - in Japanese cooking, a stock used to cook a number of interesting dishes. The usual ingredients are water, kelp and bonito flakes, but dashi recipes can vary.
dates - two types, Chinese dates and ordinary dates. Try Chinese dates stuffed with almonds. The Egyptian date palm (the classic date palm) is phoenix dactylifera. We had one up the road when I was a kid - the dates never ripened, but the birds adored it - it sounded very odd, hundreds of birds clustered in the one tree. Chinese dates are usually jujubes, which is another story entirely.
dill (anethum graveolens) Indonesian adas cina -the two main uses of dill in European cooking appear to be as a pickle (yum) or as a digestive (I personally do not favour it - it makes you forget the flavour of dessert….). It is one of the classic digestive herbs.
Dorrigo pepper - (Tasmannia lanceolata) - Australian pepper from Dorrigo NSW, hot and delicious. I know it as Dorrigo pepper, but have also heard it called native pepper, mountain pepper and other things (all painstakingly polite). In fact, mountain pepper leaf is something else (story of the day), also nice but needs to be added at the end of cooking as it loses its flavour quite quickly. Dorrigo pepper is stronger than “ordinary” pepper: heed my warning, or have a glass of water handy.
dried apricots - great snack for kids, high in iron, I always buy more than I need for cooking and wonder where it all goes. We used to make great party snacks using dried apricots eg put a bit of cream cheese on top and then a toasted almond.
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