Sometimes slow, occasionally not so

I've never tried to hide the fact that I think the way we experience food is dictated by the circumstances within which it is eaten. An apple rapidly devoured during a mad dash for an incoming bus is a wholly different fruit to one that you let yourself gradually sink your teeth into as you stare into a morning sky as blue and full of birds as the Twitter logo. Sure, they could be exactly the same fruit - same freshness, same firmness, same pesticides or lack thereof, nevertheless the two experiences are totally divorced from one another.

I'm not sure how many will agree, but I don't particularly enjoy "on-the-go" food, even if we disregard the whole face-mask situation we're currently encumbered with. Perhaps it makes us feel like the perfect capitalist citizens we're all destined to be, but food consumed at high speed just doesn't taste same, right? Being in a state of unemployment and, prior to that, on furlough means that I haven't been frequently dealing with this issue for a fair few months, however it's recently come to my attention that I have a pretty pernicious compulsion to be doing something while I eat my food. Because, y'know, contributing to healthy human nourishment just isn't productive enough to cut it.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect myself to uncover the key to global nuclear disarmament over a slice of toast and a cup of tea, but usually I'll have prepared something for myself to read, listen to or watch at the same time. If, through some freak lapse of foresight, I happen to forget to make these necessary preparations then I'll often end up scrolling through my Instagram feed, which I don't think has ever left anyone feeling particularly satisfied. Most of the time, randomly questing through Instagram feeds feels like trying to remember something you've flat out forgotten. So, this notion of needing to "do something" concurrent to eating isn't predicated on efficiency, it's a well-trodden and reinforced neural pathway paved with nonsense.

Given my tendencies, it felt nothing short of revolution a couple of nights ago for me to attempt to abstain from this habit. I'd made a dinner that wasn't particularly notable (a tin of tomatoes mixed with massaman curry paste and some mixed-vegetables cooked from frozen), but I resolved to let the food be the central focus of the follow ten minutes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the food in front of me went from being an accompaniment to the centre of my attention; just like the aforementioned apple, it felt as if I tasted a lot more from it when I wasn't simultaneously looking at recipes for other people's food. It's definitely not a stretch of the imagination to think that food can be appreciated to a greater extent when we take the time to treat it as an activity, rather than a simple need to be met.

This isn't to say that food always has to be a stop-n'-breathe exercise. Dinner on the sofa with a movie can be wonderful; reading a book with a steaming bowl of porridge is occasional bliss, and sometimes it does just seem right to read the news with breakfast. Sometimes, the moment present doesn't entirely gel with calm, meditative consumption. Like many things in life (inconveniently) it's all about judging your needs in the moment. I'm sure it will take weeks/months/years/decades (delete as applicable) for this to become fully ingrained in my mind, but I'm going to try to be more conscious about where I'm allocating my focus to.

While we're on the topic of taking things slow, let me tell you where today's recipe was adapted from; a cookbook from 1981. I made Coral-Coloured Cabbage from the late Kenneth Lo's Regional Chinese Cookbook, which I can only imagine was written at a time where the reach of home-cooking didn't extend very far eastwards. I've changed up the formula for a few details such as the addition of a few aromatics, but the recipe is virtually the same in spirit. The dish comes from Tai'an in the eastern Chinese, coastal province of Shandong and Lo recommends this dish to be served "for a banquet or a family party"; given that very few of us are currently able to do this, I'm going to say that this is fine for a weekday dinner.

Cabbages are a staple of the Winter diet throughout much of the province of Shandong, where they are grown to be particularly large and sweet. Don't worry about whether the cabbage you use quite matches the Shandong standard, because the flavour of the dish comes from the sweet, acidic cooking liquid. The cuisine of the province is also reputed for the sophisticated incorporation of vinegar into foods; again, do not be concerned if your vinegar selection is less than extensive as acidity can be achieved in many ways. The main thing we're looking for is a sharpness to cut across and balance the sweetness of the tomato puree which largely defines the flavour profile.

Coral-Coloured Cabbage

Preparation time: 20 minutes

Cooking time: 15 minutes

Serves: 3-4

Ingredients

650-750g of Napa cabbage

130g of white mushrooms

1 large sweet red pointed pepper

140g of bamboo shoots

1 1/2 tsp of fresh ginger

2 cloves of garlic

2 spring onions

1 tbsp of light soy sauce

1 tbsp of granulated sugar

1 tbsp of rice wine vinegar

1/2 tbsp of black rice vinegar (chinkiang)

1 tbsp of tomato puree

1/2 tbsp of cornflower

1 tbsp of vegetable oil

1 tbsp of sesame oil

1 tbsp + 1 tsp of salt

Method

Cut off the bottom of the cabbage and turn it sideways. Slice it from the bottom in 1-inch intervals. The way that the leaves of the cabbage are arranged mean that it should naturally fall apart into slices, but if the cross-sections do stay intact then either pull them apart with your hands or slice them further with your knife. Add the cabbage into a large bowl and cover with boiling water, and the tbsp of salt. Let the cabbage sit in the water for 5 minutes before draining off the water and setting aside.

Peel the ginger, before slicing and mincing, then crush each garlic clove and mince it in the same manner. Slice the mushrooms into cross-sections approximately half a centimetre thick, and slice the bamboo shoots into thin matchsticks (some canned varieties will already be in this format). Remove the core and the seeds from the sweet pointed pepper, and then slice the it into matchsticks as well. Finally, take the spring onions and cut them into thin diagonal slices. Set all of the vegetables aside.

Heat the vegetable oil in a large wok over a medium-high heat and when it has come to temperature, add the garlic and the ginger. Fry for 1 minute, before adding in the mushrooms, peppers and bamboo shoots. Sprinkle over the tsp of salt, and saute over a medium-high heat for 5 minutes, stirring frequently.

Add in the cabbage, as well as the soy sauce, tomato puree, sugar and both vinegars and stir through until everything is well incorporated. Take 1 tbsp of the cooking liquid and stir in the cornflower until you have a smooth paste. Add the paste back into the wok, and cook over a medium-high heat for a further 3 minutes. This should thicken up consistency of the liquid somewhat and allow it to adhere to the vegetables more.

Stir in the spring onions and the sesame oil, and cook for a further 1 minute before taking off of the heat. Serve this with rice, or as part of a side dish for a bigger meal.

Notes & Adjustments

• For the ingredients that comprise the cooking liquid, it is worth measuring these out and stirring together prior to cooking to save you having to do it while the wok is on the heat.

• If you can't find Napa cabbage, I would recommend using white cabbage as it has a similar sweetness. It is also commonly referred to as Chinese leaf.

• For the vinegars, if you can't find rice wine vinegar or black rice vinegar then you can substitute with red wine vinegar. If you do this, I would tone down the vinegar to 1 tbsp, as red wine vinegar has a somewhat more acerbic flavour. The rice vinegars can be found in Asian supermarkets, with the former also being found in many mainstream supermarkets (albeit, for a considerably higher price).

• Use whatever mushrooms you liked here. The recipe called for 4-6 dried Chinese mushrooms, which I didn't have to hand. Shiitake and oyster have a texture that is closer to re-hydrated mushrooms, but go with whatever is most easily available to you.

• If you can't get a sweet pointed pepper, then just a regular one will do.

Frayed edges

Let's be real, I think many of us are feeling less than pristine at the moment. I'm currently residing at the degree of disarray which causes me to consider the latest Fiona Apple release to feel eminently relatable on a sonic level. Restrictions are starting to lift here in the UK, but while we're still reporting daily death rates as high as 230 it doesn't seem right to jump the gun if the situation doesn't necessitate it. So, I've been continuing patrol the same grounds, applying for jobs in cafes and bubble tea shops, going to bed around two in the morning and waking up at eight; I'm not exactly a paragon of togetherness but the the phrase "getting by" is as forgivable now as it ever will be.

One thing that does, inexplicably, make me feel somewhat out of control is opening the fridge door and being greeted by a large surplus of seemingly incompatible leftovers. I've mentioned it before, but I subscribe to notion that buying a food product means that you are then responsible for using it in it's entirety (whether or not I'm wholly successful at doing so). To be fair, usually I don't need to be convinced to eat room temperature leftovers from dinner in the light of the midnight moon, but occasionally I'll be presented with a small mug of gravy, 100ml of vegetable broth, and half a tin of chopped tomatoes and feel like I'm on an episode of Ready, Steady, Cook (UK readers - remember that?).

The flip-side of this leftover drama is that when I do cook something from the remnants of a previous meal which also happens to be delicious in it's own right, I feel incredibly fulfilled. I'm sure the illusion of a perfectly circular attitude to refrigerator contents stays intact for at least 30 minutes before I realise that I probably should have thrown in a handful of the rapidly wilting coriander that sits beside my window (we can't be perfect all the time). It is precisely this feeling of ephemeral completeness that I want to share today, with a recipe that calls for, nay requires, leftover rice; a kimchi-rice pancake.

It may seem unduly particular to call for leftover rice specifically, however freshly cooked rice is too starchy and will contribute an overly soggy texture to the pancake; it needs some time to lose some of it's moisture. In the interests of flexibility and practicability, I'm this recipe takes a pretty loose attitude to what can be used as "rice". My leftovers for this came from a dinner of rice and kidney beans, so a few of the beans were included within the pancake which was perfectly fine. At the same time, grains such as farro and pearl barley would also work nicely. As long as what you're using isn't going to add a deleterious amount of moisture to the pancake batter, then you'll be set!

Don't be disheartened if the pancake doesn't look particularly neat and tidy; it is a rugged beast by nature and if it tears a little bit in the process of frying, all is not lost. Flipping things has never been my strong suit, and when I went to turn mine it doubled over on itself instead of falling neatly on it's other side. This caused me to crow "oh no, it's ruined" before being assisted by housemate-of-the-blog Owen, who heroically (and easily) unfolded it with the spatula, turned it out on to a plate, and used that to turn it back out into the pan, which you can do if the dynamic flip is a scary concept for you. It's probably what I should have thought to do!

This whole situation left me wondering what the word "ruined" meant in that situation. The risk wasn't that I'd be left with something inedible, or that the pancake wouldn't taste as good. No, my worry came from a fear that the pancake wouldn't be Instagrammable, and subsequently I wouldn't be able to write about it here. Maybe this sounds shallow, but considering that food blogs source much of their traffic from their corresponding Instagram posts. This puts a burden on food bloggers to "style" their food before they take a picture, which is entirely antithetical to home cooking for a number of reasons. There is no symmetry, to home-cooked food, nor does it follow the golden ratio or any other commonly accepted standards of beauty; the word homespun exists for a reason. And, let's be real, once we've finished cooking we just want to f*cking eat, right?

I've talked before about the food bloggers of 2005 but it's a topic worth dredging up again. I we look at the food photography from 15 years ago, we'd find it bizarrely angled and lit, completely devoid of plate-work, but it'd be a much more accurate representation of the spirit of home-cooking. Sure, 2005 had some regrettable aspects; the continuing love affair of Bush and Blair, the toothlessness of the Kyoto Protocol and Bird Flu (it also had Extraordinary Machine by the aforementioned Fiona Apple which was a great thing), but bloggers were certainly served well by the year. Photographing and arranging my food on a plate is, by far, my least favourite part of the process. But, then again, without Instagram would I have a platform to share my blogging at all? It's an uneasy relationship.

I think the important part here is to ensure that this fixation with the appearance of food doesn't extend to every day home cooking. Oftentimes, a meal will look like you've dredged up a bowlful of swamp detritus, yet will be vibrant and well-balanced to the taste. Not every meal can be bedecked with pomegranate seeds, or garnished with perfectly geometric segments of avocado; sometimes, we must come to appreciate amorphous shades of beige. Where would we be without hummus, for example? In terms of the kimchi pancake, I hope you'll come to find it's frayed and ragged edges endearing. Taste it, and I promise that you won't even care.

Kimchi-Rice Pancake

Preparation time: 30 minutes

Cooking time: 20 minutes

Serves: 2 people

Ingredients

Pancake

70g of plain flour

95ml of milk

1 tsp of dark soy sauce

1 tbsp of kimchi brine (optional)

1/2 tsp of salt

1/2 tbsp of vegetable oil

Filling

1 red onion, coarsely chopped

White parts of 2 spring onions, sliced diagonally

2 cloves of garlic, crushed and minced

1 tsp of ginger, minced

95g of carrot, grated

115g of kimchi, roughly sliced

100g of leftover rice

1/2 tbsp of vegetable oil

1/4 tsp salt

Topping

1 tbsp toasted white sesame seeds

Green parts of 2 spring onions, finely sliced

2 eggs

1 tbsp of vegetable oil

1 tbsp of gochujang

1 tsp of rice vinegar

1/2 tsp of honey

Method

Heat a frying pan over a medium-high heat, and add 1/2 a tbsp of vegetable oil when it comes to temperature. When the oil is hot, add the onions and fry for 4-5 minutes, or until they've browned slightly. Add in the whites of the spring onion, and fry for a further 2 minutes, before briefly stirring the garlic and the ginger through. Tip the grated carrot into the pan and sprinkle over a 1/4 tsp of salt before frying for another 3 minutes. Finely, add in the kimchi and the rice, and carry on cooking for 2 further minutes. Add this mixture to a bowl and set aside.

Make the pancake batter; measure out the flour into a mixing bowl and make a small well in the middle. Pour the milk, soy sauce and kimchi brine (if using) into the centre of the bowl and add in the 1/2 tsp of salt. Whisk the mixture until smooth. Pour the pancake batter over the bowl of vegetables and mix until thoroughly combined.

To a small bowl, add the gochujang, vinegar and honey and mix until it forms a smooth sauce. Taste the mixture; if you'd like it to be sweeter then add a little bit more honey, or if you'd prefer it to be more acidic then add some more vinegar.

Heat the frying pan over a medium-high heat again, and add in the vegetable oil when it has come to temperature. When the oil is hot, add in the pancake mixture and flatten until it reaches the edges of the pan. Cook on one side for 3-4 minutes. As the bottom of the pancake begins to cook, go around the edges with a spatula (silicone, if you have one) to ensure that they do not stick. Keep doing this, moving further into the centre, until you can move the pancake around by swiveling the pan with your wrist.

After the underside is cooked, it will need to be turned over. The best way to do this (without risking a fold or a collapse) is to unload it on to a plate and carefully placing the frying pan upside down over the plate and flipping it out on to the frying pan. The cooked side will be facing upwards. Make sure that there is no loose oil in the pan before you do this! Cook on this side on a medium-high heat for a further 2 minutes before placing it back on to the plate. Slice the pancake into two halves.

Finally, add 1 tbsp of oil to the frying pan and wait for it to come to temperature (this should happen pretty quickly given all of the frying it had been doing prior). Crack two eggs into the pan and fry in the oil until the whites are fully cooked. Add an egg on to each pancake half, and sprinkle over the gochujang mixture, the spring onions, the sesame seeds and a pinch of salt.

Notes & Adjustments

• I usually make kimchi using Maangchi's recipe for vegan kimchi, but the fresh stuff that you can buy from a Korean supermarket is great too! Some supermarkets in the UK will sell a shelf stable version, but they taste more like a mildly-spiced mixture of vegetables which I don't recommend. If you can't get a hold of kimchi, then pick up a Napa or Savoy cabbage and chop up 100g of it, rinse it and add 1 tbsp of salt. Leave it for an hour before rinsing again. You may also wish to double the amount of garlic and ginger that you add into the pancake and add 1 tsp of mild chilli powder to the batter.

• If your kimchi doesn't have easily accessible brine then don't worry about this step; I always find that homemade kimchi comes out with more brine than a store bought version, just because it's harder to get all of the water out of the leaves by hand.

• If you don't have gochujang, then you could just use any similar condiment to drizzle over the pancake. Sriracha or sweet chilli would also be ideal.

• The vegetables you use in this pancake are definitely negotiable, but I would avoid any with a particularly high water content.

• Rice vinegar can be substituted for red wine vinegar or lemon juice if needed.

• Vegetable stock or water can be used in the pancake batter instead of milk if preferred.

• As mentioned before, the rice doesn't strictly have to be rice, but it shouldn't be too starchy. The majority of it should be grains, but if there are pulses mixed in too then that's fine. If you don't have any leftover rice, then you could make some a few hours in advance and leave to dry out before making the pancake.

Campfire-side chat

I like to think that, for the most part, adhering to a vegetarian diet doesn't particularly hinder me in the context of day-to-day eating. The seeds of this were sown when I started at university (now almost SEVEN years ago) and found meat to be prohibitively expensive when I could just use a can of chickpeas or lentils in it's place. I didn't really know an awful lot about cooking then, but I knew that I could throw some vegetables and some kind of pulse together in a pan, season it vaguely and serve it with rice; it worked well enough for the time being. It should come as no surprise that it was during this period of my life that I chose to become a vegetarian.

So, if you ask me now whether vegetarianism restricts me at all, my initial impulse is to say something like "of course not", and claim that meat in a dish can be easily replaced by any other ingredient. However, this isn't exactly true. There are things that meat can do to a dish that the addition of a single vegetable or a bean cannot. I'm taking about the deeply savoury qualities that browned beef and liver gives a pan of bolognese, or the fulsome lick of saline fat that cubed pancetta can afford to a simply dressed bowl of pasta. The qualities that meat bring to food seem so context-dependent, that it makes me wonder why it's used as a default ingredient, rather than with intention.

This sounds like I'm preparing to make the announcement that I'm renouncing my years of vegetarianism in favour of walking the path of the flesh; I'm not. Rather, what I'm (somehow) only just coming to understand is that to be a better vegetarian cook is to understand both it's advantages and it's limits. What this translates to thinking less concretely about what is being replaced in a dish, and reflecting more on the qualities that are to be replicated. Would the meat have added a dose of salt or umami? Does the flavour of the meat carry through to the rest of the dish? Is there a textural element to it's use? I think that beginning to understand this can inspire confidence around meatless cooking. At the same time, these are questions meat eaters should be asking themselves too; if these questions can't be easily answered, then the answer is almost invariably not to use meat.

In the interests of transparency, I do have to disclaim that my vegetarianism does have some small limits. I keep fish and oyster sauce in the kitchen, and will occasionally use a chicken stock cube. On very infrequent occasions (it stands at about once a year, currently) I'll have a meal that uses meat directly; a couple of weeks back, I made Samin Nosrat's recipe for Buttermilk-Marinated Roast Chicken because I wanted to understand the reverential airs that imbue the current literature around a home-cooked roast. I understood, it was a pretty delicious experience, but not one I feel compelled to replicate any time soon. The rest of the time, the food I eat is pretty exclusively meatless.

So, let's go to the source o'the discourse; my mum has informed me, on multiple occasions now, of the existence of a recipe named "Campfire Stew" that she has picked up while discovering camping in her late-fifties. I never went camping when I was younger, but I shall not go into this, lest this blog becomes devoted solely to things I didn't get to do as a kid. Anyway, the aforementioned recipe involves putting a joint of gammon into a slow cooker/casserole dish/clay pot/whatever you choose to use and adding beans, tomatoes, vegetables and other seasonings and cooking until the gammon is tender enough to pull into strips. I'm not sure why she (repeatedly) rhapsodised to me about something so integrally carnivorous, but it stuck around in my mind for enough time for me to want to make a version that was vegetarian friendly.

So, let's think; what is the purpose of gammon? It's salty. It's fatty. It's tender. My mind instantly turned to jackfruit. If you're unfamiliar with jackfruit, I talk about it in more detail here, but it is essentially a fruit that greatly replicates the texture of pulled pork to the extent that the white pulp and flesh respectively resemble a cut of pork with a considerable amount of fat. You can find it in canned form in most major supermarkets across the UK now, as it has gained considerable repute as a meat substitute. However, there is still the matter of taste. Recreating the actual taste of various meats is near enough impossible without some form of costly scientific intervention, but the next best thing would be to consider how the meat would have been seasoned. We often associate pork with smokiness, and a slightly woody sweetness. Here's where I took a tip from wonderhowto.com and used lapsang souchong tea to achieve this flavour blend; if you don't have this, or don't want to buy a box of it then I will leave substitution suggestions below as ever (I'm aware it is somewhat unorthodox).

You may be wondering why I wouldn't just use a meat replacement product here. While I don't have any problems with them, I find that while they come in the format of the thing they're replacing, they don't go particularly far in recreating the qualities of meat discussed above. Plus, they're usually a lot more expensive to buy. But, saying that, I think it is certainly useful that they're so widely available now and have contributed to making vegetarianism and veganism a much more accessible prospect nowadays; I cut my teeth on Quorn mince and "chicken" pieces before discovering the honourable tinned chickpea.

Whatever you choose to do with it, use this as an opportunity to think about the individual qualities of each ingredient, especially if you choose to make substitutions. While I have put this forward as a vegetarian (it's also vegan, btw) alternative to campfire stew, it is still quite vegetable-forward which generally reflects my own tastes. If you would prefer it to be a bit more "meaty" then please see my suggestions below the recipe!

Jackfruit Campfire Stew

Preparation time: 1 hour (not all of this is active)

Cooking time: 45 minutes

Serves 4-6

Ingredients

1 large onion, finely diced

50g celery, finely diced

4 cloves of garlic, crushed and minced

2 red chillies, finely minced

1 green bell pepper, 1/2 diced & 1/2 sliced into 3cm strips

1 yellow bell pepper, sliced into 3cm strips

1 red bell pepper, sliced into 3cm strips

350-400g of butternut squash, cut into 2cm cubes

400g tin of kidney beans, drained

400g tin of chopped tomatoes

1 tbsp of tomato puree

565g tin of jackfruit, drained

100ml of vegetable stock

3 lapsang souchong teabags

1 tbsp of maple syrup

1 tbsp + 1 tsp of light soy sauce

1 tsp dried thyme

1 1/2 tsp of smoked paprika

1 tsp of ground cumin

1/2 tsp of ground coriander

1/2 tsp of ground black pepper

15ml of lemon juice

1 tbsp of vegetable oil

Salt

Method

Put the butternut squash into a bowl and add 1/2 a tbsp of fine salt. Use your hands to distribute this evenly throughout the bowl and let it sit for at least 1 hour. This will allow the salt to properly permeate the dense flesh of the squash.

Brew the lapsang souchong teabags in 200ml of water for 3 minutes before removing. Be careful not to steep the teabags for too long, otherwise the taste will become astringent. Add the maple syrup, 1 tsp of light soy sauce, dried thyme and 1/2 a tsp of smoked paprika and stir until consistently combined.

Drain the jackfruit, and break it down into smaller strips by slicing each piece into cross sections and then slicing again in the other direction; the coarseness of the jackfruit is up to you! Add it into a bowl and pour over the tea mixture. Let this steep for at least 30 minute (you can prepare the other vegetables while waiting for the jackfruit and the squash). Once the jackfruit has finished steeping, drain as much of the liquid as possible into a bowl and set it aside for use later.

Heat a saucepan or a wok to a medium heat, and add vegetable oil. Once the oil has come to temperature, add in the onion, the celery and the diced green bell pepper. Cook on this heat for 6-8 minutes, or until softened. Add in the garlic and the red chilli and cook on a medium heat for a further 1 minute.

Turn the pan up to a medium-high heat and add the peppers, sprinkling over a 1/4 tsp of salt and stirring through. Cook for 4 minutes, stirring frequently. Stir in the butternut squash, cooking for a further 2 minutes.

Stir in the jackfruit and the beans, and cook for another 2 minutes. After this, pour over vegetable stock, the drained tea mixture,chopped tomatoes, lemon juice, tomato puree and 1 tbsp of light soy sauce. Stir this through, before adding the cumin, black pepper, coriander and 1 tsp of smoked paprika. Turn the pan up to a high heat and bring to the boil. Once it has come to the boil, turn down to a medium-low heat and simmer uncovered for 25 minutes.

After 25 minutes, check if any more seasoning is required. Remove a piece of butternut squash and cut through it to ensure that they are cooked through. If so, turn off the heat and leave to cool for 5 minutes before serving.

I walked the path of traditional American comfort here and served this with mashed potato, but rice or polenta would also be good alternatives.

Notes & Adjustments

• As stated above, if you can't find jackfruit then you are welcome to use a meat replacement product that comes in a similar format. I would steer clear of products that are already flavoured, and go for a plain one.

• If you don't have lapsang souchong tea, there are a few potential alternatives. You could marinate the mixture in vegetable stock instead of the tea, and mix it in with double the amount of smoked paprika. Alternatively, stirring in a tbsp of a particularly smoky variety of barbecue sauce (look for the word "woodsmoke") would work well too, as would using liquid smoke.

• If you would prefer this to be more "meat-forward", take out either the red or the yellow pepper and 100g of the butternut squash and double the amount of jackfruit used.

• Although I've suggested using kidney beans, any tinned beans will work. Usually I'm more inclined to suggest using dried beans, but I don't think it makes much of a difference with a dish like this.

• Instead of the lemon juice, you could use a red wine vinegar. This would a richer, rather than a sharp, fruit acidity.