Kerri was out this evening and on the way home I wondered how to use up the few pieces of purple sprouting brocolli that we had left over. Somehow in these situations I often end up craving a Thai or Chinese style stir fry and that’s what happened this evening too. To go with the brocolli, I bought some mushrooms, cashew nuts and spring onions.

Turned out very well and although I was a bit over-full afterwards, I still found myself wishing there had been more.

Everything was quite approximate, but the recipe went something like this:
1 large garlic clove, finely chopped
small piece grated ginger (I used half a teaspoon of powdered ginger actually as I didn’t have fresh)
200g mushrooms, sliced
half a pack of purple sprouting brocolli, cut into thirds and thick stalks sliced lengthways too
3 spring onions, chopped, both white and green bits
handful cashew nuts
half a teaspoon of corn flour, made into a paste with a little cold water
1tbsp oyster sauce
2tbsp soy sauce
1tbsp Chinese cooking wine

Heat a little vegetable oil in a wok over medium to high heat and add the garlic and ginger. Stir fry for 30 seconds or so, then add the brocolli and mushrooms. Stir fry for a couple of minutes and add one tablespoon of soy sauce. Add the spring onions and cashew nuts and keep stir frying for another minute. Then turn the heat down, add the other tablespoon of soy sauce, the oyster sauce and the Chinese cooking wine. Give a good stir and place a lid onto the wok. Leave it for 3 or 4 minutes until done. Serve with some rice and enjoy!

This was supposed to be mussels but when we came to clean said mussels, most of them were open. It was 7pm by this point so we quickly returned the mussels and exchanged them for some prawns. One of the major benefits of stir-frying is the speed at which the meal comes together so the fact that it was getting late wasn’t too much of a problem.

Our recent stir-fries have been a bit haphazard, basically throwing a bunch of ingredients into a pan and hoping for the best. They turn out fine, good even, but there’s nothing authentic about them so this time we tried to stick to a more Thai-style dish. This was also good and probably no better than our throw-it-all-in-and-hope-for-the-best efforts but at least we felt a little more authentic.

Thai Prawn Stir-Fry
Serves Two

2 spring onions, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 red chilli, finely chopped
1 stalk lemongrass, finely chopped
200g prawns, shelled
Generous splash light soy sauce
Generous splash Thai fish sauce
Handful baby corn, sliced lengthwise
Handful pak choi, prepared and separated

Heat the oil in a wok over high heat. Add the spring onion, garlic, chilli and lemongrass. Stir fry for 1 minute. Add the prawns. Stir fry for 2 minutes. Add some soy sauce and fish sauce. Add the baby corn. Stir fry for 2 minutes. Add the pak choi. Stir fry for 1 minute. Add a dash of water and white wine and a little more soy sauce and fish sauce. Turn down the heat and cover, cooking for another 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in chopped coriander leaf and serve with rice or noodles.

We have two potentially contradicting ideals: we like to try new dishes and recipes and we don’t like to waste food. The contradiction occurs because the former often requires us to buy ingredients for new recipes that we only use part of and then they hang around in the cupboards for ages because we don’t like to throw them away. Sometimes though, attempts to use up these ingredients can work out very well. That is what happened on Thursday evening when we decided that we really needed to use up the various half-packets of rice noodles that we had open.

Kerri’s idea for using them up was to have them with stir fried beef. She bought some sirloin from our local butcher and when I got home, we started to prepare and cook it. This turned out very well, much better than at least I expected it to based on the fact that it was a relatively impromptu, made-up recipe. It went something like this:

Beef stir fry
300g sirloin steak, cut into thin strips
2 birds eye chillis, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 small to medium onion, finely sliced
8 baby corn, halved lengthways
handful of mange tout or sugar snap peas
soy sauce
Thai fish sauce
4 kaffir lime leaves, thinly sliced
juice of half a lime

Heat a wok over medium to high heat. When it is hot, add a little vegetable oil and then add the sliced beef. Stir frequently to prevent it sticking or burning. After a minute of stir frying, add a teaspoon of fish sauce and after two minutes add another teaspoon. After three minutes, remove the beef to a plate and return the wok to the heat.

Add a little more oil and the onion, garlic and chilli. Stir fry over high heat for one minute, then add the baby corn. After one minute, add the mange tout and the sliced lime leaves along with a tablespoon or so each of soy sauce and fish sauce. You can vary the amount of the soy and fish sauces depending on your taste; I tend to add quite a lot of both of them because I love the strong, rich flavours that they impart but that might not be everyone’s preference.

After another two minutes, add the beef back to the wok along with a splash of water, then turn down the heat and put a lid on it. Let it steam for a few minutes. Then remove the lid and add the lime juice and any more soy or fish sauce that you want to for seasoning.

Back to what started the whole thing – the rice noodles. We had two types; one that needed to soak in hot water for five minutes and one that needed fifteen. Having soaked and then drained them both, once the stir fry was cooked we put it into a bowl and added a little more oil to the wok. Added a little more onion and garlic to the wok for 30 seconds, then added the noodles and stir fried them for a couple of minutes before serving.

As I said in the comment at the beginning of the post, this rather made-up dish turned out very well. Adding the fish sauce to the steak while stir frying it imparted a wonderful umami flavour to it while it still retained its innate steakiness and reminded at times of eating in a good steakhouse. Clearly the butcher had supplied us with some really good steak. I was worried that a lack of ginger or lemongrass would let the dish down, but the lime leaves and lime juice picked it up and it didn’t lack anything. Delicious.

This doesn’t look as attractive on the plate as I was hoping for. We had some trouble getting the skin on the mackerel to crisp up for some reason, perhaps we over-crowded the pan. While we presented it on a plate, we actually ended up flaking the fish onto some jasmine rice and mixing in the sauce. That would have looked even less pretty though so I suppose I should be grateful that we have this picture.

I’ve been craving mackerel this week, most likely because there’s been so much focus on sustainable fish in the media lately (you can read more about it here). We had a surfeit of Thai-style vegetables left over from earlier in the week and this recipe from “Thai Traditional Cooking – The Mother’s Recipes” seemed perfect. It specified whole, white fish but there was definitely enough punch in the chilli sauce for a stronger tasting fish like mackerel.

It wasn’t as quick as the prawn dish we cooked on Tuesday but it didn’t take a lot longer. It had that perfect balance of hot, sour, salty, sweetness that Thai food is known for and kept us full all evening. £2.75 for those four mackerel fillets so easy on the wallet too. A good January dish.

Pla Rad Prig (Fried Fish with Chilli Sauce)
Serves Two

4 mackerel fillets
2 shallots, peeled and chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
5 small, red chillies, chopped
1/2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp fish sauce
2 tbsp tamarind juice
2 tbsp water
Oil, for frying
2 spring onions, sliced

Start by cooking the mackerel fillets in some oil. We used a Jamie Oliver method that we saw on TV recently: fry the fish skin side down until the flesh on top has almost cooked through. Turn, cook briefly and then remove from the heat.

While the fish is cooking, pound the chillies, garlic and shallots together in a mortar and pestle until you have a rough paste.

Heat the tamarind juice, sugar and water together until boiling. Add the pounded ingedients and cook for two minutes. Add the fish sauce and then pour over the cooked fish.

Dress with the spring onion and serve with jasmine rice and some vegetables.

Adapted from “Thai Traditional Cooking – The Mother’s Recipes” by Maria Kanignan Saunders. Neither of us know where this book came from and the only online reference I can find for it is on Amazon, listed at £35. It’s a good book but it’s very small and probably not worth that much.

The orginial recipe called for 10 small, red chillies which I thought sounded too much so I halved it. This was about the right kind of heat for us but it could have taken a little more so increase if you like extreme heat. There was no water in the original recipe either but there didn’t seem to be enough liquid from just the tamarind so we added that in too.

This is an old one which we ate this when we arrived back in London after Christmas. Spicy prawn soup is a great dish when you’re looking for something light and interesting after days of eating too much heavy food. We cooked the same thing last year and often do a variation of it when we’re feeling like we’ve over-indulged.

The noodles were particularly good, we fried some onion and garlic before adding the noodles to the pan and then seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil. I remember thinking at the time they deserved to be more than a side dish and am planning something similar for tomorrow night.

I wasn’t going to post this since the pictures came out so badly but our friends who came and ate this with us asked for the pork recipe so here it is. We don’t have a very large dining table so don’t entertain at home as much as we would like to. When we do have people for dinner then we tend to cook one-pot dishes such as these that can be eaten on laps so people can spread out around the kitchen. It works quite well but we’re both looking forward to having more space so we can do traditional Thai banquet-style dinners.

The other thing about having people over is that, while it’s okay for us to eat slightly cold food while we try to get good pictures of the food, it’s not something we tend to inflict on our guests, hence the hastily snapped pictures. It’s a shame that neither of these dishes look all that appetising since they were actually pretty good, especially the pork. As with most Thai curries, the cooking of the dish itself is quick and easy, it’s the making of the pastes that takes the time.

We cooked both of these dishes intending to serve six people, with some rice and vegetables but there wasn’t really enough. I’d say this was probably enough to feed four, generously. I would therefore like to apologise to my guests (if they’re reading) and hope you didn’t have to stop off for more food on the way home!

Pork and Green Peppercorn Curry
From David Thompson’s “Thai Food”

300g pork shin (I used leg since shin is almost impossible to find)
2 cups coconut milk
Lemongrass offcuts (from paste)
Pinch of salt
1.5 cups coconut cream
1 tsp palm sugar
2 tbsps fish sauce
2 tbsps picked green peppercorns
3 kaffir lime leaves, shredded
Handful holy basil leaves
1 long red chilli, deseeded and juliennned

Paste
6-10 long red chillies, deseeded, soaked and drained
Large pinch salt
6 tbsps chopped lemongrass
1 tbsp grated lime zest
2 tbsps scraped and chopped corinader root
1 tsp coriander seeds, roasted
1 tsp cumin seeds, roasted

First, make the paste.

Bring the coconut milk to a boil in the pan. Add pork, lemongrass offcuts and salt. Add water to cover, if necessary. Simmer until pork is tender (about 30 minutes) and leave to cool in stock. When cook, remove, reserve the stock and trim and slice the meat into 1cm pieces.

Add the coconut cream to a clean pan and then add the paste and fry over a medium heat until fragrant, about two minutes. Season with the palm sugar and fish sauce and then add the pork. Moisten with the reserved stock if necessary. Finish with the remaining ingredients and check seasoning before serving.

Chicken and Vegetable Curry
From David Thompson’s “Thai Food”

500g skinless chicken thighs
4 cups stock

Selection of vegetables (mushrooms, basil leaves, bamboo shoots, eggplants, beans)

Paste
20 dried red chillies, deseeded, soaked and drained
Large pinch salt
4 tbsps chopped lemongrass
4 tbsps chopped shallot
2 tbsps chopped garlic
2 tsps shrimp paste

Start by making the paste.

Slice the chicken, combine with the paste and fry until fragrant – about two minutes.

Add the stock and bring to the boil. Add vegetables and simmer until cooked. Check the seasoning and then serve.

We had a roast chicken on Sunday and, of course, there were leftovers. We normally turn these into chicken curry but I was keen to try this Nigella recipe that I’d seen her make on TV recently. We forgot the vegetables and played around with the recipe (adding lemongrass and fish sauce) and it was okay, but not brilliant. The tamarind and turmeric gave it a pungent, slightly harsh flavour which clashed with the other fragrant notes and it just wasn’t as fresh as I was hoping for. One for the “needs work” category.

While searching to see if I had already posted this recipe, I came across this post, the opening line of which reads “The plan was for something light and spicy to counteract the amount of heavy food we’ve eaten over the last few days”. Not that we’re creatures of habit or anything but that was the exact reason we came to be eating this on Friday, the night we got home from a week of heavy food in Devon.

Habit or not, this dish is perfect for when you feel in need of something fresh and restorative and is also great if you’re feeling like you might be coming down with a cold, as I did on Friday. I felt fine on Saturday and while I don’t think this is magic soup or anything, there’s definitely something to be said for eating plenty of chilli if you’re feeling less than brilliant.

We had a stir-fried noodle dish with this too, recipe to follow.

We went to Brussels for the Bank Holiday weekend (post to follow) and, on our return, resolved to eat healthily to rid our bodies of all the Belgian beer, mussels and chocolate we ate while we were away. Some kind of stir fried chicken is what we usually opt for when we want something that is light, full of vegetables but still filling. Not the most original choice but it works for us. We vary the sauce ingredients depending on whether we’re in the mood for something Chinese or Thai, this one had a Thai tilt to it, close to this recipe.

Thai food used to appear in our kitchen very regularly since we both love the hot, sour, salty, sweet combination and Stephen is obsessed with buying catering sized bags of chillies and shallots and pounding them up in the mortar and pestle. Our local Thai supermarket has closed down and while it’s easy to find the staples like ginger and lemongrass in the supermarket, the more unusual things like galangal and lime leaves can be harder to source.

Coupled with that, the complex dishes that we enjoy the most take time to prepare and cook. The ingredients need to be peeled and chopped and pounded to a paste before being fried slowly to release the flavours and then cooked with meat or fish and coconut milk for a long time so that everything comes together in a cohesive way. Time isn’t something we’ve had a lot of recently and when we have had it, there have been other things needing attention that we’ve had to prioritise over spending whole afternoons in the kitchen. Luckily for us, yesterday wasn’t one of those days which meant we had time to gather our ingredients and make two Thai dishes for dinner.

We started with a seafood salad that was a great way to awaken our taste buds and prepare us for the main course. Despite the long ingredient list, this was very simple to put together but the quality of the fish was important. It seemed a little wasteful or extravagant to boil the scallops and then drown them in lots of aromatics and they did lose some of their flavour but they worked brilliantly as little sponges sucking up all the flavour from the lime juice and fish sauce. The prawns, cooked in their shells, retained their sweetness and added a firmer texture while the squid, although good, mostly bulked everything out.

While we were eating, the khmer chicken samla was simmering away on the hob ready for us to eat once we’d finished with our starters. This is a dish we’ve cooked a couple of times before and is one of the first Thai dishes I really enjoyed; Stephen’s sister cooked it for us years ago and then bought us the book as a gift. Consequently, it holds happy memories for me as the dish that really introduced me to one of my favourite cuisines and is the one I crave most often when thinking about Thai food.

There’s no messing about with this, there are 10 cloves of garlic in there, the same amount of lemongrass and two tablespoons of shrimp paste – the really stinky stuff that you have to fry and can still smell days later even though you’ve scrubbed your entire kitchen. Four dried chillies mean it’s hot and it’s spicy with a huge amount of flavour going on but it’s also perfectly balanced and fragrant. Just don’t get stuck into the Gruner Veltliner like we did and leave it to cook down too long because there’s a fine line between punchy and over-reduced. We were just about okay but had we started on the Riesling too then we would have been in trouble.

Yam Talay (from the Blue Elephant Cookbook)
Serves Two

4 cloves garlic, peeled
2 large red chillies
2 bird’s eye chillies
Seafood (we used four prawns, four scallops and one squid)
1/2 tsp sugar
5 tbsps fish sauce
5 tbsps lime juice (original recipe states lemon juice)
2 stems lemongrass, finely sliced
4 kaffir lime leaves, finely sliced
Half a red onion, finely sliced
2 spring onions, finely sliced
8cm carrot, cut into julienne
10 mint leaves
6 stems coriander leaves, chopped
Lettuce leaves

Pound the garlic into a paste with the chillies.

Bring a pan of water to the boil and add the seafood, boil for one minute.

Drain the seafood and put into a bowl. Mix in the chilli and garlic paste, sugar, fish sauce and lemon juice.

Add the remaining ingredients, toss together and then serve on top of the lettuce leaves.