Hot and Sticky Roast Quail with Thai Style Brussels Sprout Noodles

Paging through Nigel Slater’s “the kitchen diaries” book, Kerri found this quail recipe, which sounded rather appealing. It involved basting quails in mustard, soy sauce, lemon juice, cayenne pepper and rather a lot of garlic and then roasting them. The result was very tasty, with some heat from the mustard and the cayenne and well balanced by the other flavours. It does bring out the caveman instincts, having to pull the little birds apart with your fingers in order to eat them efficiently.

Having done our recent shopping order online, we have of course ended up with large bags of things that we don’t usually need large bags of. One of these things is brussels sprouts. Both of us really love them, so it’s not too much of a disaster, but we do need to think of interesting things to do with them. When I suggested noodles with pak choy to go with the quail, we soon changed that idea to noodles with brussels sprouts and came up with a recipe.

We steamed the sprouts until just done, then stir fried half an onion (finely chopped), a whole red chilli (also finely chopped) and a clove of garlic (crushed) before adding the halved sprouts. While this was going on, we prepared some rice noodles and then put those into the wok with everything else, adding a dash of sesame oil and a splash of soy sauce. It worked out rather well for something that we’d made up on the spot and we’ll certainly try it (or something similar) again soon.

Nigel Slater’s quail recipe uses mustard, but I think this could easily be replaced with chilli and a dash of sugar or something similar to make it more Thai styled, which would bring the quails and the noodles a bit closer in a culinary sense. As it was, they worked very well together as far as taste is concerned, but the slight mismatch in culinary styles bothered me: we weren’t aiming for fusion or Mexithairranean chain-pub food after all. Although using the brussels sprouts in the noodles caused something of a mismatch anyway, so maybe I should stop worrying about it; it was very tasty after all and that is what matters the most.