Thai Monday: Lemongrass Beef and Tom Yum Goong
As it was a Bank Holiday today and we had plenty of time, we decided to cook some Thai dishes. We’ve done the lemongrass beef several times before and it’s one of our favourites. To go with it we decided on Tom Yum Goong.
Both dishes are quick to prepare which makes a refreshing change when it comes to Thai dishes and neither ate into our full day of relaxing. Despite not looking all the attractive, the soup was good: hot and slightly sour. The lemongrass beef, as always, was brilliant.
3 cups mild chicken stock
2 stalks lemongrass, smashed flat and cut into 1.5 inch pieces
3 wild lime leaves
3 birds eye chillies, cut in half lengthwise
1/4 pound oyster mushrooms, chopped
1/2 pound prawns
3 tbs fresh lime juice
2 tbs fish sauce
Place the stock in a pot with the lemongrass and bring to the boil.
Add the lime leaves and chillies and bring back to the boil, cook for five minutes.
Add the mushrooms and prawns and cook for 1 minute or until the prawns have turned pink.
Remove from the heat and stir in the lime juice and fish sauce. Taste and adjust seasonings if necessary.
Roast Pork
Yesterday we had friends over for lunch and cooked roast pork with stuffing, roast potatoes, cabbage, leeks, carrots and peas. We also deep-fried some sage leaves and served these with the pork. I’d had these earlier in the week at a really good pub but ours didn’t turn out the same way. A lot of the recipes we found for frying the leaves used a beer batter which we didn’t do, perhaps that was the reason.
The meat was lovely though and Stephen made some brilliant gravy to go with it.
Pizza!
Pizza tonight! We made the dough, then went shopping while it rose and when we got home, all we needed to do was heat up the oven, add the ingredients and cook them. Kerri made a tomato sauce by cooking down some cherry tomatoes with garlic and oil, which worked rather well.
The first pizza had olives, salami and mozarella on it. This one didn’t quite fit into the pizza tray, which meant that it had a lot of crispy crust around the edges which we dipped into olive oil. Yum.
The second pizza had anchovies, capers, chilli, lemon zest and mozarella on it, which was a recipe we’d previously used for a tart. It didn’t seem to work quite so well on the pizza; maybe the thicker dough diluted the flavour or the tomato made it too sweet. Hard to tell quite why. It has potential though and I’m sure we’ll try it again, as we really loved the tart that we’d made with it.
Stir Fried Snow Peas
Usually I call these “sugar snap peas” but this was a Chinese style dish and they’re generally called “snow peas” in Chinese restaurants 🙂
Kerri was out this evening and I worked late and just wanted something quick when I got home. At one point on the journey I had decided on fish fingers, but then I remembered that we had some sugar snap peas that needed to be eaten and thought of having them stir fried with garlic and ginger. I didn’t do a lot of measuring, but the recipe went approximately like this:
1 pack sugar snap peas
half an onion, finely diced
two cloves of garlic, finely sliced
half an inch of ginger, cut into sticks
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp Chinese cooking wine
a little cornflour mixed with water
I heated up the wok to a high heat, added a bit of oil and then put in the onion. After a minute, I added the ginger and garlic and cooked for another minute or so. Then I added the sugar snap peas and stir fried for a couple of minutes, before turning down the heat and adding all the wet ingredients and covering. I left it for a few minutes more, sprinkled it with flaked almonds and ate it with rice.
Tasty and quick. And healthy too.
Orecchiette Puttanesca
Kerri made some puttanesca sauce on Sunday and there was some left over, so I had it tonight as she was out. I had it with some orecchiette; usually we have it with spaghetti but I thought I’d experiment and the experiment turned out rather well.
It didn’t look that orange in real life; I suspect the camera was compensating for the green of the plate all around it. Maybe I should have switched the plate for a different one, but I liked the swirly green and was determined to have it on there 🙂
Empty Pies!
After a tough afternoon of standing around on a field of mown grass, punctuated every now and then by brief moments of excitement as a small red thing goes whizzing past, there is nothing better than sitting down to well earned tea. Usually consisting of sandwiches, maybe some small sausage rolls, a glass of squash, a cup of tea and preferably something sweet afterwards.
After such an afternoon this past Sunday, the gods of cricket played a cruel trick on me. Having eaten a selection of sandwiches and a small sausage roll and having drunk a couple of glasses of squash and a cup of tea, I picked up a little pie that looked a bit like a mince pie. I wondered what was inside it. Possibly apple? I bit into it and tasted… pastry. It was empty inside. What a disappointment. I tracked down another one and it too was devoid of any tasty filling. There was nothing left to do but to take a picture to record the tragic event.
Thai Green Curry
We haven’t had this for ages so while shopping on Saturday, we stopped off at our local Thai supermarket and picked up the ingredients we needed to make the paste. Stephen made up the paste yesterday and I cooked the actual curry when I got home tonight.
It was good but not as good as usual. I blame Stephen for going to the pub and leaving me to cook it when he knows this is his job. Actually, I think it’s more likely that the fault lies in the half-fat coconut milk. We’ve used it before and it’s been fairly successful but we tried a different brand today and it was much thinner.
Both the paste recipe and the curry recipe appear in various posts but for ease I’ve reproduced them here, originally from ‘Hot Sour Salty Sweet’ by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.
Thai Green Curry Paste
Serves four (can be stored in the fridge for a month):
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
1/4 cup minced coriander roots (or leaves and stalks)
11/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup minced lemongrass
1/4 cup coarsley chopped garlic
1/4 cup coarsley chopped shallots
2 tablespoons chopped galangal (or, 1 tablespoon minced ginger plus 1
tablespoon lime juice)
1 tablespoon minced wild lime zest
1/2 cup green bird chillies stemmed and coarsley chopped
1 tablespoon shrimp paste
(This has to be pounded until it’s smooth and free of coarse bits – about 20 minutes in a large stone mortar and pestle).
Thai Green Chicken Curry
Serves Two
1 can coconut milk
2.5 tablespoons green curry paste
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 chicken thighs, chopped into pieces
10 wild lime leaves
Pinch salt
Vegetables – any combination of: baby aubergine, baby corn, mange-tout
15 sweet basil leaves
If there is cream at the top of the coconut milk then spoon this off and cook for five minutes. If there isn’t any then skip this part and just fry the paste in oil with 1 tablespoon of fish sauce for five minutes.
Add the chicken, coat with the paste and cook for about five minutes.
Add the coconut milk and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and cook for 15-20 minutes.
Add half the lime leaves, salt and another tablespoon of fish sauce and bring back to the boil. Simmer for a further 15 minutes.
Add the vegetables and cook for 5-10 minutes.
Add the remaining lime leaves and the basil leaves, cook for a further minute and serve.
Indian Cooking – Methi Chicken, Sag Aloo and Naan Bread
Somehow we have never cooked any Indian dishes together before, but a friend had given us some methi leaves so this was a perfect opportunity to start with methi chicken. We followed this recipe, making our own garam masala rather than buying it ready made and soon the warming aroma of roasted spice was everywhere.
To accompany this, we also cooked sag aloo, using more of our garam masala. It was really good but not quite the same as restaurant sag aloo – probably due to us using less oil.
We also tried cooking some naan bread, which was okay but a bit doughy and probably needed to be cooked a bit more. A good attempt though and something to learn from for next time.
Smoked Mackerel Risotto
I picked this up last weekend intending to use it in salads for lunch throughout the week, that didn’t happen though so it was left lurking in the fridge. Since making stock last weekend, I’ve had a risotto craving so I thought I would use the mackerel up tonight and satisfy my craving at the same time. I’m glad I did because the end result was really tasty.
Sweat off a stick of celery and half an onion, then add 125g of risotto rice. Cook for a couple of minutes then add 50ml white wine. Once the alcohol has burnt off, start adding the stock slowly until it’s almost completely absorbed. Continue until all the stock is used. I started off with 500ml but the rice still had too much bite to it so I continued adding boiling water until the consistency was as we like it.
When cooked through, add some spinach and combine with the rice until the spinach has wilted. Add the mackerel and serve.
This is the first time I’ve ever been successful with risotto, Stephen’s very good at it so I usually leave him to it. I’m glad I gave it a go this evening because it worked out well.
Chilli
Stephen and I cooked this on Sunday and then froze it in portions for eating later on. We followed our usual recipe but the end result was almost completely devoid of heat and flavour. We rectified this by adding lots more spices and some extra tomatoes.
I’d been looking forward to it all day, it was yet another wet and cold summer’s day in London and it was lovely to come home to something warming that required very little effort.
