Thai Mondays Part 5: Stir Fried Pork with Beans and Green Peppercorns
Last week Kerri had lunch at a Thai restaurant and had a dish that she really enjoyed, which was beef with chilli, lemongrass, basil and a few other things. We had a look for recipe that was similar and, by happy coincidence, I had already bookmarked a recipe that contained most of those ingredients and we already had a large number of them. It called for pork rather than beef, but that was fine, so we bought some pork and some holy basil and were ready to go.
Although this is called a stir fry in English, it is actually a dry curry. Its Thai name is pat prik king muu bpaa, where “pat prik king” means a curry made from dried red chillies and cooked in oil (or rendered pork fat) rather than coconut cream.
First we made the curry paste by incrementally pounding together all of the following ingredients in a mortar and pestle: 10 long dried red chillis (soaked and drained), two tablespoons each of chopped galangal and chopped lemongrass and three tablespoons each of chopped red shallots and chopped garlic, along with one tablespoon of chopped coriander root. These are all in the following picture, along with a couple of other ingredients that come in later:
(After cooking this, we realised that we had left out crushed dried fish, so our dried fish will just have to hang around waiting for another recipe that needs them and hopefully they won’t feel too neglected).
We fried this paste in some oil; the recipe said 6 tablespoons which sounded like quite a lot, so we started with a lot less than that, but ended up adding some more as we went along we it looked like it needed it. When this had cooked for a while and become really fragrant, we added about 200g of thinly sliced pork loin. We stir fried this for about five minutes and then seasoned with a pinch of white sugar and a couple of tablespoons of fish sauce. Then we added chopped beans, julienned krachai, torn lime leaves, chopped long green chillies, some green peppercorns and a handful of holy basil leaves.
After a couple more minutes to heat all of this through, we served it with some jasmine rice. The flavours worked really well and Kerri said it was her favourite Thai dish second only to Green Curry, which is really saying something! The dish had a deep, rich base from the dried chillies and the fish sauce, but had some fresh and lifting flavours from the lemongrass and lime leaves too. The holy basil gave delicously basilly notes as only it can do. Last time we’d had green peppercorns, they didn’t blend in with the rest of the dish so well, but this time they were really good and provided little bites of bitter heat that complemented the other flavours rather well.
The recipe didn’t explicitly say so, but I am guessing that this dish originated in the north of Thailand, given that it includes pork and krachai and suggests that you fry the paste in pork fat (a suggestion that we took under consideration for only a second or so before ignoring).
This turned out very well indeed, which we were obviously very pleased with. The other Thai curries that we have cooked so far have been “wet” ones with a lot of sauce, whereas this one was a lot drier. If we cook this again, we might accompany it with a soup to complement its dryness, but it was really good nonetheless and definitely a favourite.
Chicken with Olives and Poorman’s Potatoes
We weren’t intending to eat at home on Saturday night but a bought of illness meant a change of plan. We needed to find a recipe that used ingredients we already had, Stephen suggested using one of our new Spanish books as the recipes are straightforward and don’t require lots of complicated ingredients.
The chicken was very easy and resulted in a tasty and comforting dish. This recipe comes from the Andalucian region and is considered a homely dish and not something you’d necessarily find in a restaurant, it’s from Jenny Chandler’s The Real Taste of Spain.
Serves Two
Two chicken legs, jointed
Salt
Olive oil
1/4 tbsp rosemary, chopped
1/4 tbsp thyme, chopped
Five mint leaves, chopped
1/2 tsp sweet paprika
One onion, thinly sliced
Three garlic cloves, whole
1/2 small dried red chilli
35ml dry sherry (we actually used about 60ml altogether, most of which was wine with a little sweet sherry as, somewhat mysteriously, our dry sherry has run out)
75g black olives
1/4 lemon
Season the chicken with salt then fry until the skin is crisp and golden. Remove from the pan and toss with the herbs and paprika.
In the same pan, brown the onions and then add the garlic and chilli and allow them to colour.
Add the chicken back to the pan, pour in the sherry and transfer to the oven for 40 minutes.
Add the olives and lemon and cook for a further five minutes.
Even though we increased the amount of liquid I think we’d increase it further next time, the juices in the bottom of the pan were delicious but scarce. More olives wouldn’t hurt either.
The recipe suggests serving this with crusty bread but we opted to make the potato dish instead, from the same book.
Olive oil
450g potatoes, thinly sliced (we used Maris Piper and a mandolin)
1/2 onion, thinly sliced
1/2 green pepper, thinly sliced (we used red but would probably leave this out next time)
One garlic clove, crushed
1/2 tbsp wine vinegar
Handful fresh parsley
Add half the oil to a frying pan with a lid, layer up the potatoes, onion and pepper seasoning as you go. Add the rest of the oil, cover with lid and cook over a gentle heat for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Remove the lid and add the garlic then increase the heat to brown the potatoes. Sprinkle with vinegar and parsley before serving.
These turned out really well and were particularly tasty given the few ingredients (this recipe is also from Andalucia and hails from poorer times before the influx of tourists). Next time we need to remember to stir more often (we were watching a movie…Psycho if you’re interested) and brown for longer…there were some deliciously crunchy, gooey pieces of potato stuck to the pan that we fought over!
We both really enjoyed the dishes and look forward to experimenting with more Spanish cooking.
Fish Pie
Being Good Friday today, Kerri wanted to cook fish pie. We found a tasty sounding recipe in a newly acquired cook book called Fish, subtitled “Recipes From a Busy Island”. It’s a National Trust book and is geared towards responsible and sustainable fish recipes.
The recipe was called “Tweed Salmon, Smoked Haddock and Langoustine Pie with Cheese and Mustard Mash”. We didn’t have Tweed salmon specifically, but we bought some salmon, some lovely undyed smoked haddock and a couple of langoustines, along with some off-plan pollack from our local fishmonger:
We poached all the fish with in milk and some cream, along with onion, black peppercorns and a bay leaf. The langoustines didn’t need to be cooked at this stage, but we shelled them and put the shells into the pan with the other ingredients to get some extra flavour into the milk. Once the fish was just cooked (only about 7 minutes), we removed it from the pan and flaked it. We let the flavours of the other ingredients infuse into the milk for a while longer before straining it.
We made a roux with butter and flour, then slowly added the infused milk to it to make a white sauce before adding chopped parsely and seasoning with salt, pepper and nutmeg. We distributed the flaked fish and the raw langoustine tails into an oven fish and then covered it all with the sauce. This went into the fridge for an hour to cool.
We steamed potatoes and mashed them, then added cream, butter, salt, pepper, mustard and cheese. It didn’t look quite pliable enough to spread on top of the fish, so we added a little milk. We spread it onto the fish and sauce, then sprinkled more grated cheese over the top. Into the oven for 40 minutes, until the top was nicely browned.
Having tasted the fish (which was good), the white sauce (which was good) and the mashed potato (which was good), we fully expected the final result to be good too. It was very good indeed, which we were rather pleased with after last weekend’s string of not-quite-there dishes. The fish was firm and flavourful, the sauce was lovely and not too liquid and the mash was really good; well seasoned and included just the right amount of cheese. Brilliant!
Beef Casserole
Stephen cooked this last night to our usual recipe (although he forgot the tomatoes) which meant that all we had to do tonight was reheat it and add some vegetables. The lack of tomatoes gave the casserole a really deep, meaty flavour which was lovely. The chestnut mushrooms really stood out flavour-wise and added to the deep flavour.
Salad
Monday is gym night so dinner needs to be quick and easy (or lovingly prepared by Stephen but he selfishly decided to go out this evening). Rather than reaching for the toast which is what normally happens when I’m eating alone, I decided to “be good” and eat salad. I usually have this for lunch a couple of times a week but today I had the leek and potato soup (ok but not brilliant) so had everything I needed in the fridge including my two favourite ingredients: avocado and smoked mackerel.
The avocado breaks all the food-mile-rules but having only recently discovered I like it, I can’t get enough of it. Smoked mackerel is my favourite protein to add to salad because the oiliness means there is no need to make dressing. I like the contrast of the peppery mackerel with the cool, crunchy salad too.
Thai Odyssey Part 4 – Mussel and Ginger Soup and Squid Salad
Given the success of last time’s soup and salad combination, we decided to give it another try. Normally on Sundays we have some sort of roast and Thai Monday happens on… Monday. But as I’m out tomorrow evening, we decided to have Thai Sunday instead.
This time, the salad was squid salad, aka yam pla meuk. As with many Thai salads, a “squid salad” contains mostly just squid, and the other ingredients are just there to complement the squid and are secondary to the squid itself. Often Western salads contain many different leaves and other vegetables, meaning any meat or fish in it is an addition to it rather than the main ingredient. Not so with this salad.
We had cooked squid before in a Vietnamese recipe and it hadn’t been a huge success, so we were a bit concerned because this recipe from David Thompson’s “Thai Food” also required poaching the squid. This recipe looked more promising though.
We started by poaching the squid briefly until it was just cooked and still soft. We then mixed it with 3 red shallots, 2 lime leaves, a stalk of lemongrass, some mint leaves and some coriander leaves. Then we immediately dressed it with a dressing made from 2 birds eye chillies, a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar, 2 tablespoons of lime juice and 2 tablespoons of fish sauce and tossed it to coat all the ingredients.
This worked well; the crisp lemongrass and shallots complemented the soft squid well and the dressing held it together nicely.
Soup was mussel and ginger soup, aka tom som hoi malaeng puu. We started with a paste from coriander root, salt, garlic, shallots, ginger, shrimp paste and white peppercorns. We fried the paste and then added palm sugar, tamarind water and fish sauce. Then added chicken stock and grated ginger. Once it reached the boil, we added the mussels and cooked until they were all open. After that, more ginger and spring onions before serving it up with a sprinkle of coriander leaves and ground white pepper.
According to the recipe, in the northern regions, people often use krachai instead of ginger. As we had quite a lot left over from our jungle curry, we decided to use some in the soup. We put some into the paste instead of the ginger, but then we needed half a cup of grated krachai / ginger to put into the soup and I really didn’t fancy peeling and grating that much krachai. So ginger it was.
The soup had promise, but unfortunately had a rather bitter taste. Probably due to the fact that I’d been rather inattentive while frying the paste and had burnt it a bit. Or due to our strange half krachai, half ginger combination. So the squid was a success but not the soup; we could try it again and be more careful with the paste in case it was that, but there are loads of other interesting things to try that it’ll be a while before we get back to it. Or maybe it was just that having Thai Monday on a Sunday caused cosmic culinary disturbances 🙂
Leek, Pesto and Parmesan Tart and Slow Cooked Shoulder of Pork
We had friends over for dinner last night and took the opportunity to go through our recipe file and cook some of the dishes we hadn’t done before. We started with roasted nuts which is from Nigella’s “How To Eat” and is based on the nuts she ate at the Union Square Cafe in New York. I’d been wanting to do these for a while and it was a great way to use up the half-eaten packets of nuts that we’ve used for various dishes in the past.
We took a selection of nuts and roasted them in the oven for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile we took some melted butter and mixed it with two tablespoons of chopped rosemary, half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper, two teaspoons of dark sugar and two teaspoons of salt.
Once the nuts were toasted, we mixed them into the spiced butter and served them. They were really tasty, a good combination of sweet and hot.
We then moved onto the tart which was really just a quick assembly job, some ready rolled pastry scored around the edges and cooked for 12 minutes. It puffs up like a pillow so you need to knock the middle back with a fork before spreading it with a mixture of creme-fraiche and pesto. Then the briefly fried leeks are arranged on the pastry and topped with parmesan and black pepper. The tart then goes back into the oven for 15 minutes.
I enjoyed the combination of flavours but I think it would have been better with some salad to balance the inevitable richness of the cheese and pesto. Individual tarts would have looked prettier on the plate too.
Having enjoyed the slow cooked lamb so much recently we were both keen to try the same method with a different cut of meat, a recipe from the River Cafe Easy book using pork looked like exactly what we needed. Half a pork shoulder, browned all over before adding garlic, sage, wine and lemon peel. The heat is reduced and the pork cooks slowly on the hob for three and a half hours with more wine added slowly to prevent it from drying out. Once all the wine has evaporated, 250ml of milk is added which thickens during the last half hour of cooking.
The outsides of the pork char slightly and become coated in the juices from the pan and the garlic and sage which provides a lovely flavour, unfortunately the insides had dried out a little and the flavours hadn’t penetrated the meat all the way through which was a shame.
We served some new potatoes and green beans with the pork as well as Jamie’s creamy butternut squash. The butternut is coated in a mix of coriander seeds, chilli and thyme before roasting in the oven for 40 minutes. It’s then topped with wine, cream, nutmeg and parmesan before roasting for another 15 minutes.
Unfortunately, the cream mixture seemed to curdle and separate which meant the dish looked rather unattractive. It tasted ok though and the sweetness complimented the pork well.
So, not a particularly successful evening food-wise. We haven’t had many dishes turn out badly recently and it’s a shame that it happens when other people are eating with you. Perhaps next time we should stick to tried-and-tested dishes rather than attempting to cook lots of new things.
Leek and Potato Soup
It’s been a bit quiet around here lately, mostly due to us both having busy weeks. We’ve got some interesting things planned for this weekend though so stay tuned.
This was a quick soup inspired by the lonely looking leeks languishing at the bottom of the fridge and some potatoes I bought last night but we ended up not using.
Soften some onion and garlic in oil then add the leeks, potatoes thyme, s&p and bay. Cover with vegetable stock, bring to the boil then simmer for 15 minutes. REMOVE THE BAY LEAF (I forgot) then blitz.
I intend to eat this for lunch next week, I hope the blitzed bay leaf doesn’t render it inedible.
Lamb Chops with Garlic and Spinach Pilaf
This came from a recent edition of Delicious magazine and jumped out at me when I was looking through my recipe file for things to cook this week. Quite why I was so excited about it I’m not sure as the pilaf uses cumin and coriander which I’m not that keen on. Stephen likes that mix of spicing though so I continued with the recipe anyway and it turned out well. The spices weren’t that strong and actually provided a good contrast to the sweetness of the lamb chops. We were both very full afterwards too which is always a good thing.
The recipe inexplicably serves three people. We made the whole amount and Stephen has taken the leftover pilaf for lunch today.
1 whole head garlic, split into cloves
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon of coriander
1 teaspoon of cumin
Pinch of hot chilli powder
225g basmati rice, rinsed and drained (we used brown because that’s all we had…if you use brown then you’ll need to cook it longer)
450ml chicken stock
1 bay leaf
3 medium tomatoes, chopped and de-seeded (I never bother to de-seed tomatoes)
225g spinach
Handful of chopped parsley
Lamb chops
Boil the garlic cloves in water for three to four minutes, drain and rinse under cold water. Peel.
Heat oil in a large pan (we used a wok) and when hot add the spices and fry for one minute.
Add the rice, stock, garlic, tomatoes, bay and seasoning. Cover the pan and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 13-15 minutes.
In a seperate pan, wilt the spinach and remove to a bowl.
When the rice is tender and has absorbed most of the liquid, stir in the spinach and parsley. Turn off the heat and cover with a damp tea-towel for 10 minutes.
Fry the seasoned chops to your liking and serve.
Thai Odyssey Part 3 – Jungle Curry of Duck
Jungle Curry. About twelve or thirteen years ago I tasted jungle curry for the first time. At the time I thought it mind-bendingly hot and ate it at about one spoonful per minute, sweating furiously all the time and drinking gallons of water between mouthfuls. However, a week later I found myself craving it again. This masochism mystified me somewhat, but there was just something about jungle curry that I couldn’t quite place, but that something made it irresistible. Something apart from just a chilli rush; something wild; something unmistakeably “jungle”.
Having grown up and read cook books since then, I have realised what that “something” is: krachai. David Thompson’s “Thai Food” book that I have been cooking from over the past few weeks describes it as “wild ginger”. At first I thought this was just a name for want of a name, but having tried raw krachai, it is a little reminiscent of ginger; a very earthy, nutty, wild version of ginger.
Jungle curry is a very hot curry and, unlike many other Thai curries, contains no coconut milk. It also contains several kinds of vegetables and is often cooked by people who live outside of major towns in Thailand because the ingredients are easily available.
So, finally cooking jungle curry myself rather excited me. Armed with far more krachai than I actually needed, more bird’s eye chillies than one should be allowed to possess without a license and sundry other ingredients, I set to work. Apart from the main curry paste which included many ingredients, the recipe also included another simpler paste containing only garlic, chilli and krachai.
Starting with the curry paste of course, which included everything in the picture below:
Namely green bird’s eye chillies, a long green chilli, galangal, lemongrass, krachai, shallots, garlic and salt. When this had been bashed into a suitable paste, we did the simpler paste, which was a lot quicker:
Just the garlic, chilli and krachai as mentioned above. (The strange bunch of mutant carrots on the left is the krachai for those that are interested.) This paste smelled really nutty from the garlic and krachai when it had been made; most intriguing.
We started off by frying the garlic, chilli and krachai paste for a while until golden. Then added the curry paste and fried it until it made us sneeze. I found it curious that there were two separate pastes when one paste contained only a subset of the ingredients of the other one. Perhaps for a precise flavour we need some of the garlic, chilli and krachai to be cooked more than the rest? Not sure; especially as the “Jungle Curry of Fish with Breadfruit” on the next page only contains the normal curry paste.
Anyway, having done that, we seasoned the paste with two tablespoons of fish sauce before adding 500ml chicken stock. The recipe says to make stock from duck bones, but we were sadly lacking in both duck bones and in time.
Once the duckchicken stock was boiling, we added two sliced duck breasts, some quartered baby aubergines and also half a cup of pea aubergines. After a few minutes, we added the rest of the ingredients, which were: green beans, baby corn, julienned krachai, chopped long green chillies, lime leaves, holy basil leaves and green peppercorns. A few minutes of simmering and it was done.
I tasted a spoonful of the curry and it was really good, just what I had been hoping for. However, when we started eating it, it didn’t taste as good. Kerri pointed out that we should leave it to cool a bit, so we did that and then the flavours developed a lot better. That will teach us not to be so greedy and to wait a bit before eating.
This worked out well in the end, although it could have done with a little more salt. Next time we would make it with fewer pea aubergines and peppercorns too, as these seemed to get in the way of other ingredients and prevent the tastes from working together so well.
We served it with rice of course, and also some pickled vegetables:
If anyone is a fan of jungle curry, I would definitely recommend getting hold of some krachai (aka grachai) and trying to make it yourself.
