Laksa-licious

Tasty, tasty holiday treat! The last time I had laksa I was in Malaysia and I'll always remember how amazing this noodly, spicy soup was out there. 
This particular balance of ingredients was suggested in Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey, currently my favourite book, and turned out tasty as can be - even with a few of my convenience tweaks thrown in.

A warning: this can take a while to make because of all the chopping to make up the paste before you start cooking! I made enough for four dinners, we'll have the leftovers of the first half for lunch tomorrow and pop the rest in the fridge for another time.

The Curry Paste
The spice paste contains lots of ingredients, all chopped or ground up, and popped into a mini food processor to be made into a smooth paste (or you could do it in a pestle and mortar, old style). If you don't fancy making the paste, buy a pot of pre-made from the supermarket and skip to the next section.

Dried Shrimp

1 tbsp Shrimp Paste

10 Dried Chillies

Several garlic cloves

A peice of galangal

Two stalks of lemongrass

1 tbsp Coriander Seeds

1 tbsp Turmeric

Handful of peanuts

Several Shallots

3-4 tbsp oil

The finished paste

* Just by the way: you can use ginger instead of galangal, any onion instead of shallots and can buy frozen, pre-chopped lemongrass as well as shrimp paste at the supermarket. The rest of the ingredients shouldn't pose a problem, except the dried shrimp which you can leave out if necessary.

The Laksa
Heat up a glug of oil in a pan and fry the paste for a few minutes. Add 750ml of stock, preferably fish stock. I was stuck so I used 500ml dashi and 250ml vegetable stock. Also a can of coconut milk, 1 tbsp palm sugar and 2 tbsp nam pla (Thai fish sauce).

While that's coming to a simmer, pour boiling water over some dried, flat noodles and leave to soak. They'll be ready in a few minutes.

Add some king prawns to the soup and leave to simmer for a few minutes. Pile the cooked noodles into bowls along with sliced cucumber, bamboo shoots, beansprouts, red chilli, spring onion, mint and coriander.

Ladle the soup over the top along with the prawns. Goes nicely with Jubilee champagne!

 

Surf & Turf BBQ: Lamb burgers, Sea Bass & Prawns with Watercress Salad

When we looked out of the upper window of our house on Sunday afternoon we saw three things in common with all of them: laundry on the line, mowers running and barbecues out. Ok, so we didn't quite get around to getting the mower out, but we did do the laundry and wheel out the barbecue.

We went to the supermarket on the way home from the pick-your-own farm, primarily for cat food and compost baggies, but couldn't resist a couple of special offers on organic lamb mince, line-caught sea bass and large atlantic prawns. Oh yum. We were salivating already as we drove home, catching the smell of everyone elses barbecues on the way past.

The skewers are easy: take prawns, thread on skewer. Done. Major mistake? Using pre-cooked prawns. They were still tasty but dried out quite a lot on the coals.

Lamb, Redcurrant & Mint Burgers
I got the idea for these from the counter at waitrose, where they sell them pre-made. As we'd just picked some redcurrants at the farm these burgers came back to mind so I thought I'd give making them a go. I made it up as I went along but the results were really good.


I put a handful of redcurrants together with a handful of chopped mint, some salt and pepper, 200g of lamb mince, plus onions and garlic, pre-fried with a little sugar to help them brown and make them slightly caramelised. Squished up by hand and formed into patties, these were perfect.

Asian Style Steamed Seabass
This one's easy, just whisk up a couple of dashes each of light and dark soy sauce, the juice of a lime, a splosh of sesame oil and another of rice wine vinegar, a big dollop of grated ginger, some chopped coriander and a red chilli. 

Keep tasting it and adding the ingredients until it tastes good to you, if it isn't acidic enough add more lime or vinegar, if it's too acidic add more oil, if it isn't salty enough add more soy. Tweak away until you like it, that's why you're making it.

Lay the fish in a foil parcel and spoon over the sauce, wrap it up tightly so it won't leak and it's good to go on the barbecue.

Watercress, Herb, Blue Cheese & Walnut Salad

I love watercress and I love herbs, luckily I already had a lot of both. I mixed the watercress with the following, scavenged from the garden: chives, basil, oregano, marjoram, coriander, spinach, sorrel, parsley, fennel and nasturtium leaves.

Make up a dressing from balsamic vinegar, first cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, spoon this over and then top the whole salad with walnut peices and little peices of blue cheese - whichever is your favourite, but a slightly sweeter type goes best.

I garnished it with a nasturtium flower and borage and coriander flowers, because they're incredibly pretty and edible too.

What I did with the lamb joint I was too lazy to cook yesterday

I was feeling a bit down so when I got home from work my lovely husband offered me a chinese takeaway. Hot and sour soup, pancake rolls, monks vegetables, oooh lots of my favourite things danced before my eyes for a moment. And then I thought about the lovely lamb joint in the fridge, and the heart-pounding, insomnia-inducing after effects of MSG overload... so I changed my mind...

Once I'd stopped dithering I could turn my mind to how easy dinner would be if I just got on with it. I plonked the lamb in a baking tray, made slits with a knife and stuffed the poor beastie with garlic and rosemary. Salt, pepper and olive oil to coat and straight in the oven at 180 degrees, covered in foil.

Got the hubby to scrub the potatoes (I hate that job!) and put them in a pot with some torn up mint from the garden. I picked some thyme too, and prepared the leeks with some extra garlic.

Then I plonked myself on the sofa to watch Modern Family and the Simpsons to cheer myself up. By the end of the Simpsons the lamb had been in the oven for about an hour, so it was time to take the foil off the lamb and put the potatoes on to cook in boiling water. 


Then I heated up a frying pan with some oil, added the garlic and then the leeks and thyme, just to brown a little bit. Then, the happy sizzling noise of a glass of white wine, left until almost all of it has boiled away, then a pint of veg stock and the lid on to let them braise.

Twenty minutes later, the lamb came out of the oven to rest - it does make a difference you know, I used to think it was a load of baloney but it isn't. And it gives you just enough time to stick the pan on the hob, add a bit of water and make some gravy. Add the broth from the leeks too, with the garlic and thyme it just works beautifully.

Lamb, minted jersey royals and braised leeks with gravy. Not bad at all. I didn't miss having a takeaway that's for sure. 

Pastalicious

Being of partly Italian descent I felt quite ashamed when I hit my late twenties and realised I still didn't know how to make fresh pasta. Then, one birthday, I was given a pasta machine...

Delicious dinners plus absolute disasters ensued. That pasta machine was the target of so much abuse before it finally gave up the ghost, with a last ditch attempt to poison us by shedding metal from its gears into the dough. Yum.
I didn't make pasta from scratch again for a couple of years, it just seemed like too much aggro when perfectly delicious dried pasta was available in the shops. The texture isn't quite the same but dried pasta is wonderful enough and doesn't cause stress spikes in your blood pressure.

I did eventually get another pasta machine though and, with some trepidation, set out to make my own once again.

Pasta is honestly easy to make and absolutely delicious

It's a funny thing, a bit like the gardening, somehow everything just clicked into place. Now whether that's just because I had a bit more general cooking experience or because the new pasta machine isn't harbouring a grudge, or maybe just that I'm less stressed out and happier these days, I've no idea. All I know, is that I do now understand how easy pasta is to make and can't really recall what it was that made it so stressful before.

The ratios I use are about 100g flour to 1 egg, with the average batch being 400g/4 for 2 people to have both dinner and a lunchbox the following day. So, that's 100g/1 per portion or, if you're feeling lazy, just use a teacup to scoop out the flour, you can always add a little water if the mixture turns out a bit dry. Strong bread flour seems to work fine for me but the extra finely ground tipo 00 is the easiest to knead.

Stick the flour into a mixing bowl with a big pinch of salt, crack the eggs directly into the center of the flour and start to combine. It'll turn into a lovely yellowish dough which needs kneading, just like bread, for about 10 minutes. Then wrap it in clingfilm and leave it in the fridge for at least half an hour, preferably for an hour, and no longer than a day.

After it's chilled out for a while, pull it out of the fridge and tear off half or a quarter of the dough (depending on how much you made) and flatten it out on the worksurface with your hands.

Put the pasta machine onto it's widest setting, mine runs from stages 1-7, that probably refers to a measurement of some sort but I've no idea what.

Give the pasta a thin coat of flour and then run it through the machine, put the setting up one and run the pasta through it again, continually flouring at any sign of stickiness. By about stage 4 or 5, cut the strip of pasta in half and keep going. I never take it to stage 7 (the thinnest setting), as I think stage 6 works best. Stage 7 would be good for pressing herbs or flowers between sheets of pasta, I think I saw Jamie Oliver demo that.

Depending on what you want to make, once a strip of pasta is ready you can either run it through the spaghetti or tagliatelli rollers, cut it into papardalle with a knife, or look at making shapes from it - fusilli, farfalle etc.

The most common shape I make is tagliatelli, although today I made lazy pasta - strips of pasta that look like they've been cut by a drunk six year old.
No matter what you make, the one thing I've learned the hard way is that you need to keep pasta floured and don't leave it sitting in a pile for too long or it'll stick together and be a disaster. Make sure all the peices have a thin, floury coat and every now and again toss them about to get air in between them and stop any sticky bits from getting settled.

Whatever you do, don't lay peices of pasta on top of each other to store them. They need to be stashed individually with air all around them. I once stayed up until 2am making tortellini only to come down in the morning and find a dish of squish, completely unrescuable. I haven't made tortellini since as it was an utterly depressing sight, so ignore the above advice at your peril!

Repeat until all the dough is used up and ready to cook. Get a huge pan of water on the boil: whichever saucepan you were thinking of using, use one at least a size larger than that. I used to think this was overkill and unnecessary, it isn't though. Without lots of space for the pasta to swirl around in, it does tend to get stuck together and you can end up with clumps of uncooked bits. Don't bother adding oil to the water, greasy pasta is horrible, just use a big enough pan.
Add a huge pinch of salt to the water, it makes a big difference to how great the pasta tastes.

We're talking just a few minutes before it's ready, it'll float to the top when it is but always do the taste test anyway or you won't get it just the way you like it.
Drain it in a colander but keep a bit of the water left over in the pan too. Add your sauce, mix it up and serve.

The Sauce
Today I made a ricotta and green things sauce. I sauteed up some garlic, onions and celery, added frozen spinach and peas, then some sliced courgettes and finally a pot of ricotta. Salt, pepper, chopped mint, the juice of half a lemon and it's ready to go (don't forget the cup of water left in with the pasta, this provides a bit of liquid for the sauce and the starch, so I'm told, helps it adhere to the pasta).

One final thing, grate a little parmesan over the top. Fabulous!