This is super tasty and really very fast to make after a busy day at work, so long as you remember to get the duck breasts in to marinate the night before anyway. This feeds two greedy adults and is an almost direct go at the Ching He Huang recipe from Chinese Food Made Easy, which is well worth a watch or peruse if you like a Chinese dinner now and then.
So, you'll need to start with your two duck breasts and a sealie bag. Stick the following things into the baggie and mush it up a bit: tsp ground five-spice, tbsp sesame oil, 3 tbsp hoisin sauce, 1-2 tbsp soft brown sugar, 3 tbsp water, 1 tbsp dark soy sauce. Add the duck, seal up and bung in a bowl in the fridge until tomorrow dinnertime.
Next day, get the oven on at 200°C and pat down the duck breasts (throw away the marinade). Pan fry them in a dry pan on a high heat for a couple of minutes either side, then put in a baking tray (skin up) and roast for 15 minutes or so.
While they're roasting get a litre of chicken stock on the hob and bring to a simmer. Add a tablespoon each of shaoxing rice wine (or sherry), soy sauce and rice vinegar (or any vinegar).
At the same time put some noodles on to cook, they should only take a few minutes. When they're done drain them and hold them under the cold tap for a bit to stop them going soggy.
Add some shitake mushrooms and sliced spring greens or cabbage to the soup and cook for a few minutes.
Take the duck breasts out of the oven and rest on a cold plate for at least 5 minutes, before slicing. Add the noodles, some sliced spring onion and chopped coriander to the hot soup, lay the duck slices on the top and garnish with thin slices of green chilli.
This could definitely be a bento lunch, in fact the recipe came from "The Just Bento Cookbook", but we had it for a Saturday brunch and it was perfect. The following amounts serve two people. For a vegetarian version just leave the salmon out from the salad.
First of all, get your rice on to cook (instructions for perfect short-grain rice are here) and toast up some sesame seeds. Also immerse some wakame seaweed in cold water to rehydrate.
Now mix 4 eggs, 4 tsp sugar, 2 tsp sake, 4 tsp corn flour and a large pinch of salt together in a bowl with a fork. Heat up a small frying pan over a low heat and wipe it with oil, when it's hot pour in a small amount of the egg mixture - about a quarter. Keep these omelettes fairly thin.
When the egg has set, flip the omelette over and cook for a minute on the other side before turning out onto a plate. Repeat until you have at least 4 omelettes, but you'll probably get 5 which means one to eat hot right out of the pan!
When your rice is done, turn it out into a glass bowl with a tbsp of rice vinegar. Fan the rice with one hand while turning and stirring it and the vinegar with a spatula in the other. The rice should go very sticky. Add the toasted sesame seeds and mix through, then leave to one side to cool down.
The salad is very easy to put together. Peel a cucumber and rub salt into the surface, massage it for a few minutes over the sink to firm up the flesh and season it. Then slice it into half moons.
Mix the cucumber with the drained seaweed and the smoked salmon, if using. Whisk up a splash of rice vinegar, a drizzle of toasted sesame oil, a pinch of sugar, black pepper and some shoyu (Japanese soy sauce) to taste.
When the seasoned sesame rice is relatively cool, place a large spoonful in the center of each omelette and fold around into a square. Lay down with the folds on the bottom and sprinkle over some furikake or pickled ginger. Serve with the salad.
Singapore noodles are an old family favourite but they are a bit hit-and-miss from takeaways. The ones I've made contain fairly average veg that a Uk fridge is likely to contain, rather than any specialist (expensive) ones, so they aren't exactly like ones from a good Chinese but they are tasty.
The guideline recipe I used is from "Chinese Food Made Easy" by Ching He Huang - a great book if you love a Chinese takeaway, but hate the heart-thumping, water gulping after effects.
I like to pre-prepare all of the spices and veg, so that the last thing to touch the chopping board is the raw meat. For the spices, you need a chopped red chilli, a few cloves of chopped garlic and a couple of generous tablespoons of turmeric. The garnish is chopped spring onion and a sprinkle of dried chillies. In addition to the veg, you're also going to need 2 tbsp light soy sauce, 2 tbsp oyster sauce, 1 tbsp of rice vinegar, some chicken and some bacon. Or use prawns if you have / like them.
The veg I used (and by no means feel bound by these, because I certainly didn't choose these ones based on any recipe!) were: one green and one red pepper, spinach, a cob's worth of sweetcorn and a carrot sliced into thin batons. I also had a jar of mushrooms preserved in olive oil which needed using up, these were really good in it.
Then you can chop up your chicken - this was the meat off two legs, as they are cheaper than buying a pack of four thighs or two breasts, and I always feel the breast is less tender anyway. The sad water-injected legs you'd get off a battery/poorly treated chicken won't cover this, at the very least a free range bird is needed, but I'd recommend organic for too many reasons to cover here. There are some notes on choosing chicken in this earlier post.
Pre-cook the chicken with nothing more than a little seasoning and some oil, then put the peices to one side. You also need to soak your
rice noodles, hot water from the tap will do, for about 5-10 minutes
depending on what the packet says.
In the same frying pan, heat up a little more oil and add the garlic, fresh chilli and turmeric (and mushrooms if using). Cook for at most a minute, then add the bacon and cook for a minute more. Tip all of the veg in and cook until tender, then add the soaked noodles, light soy, oyster sauce and vinegar.
Mix it all up, add the dried chilli and spring onions, and serve.
