Tag: soy sauce

Low-fat sweet & sour pork

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Chinese takeaways are a real treat but this tasty low-fat version of an old favourite makes a great dinner any day of the week. Try Woman’s Weekly’s healthier sweet and sour pork.

Serves: 4
Costs: Cheap as chips

That’s goodtoknow

Woman’s Weekly cookery editor Sue McMahon suggests cutting the tendons and trimming the fat from the pork before using it. If you want a hotter sauce, add garlic and chillies

Ingredients

2tsp vegetable oil
350g (12oz) piece of pork fillet, cut into chunks
1 onion, peeled and cut into wedges, leaves pulled apart
1 red or green pepper, deseeded and cut into chunks
Thumb-sized piece of fresh root ginger, peeled and finely sliced
1 cinnamon stick or 1tsp ground cinnamon
227g can pineapple rings in natural syrup (140g drained weight – reserve the syrup), each ring cut into 8 pieces
230g can plum tomatoes
1tbsp tomato ketchup
1tbsp vinegar, or more, to taste
½ chicken stock cube
1tsp flour or cornflour
About 2tbsp soy sauce, to taste

To serve:

200g (7oz) dried egg noodles
2 small heads pak choi, leaves separated and large ones chopped

Method

Heat the oil in a large pan and fry the pork for about 5 mins until browned on both sides. Take it out of the pan and set aside.
Add the onion, pepper, ginger and cinnamon to the pan and fry for 5 minutes. Add the pineapple, 3tbsp of the pineapple’s syrup, and the tomatoes, ketchup, vinegar, stock cube and 150ml (¼ pint) water. Bring to the boil, and then simmer for 10 mins to let the sauce thicken.
Put the pork back in the pan and simmer for another 5 mins. Mix the flour, or cornflour, with the rest of the syrup to make a paste, add to the pan and stir until thickened. Add the soy sauce, and more vinegar if needed, to taste.
Cook the noodles according to pack instructions, adding the pak choi to wilt. Serve with the sweet and sour pork. (Not suitable for freezing).

By Feature: Kate Moseley. Photos: Chris Alack. Stylist: Sue Radcliffe

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Nutritional information per portion

Calories 381(kcal)
Fat 9.5g
Saturates 3.0g

This nutritional information is only a guide and is based on 2,000 calories per day. For more information on eating a healthy diet, please visit the Food Standards Agency website.

Guideline Daily Amount for 2,000 calories per day are: 70g fat, 20g saturated fat, 90g sugar, 6g salt.

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Duck Leg Adobo – A Real Family Meal

If you’ve worked in restaurants before, you know that every
night before service the staff sits down to what’s called the “family meal.”
One of the younger cooks is usually charged with scraping together something
filling and, more importantly, not expensive. It was during one of these
meals that I first had adobo.

When I worked at the Carnelian Room in the late 80’s, much
of the kitchen crew was Filipino, so chicken and pork adobo was a very
common dinner. One of the dishwashers made a particularly great version, and I fell in
love with the bold, simple flavors. I also remember being pretty annoyed that
the dishwashers there were better cooks than I was at the time,
but that’s another story.

Anyway, I happened to have some duck legs around last week, and all it
took was a well-timed email wishing for adobo to inspire this video. I
understand that most of you will not use duck for this, but if you do, be sure
to save the fat.

Duck fat is prized by chefs, and more heart-healthy than
people realize. It can be used for just about anything you’d normally fry
in butter or vegetable oil. I roasted some Brussels spouts with mine, but it
also will make just about the best homefries you’ve ever tasted.

Like I said in the video, no duck, no problem. If you can simmer it
in a sauce, it will work in this recipe. Because of the high soy sauce content,
be careful about over reducing, but other than that, not much can go wrong.
This is cheap, easy, and very flavorful, which is why it makes for such a
great “family meal.” Enjoy!

Ingredients for 6 duck legs:

6 duck legs (or about same amount of chicken or pork)

salt and pepper to taste

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tbsp reserved duck fat

1 large onion, sliced

8 cloves garlic, minced

1 cup seasoned rice vinegar (if not seasoned, use a little
sugar to taste)

1/2 cup soy sauce

1 1/2 cups chicken broth

2 tsp samal chili sauce, or other hot pepper sauce to taste

2-4 bay leaves

Spare ribs

I occasionally go on, what is known in our house as, “The Shitty Food Diet.”

The Shitty Food Diet is very simple and very effective – if what you want to do is lose a lot of weight very fast and don’t really care about the impact on your health.

What you do is eat INCREDIBLY shitty food – but hardly any of it. So on the downside you get quite hungry, but on the upside, you’ve got some sort of disgusting, shaming treat waiting for you and the thing about diets is that they’re all about morale.

So a typical day’s menu might go like this:

Breakfast: 1 latte with chocolate croissant

Lunch: nothing

About 2pm: McDonald’s double cheeseburger and small coke

6.30pm: 1 packet peanut M&Ms OR 1 Krispy Kreme OR 2 Jacob’s cream crackers

Dinner: 3 small glasses of oaky Chardonnay and 2 handfuls of crisps

This is the kind of menu I find myself eating quite often and I am thin as a rake. People say to me “You are so thin, what diet are you on?” and I say “The Shitty Food Diet” and they go “Ha ha ha, no really.”

Except next-eldest sister. She said “You are so thin, what diet are you on?” And I said “It’s called The Shitty Food Diet.” And she said “Ooh really – what does one do on that?” But my sister lives in Notting Hill – nothing surprises her.

So this is what I do on my own time, but on my husband’s time, it’s a different story.

But as it happens, we are getting a bit slack about provenence in this house. My husband’s strict rules about what, exactly, one is allowed to buy and eat basically allow for us to eat almost nothing except kale and roast chickens. He doesn’t want to buy, from a supermarket any fish that isn’t mackerel or any meat that isn’t produced by Duchy Originals. So if we haven’t been to the farmer’s market recently (where one can buy, guilt-free, anything one wants), the menu round here gets a bit samey.

I used to observe these rules faithfully but recently I’ve got a bit loose around the edges with it. The other day I just wanted some spare ribs, damn it. We’d just been to a restaurant called Sonny’s Kitchen in Barnes, which was AMAZING – just the best food I’ve had for a really, really long time and worth a trip if you’re anywhere near it.

You would think that being married to my husband I get to eat a lot of amazing food, but it isn’t so. A lot of new restaurants we go to aren’t very nice and if you order wrong, well: yuk. Sonny’s Kitchen genuinely stood out.

So anyway we had these spare ribs, which were like, out of this world and I wanted to re-create them, although nothing like as spectacular. But I couldn’t find any free range organic spare ribs in Waitrose so I just thought – fuck it – and bought the essentials ones.

And they turned out gorgeous, drowning in a barbeque sauce, which contained the following:

5 tablespoons tomato ketchup
3 heaped teaspoons English mustard
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1tsp chinese five spice
the zest of 1/2 an orange if you have it
2 cloves garlic, crushed
3 tablepoons veg oil to loosen
1 tablespoon vinegar, any sort

1 Mix together the sauce ingredients and leave the ribs to marinade for as long as you can – all day for preference but even 30 mins will make a difference.

2 Put in the oven at 180 for about 25 mins.