Tag: spring onions

Thai pork burgers

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Ingredients

For the Thai spice paste:

1 bunch coriander
3tbsp breadcrumbs
Half red onion
Zest and juice of 1 lime
1 lemon grass stalk, woody outer layer removed
1 large red chilli, deseeded
2 garlic cloves
20g creamed coconut
1tsp fish sauce
1tsp light soy sauce

For the burgers:

That’s goodtoknow

Make Thai grilled vegetables to go with the burgers by marinating asparagus, spring onions, red peppers and sliced courgettes in a mix of coconut milk, peanut butter, Thai fish sauce and light soy sauce for 30 mins, then cooking under a medium grill.

Method

Put all the ingredients except the pork into a food processor and whizz to a paste.
In a large bowl, combine the pork and Thai paste together with your hands.
Divide into four balls, then shape into burger patties with the flats of your hands.
Heat a little oil in a frying pan and cook the burgers for around 12-15 mins, flipping every minute to ensure they are evenly cooked all the way through. Serve on ciabatta rolls.

By Keith Kendrick

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Aromatic pork belly hotpot

My husband absolutely loves Chinese food. If you want to make him seriously happy, ring him up and say “Shall we go out for dim sum?” This year for his birthday I am going to make a thing happen that I’ve failed to every year we’ve been together to do, and organise a party at a Chinese restaurant, get one of those tables with a big swirly round glass rotating thing in the middle. It’s all he wants really, ever – to be about to sit down to a big spread of Chinese platefuls.

But as well as dainty dim sum bites, he also likes the scarier aspects of Chinese food; he is completely down with the Chinese love of texture – finding a plateful of cold jellyfish or chicken’s feet as interesteing as a steamed pork bun. Often even more so.

I’ve never had that much success cooking Chinese food. Curries are easy, but I start out trying to make something Chinese and it turns into a Thai stir-fry.

But the other day I stumbled across a recipe for an Aromatic (i.e. Chinese) pork belly hotpot. There is a very famous Singaporean restaurant in North London called Singapore Garden, which does something very similar and I thought I would re-create it for Giles last night.

Because he is a bit down in the dumps, my husband. He is so, so bored. It is dark. We are not in the middle of an exciting boxset. I am grumpy and fat and not interested in anything except lying down and not being spoken to or looked directly in the eye.

Anyway this thing, from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, was absolutely terrific. Really amazing. And very simple, in fact – it only required a few things and the prep was easy.

I had been considering doing a Massaman curry but the list of ingredients was quite bonkers. Reading it and losing more and more heart as the ingredient list went endlessly on brought to mind that thing of when someone suggests a night out and it all sounds great but then they start saying “… the restaurant’s in Putney… then we could all go out dancing….” and you look outside and it’s just started snowing again and you say “Oh actually I think I’ve got a bit of a throat coming on, might give it a miss *Click Brrrr.*”

So if you like the sound of this hotpot, please give it a go because it produces something really quite echt and marvellous. It is, because it is pork belly, quite fatty and glutionous, so if you’ve got a bit of a “thing” about fat, this isn’t for you. I mostly mean you, Becky B.

The only other drawback is that, like a lot of Chinese food, that it makes you thirsty as hell afterwards.

Aromatic Pork Belly Hotpot
Serves 4

1kg pork belly, skin on
8 spring onions
dried chillies
1 fresh red chilli
1 pint chicken stock
100ml light soy sauce (absolutely not dark)
75ml Chinese rice or mirin wine
25ml rice wine vinegar
2 tbsp light brown sugar
3 star anise fruits (fruits??? have always thought that was stupid)
10cm fresh ginger peeled and cut into slim pieces. Yes I know it is hard with a knobbly bit of ginger to achieve this, but just do your best
4 nests of fine egg noodles per person
4 little whatsits of baby bok choi per person

1 Chop up your belly into chunks, leaving the skin on

2 Put it in a pot and cover it with boiling water and simmer for 5 minutes. Scoop off the yukky scum that floats to the top. Try to ignore the slightly nasty porky stench.

3 Drain the pork, give the pan a rinse and then put the meat back in. Chop 5 spring onions in half and chuck these in then add the stock, soy sauce, rice wine, rice vinegar, sugar, star anise, ginger and a good pinch of dried chilli.

4 Now simmer all this for 2 hours with a lid firmly on.

5 After this time, lift the pork out with a slotted spoon and put to one side. If you have a gravy separator, run the remaining liquid through it to get the worst of the grease off. If you don’t, do your best skimming the top off the liquid with a spoon.

6 Now boil the liquid briskly to reduce it a bit. Keep tasting as it boils because what you don’t want is to reduce it too much and just get a far, far too salty thing. Better it still be a bit runny but edible.

7 Put the pork back into the liquid and turn the bok choi in the stew for 5-10 mins to steam.

8 Serve on a bed of noodles with some fresh chilli (no seeds) and spring onions cut on the diagonal over the top.

Eat and try to look on the bright side.

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Luxury potato

There is a time in life that all mothers dread. It’s worse than childbirth, because it goes on for longer, it’s worse than breastfeeding, because it comes out of the blue. It’s worse than looming housework, because housework can at least sometimes be soothing in its mindless repetition.

It’s when your toddler drops their afternoon nap. Because right up until they are about two, or even two and a half (or even three if you’re really lucky) the little suckers go to sleep for up to two hours after lunch, allowing you to do whatever the FUCK you want. I mean, you can’t leave the house, but those two hours are yours, yours, yours and no-one can take them away from you.

The minute your child nods off at lunch also pretty much marks the end of the day because mornings are the hardest work with toddlers. As soon as they’re a-bed, you’ve got two hours to do WHATEVER!!!! and then in the afternoon you can both just doss around eating fingerpaint until bedtime.

It’s hardest on the mother if the child has been doing this nap strictly, in its bed, for 2 hours exactly, pretty much since birth. If you’ve been more relaxed about it, letting the child nap in a buggy while you sail off to, I don’t know, Westfield or something on the overland the transition to no nap is less horrific – you are used to being flexible, you are used to just dealing with every day as it comes.

I am not like that. I am not bendy, like a willow – I am rigid, like an oak tree. Or maybe just doomed, like the ash.

It’s not like I didn’t know that Kitty was going to drop her nap. In fact, I’m surprised she’s kept it up for this long. But now we find ourselves in a mid-nap-dropping slippery patch. She still needs to have a little kip but she won’t pass out in front of the telly and won’t go to sleep in her cot. She will only now nod off in the car, or in her buggy.

Which means I have to go out, somewhere, at about 2pm, so that she will sleep between 2ish and 2.30ish.

As the end of the nap loomed, I dreaded this. But in actual fact, it is oddly freeing.

(And I am lucky – some toddlers suddenly do a thing where if they nod off for even 2 minutes after lunch, they won’t go to sleep until 9 or 10pm at night. Though that could well happen to Kitty I suppose.)

A thing that mothers who choose to be very strict about a routine sometimes complain about is that you are confined to the house, you can’t really ever go out for lunch and you have to rush back from whatever you are doing in the morning so that the child doesn’t fall asleep on the way home and thus ruin completely your two hours of peace. You are in a gilded cage. That’s been me for two years.

So today, for example, as it’s nice and sunny I’m quite looking forward to bundling us both up and going for a very relaxed stroll somewhere – because there is no more relaxing walk to have than when you are pushing a sleeping child in a buggy (and that child is supposed to be asleep). Maybe we’ll go to Primrose Hill? Maybe we’ll go to Hampstead? North West London is our oyster.

In other news, my husband is away in Canda until next week, which means that Kitty and I are even more loose, twisting in the wind really, with nowhere much to go and nothing much to do. We can eat our dinner in a fancy restaurant at a moment’s notice. Or just come home and eat crackers in front of the telly in our pants. Not that my husband ever prevents this sort of spontaneity, you understand, just that it is somehow less likely.

I saw my husband off on his chilly cross-Atlantic adventure with a luxury baked potato, which is a baked potato loaded with sour cream, caviar, chopped egg and spring onions. Not expensive caviar, just lumpfish caviar from the deli fridge at Waitrose – although we did once do this with really expenseive stuff and drank champagne with it; possibly one of the best dinners of my life.

I only learnt how to bake potatoes properly in the last two years or so – I’d never really done it before. What you must do is bake them at the absolute highest temperature that your oven will go for 1 hour – not at 180 for 1hr 15 or 200 for 45 min or any such nonsense. FULL HEAT, 1hour.

Then split, butter, sour cream, caviar (one little pot is enough for 2 people) I boiled egg chopped finely, some spring onion. Whether or not you have champagne too is up to you in that moment. Because, sometimes, there’s nothing quite like just winging it.