My Teriyaki Salmon with Thai Sticky Rice and Chilli Lime Broccoli

Last night I made a fairly quick teriyaki salmon dish because we fancied something full of flavour but fairly light and I always look to Asian food for this! I served it with some sticky Thai rice which went with it very well, though you could use noodles or even egg fried rice if you'd prefer. And to keep it zingy, I lightly fried my broccoli in chilli and lime juice. The perfect late Friday night meal after a long week at work that involves minimal prep, only about 15mins in front on the hob and whole lot of satisfaction at the table (or on your knee in front of Alan Carr!)

Ingredients 

1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
2 tablespoons clear honey
3 tablespoons dark soy sauce
1 garlic clove, chopped
a chunk of ginger, chopped (about double the size of your garlic clove)
2 salmon fillets

oil (I used olive as it's all I had in, but preferably a none flavoured oil)
a handful of tender stem broccoli
1/2 - 1 chilli (depending on taste), chopped finely
1 lime

thai sticky rice
fresh coriander to garnish



Firstly marinate your salmon buy mixing together the vinegar, honey and soy sauce in a shallow bowl. Add the garlic and ginger (and don't worry about chopping these super finely as we will be sieving them out later). Then put your salmon in the bowl and coat all over. Cover with some cling film and leave in the fridge for a couple of hours or until you are ready to cook!





When you're getting hungry, preheat the grill to about 180degrees and cook the rice according to packet instructions. If you're doing Thai sticky rice then I always aim to have it cooked about 10minutes before I'm ready to serve so you can leave it in the hot pan with the lid on to get really really sticky first!

Take out your bowl of salmon, and roll the salmon in the marinade again so that it is all covered. Take the fillets out and put onto a baking tray, saving the left over marinade for your sauce later. Put into the preheated grill for about 10-15minutes, checking regularly. You want to be able to put a knife into the thickest part of the fillet and it to slide a flake out very easily, but don't overdo it and dry out the salmon - as soon as it is no longer rubbery then take it out!



As the rice and salmon are cooking, get a pan of water on the hob and boil (or steam if you have a steamer!) the broccoli for about 5 minutes or until just tender. Drain and put to the side for a moment.

Give the broccoli pan a quick rinse and add the left over marinade to heat for a few minutes until it thickens slightly. Squeeze in the juice of half a lime, saving a couple of wedges to garnish if you'd like. Don't worry if it doesn't look like much sauce - there is so much flavour in this that you won't need a lot!






Add a splash of oil to a frying pan and add your chopped chilli. Fry for a couple of minutes then add the broccoli. Squeeze in the juice of the remaining half a lime, and you're ready to serve!


Line up the rice, salmon fillet and broccoli on a plate, making sure you sprinkle all of the chilli over from your broccoli pan! Sieve the sauce into a jug so that you remove the chunks of garlic and ginger, then drizzle the sauce over the whole dish. Sprinkle with fresh coriander and add the lime wedge if using.

A really tasty dish, full of fresh, zingy flavours with just the right amount of stickiness to feel indulgent!! Enjoy!

A really very tasty (and also kind of healthy) lamb kebab!

I just made a totally yummy sort of lamb kebab for dinner and it was SO BLOODY GOOD that I'm blogging it before I forget exactly what I did! Unfortunately, I can't take all the credit because it was inspired by Jamie - I was watching his money saving meals thing the other day and he did a kebab that is probably EVEN BETTER than this one so you may as well search for that instead - but I've made this my way and it's probably a little simpler than his and kind of healthy too!

As I've just cooked this for me with left overs in the fridge for tomorrow, this recipe is for two, but everything in it is so easy to double or triple in quantity and I think it would be a brilliant help-yourself-around-a-table/finger-food dinner to make for friends!

For the kebab
2 flame baked chapattis (or whatever kind of flat bread type thing you can find!) 
about 250g/half a standard supermarket pack of lean lamb mince (we're not cooking in any fat so if you get a good quality mince then it really is pretty healthy!)
a tea spoon of garam masala (or a combination of warming spices, like cumin and coriander)
salt and black pepper

For the tasty bits
1/2 white cabbage, sliced finely
1/2 red onion, sliced finely
a couple of glugs of white wine vinegar
a tea spoon of sugar

about 250g/half a pot of low fat natural yoghurt
a handful of fresh mint, chopped
juice from 1/2 lemon
1 tiny garlic clove, chopped finely/crushed (or a bit of garlic powder if you prefer)
salt

For the extras
a red chilli, chopped
a handful of fresh coriander, roughly chopped
1/4 cucumber, sliced
a handful or two of sweet gem lettuce, chopped

Preheat the oven to about 180 degrees and pop in your flat breads. Cook these according to packet instructions and make sure they're not piping hot when you serve up because you're going to want to be able to pick them up!

To make your kebabs you literally need to mix the spices and a good few twists of salt and pepper into the mince with your hands. Then split into four and roll each one into a kind of sausage shape - there's no need for it to be neat! If you've got some skewers then wrap the sausages around them, but I didn't bother and they still worked brilliantly (they'd be dead good barbequed but we've only just hit Feb so I think that might be a bit ambitious!)



Then get a griddle pan over a medium-high heat and pop the kebab straight onto it. Leave for several minutes on one side before turning - you're aiming for it to almost blacken with the fats inside the meat just sizzling away on the pan - and then turn until the whole sausage has been cooked. Remove onto a piece of kitchen roll to soak up any excess fats and then these are good to go - I made all of the other bits and bobs while the kebabs were cooking so the meal literally only took as long to make as these tiny sausages took to cook!

So while the lamb is on the hob, mix together the cabbage, red onion, white wine vinegar and sugar in a bowl and scrunch all together. The quantities here are too much for two people but this should keep pretty well so you could use it in another meal later in the week! In another bowl mix together the yoghurt, mint, lemon, garlic and a couple of twists of salt.

Make sure you've got all of the extras prepped and then dish up! I don't think there is a good way to eat this but I went with one hand and one fork and it went down pretty well...

Enjoy! No, seriously, you are really going to enjoy this!!

Kind of Thai Fishcakes

Just a quick recipe for you tonight that I made for me and my flatmate last night. We had a Thai inspired meal of fishcakes and stir-fried veg.

I'll be honest, it was my first time making these fishcakes and I completely made up the recipe so they still need a little bit of work, but I vowed to share my kitchen successes and failures on this blog so you're going to get it anyway!! Not that this was a failure - it was pretty nice, just not gobsmackingly beautiful - so why don't you play around with the recipe a little and you might find something more delicious than mine!



  
Serves 3 (us two and my dinner tonight!)

 

Ingredients

3 small portions of potato, peeled and chopped
1 stalk of lemongrass
your choice of stir fry veg, chopped - I used cabbage, pepper, broccoli and carrot
1 teaspoon sugar
splash of rice wine vinegar
3 fillets of white fish
3 teaspoons Thai Green curry paste (if you spend a little more on a better paste then this is more than enough because it'll be full of flavour, but if it's a cheapo one then you might need a little more!)
a handful of fresh coriander, chopped
1 red chilli, finely chopped
sea salt and black pepper
1/2 lime, squeezed
 olive oil 
1 small egg
plain flour
a drizzle of soy sauce
sweet chilli sauce (to serve)

Begin by getting a pan of water boiling on the hob. Slightly squash your lemon grass with the flat of your knife to release the flavours, then add to the pan whole (or in half if too long!). My intention here is to flavour the water - and subsequently the potato - with these gorgeous citrus flavours without them overpowering the fishcake.


Prepare all of your stir-fry veg and put in a bowl. Mix in the sugar and rice wine vinegar and leave to one side for later.

Then, spread the green curry paste over your fish fillets. Place them on a baking tray and wrap loosely with silver foil. This needs to go in a preheated oven until just cooked and flaky (probably at about 180 degrees for around 10-20mins depending on the size of your fillets).
  
Add your chopped potato to the pan of water and boil until soft (about 10mins).


Once the fish is cooked, remove from the oven and flake into a large bowl. Add the chilli, coriander and lime juice, and season with salt and pepper.

Once soft, drain the potatoes and remove the lemongrass stalk. Add a drizzle of olive oil and mash. Then add the potato to your fish bowl, mixing together.


Sprinkle your flour onto a flat surface. When the ingredients in your bowl are cool enough to touch, crack your egg into the bowl and combine with your hands. Collect a small handful into a ball and squash between the palms of your hands to make a fishcake shape. Lightly dip both sides into the flour and put on a plate ready to fry. Repeat until you have created all of your fishcakes.







Add a drop of olive oil into a pan (I used a griddle pan) and pop your fishcakes in. Cook for a couple of minutes on each side.

For your veg, simply add it to a wok with a dash of olive oil and soy sauce. Cook for a couple of minutes until the veg is starting to soften, but still with some crunch!



Serve up and enjoy with some sweet chilli sauce!

My best ever Fried Rice Recipe

The other night I made the best fried rice ever... it was tasty, healthy, cheap, easy and lasted me a dinner and two lunches! With just a few bits of veg I had left over in my fridge and a selection of Thai flavours I concocted this yummy dish, and I really didn't expect it to go quite this well... It was that good I probably won't be able to recreate it, but I've done my best to write a bit of a recipe for it here so that you can have a go and so I can try and remember how I did it!! Apologies for the big headedness - you will just have trust me that this was just THAT good!

Ingredients (don't trust these completely, alter as you wish, and feel free to add whatever veg you like!)

Serves 2-3
two white fish fillets (I actually just used cheapo frozen white fish!)
1 portion of rice (about 1/3 cup)
1 large carrot, grated
2 teaspoons of sugar
1 teaspoon of white wine vinegar
2 eggs
olive oil
1 red onion, chopped
about half a broccoli (cut the florets into small pieces)
2 lemon grass stalks, chopped finely
1 garlic clove, chopped finely
1 chilli, chopped
1 red pepper, chopped
3spring onions, chopped
1 tablespoon of soy sauce
1 tablespoon of Thai sweet chilli sauce
salt and pepper
a large handful of fresh coriander, chopped roughly

Recipe (or something similar!)

Bake the fish in the oven for 15-20mins depending on the size of the fillets. Boil a pan of water and add your rice. Cook until it is soft and then drain. Mix the grated carrot with the sugar and white wine vinegar. Crack the eggs into a jug and whisk with a fork. Leave all these to the side for later.

Put a dash of oil in your wok over a medium-high heat, then add the onion and broccoli and fry until the onion starts to soften a little.

Then add lemon grass, garlic, chilli and red pepper and fry for a couple of minutes.

Add the carrot mixture and spring onions and fry for a further minute before tipping the veg into a bowl, leaving the wok empty.


Put another dash of olive oil into the wok and add your whisked eggs. Keep moving it around with a wooden spoon until the eggs begin to cook, making sure that none of it sticks to the pan.

Add the ready cooked rice and mix in. Make sure all of the egg is cooked, then add your veg mixture.

Mix in your soy and sweet chilli sauces and season with salt and pepper.

Finally, throw in as much coriander as you like (it's my favourite herb and an essential flavour to this dish!), mix altogether and serve.

YUM!!!!!

First Meal in my New Flat

I'm back!!! I finally have internet in my new flat so I have loads to share with you... There's still some meals from my trip around Eastern Europe and a family holiday to Pollenca and, of course, tons of recipes from my own cooking and books!

I thought the best place to start would be the first meal I cooked in my new kitchen... it's a lovely open plan kitchen/dining/living room - perfect for entertaining as I can cook while still chatting to my friends! So the dish is just a very simple Chicken Tikka Masala - not fancy but absolutely fool proof and very tasty! So welcome back everyone, pour a glass of wine and enjoy the recipe!

 

Chicken Tikka Masala

Serves 3 (great for 2 people with leftovers for the freezer!)

olive oil
2 chicken breasts

1 onion (I used red this time but I normally use white)
large tablespoon of tikka masala paste
2/3 cup of rice
1 red pepper
6-8 mushrooms
tin of chopped tomatoes
handful of flaked almonds (optional)
handful of fresh coriander leaves
1 naan bread
2 tablespoons of natural yoghurt (optional)



Chop all of the ingredients and get a pan of water boiling ready for your rice.

Put a deep frying pan on a medium heat and add a dash of olive oil. Add the chicken and fry until it has turned white.

Add the onion. As the onion softens add the tikka masala paste and stir until it is covering all of the chicken.

Cook the rice according to packet instructions (I usually put it on at this stage and the timings tend to work well).

Add the peppers and mushrooms to the pan and fry for a few minutes, mixing with the chicken, onions and paste.

As the veg softens, add the tin of chopped tomatoes, most of the almonds and coriander. Leave to simmer and absorb all of the flavours for about 5 minutes. If you are serving with naan bread then put it in a preheated oven.

If you want a creamier curry then add natural yoghurt, but it is still delicious without!

Drain and serve your rice and spoon on your curry. Sprinkle the remaining almonds and coriander over the dishes and eat!



So there you have it... the simple and tasty dish that I made for my friend as the first meal in my new kitchen! It's a really great basic recipe that you can mix up with different meats, different veg and chilli if you want to add some more spice - delicious with spinach added towards the end of cooking if you fancy a tikka saag!

A good one for a Saturday evening if you fancy making it tonight or it can even be a fairly quick mid-week meal... have a lovely weekend folks and enjoy!

Saturday Night Curry... Tasty Lamb Rogan Josh

 My Recipe for a simple Lamb Rogan Josh

A tasty curry I made for dinner on Saturday night with red pepper and spinach, washed down with a cold ginger beer... yum!

I took the recipe for marinating the lamb from a Jamie Oliver Recipe, but then decided to simplify the rest of the ingredients and cooking methods just because we were hungry and wanted to eat!!

I had no chilli so didn't make mine very spicy - but if you like spice then just add 1 or 2 in with the red pepper. The Pataks curry pastes are really good for making quick, flavoursome curries when you don't want to bother with all the spices yourself...

So if you want a simple, tasty recipe, this is the one. If you're after something with a bit more depth and preparation, then head over to Jamie's recipe - it will make a truly delicious curry I'm sure!!
 

 

Ingredients

Makes 3 portions

Marinade
2cm square piece of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
2 large tablespoons low fat natural yoghurt
black pepper

Curry
3 lamb steaks, cut into big cubes
2 tablespoons Pataks Rogan Josh curry paste
1 red onion, chopped
1 red pepper, chopped
1 fresh red chilli, finely chopped (optional)
tin of chopped tomatoes
2 handful spinach leaves
small handful fresh coriander, chopped


rice, naan, poppadoms, mango chutney, iced cold ginger beer... whatever you fancy, to serve!

Method

Combine all the ingredients for the marinade in a plastic tupperware or bowl. Add the lamb and mix to coat all of the meat. Leave in the fridge overnight or as long as you have time for.


Add the curry paste into a deep frying pan (or wok). Fry for a couple of minutes on a medium heat until the oils begin to leak out of the paste, then add the onion, red pepper and chilli (if using).

As the onion begins to soften, add the lamb and marinade and mix to combine the flavours.





Pour in the chopped tomatoes and a small cup of water (if needed). Add the spinach leaves and mix as they soften. Add most of the fresh coriander.

Put a lid on the curry and leave to simmer away on the hob or slow cook in the oven (ideally on a low-medium heat for a couple of hours). You want the lamb to be cooked through but still tender.

Cook your rice and naan as the curry is in the oven. Serve with extra coriander sprinkled on if desired. Enjoy!

Anjum Anand's Light Cumin-Flavoured Chicken Curry

Anjum Anand 'I Love Curry'

This colourful curry book, published by Quadrille, has gorgeous full page photographs for every recipe. I'm quite a visual person so I like to see what my dish is (hopefully!) going to look like, and I often pick to cook recipes with a photo over those without.

The dishes all sound delicious, and I think I picked one of the least exciting ones (not out of choice, but down to the stock left in my Sainsbury's local at 7pm on a Tues!) - I certainly plan to cook my way through most of these.

With sections on 'To Start: Bites', 'The Curries' and 'Accompaniments', this book offers an easy meal plan as I always love to make a starter if I'm cooking for someone or for an occasion. And the curries and accompaniments are then broken down into several different chapters, so you can pick to suit ingredients you may have already got in the fridge.

I often whip up a curry with one of the Pataks curry pastes and either some chopped tomatoes or coconut milk... and this produces a consistently tasty curry. But this is a lovely, well laid out book, that I can see myself using every time I want to spend a bit more time over making a curry and fancy some more interesting flavours. (I should just say that I'm really not a fan of the cover - I think the colour combination makes the book look cheap and in-authentic, which it's not - but under the dust-jacket is a plain mint green that looks much much nicer!!)

Light Cumin-Flavoured Chicken Curry

... in my case it was a turkey curry, but that's because I was making it on a budget! I think it would have been much more flavoursome with the chicken on the bone, as recommended in the recipe, but hey, it was pretty good anyway!

I also chose to add green pepper, because I wanted to bulk it out a little and so that we had a bit of variety as I was simply doing this with naan bread as a late dinner for me and a friend.


It's a long recipe so I won't write it out, but basically marinade the chicken/turkey in a mixture of plain yoghurt, garlic, ginger, ground cumin and ground coriander... and leave (for much longer than the 10mins I did!)

 Fry off the onion and cumin seeds, then add garam masala, chillies (and pepper).

 Add the marinaded meat.

 Add water and simmer. Add fresh coriander (which Sainsbury's had unfortunately run out of!) and serve.

Anjum Anand words it much better than that, and there are a lot of details that I have missed out, but this is the general idea!  And the result was good - maybe not 'the best Indian curry I'll ever cook' - but light, simple and tasty. A definite one for the future.

Cooking for a Friend

Hoisin and Garlic Pork Medallions with Feta and Coriander Stuffed Sweet Potato

My friend came for dinner last night and I created a bit of a concoction, borrowing from a couple of different recipes. Everyone had been chatting about pork at work, so that was my starting point - pork medallions from the Tesco Finest range (on offer obviously!) My sauce was actually inspired by the recipe on the back of the pork pack, and adapted to use ingredients I already had. The sweet potato recipe is a variation of one of my absolute favorites from Jamie's 30minute meals - he mashes sweet potato and normal potato with feta, chilli and coriander (and it's delicious!). My friend isn't keen on chilli so I ditched this part and decided to bake the sweet potatoes as a change. It all took me less than half an hour, and received great reviews from my friend!

Ingredients

Pork Medallions
Hoisin and Garlic Sauce (I used ready-made because I already had some, but would be nicer homemade!)
Dark Soy Sauce
Garlic (fine chopped)
Ginger (grated or fine chopped)
Spring Onions (rough chopped)
Sweet Potatoes
Feta Cheese
Coriander
Veggies (carrots and broccoli for me!)

Recipe

Put the sweet potatoes on a baking tray into a preheated oven (about 180degrees).  They need about 20-30mins depending on the size of the potato.

Sear the pork in a hot pan for a couple of minutes each side, then put to one side.

Get a pan of water boiling for your veg.

Mix the hoisin and garlic sauce with a few dashes of soy sauce in a bowl. Fry the garlic and ginger in a drop of olive oil until just turning golden, then add the sauce.





Put the pork into the pan with the sauce and keep the heat on fairly low to cook through for 5-10mins.

Put the veg in your boiling water, or better steam it if you've got the right utensils (which I don't unfortunately!)

Take the potatoes out of the oven and cut in half. Cut slices through the inside of the potato, not cutting through the skin.



 Chop the feta and coriander together to mix all the flavours.

Then use your knife to push the mixture into the gaps you've just cut into the sweet potatoes. Pop back in the oven for a few minutes.

Then voila! Dish up, sprinkle the spring onion on top of the meat...

Eat!