Category: Asian

Skinny Chicken Laksa

.Reading time 2 minutes.

Serves: 2

I avoid Laksa at lunchtime. I avoid cooking it for dinner.

It tastes awesome, though it is notoriously fatty. I’m probably kidding myself given half the dinners I make, though Laksa has always been a red light for me.

This recipe by Jill Dupleix – which I have adjusted slightly – is, at least on face value, much healthier than the 400ml can of coconut cream variety I am used to, and tastes just awesome. The meat isn’t fried, the laksa paste isn’t fried off in oil.

(That means you can eat more I assume!)

On my deathbed I’ll smash down pork crackling and proper Laksa, though until then…

Serves 4

150gm vermicelli noodles
2 c (500ml) chicken stock
2tbs laksa paste
2 chicken breasts cut into 3cm strips
8 cherry tomatoes, halved
2 tsp caster sugar
250ml can reduced fat coconut milk (OK, original recipe was 100ml though can was 250ml)
200 gm green beans, trimmed and cut in half
1 cup bean sprouts (add as much as you want)
2 cup coriander sprigs (again, add as much as you want)
2 cup mint leaves (ditto)
Fried Asian shallots to serve (half handful per serve)

Method

  1. Soak the noodled in warm water for 10 minutes until soft. Drain and set aside.
  2. Heat the stock in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Once hot, whisk in the laksa paste.
  3. Add the chicken, tomato, sugar and ½ teaspoon of sea salt and simmer for 10 minutes until chicken cooked through.
  4. Add the coconut milk and beans and simmer for 5 minutes until beans cooked through.
  5. Divide the noodles among 4 bowls and soon over the chicken and the laksa broth.
  6. Top with bean sprouts and scatter with coriander, mint and dried Asian shallots.

 

Penang Beef Satay

.Reading time 1 minute.

Serves: 4 as part of a meal

The great thing about this recipe is that because you have to let it marinate over night, it has weeknight written all over it.

Prepare it after dinner on Sunday, pop it covered in the fridge, Monday morning, put your skewers in water and Monday night… fire up the grill to hot, thread your meat loosely, cook up some rice, chop up a few cucumbers and there you have the best Monday night dinner in the street.

How good is that!

Ingredients

4 spring onions
½ c unsalted peanuts
2 tbsp (Malaysian) curry powder
½ c thick milk from milk powder
½ c coconut cream
2 tbsp fish sauce
½ tsp turmeric
2 tbsp brown sugar
2 Rump steak, cut into thin strips
Sweet chilli sauce to serve

Method

  1. Process in a food processor all the ingredients except the steak and sweet chilli sauce and marinate the steak overnight.
  2. Thread the steak onto soaked bamboo skewers, grill and serve with the sweet chilli sauce.

Curry Puffs

.Reading time 2 minutes.
puffs.jpg
Holy crap these are good. The real deal. Add peas if you feel like it.

Serves: 4 – 6 as a side

If your brief is to shut down the local Malaysian Curry Puff business, proceed with this recipe.

Wow, it doesn’t get any more real than this.

They don’t get the heart tick of approval though they get every other tick out there; seriously, they’re perfect. Just like that Malaysian Curry Puff business you’re shutting down.

A few other recipes I read asked for the homemade creation of your own puff pastry, though that is totally non-necessary based on my experience.

I doubled the recipe though for 4 to 6 people, follow the recipe below. Plenty to share!

Ingredients

2 tsp peanut oil
2 tsp finely chopped coriander root
2 spring onions, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
100gm beef mince
½ tsp ground turmeric
½ tsp ground cumin
½ tsp ground coriander
2 tsp fish sauce
1 tbsp water
100gm mashed potato
2 sheets puff pastry
1 egg, lightly beaten
Vetegable oil
Sweet chilli sauce to serve

Method

  1. Stir fry the coriander root, spring onion, garlic and beef until the colour changes.
  2. Add the turmeric, cumin and coriander and stir-fry until fragrant.
  3. Add the fish sauce and water and simmer until the mixture thickens.
  4. Stir in the mashed potato and cool.
  5. Cut rounds – around 10cm in diameter – from the pastry sheet. Spoon the filling into the centre of each, brush around the edges of the pastry with the egg, fold to enclose and press together with a form to seal.
  6. Deep-fry the curry puff until crisp and lightly browned, drain on paper towels and serve with the sweet chilli sauce.

Cha Ca (Ling Fillets marinated with dill and tumeric)

.Reading time 2 minutes.

Serves 6

According to Google translate, ‘kinh ngạc’ is amazing in Vietnamese and I do hope it is because this dish is a-mazing.

It’s got it all.

Healthy, hot, filling, so tasty.

Seriously, copy paste these ingredients and clear your schedule for tonight because this is going to make tonight – and every night you cook it – very special.

Mark Jensen of Red Lantern is a genius!

Ingredients

1kg ling fillets
8 spring onions (scallions)
4 garlic cloves
1 tbsp ground turmeric
2 tsp hot curry power
2 tbsp plain yoghurt
1/2 cup fish sauce
3 tablespoons sugar
3 tbsp vegetable oil
1 bunch dill
125g rice vermicelli
1 cup fish stock
1 lemon
300g bean sprouts

Method

  1. Cut the fish into 4cm pieces, place in a bowl and set aside.
  2. Put the white heads of the spring onions (reserving the stalks) and garlic in a mortar and pound to a paste.
  3. Add the paste, turmeric, curry powder, yoghurt, fish sauce, sugar, 2 tablespoons of the oil and a third of the dill, roughly chopped) to the fish and mix well. Cover and marinate in the refrigerator for 1 hour.
  4. Cook the vermicelli in boiling water for 5 minutes, turn off the heat and let sit for a further 5 minutes. Strain, refresh under cold water a set aside. (This may contradict instructions on pack, though don’t worry!).
  5. Thinly, diagonally slice 4 or 5 of the green spring onion stalks.
  6. Heat a large frying pan over medium heat, add the remaining oil and fry the fillets for 30 seconds on one side.
  7. Turn the fillets over, add the fish stock and simmer for 3-5 minutes until the fish is cooked through.
  8. Remove the fish and squeeze over the juice from the lemon.
  9. Mix the bean sprouts, sliced spring onion, remaining dill and vermicelli together, place into bowls and spoon over the fish fillets and sauce.

Oriental Pork Cakes

.Reading time 1 minute.

Serves 4

Slightly dull name for a recipe and not sure where I found it either; though name aside, they’re really good, they’re really simple and they’re really made from mince, the finest thing out there.

And reasonably healthy too, especially if you substituted chicken or even turkey mince .

I think having lots of these little recipes around is great for those weekend lunches and week nights where suddenly it’s meal time and you need to think on your feet. If you cook this, people will think you’re a genius.

Ingredients

500g pork mince
3 pork chipolata sausages (100g), skins discarded
2 eschalots, finely chopped
1 lemongrass stem (pale part only) finely chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
Grated zest of one lime
Splash of fish sauce
1 small red chilli, seeds removed, finely chopped
¼ cup finely chopped coriander leaves
Sunflower oil, to shallow fry
Sweet chilli sauce, thinly sliced cucumber and lettuce leaves to serve

Method

  1. Place the mince, sausage meat, eschalot, lemongrass, garlic, zest, fish sauce, chilli and coriander in a large bowl. Mix well with your hands until combined.
  2. With damp hands, shape the mixture into 16 cakes and chill for 15 minutes to firm up.
  3. Heat a little sunflower oil in a large frypan over a medium-high heat. Cook the cakes (in batches if necessary) for 3 – 4 minutes until each side is golden and cooked.
  4. Serve the cakes with chilli sauce, sliced cucumber and lettuce leaves.

Omelette of Pork Mince, Preserved Radish and Spring Onion (Trung Chien Thit Bam)

.Reading time 2 minutes.

Serves 2

I am so impressed with the Red Lantern cookbook (Secrets of the Red Lantern, Pauline Nguyen).

Having not cooked from it for a few years, I am back into it and everything I have cooked so far has been quite outstanding; the recipes are clear to follow and the book is generally an excellent read, with many stories behind the authors and the food.

This omelette is great and reminded me of Neil Perry’s Blue Swimmer Crab omelette, not because they are similar in taste, but because of the freshness and lightness of the end-production. The spring onions with the fish sauce and browned pork is just great, surrounded by the fluffiness of the egg.

I had the omelette with sliced green chillis and spring onions, and a bowl of rice on the side.

This should become one of the long-day, too-hard-to-cook-but-should-cook-something recipes in your repertoire.

Ingredients

4 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cracked black pepper
1 teaspoon fish sauce
2 spring onions, white part only, sliced
1 tablespoon oil
1/2 small red onion (I used an eschalot)
2 garlic cloves, crushed
100g minced (ground) pork
1 tablespoon preserved radish (available from Asian Supermarkets, I found a Japanese brand providing a whole, slated radish and chopped it finely)

Method

  1. In a bowl, whisk together the eggs, salt, pepper, fish sauce and sliced spring onions.
  2. Place a large non-stick frying pan over medium heat, add the oil and then fry the onion and garlic until soft and fragrant.
  3. Add the pork and preserved radish and continue to fry until browned.
  4. Pour the omelette mixture into the pan and cover with a lid; foil or a same-size fry pan will do.
  5. Cook until the base is golden brown and the top just set, slide out onto a plate folding if desired and serve.

Terry Durack’s Thai Chicken and Basil

.Reading time 3 minutes.

Serves 4

This is a Terry Durack recipe from his book Yum, a $1 purchase from St Vincent de Paul. (Seriously, St Vincent de Paul has to be one of the best cook book chains in Sydney!)

Up until I tried this recipe, I had admired Terry Durack as a food critic though had been less impressed by his recipes. Though I am sure that this was about me and not you Terry!

He opens his book with this dish and describes it as one that changed his cooking life just because it is so unbelievably simple; I have to agree that cooking this and tasting it, it really did open my eyes too. Genuinely, like tasting the snow-egg at Quay or eating at Per Se in New York, cooking this recipe really is one of the seminal moments in my cooking life.

It is hard to believe that this recipe could taste combined, complex or even good. Instead, it really is an amazing dish that demonstrates that with only a few of the right flavours, you can produce a wonderful dish without any complaints.

To put it as Terry Durack does, ‘this dish taught me that you could toss things in the wok while half-drunk and without a care in the world, and still be able to feed people without killing them…’

I have always been lazy with this dish and substituted 3 chicken breasts for the a whole chicken (and I’ll keep doing it) and I have altered (as I usually do) the recipe to be slightly easier to follow.

Ingredients

1 small chicken, meat from the breast, thighs and legs removed, sliced into strips
3 or 4 green (or red) chillies, deseeded and sliced into thin slivers
2 tbsp of finely chopped parsley
Bunch of basil leaves, removed from stem
4 tbsp vegetable oil
3 tbsp fish sauce

Method

  1. Heat the oil in a wok and cook the chicken over a moderate heat for a few minutes, then add the chillis, most of the basil and the parsley.
  2. Cook, stirring as you go for another 3 or 4 minutes.
  3. Splash in the fish sauce and stir through.
  4. Add remaining basil and serve with jasmine rice.

Vietnamese Fish with aromatic sauce and noodles

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Serves 4

Let’s cut to the chase about this dish:

  1. It was titled ‘Cha Ca’ which means ‘Vietnamese Grilled Fish’. Which it isn’t. There is no grilling. Not sure how it gained that title. (The recipe is from Damien Beaumont; I found it in Delicious magazine).
  2. I cooked this after a long day out in the sun with the boys. It isn’t a quick Tuesday night number (unless you prepare it in advance) though it certainly works if you have two hours… and your boys can be trusted to get the sand out of their towels, run themselves a bath and pour you a glass of wine. Trust me; you really will deserve a wine it if you’re in the kitchen for two hours after a long day of bike riding, swimming and bush-walking!
  3. It is a wonderful dish. It isn’t light, though it isn’t heavy. It isn’t spicy though it is not without its quirks. It is very satisfying and given that you should be on your third glass of white by the time you serve, it is just what you need to nurse slight sunburn and exhaustion.
  4. The dill really surprised me in this dish. It is an excellent accompaniment and should not be skipped.
  5. As usual, I have slightly adapted the dish.


Ingredients

3 garlic cloves, chopped
5cm piece of fresh garlic, peeled and chopped
3 long chillies, chopped plus 1 thinly sliced chilli to serve
2 tbs fish sauce
2 tsp ground turmeric
1 red onion, thinly sliced
2 tbs sunflower oil
½ cup chopped dill. Plus sprigs to serve.
400ml coconut cream
500gm skinless firm white fish fillets cut into 3cm cubes. (I used Barramundi which was great)
Juice of 2 limes (I used about 1 ½ of lime juice, though it is not overpowering)
250g rice vermicelli noodles
Cup each of coriander and mint sprigs to serve
6 x sliced spring onions to serve
Half cup chopped peanuts to serve (I used cashews which were fine)

Method

  1. Combine the garlic, ginger, chilli, fish sauce, turmeric and half the onion in a small food processor. Add 2tbs of water and process to form a smooth paste. Set aside.
  2. Heat oil in a pan over medium-low heat.
  3. Cook remaining onion for 5 minutes, stirring, until soft a slightly golden.
  4. Add chopped dill and past, then simmer, stirring occasionally for 10 minutes.
  5. Add coconut cream and simmer for 20/25 minutes, stirring occasionally until thickened and reduced by a third.
  6. Stand at room temperature for 1 hour to allow the flavour to develop. (Leave overnight if doing the day before.)
  7. Return the paste to a frying pan over low heat and cook, for 3 – 5 minutes, stirring until heated through.
  8. Add the fish, stir gently to coat, then cook for 5 – 8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until fish is cooked through.
  9. Add the lime juice, combine and test for seasoning. (I added a pinch of salt.)
  10. Meanwhile, prepare the noodles.
  11. Serve the fish and sauce on the noodles (4 bowls). Garnish with the herbs (including the extra dill), extra chilli, peanuts and spring onion.
  12. Have that third glass of wine. You survived a whole day in the sun and you cooked this. Leave the washing up till later.

Dau Hu Rang Muoi (Salt and Pepper Tofu)

.Reading time 2 minutes.

Serves 2 as a starter

I pulled this recipe from Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen (recipes also by Luke Nguyen and Mark Jensen).

Red Lantern is a Surry Hills Vietnamese restaurant, with almost a cult following; the food is modern and brilliantly executed, with great service and a dark, red atmosphere.

Indeed, my mother took me to a Fish Market Cooking School around 2003 held by Mark Jensen and we cooked a prawn dish that really marked a turning point in my passion for cooking. Subsequently, I’ve eaten at Red Lantern at least a dozen times since.

This dish is very satisfying, both from the perspective of cooking it, and eating it. Tofu is one of those ingredients you cook just not quite enough to be completely confident; and yet once you’ve finished deep frying it and the smell of the spring onions, chilli and garlic in the oil hits, you know you’re onto something fabulous.

This could be done as part of a Vietnamese feast or a starter as part of a dinner party, possibly served with other interesting starters. It really is a unique, sharp and tasty dish.

Ingredients

250g tofu pillows (Chinese-style pressed firm tofu)
Oil
2 spring onions (scallions), sliced
1 bird’s eye chilli, sliced
1 teaspoon minced garlic
Salt and pepper seasoning mix (Combine 1 tbs salt, 1 tsp sugar, 1 tsp white pepper, 1 tsp ground ginger, ½ teaspoon five-spice)
Lemon

Method

  1. Cut the tofu into 4x2cm cubes and place on a cloth to dry; in a standard tofu pack, this makes 6.
  2. Put enough oil in a wok to deep-fry the tofu, and heat to 180c. This will cook a brown a bread cube in 15 seconds.
  3. Deep-fry the tofu for 5 minutes or until golden and very crispy. Remove from the wok and reserve the oil for later use.
  4. Add 2 teaspoons of the reserved oil to the wok and place over a high heat.
  5. Add the spring onions, chilli and garlic and stir-fry for 30 seconds ensuring the garlic doesn’t burn. Add the tofu and salt a pepper seasoning and toss.
  6. Serve with salt, pepper and sprinkle of lemon.

Gok Wan’s Leftover Roast Duck Noodles

.Reading time 1 minute.

Serves: 2

This is a cracker of a dish.

From go to hero, it is the fastest way to whip up a great tasting Asian dinner using your left-over meat; duck, chicken or in my case, three small leftover pork scotch fillets. Shred your meat, get your noodles ready and five minutes of wok time later…

Kid friendly too!

This is not the original recipe as I have altered some of the ingredients up. You could tone it down a notch though I really like the fun, fresh taste.

Ingredients

1 tbsp groundnut oil
200gm leftover duck meat, shredded (or pork, chicken, lamb etc)
1 cucumber, deseeded and cut into batons
4 spring onions, finely sliced into 4cm lengths
3 – 4 tbsp hoisin sauce
1 tbsp light soy sauce
150gm dried fine egg noodles, cooked and drained according to instructions (I used Wokka Thin Egg Noodles (Shelf Read).

Method

  1. Heat the oil in a wok over a high heat. When the oil is smoking, add the duck meat and stir-fry for 2 – 3 minutes, until the meat is beginning to turn golden and a little crisp.
  2. Add the cucumber and spring onions and continue to stir-fry for 2 mins, then add the Hoisin sauce and a splash of water, Mix well.
  3. Add the cooked noodles, with the soy sauce if using and toss everything together. Serve immediately.