Vietnamese beef & starfruit salad

I'm mad for Vietnamese food. After Thai it's my second favourite SE Asian cuisine. As soon as I get chance I'm going to head out there, travel around, and eat everything in my path. In the meantime I'm having to settle for reading up on the food and making an effort to cook it a bit more.

So, with that in mind, here's a simple Southern Vietnamese style salad recipe which I adapted after reading up some recipes (in this yer book, amongst others). This kind of food is right up my street - fresh, healthy & full of flavour. Easy too....


Beef & starfruit salad

The dressing is the classic Viet dipping sauce / dressing 'nouc cham'. As i understand it there are lots of variations on the recipe but the one below is the most common.

Ingredients (serves 2, or 4 as part of larger meal):

• 250g or so of thick cut steak, i used fillet but rump, sirloin or ribeye would all work a treat
• 1 large / 2 small not-too-ripe starfuit **
• A handful of plain skinless peanuts - toasted in a dry pan for few mins until nicely coloured
• 1-2 long red chillies
• Small bunch Thai basil
• Small bunch mint
• Large handful of beansprouts
• A couple of peeled Asian red shallots (optional)

**ripe (sweet) starfruit are yellow, unripe are green and more sour - a greenish one is perfect here as you want it bit sour, but don't panic if you can only get ripe ones....just add little more lime juice to your dressing to balance the whole thing out.

Beef marinade:

• 2 coriander roots
• 4 slices of peeled galangal
• 3 sticks lemongrass, tough outer layers peeled off
• pinch of sugar
• tablespoon of fish sauce

Nouc cham dressing / sauce:

• 3 teaspoons fish sauce
• 3 teaspoons rice vinegar
• 2 teaspoon caster sugar
• 4 teaspoons water
• 2 teaspoon lime juice
• 1 clove garlic, finely sliced
• 1 bird's eye chilli, finely sliced

Method:

First make the marinade your beef: chop the first three ingredients roughly then pound to a paste in a pestle and mortar before mixing in the fish sauce and sugar. Rub this into your steak and leave for least an hour, but even 24 if you can.

When marinated, grill the steak on a bbq or griddle pan to your liking (an yes medium rare is clearly the best choice here). Set aside to rest.

Next make your dressing: add the water, vinegar and sugar to a small pan and bring just to simmer. Turn off heat, give a stir and allow to cool a bit then add the fish sauce, lime juice, sliced chilli and garlic. Taste and adjust to your preference.

To finish the salad: slice your shallots quite thin & the red chilli at an angle, cut your starfruit in to nice long shards or, if that sounds too poncy, then any-old-how will also be fine!

Cut your now rested steak into nice bite-sized pieces. Mix these with all the salad ingredients. Dress with about half the nouc cham sauce, toss again and serve.

Stick the rest of the sauce in a dipping bowl and serve alongside.

Hope you like it. More Vietnamese recipes to come.

A

Thai crisp fish salad with green mango & cashews

Crispy fish salad with green mango & cashews

For the last month or so i've been doing salads at the restaurant. It's a big step up for me and a really challenging role - partly because they're a lot of work to knock up during service, but also because whoever is doing salads runs the 'Larder' section. Larder does pretty much half of the kitchen's menu; we do all the canapés, entrées, relishes & salads, plus, at lunchtime, we also knock up the soups, pad Thai, oh and need to be able to jump on pastry and do the desserts too.

There's normally 3 of us and i have organise the team's prep during the day, make sure we're ready for service, not in the shit, or, for that matter, about to run out of any of the wide array of obscure sliced, toasted, deep fried, julienne or fermented wot nots we need each day. During service i then call the orders, do my dishes, check the other's, taste this that or the other, and generally sort of hold it together and not sink the ship.

It's challenging, and sometimes v.stressful. Especially for someone like me who was behind a desk not much more than a year ago. But I'm learning loads and basically loving it.

Anyhow, i ramble! Basically what i meant to say is: i'm now doing salads, so here's a nice salad recipe from Nahm: fish salad with green mango and cashews....

It's a dish we've had on as a special recently, using brill. It's exactly my kind of food - fresh & simple, but also interesting and bang full of flavour and texture. so thought i'd share the recipe, i'm sure the nice man David Thompson wont mind (!?).

No of ingredients might look a lot but it is a pretty simple salad by Thai standards.

Ingredients (serves two without much else or four or more as part of a Thai meal)

• Around 250g of fish on the bone (as mentioned we use brill at Nahm for it but any firm-ish rich white fleshed fish should work well, e.g john dory would be ideal, or even trout or salmon i would think, i used a hake tail cut in to thick steaks on this occasion). Whatever you buy get the fishmonger to gut, clean & scale it first.
  
• 100g or so of plain cashew nuts
• 4-5 sticks of lemon grass, peeled and though outer layers removed.
• 4-5 red Thai shallots, peeled
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 green (hard & unripe) mango
• small bunch coriander, with the roots
• small bunch mint
• couple of kaffir lime leaves
• juice of 3 or so limes
• 2-3 bird's eye chillies
  
• white sugar
• salt
• light soy
• fish sauce
• plain oil to deep fry

Method


Peel the mango and julienne it into matchsticks (see pics - feel free to use a mandolin or something here).
















Finely slice the lemongrass, slice the shallots quite thin.

















Slice 2 of garlic cloves a thinly as possible, then shallow fry in plenty of oil until just golden and crisp, set aside. now fry your cashews until golden in the same oil (boiling them for 20 mins first produces a nicer result, if you can be bothered).

Pick the leaves from the mint and coriander, tear off the coriander roots, wash and set aside.

Cut your fish in to steaks (on the bone) about thumb thickness, marinate for 5-10 mins in generous amount of light soy with a pinch of white sugar, before deep frying in plenty of sizzling hot oil until dark golden brown with crisp skin. drain on to kitchen paper and allow to cool for few mins before flaking flesh off bone in to large chunks, ensure crispy skin included.











Now make the dressing: pound the last garlic clove with 3-4 cleaned coriander roots, a bird's eye chilli or 3 and a pinch of salt, in a p & m until fairly fine. add juice from about three limes, good pinch of white sugar, and season up with fish sauce. it should be hot, sour, salty and only slightly sweet.





Ok nearly there....shred your lime leaf as fine a you possibly can and assemble the salad by adding all the ingredients (except the dressing) in to a mixing bowl, saving back half the lime leaf shreds for garnish.














Now just mix, add dressing, mix again briefly and serve. garnish with reserved lime leaf.








Serve in nice bowl for people to share from & garnish with reserved lime leaf.







Andy.

Thai-style fish salad

Here's a recipe for an easy Asian style fish salad. It is loosely based on Larp (or 'Laap' as it's sometimes written) - a salad of minced meat or fish found throughout northern Thailand & Laos (it's often described as 'the national dish' of Laos). But the recipe below is not true Larp, so I'm not gonna call it that. I will try an stick an authentic (e.g a version with home smoked fish and the essential roasted chilli powder) recipe up here at some point, because, although its more work, it's damn tasty. Working at Nahm is really strengthening my belief in doing Thai food the authentic way, which, 9 times out of 10 = the hard way i'm afraid (both in terms of work and the difficulty of finding the ingredients)! I believe it's worth it, but here on my blog i also want to do fair few dishes which are pretty accessible so hence 'Thai-style fish salad'. Should still taste good.

Thai style fish salad

Ingredients (serves 2 as a stand alone dish, or 4 as part of a Thai meal):

• 400g fish fillet - sea bass, bream, snapper or any nice flakey white fish
• Large handful of beansprouts
• 4 or 5 thai red shallots or a small bunch of spring onions
• 2 tablespoons of uncooked Thai fragrant / jasmine rice
• 1 - 2 long red chillies
• Optional: 1 - 2 bird's eye chillies
• 1 tbsp white sugar
• 2 tbsp fish sauce
  
• 3-4 tbsp lime juice, plus some extra lime pieces to garnish
  
• 2 sticks of lemon grass
• small bunch thai basil, or large handful of mixed coriander and mint or mixture of above as you please.
  
• salt and white pepper
  

Method:

• Take your fish fillets, season them with salt and white pepper and put them in a steamer or colinder in a pan and steam until just cooked - about 3 - 4 mins above boiling water. Take out and allow to cool a bit, peel the skin off (if there is any) and flake the flesh into a mixing bowl.
• Take the raw rice and toast in a dry frying pan on a medium heat, stirring fairly regularly for about 5 mins, until toasted. Grind in a pestle and mortar or whizz in a blender until a coarse powder (sounds weird i know but it gives some real texture to the dish).
  
• De-seed and finely slice the long chilli, peel the tough outer layers off the lemongrass and slice the tender inner part very finely, now slice the shallots or spring onion and throw all this, plus the beansprouts and ground rice into the mixing bowl.
• Now make your dressing - mix the lime juice, fish sauce and sugar together until sugar dissolves. If you want to heat things up then bash up a couple of bird's eye chillies and mix them into the dressing too. Taste the dressing and adjust with more fish sauce / lime / sugar.
• Add two thirds of the herbs to the mixing bowl and tip in the dressing, toss it all through.
• Plate up and garnish with reserved herbs and lime pieces.

N.B ideally dishes like this are best eaten as part of a Thai meal - along with rice, a curry, soup and relish and perhaps some raw sliced veg along side.

pic by www.benbroomfield.com

Quick lunch - aubergine, courgette, tahini, yogurt salad thingy

Hmmm, all the recipes i seem to be blogging at the mo are of my thrown together lunches on days off from work! Will endeavor to get some more fancy (& some Nahm-inspired) stuff up here soon but, in meantime, here's another of said thrown together numbers...

Roast aubergine & courgette salad with tahini an yogurt dressing

Was in back garden when took this pic, would have looked nicer if sun had come out from behind cloud before i took, but was too hungry, so i ate it.

Ingredients (serves 2, but easy to double/ triple/quadruple for numbers):

• 1 medium aubergine
• 2 medium courgettes
• some natural yogurt - about 4 or 5 tablespoons
• a tablespoon or so of tahini
• some herbs - coriander & mint is an ideal combo here, oh and some thyme for the veggies if you have
• black onion seeds, and dried chilli flakes - optional, but desirable
  
• a long red mild chilli
• a lemon
• 3-4 cloves garlic
• olive oil
• a tomato or two

Rough method (vary as you please):

• preheat the oven to pretty hot (between 200 & 220 degrees C) chop you aubergine in to largish chunks (e.g one medium aubergine into 8 pieces or so), cut the courgettes slightly larger. Irregular shapes is good, but aim for roughly the same size.
• put them on a baking tray, smash 2 or 3 cloves of garlic up with pestle and mortar or blade of knife (leaving skin on is fine) and scatter over, season wit salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil, oh and if you have them then throw some sprigs of thyme around & scatter over some dried chilli flakes.
• roast until nicely colored and cooked through - about 20-30 mins (give a shake half way through if you remember/ can be bothered).
• make dressing by mixing together yogurt, tahini, good squeeze or two of lemon juice, add salt n pepper a finely chopped/crushed clove of garlic and some chopped mint and/or coriander leaves. taste and adjust seasoning or lemon juice.
• quarter tomato and take seeds out, then roughly dice, finely chop the chilli and pick some mint &/or coriander leaves
  
• to serve take a platter or individual plates out the roasted veg on, spoon yogurt sauce over liberally, scatter with tomato, herbs, chopped chilli and then black onion seeds
• recommended with hot pittas alongside (and would go very well with some simple fish or grilled meat).
  

Off to work shortly, no more time off this wk for me!

Andy

Chorizo salad (& a new camera!)

Finally, i've bought a half decent camera...a digital SLR with macro lens.

I barely know one end of the camera from the other yet but am going to enjoy learning and putting the results up here etc.

So here's the very 1st pics from it - hot off the press (it's basically what i just ate for lunch). Plenty of room for improvement but, compared to my old camera, the diff is huge.

Chorizo salad with chickpeas, tomatoes & roast pattypan squash:

Rough recipe: i cut a couple of pattypans each in to about about 8 pieces and roasted with some garlic, thyme, quartered onions, seasoning and olive oil - for about 20 mins in hot oven. Meanwhile i cooked some slices of good quality soft chorizo in a pan, deseeded and sliced few plum tomatoes, chopped a little red chilli and couple of spring onions....to this i then added a tin of drained chickpeas and plenty of roughly chopped parsley and mint, oh and the zest of one orange. Little red wine vinegar/lemon juice, seasoning and good olive oil and toss through.

Couple more pics...

Provence & my news

Ok firstly my major bit of news: i went in to Nahm today and finalised things - so i start my first full time cheffin job on 3rd of August!

So my new life starts then - think poverty, sleep deprivation, smelling of shallots on the night bus while heading home at some stupid time etc... but also COOKING, lots of cooking, plus loads to learn and spending lots of time with the great birgade of chefs from all over the world who work there.

Bring it on.

Now, to Provence...finally now back and have got round to gathering a few pics so i can post a snippet of my recent 8 days cooking (& chilling) in a lovely house plus vineyard in Provence.

Is a cliche but cooking out there was a real pleasure because of the quality of the produce. We had the local farmer character bring us various super fresh & yummy fruit an veg almost daily - courgettes, ugly but as-good-as-they-get tomatoes, basil, figs, plums etc. Plus using local olive oil, eating olives from the land, honey from the forest...you get the idea!

I was staying with & cooking for 'Mr & Mrs J' - two very nice people who really enjoy & understand good food, so that made it all the better. On a couple of occasions we also had guests for dinner - ex pats & the charming French farmers (+ plus families) who were concerned with turning out lovely wine from the property's vineyard.

Anyway, enough rambling from me. Here's some pictures and a couple of associated rough recipes:



These are braised young artichokes (got pretty swift at preping these when doing a stage at Moro, they got through tonnes). I just prepped them down to tender part with help of speed-peeler, halved them then braised little water, olive oil, fresh thyme and a whole garlic clove or two. They're ready when tender to point of a knife. Squeeze of lemon and drizzle of oil and they're good to go.






Provencal fish stew...with pernod, orange, saffron and whatever fish was good on the day (monk & giant super fresh prawns in this case):




















In the foreground: crispy courgette flowers and slices of young courgette. I used a beneiget batter from a my Tom Aiken book - mostly 00 flour, but also cornflour & baking powder. Worked well, giving a light crisp result.



















Just some of the yummy fresh produce...which made my job easy (didnt need to do much to it to make tasty):



















Little crostini nibbles, marjoram leaves on top:















An ever-elegant 'Mrs J' picking up some choice produce at the local weekly market:
















And a couple of snaps of the produce at said market:


































Courgette carpaccio sort o thing...very finely sliced (i used my mandolin) courgettes, toasted with seasoning & a little white wine vinegar. Laid out nicely on a plate the scattered with toasted pinenuts, parmesan shavings and finished with good EV oil and more black pepper:




More lunchtime fodder: fried aubergine covered in diced roast red pepper & tomato, wine vinger oil and basil (similar to the pasta further down).















Tomato, olive, parsley & shallot salad - lemon & oil dressing, a lunchtime staple.














Below - maltagliati (rough cut flat pasta pieces) with roast red pepper, tomato olives and basil. Which is a really nice easy way with fresh pasta...you just role it to the penultimate thickness (i.e thickness for parpadelle etc) and then cut in to rough shapes. I then roasted and peeled a couple of big twisted red peppers, peeled and diced a bunch of good tomatoes and destoned a load of black olives. I put all of these in a bowl with few glugs of good EV olive oil, some finely chopped raw garlic and good red wine vinegar, seasoned and mixed. Cooked the pasta (2 mins in boiling salted), drained and added to a large pan with the red-tomato-olive mix, warmed through on medium heat for 2mins, added a load of fresh basil and served in pan - people can help themselves.

Rojak

Rojak is a mad fruit n veg salad, with a real hot – sweet – sour – salty thing going on. It’s quite unusual and fun to make.

I’ve eaten it in different forms, with the least successful being the one I recently I tried @ C&R café, it was drowned in the sweet soy sauce called kecap manis and had tinned pineapple in the mix…a bit rank tbh (plus their satay was some of the worst I’ve tried), a shame as I’d been recommended that place as “the Tayyabs of Malay food”. Not so according to my visit! Below is the way I like rojak: pretty zingy and full of fresh fruit and veg, with no soy or kecap manis in sight.

In fact i think it's different styles of Rojak depending on where it's from - the sweet soy version is Malaysian, whereas the fruity fresher version comes from Indonesia. So looks like i'm with the islanders on this one (or perhaps i just need to try a good Malay one?).

Anyway!

You could eat it as part of a meal i.e at same time with other dishes (e.g soups, curries etc) as is the way people tend to eat in SE Asia, or as a super healthy light lunch (with some rice or noodles) / starter.

Ingredients (serves 4, roughly):

o A selection of fruit and veg, e.g as…green mango, ripe pineapple, granny smith apple, cucumber, chow chow, daikon….or even blanched sugar snap peas, fennel, carrots etc.
o 3-4 spring onions
o some roasted blanched peanuts – maybe 100g
o A small handful of fresh coriander & / or mint leaves

For the dressing:

o 1 tablespoon shrimp paste
o 2-3 fresh long red chillies
o 4cm piece of fresh ginger
o 1 tablespoon of tamarind pulp
o juice of a lime
o 2 tablespoons fish sauce
o 2-3 tablespoons caster sugar

Slice the fruit n veg in to a mixture of odd shapes, but make sure they are all sort of bite sized and quite thin is usual good for the really crunchy ones.

Wrap the shrimp paste in foil and toast in a dry pan on low heat / in 180 oven for about 10 mins.

De seed the chili and peel the ginger, chop them both quite small then pestle and mortar (or blend) them until a rough paste.

Add in the toasted shrimp paste and mash through / wiz bit more. Now mix through the lime juice, tamarind, fish sauce and sugar. Add a couple of tablespoons of water and mix it all nicely to make a dressing. Taste & set aside.

Tear any large herbs leaves roughly, leave the rest whole, finely slice the spring onions on an angle. Mix these with the rest of the salad ingredients, peanuts etc. Finally toss with ½ the dressing and divide between plates / put on a platter, finish by spooning over the rest of the sauce.

Andy

Quail, daikon & pickled spring onion salad

This salad uses quail (which i'm a big fan of), but you could easily do it with all sorts - poussin, pigeon, chunks of tender beef or even pieces of salmon. Is just really about a marinade plus a few interesting Asian accompaniments.

Get the pickled spring onions done first (you wont nearly use them all here, but they keep for ages in fridge and can be used for all sorts).

Ingredients (for 2):

2 Quail

1-2 large ‘Dutch’ red chillies

½ a small daikon / mooli (if you cant find use another radish or even a cucumber)

Few sprigs of shiso cress (or use small coriander sprigs)

A couple of large slices of pickled ginger

Pickled spring onions (*see below)

Marinade:

2 tablespoons kecap manis (or substitute some dark soy sweetened with a little honey)

1 teaspoon Chinese 5 spice powder

1 teaspoon sesame seeds

1 teaspoon rice vinegar

Plus a pinch of chill powder if you want to spice further.

Dressing:

1 tablespoon kecap manis (or substitute some dark soy sweetened with a little honey)

The juice of ½ a lime

1 teaspoon of sesame oil

*Pickled spring onions:

2 bunches of spring onions

½ cup caster sugar

½ cup rice vinegar

1 cup water

1 star anise

1 slice fresh ginger

1 dried red chilli

- Chop spring onions in to short lengths and place in a jar, bring liquids to boil until sugar dissolves then add rest of ingredients except the s-onions. Allow to cool a bit then pour in to jar with spring onions. Leave for at least 30mins before using. Keep with a lid on in the fridge.

Method:

• Pre heat your oven to 220 degrees C.
• Take the breasts and legs off the quail (or get the butcher to) and mix in a bowl with the rest of the marinade ingredients, chuck away the carcasses (or freeze them for stock later). Leave the meat to marinate for an hour or 2 if you have chance.
• When you’re ready to cook, take the legs out of marinade, place on a small roasting tray and place in the oven for 15 mins, or until cooked though and just crisp
• Meanwhile cut the pickled ginger in to long slithers, do the same with the red chilli (taking the seeds out first).
• Cut the daikon in to v.thin slices (I use a mandolin here).
• Fry the breasts skin side down in a hot pan (with a little splash of oil) for a couple of mins on each side.
• Assemble the dish by laying out the quail pieces and placing the spring onions, radish, ginger, chilli and shiso around.
• Finish by mixing together the dressing ingredients and drizzling over.

A

(thanks to Ben Broomfield for pic http://www.benbroomfield.com)

Al fresco pics

Ok i haven't blogged in a bit (been busy working away at Maze and York n Albany among other things), but keen to get some new stuff up over next few days.

Plus I need to get that manky pic of my mashed up finger off the top spot (no better way of putting peeps off my blog than being greeted by snaps of gruesome injuries)!

So, for a start, here's a sample of some al fresco (in my back garden) pics you might like. Food's by me, pics by Sarah Louise (http://www.sarahlouisephotography.com) - a great photographer i do some snaps with from time to time...


Chilled beetroot soup with goats cheese & baby purple basil:














Confit cherry tomato crostini



























Marinated strawberries (vanilla, lemon, star anise etc)




























Yogurt, mint, pomegranates, pistachios, honey and medjool dates.














More recipes etc to come soon.

p.s the finger is now back in action (no more documentary snaps i promise!)

A