Laarb

The following is a recipe i wrote up a fair while ago for a website that never happened. Two things makes it not as good as originally intended.

1. One of the jokes doesn't work because i can't work out how to change the text colour on tumblr.
2. I lost my old picture, and have broken my camera for a second time, so i just stole someone elses picture from the internet.

It seems a shame to let it go to waste, so i cooked it again, checked if it was any good and now present it to you for your enjoyment...

This is quite good for poor people, unless they don’t have any of the ingredients, in which case it will be more expensive. If you have some of these things, or know you can get them, please read on. This dish is quite a treat; a pleasant mixture of textures and flavours.
I got this idea from a book I read on Thai food. The recipe is almost exactly the same but I changed the name and then put the real name in brackets afters.

Credit Crunch Thai Salad (Laarb really.)

There’s two ways you can cook this – the traditional Thai way or my way, but I like to think of it more as the not very good way or my way. The difference is in the way the meat is cooked, and it’s really just personal preference. For fairness sake I present both ways side by side, mine in black writing, and the original in a faecal brown.
Regardless of what way you choose, the ingredients are the same.

Pork mince, but please, not too much – you are getting a bit chubby, 100g
A couple of spoons of rice.
3 spring onions.
half a shredded little gem lettuce or some Chinese cabbage.
half a shredded carrot.
handfull of coriander.
A lime.
2 tbsp fish sauce.
a couple of squeezes of sriracha sauce.

Mine:

1. Get a pan on the hob and dry fry your rice. It will start to go golden and maybe fidget a little in the pan. Get it out and crush it up to a coarse texture in a pestle and mortar.

2. Pan back on, wait till it’s very hot, add oil and fry pork until browned.

3. Remove from heat and season with fish sauce and half a lime. I like to add the spring onion now because I despise raw onion.
4. In a mixing bowl, add the meat and springers, carrot and some of the toasted rice.
5. Add a little sriracha and then a little more fish sauce and lime until it tastes nice.
6. Add coriander and mix well, then serve on either a bed of gem lettuce or some finely chopped Chinese cabbage with the rest of the toasted rice on top.
7. Just really enjoy it.

Original:

1. Do the rice thing as above.
2. Marinate the pork mince in lime juice for a few minutes while you put a pan or wok on the hob. This starts to cook the pork instantly and ruins the texture.
3. When the pan is hot, add a few tablespoons of water to it and then add the pork. Try not to cry as the meat boils away to a concrete gray.
4. Follow the rest above

stolen.

Thai Fish Curry: Fatboy Version.

this is a bit of a larger recipe, bit more complex, but incredibly enjoyable. i actually stole it from a menu of a little pub in the north lanes in brighton, and did what i could to recreate it at home. there's a lot of textural complexity in the fish, between the crunch of the crumbs or the almost doughy aspect it takes on soaked in the curry and the creamy fillet beneath. i think it's worth making the effort for this. it's good.

for the curry...

1tbsp red curry paste

2 spring onions

clove of garlic

1 red chili

a bunch of coriander stalks

1 tbsp fish sauce

1 tbsp of palm sugar

juice of half a lime

optional vegetables. i would recommend snow peas/mange tout or some delicious mushrooms, but anything else, just slice thin and it'll be fine.

for the fish...

nice white fish fillet. i chose whiting for some reason, but it was delicious

breadcrumbs

flour

1 egg

shitload of oil

chop, slice and hack and grate everything up for the sauce. then get the paste in a saucepan with a little oil and cook it for a couple of minutes. if it's getting dry and sticking, add a little water. when the paste splits a little from the oil, it's done.

drop the spring onions, red chili, coriander stalks and garlic in and simmer for five minutes or so. add the coconut milk, fish sauce, lime juice and palm sugar. adjust as required. set aside to be heated up later. if adding snow peas or mushrooms, then do it during the later reheat so they retain a little bite.

take your fillets and flour, egg then breadcrumb. if you're using fine breadcrumbs, think about doing this twice.

do they look like this? if not, throw them away.

not really! put them in the fridge to set a little, until you've go your oil hot. you can either deep fry or shallow fry, but i prefer to deep fry because i find it easier to control timings.

medium high heat, don't start frying until you can drop a little bit of bread in and it sizzles. keep you're eye on the pan. if it's smoking, turn down your temperature, take it off the flame. safety first and that. give it some minutes, until the breadcrumbs are crisp and golden, then gently remove and set aside to drain on kitchen towel.

compile the dish now - fried fish with your curry, topped with shredded coriander and roasted chopped peanuts. serve with rice and a singha beer.

eat it and wipe your hands and face afterwards.

Thai Fishcakes with Pickled Cucumber

I was torn between crab cakes and fishcakes for dinner tonight. It’s a little muggy today and I wanted something light and fresh, and this pickled cucumber is the gastro equivalent of having a cold bath. Crab is delicious, but a little expensive. Cod is cheaper, but our consumption is unsustainable. I truly worry about the fact that such a beautiful fish will disappear from our plates if we aren’t careful…I chose the fish.

Regardless, you have to make this dish at least once this summer. This pair go together like Jenny’s and Forrest’s.

For the cucumber salad you’ll need…

chunk of cucumber as long as your index finger, unless you have long fingers, then one as big as your ring finger, seeded and sliced length ways

white of one spring onion, sliced length ways and finely

2 tbsp white vinegar

1 tbsp sugar

1tbsp fish sauce

1 birdseye chili chopped

Combine vinegar, sugar and fish sauce and allow the sugar to dissolve. Add everything else and put in the fridge for later.

Now we move onto the fishcakes…

175g of cod, filleted (but honestly, i just grabbed a piece not quite as big as my hand, but i talked to my housemate and he and i guessed 175).

1 tbsp of red curry paste

1.5 tbsp of fish sauce

1 tsp palm sugar. you can use white, but it won’t taste the same.

1 stalk of lemongrass

a palmfull of fresh coriander, chopped

1 egg

1 clove of garlic

green shoots of one spring onion

Throw all this into a blender and blitz it up into a paste. Meanwhile, heat up half an inch of oil in a frying pan and shallow fry spoonfuls of the mixture. Cook until brown and crispy and handsome. When they’re ready, drain them off on kitchen paper.

To serve, dot a few fishcakes on the plate and dress with the pickled cucumber. A bit like the picture.

Congee/Camera

This is a recipe for congee. I put congee/camera because I have got a camera now that is above 2.6 megapixels which will benefit the visual representations of such eloquently put menu ideas. The congee is seperate from the camera in every other way. Please keep your cameras away from your pots and pans, because they might break and you’ll have to wait for christmas to get a new one or start saving up your money from your paperound that you were going to spend on football stickers.

cCongee is called lots of other things with cool names like ‘jook’ or ‘babaw’, but is essentially a rice porridge. It does sound terrible, but it is very nice when done correctly, which if you follow me, should happen. It’s all about the combination of bland, bland soupy rice topped with flavoursome meats and vegetables, which, when mixed in, gives you little spikes of flavour and texture. I’ve chosen a thai style one to do, because that’s what I had in my cupboard, but it’s well worth trying a few variations.

It’s also really easy to cook, and I even managed it really really drunk last night. Here, I recreate the process, but omit the stumbling, tears, the burping and arguing with my neighbours.

For the rice porridge you will need:

quarter of a cup of jasmine rice, washed

5/6 cups of chicken stock

thumb sized piece of ginger, peeled and finely chopped

for the topping you will need:

leftover roast pork or 100g pork mince

garlic, smashed and chopped

spring onions

handful of beansprouts

quarter of a carrot shredded

a chilli

tbsp palm sugar

2 tbsp fish sauce

1 tbsp rice vinegar

To cook the porridge, bring a pot to the boil containing the chicken stock and the ginger and add your rice. Turn the heat down low and simmer for 30-40 minutes or more. You’re looking for the rice to start breaking down and the starch to thicken the stock.

In the last ten minutes or so, grab a pan or a ken hom wok and set it on the highest heat. Stir fry your pork until it starts to get crispy, then add your garlic, chilli, spring onions and carrot. Stir fry that for thirty seconds or so, then add your sugar and fish sauce, then the vinegar. To finish, add the beansprouts and stir it a couple of times off the heat.

Arrange nicely on top. Eat.

p.s it’s not very good drunk food.

Thai Pork Patties.

I’m trying to do something new with the pictures until i find a better camera. Won’t it be nice and handy to have a saved jpeg to follow rather than a thick stack of writing? Possibly.

Here is another thai recipe using the same sauce as the last, which is a bit like cheating, except for it accompanies these moist, juicy little pork burgers that I would like you to try.

I don’t actually know if you’ll be able to read the info on the picture though, so I repeat the instructions here…

For the sauce:

2 spring onions sliced

1 or 2 birdseye chillis

half a lime, juiced

crushed and chopped garlic clove

2 tbsp fish sauce

1 tbsp palm sugar

3/4 cup of chicken stock

coriander stalks

for the pork patties:

200g minced pork

1 birdseye chilli

coriander leaves

1tbsp red curry paste

1 tbsp fish sauce

To make the sauce, throw all the sauce ingredients into a pan and bring up to heat. Make sure the sugar has melted and then take it off the heat. Sauce done. Unless you want to add some coriander leaves.

To make the patties, combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix, then form into tiny burger shapes. Pan fry. You could also stir fry some mushrooms and more spring onions with a little garlic and some of the sauce to flavour.

Serve over rice, as pictured, or roll up in some fresh little gem lettuce leaves, dipping in the sauce. Mostly i do both of these, because i’m a growing lad.

The pork mix also makes insanely good meatballs for noodle soups, which i suppose i’ll do a recipe for soon.

love daniel coleman x

little thai salad.

I quite like thai food. Here is a thai salad. It should have a papaya in it, but i didn’t have no papayas. If i didn’t write that it needed papayas though, you would have never known. Unfortunately, my delete key isn’t working, so there’s no way i can keep it a secret from you now. I wouldn’t anyway...i like you too much to lie. Hopefully as much as you’ll like the following recipe…

smoked mackerel fillets (one or two. your choice fatty), chopped.

shredded carrot, half per person

shredded cucumber, quarter per person

tomato per person

coriander

couple of tablespoons of unsalted peanuts

and for the sauce…

quarter cup of chicken stock

heaped teaspoon of palm sugar

birdseye chilli

spring onions

half a lime

2 tablespoons of fish sauce

clove of garlic

coriander stalks

First we’ll make the sauce. Put all the ingredients in a pan, bring to the boil and then tun the heat off. Give it a little stir to make sure it’s amalgamated. If you need to, adjust the ingredients as you see fit. As long as it tastes delicious then it’s done. My palatte will be different from yours, mainly because i smoke a lot and drink a lot and sometimes kiss questionable women with my mouth, so it might need a little tweak if you are young, innocent and have a soft, pretty little mouth.

Next, toast the peanuts in a dry pan, and put some oil in another pan on a high heat. Hard fry the mackerel, and when it gets crisp and brown, take it out and lay it on some kitchen paper to drain and cool. Chop up the peanuts.

To serve, just dump it in a big pile and toss it with some of the sauce.