Pasta with Broccoli

You need to use the orecchiette or shell style pasta to catch all the garlicky oily yumminess.

• Orecchiette or shell pasta
• 2 heads broccoli
• 4 cloves garlic,finely chopped (do not use a garlic press)
• 6 anchovy fillets (drained and minced)
• Handful of black olives, pitted and lightly bruised
• Cup of breadcrumbs, fried in olive oil until golden brown
• Parmesan cheese.

Break the broccoli into small florets and blanch in salted boiling water until just cooked. Drain, splash with well flavoured olive oil and set aside. Warm a splash of oil in a low to moderate frying pan. Saute the garlic and anchovies gently until the garlic is fragrant and the anchovies have melted. Toss through the olives, stir for a moment and then add the broccoli. Toss the sauce through the cooked pasta and serve sprinkled with breadcrumbs and Parmesan.

Pasta with lentils and yoghurt

This (somewhat modified) dish comes courtesy of Jill Dupleix’s New Food. It may sound odd but is actually really, really delicious and well worth a try. 

• Cooked thin spaghetti
• 1 cup brown lentils
• 1 litre of water
• 1bay leaf
• 2 onions, finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 tsp each of ground cumin and coriander
• generous pinch of smoky paprika
• About 1 cup of passata
• small tub of natural yoghurt
• Chopped coriander and parsley

Put the lentils in a pan with the bay leaf and cold water. bring to the boil and cook for around 20 minutes or until tender – DO NOT salt the water as this toughens the lentils. Drain, but reserve around a cup of the lentil water. Saute the onions in olive oil until golden, then add the spices, lentils and salt to taste – I need a lot of salt to make lentils work for me and would use about a teaspoon for this recipe. Add the passata. If it’s too dry, add either more passata or some of the reserved lentil water. Warm through and then toss with the cooked pasta. Stir through the yoghurt and serve with the coriander and parsley.

This recipe is for a dish I’ve been making for some years now, vaguely inspired by (although nothing like!) an avocado curry I once had at a Balinese restaurant. It’s very simple, very tasty and great for meat-free nights. Best of all, it’s totally adaptable. Basically it’s steamed rice surrounded by a few different ingredients and smothered in a sweet curry sauce. I use slices of mango,  avocado halves and deep fried blocks of tofu. You could also use hard boiled eggs, slices of tomato and cucumber or whatever else you fancy. I guess it’s basically a nasi campur style of eating – a buffet on a plate and so the joy of it is that you can chuck whatever ingredients you want on the plate and everyone gets something they like. My kids will only take a small amount of the curry sauce, but that’s just fine for now.

Look, I just completely made this dish up so please consider this recipe a guidleine only. Put whatever ingredients you want on the plate and whatever spices you want in the curry sauce. I can’t imagine that I’ve ever made this dish the same way twice but I do like to keep the spices on the sweet and fragrant side as they go so nicely with the fruit.

Mango rice with sweet curry sauce

• 1 onion, finely diced
• 2 ripe tomatoes, finely diced
• half a teaspoon of tumeric powder
• quarter of a teaspoon dried galangal powder
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 6 cloves
• 6 cardamon pods
• Kaffir lime leaf
• 1 teaspoon good quality curry powder
• stick of lemongrass, bottom part only, bruised
• tin of coconut milk
• Tablespoon fish sauce
• 2 teaspoons palm sugar
• 1 – 2 ripe mangoes
• 1 – 2 ripe avocados
• Block of firm tofu cut into 1 cm slices, each slice cut in half to make a square (does this make sense??!), dried with kitchen paper and sprinkled with salt, fried in 1 cm of hot oil until golden and crispy on both sides.

Gently sweat off the onion in small pan with just enough oil to stop it from sticking. When it’s starting to soften, add the tumeric, galangal, cinnamon, cloves, cardamon and curry powder, give it a stir for a minute or two, and then add the tomato. Fry this gently for a good ten minutes until it’s a sticky pink mess and then add half of the coconut milk (reserving the rest), the kaffir lime leaf and the lemongrass stalk. Simmer for another 10 minutes. Add the fish sauce and sugar, stir well and simmer for another couple of minutes. Taste and adjust the fish sauce / sugar balance accordingly. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve, pushing the pulp through with a fork. Set aside – this can be made well in advance. Just before you are ready to serve, reheat the sauce, adding the remaining coconut milk (this just freshens it up nicely and allows you to taste the coconut).

Remove the mango cheeks and score the flesh into 2cm slices along the length and gently remove. Halve the avocado, remove the kernel and skin. Starting about 1.5 cm down from the skinny end, slice each half in 2cm along it’s length. If you leave it intact at one end you can then fan it out into a nice attractive shape.  Put a neat round mound of rice in the centre of a plate. Place an avocado half, slices of mango and pieces of tofu in little separate piles on the plate. Douse the whole lot with spoonfuls of the curry sauce. Fresh herbs and crispy fried shallots make a delicious little mouthful of extra fun on top if desired.

The big culinary revelation of Cambodia for me came about in an unexpected fashion. Pete and I had left Alex with our friend Andy (who was living in Cambodia at the time) and gone to ancient city of Angkor Thom. It started to pour with rain so we sheltered in a little food stall overlooking the surreal madness of the Bayon temple. Pete ordered a dish  described as “beef and potato” expecting it to be some sort of curry. It turned out to be good old steak and chips. The steak was from stringy Cambodian cows but had been marinated to soften and flavour it and the whole thing was served with a lime and black pepper sauce for dipping.

This sauce  is a sensation. I’ve made it a few ways but I like the method described by Wendy Hutton: you get an individual dipping dish for each person and  make a little pile of salt mixed with whole peppercorns pounded in a mortar and pestle and add a couple of wedges of lime. Each person can then squeeze the lime into the dish and  balance the sauce as they  please.  We did manage to get hold of some Cambodian pepper  which has a distinctively  mellow flavour that makes it much  more authentic but ordinary black pepper is fine. You could serve anything with it – fish cakes, tempeh, plain rice but this is how I like to eat it:

Cambodian steak and chips

The best thing about this is that you can make a perfectly ordinary steak and chips for the kids and serve the loc lac on the side for those who want it.

• Steak – whatever cut, and cooked however you like and sliced thinly to dip in the sauce
• Potatoes  for chips
• Oil for deep frying
• Finely  shredded iceberg lettuce
• Finely sliced tomato
• Finely  sliced cucumber
• Asian herbs (optional)
• Dollop of good quality mayonnaise
• Lime sauce (lime, salt and black  pepper)  as described  above

Basically all you are doing is assembling the salad ingredients  on  a plate with a nice dollop of mayonnaise and then serving with the steak and chips. If you are deep frying the chips yourself, make sure you do the double fry. That is, fry them on a medium heat until just cooked through. Remove from the oil and drain on a paper towel. Pump the oil up to extra hot and cook the chips in batches until golden. Oven cooked chips are of course easier and healthier but not nearly so much fun. Serve the chips and the sliced steak with the salad with the bowls of loc lac sauce on the side for  dipping.

I think this could be a great vegetarian dish if you replaced the chicken with deep fried cubes of  tofu. I omitted the chili (which the kids aren’t crazy for and which Pete and I don’t eat, other than on special occasions for traditional Chinese medicine reasons)- but it would definitely be even better with. I’ve cooked extra rice tonight and spread it out on a tray to dry in the fridge – fried rice tomorrow night.

And while I’m on the subject of Vietnamese food, if you haven’t had a look at Luke Nguyen’s Vietnam on SBS (Thursday 7.30),do so now! Last week he had a whole Mekong Delta fish, the scales of which puff up and turn crispy upon deep frying, drenched in a ginger sauce. Just totally sensational, really.

Stir-fried chicken with mango and cashews (Wendy Hutton, Green Mangoes and Lemongrass)

• 2 large firm ripe mangoes  – cheeks sliced off, scored diagonally into 1 cm wide slices and eased out of the skin.
• 3 tbs fish sauce, 1 tsp lime juice, 1 tsp sugar, half tsp salt, quarter tsp black pepper, mixed together until sugar and salt dissolved
• 250 ml vegetable oil
• 500g boneless chicken breast cut into 2cm squares (or replace with a block of firm tofu cut into cubes and fried until crispy)
• 2 tsp finely minced garlic
• 1 tsp finely minced large red chili
• 200g trimmed snow peas
• 1 medium ripe tomato
• Half a cup of dry roasted cashews

Heat the oil in wok until very hot. Cook half the chicken, stirring frequently for 2 minutes, remove with slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper. Repeat with remaining chicken. Take the wok off the heat and remove all but 3 tbs of oil. While the wok is off the heat, add the garlic and chili and stir fry for a couple of seconds. If you keep it off the heat, then you’re less likely to burn the garlic which will make the dish bitter. Return the wok to the heat and add the snow peas, stir fry for 1 minute. Return chicken and add fish sauce mixture. Mix well, then add mango, tomato and cashews. Stir gently until warmed through.