quick

Smoked Salmon with Soba Noodles and Ponzu

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We eat quite a lot of salmon in our household: the toddler enjoys tinned salmon (Tasmanian, of course) as a snack/lunch/easy dinner, we all love fresh salmon (especially the crispy skin!) and smoked salmon is popular too. One thing we miss, which we used to eat a lot of in England, is hot smoked fish. ‘Normal’ smoked salmon is cold smoked, so the fish is effectively not cooked (it is cured beforehand). Hot smoking uses hot smoke, so the fish is both cooked and preserved by the smoking process. While smoked salmon is normally sold finely sliced, hot smoked salmon is sold in steaks. If you don’t like smoked salmon, give hot smoked a go, because it’s very different.

Anyway, when I spotted this recipe, using both hot smoked salmon AND soba noodles, I had to give it a go. It has very few ingredients, but you might struggle to find the frozen edamame unless you go to a specialist Asian food store. Soba are pretty easy to find although the ones I bought from the supermarket were about 75% wheat and only 25% buckwheat. If you have the time and inclination, seek out a higher proportion of buckwheat.

Begin by making the ponzu sauce. To the juice of one lemon add 1 tbsp rice wine vinegar, 2 tbsp of soy sauce, ½ tsp caster sugar and 1 tsp of sesame oil. Mix to dissolve the sugar and set aside.

Take your hot smoked salmon (I used one 185g packet between the two of us) and, if the skin is still on, remove it. Straight from the packet it will be extremely tough and really quite unpleasant. You can always have a go frying it up if you wish! Flake the fish (equally!) into two bowls. Into each bowl add a finely sliced spring onion, some julienned carrot and some julienned cucumber. I used these in lieu of the edamame; I suggest you use whatever is in the fridge!

You could easily do all this in advance. At this point, cover your bowl(s) with cling film and pop in the fridge until you are ready. If you prefer the salmon at room temperature (like me) don’t forget to take them out half an hour or so before you want to eat.

When you’re ready to serve, cook some soba noodles in boiling water. Be careful not to overcook because they will become a bit soggy and claggy if you do. The ponzu will help separate the noodles and perk them up, but you’re much better off opting for al dente.

Top the salmon and vegetables with the soba, pour over the ponzu and sprinkle on a few sesame seeds (toasted if you can be bothered).

Not only does this taste really good, but it’s easy, quick and insanely healthy.

This alone did us for dinner (though we did wrap up the evening with a sneaky chocolate!). It would also serve well as a salad to serve as part of a more extravagant meal, or a light entrée. Aside from the salmon and noodles, it’s flexible and the ponzu is easily made from store cupboard ingredients. Andy did comment that he thought next time some finely sliced fresh chillis would be a welcome addition. If you do want to spice it up, you could also use chilli oil in lieu or (or as a part substitute for) the sesame oil.

Chicken Quesadilla Recipe

- Alex 2 Comments

Quesadillas

I watch a lot of cooking tv. I’m not a huge fan of the ‘reality’ programs but pretty much anything else I’ll watch – no matter how old school the production values (the really quite awful Four Burners and a Grill) or how much the chef irritates me (er, no names, because that would be just mean).

The other morning we were watching Good Chef Bad Chef. This is one show that irritates me because it kind of ‘works’ under the assumption that the chef using the meat, cream, butter and salt is the ‘bad’ chef, while the nutritionist, whose food is predominantly vegetarian (she uses a lot of seafood) and who uses dairy alternatives, is the ‘good’ chef. Andy always grumpily points out that Adrian usually looks a lot healthier than Janella …

Philosophical issues aside, lots of the food that Adrian Richardson cooks on this show looks really good. On Saturday morning he cooked quesadillas with a prawn filling. Show over, Andy says “we should have quesadillas for dinner”. Wow, I thought, that is going to be one serious pain in the butt to put together.

As we have prawns coming for Christmas, we didn’t want to do seafood so we opted for chicken. I found a recipe on taste which we used as a rough guide.

We began with one onion, finely chopped and sautéed in the wok. We added just one clove of garlic and then half a red capsicum finely chopped.

I finely (super super finely) sliced one chicken breast and the meat was tossed with some ground cumin and ground coriander. The meat was added to the wok and quickly fried.

While the meat was cooking I made a variation on the avocado cream in the taste recipe: half an avocado mashed, mixed with a couple of tablespoons of natural yoghurt and then seasoned.

I also made a quick salsa: one tomato, quartered, deseeded and finely diced (deseeding, while wasteful, does make it a LOT easier to dice the flesh), a quarter of a red onion finely chopped, some chopped coriander, and a good squeeze of lime juice. The following evening I made some more salsa, which I jazzed up with some finely sliced jalapeño peppers and some finely chopped red capsicum. If you use the juice from the peppers you don’t need the lime juice.

To wrap up the quesadillas, we heated a non stick pan, gave it a very light spray with some oil and popped in a wrap. Andy topped half the wrap with some of the chicken mix and a good handful of grated cheddar. Fold the wrap in half and you can add a second wrap to the pan. When the wraps start to become golden, flip them over (not as hard as it sounds if you’re careful). Just pay attention to the heat of the pan as you want the cheese to melt but not at the expense of burning the wrap.

Quesadillas

Serve piping hot with the avocado cream and salsa.

With two of us on the case, this meal took less than 30 minutes to put together. With just the one chicken breast used it’s very economical and it’s also pretty healthy (look at all those vegetables!). Without a doubt it’s something we’ll be making again … especially as we reckon we could manage it on the BBQ during summer!

San Choy Bow

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It’s all hot, hot, hot here in Adelaide (for a few days, at least). We’re expecting 37°C today, and 39 tomorrow so Saturday’s 31°C is looking like a cool change.

With this in mind (and probably a long hot summer ahead), meals need to be light, fresh and quick and easy to prepare. No one wants to heat up the kitchen or spend hours at the stove or even the BBQ.

Andy announced that we should have san choy bow one night this week so we picked up some pork mince on the weekend and I was left to my own devices (the internet) to come up with a meal.

You’ll have noticed that we don’t eat a ton of Chinese food. I’m not a huge fan and the only style that gets me excited for eating out is Sichuan. We have an underused copy of Fuschia Dunlop’s Sichuan Cookery and we frequently eat a spicy chicken stir fry. But that’s it.

I did a bit of googling, searching for an appropriate san choy bow recipe and found that they were mostly unbelievably bland sounding. I found an Anna Gare recipe that sounded like I was onto a winner. Although the list of ingredients looked a little intimidating, I could tell that it was going to provide me with a great base dish.

As always, I used her recipe as a guide and unfortunately the original recipe is no longer on line.

I began by finely chopping 1 and half onions and frying them, in the wok, with a couple of cloves of crushed garlic and a generous teaspoonful of ginger*. When the onion had started to soften I added 500g of pork mince and stir fried until that was cooked through.

I then added a generous few splashes of fish sauce, the juice of half a lemon and a good glug of soy sauce. Finally, I mixed through 1 scant teaspoon of palm sugar. I raised the temperature to ensure that the palm sugar was melted through and to boil off some of the sauces. San choy bow isn’t meant to be saucy!

That was my work done for the day. The cooled mince mixture was put in the fridge overnight, ready to be pulled out for a quick after work dinner.

When we were ready to eat, Andy julienned some carrot and finely chopped a green capsicum and hese were stir fried with the pork mixture. To finish, we mixed through some chilli flakes and some sliced spring onion and served in lettuce cups.

A little bit messy to eat, perhaps, but a perfect meal on a hot day!

* We’ve given up buying fresh ginger (which is invariably imported). You can buy Australian ginger paste in small jars from most supermarkets.