Leith's Thai Noodle Salad

So today was a bit of a big day.  First day back at work.   4am alarm call. New healthy eating regime (again).  Restarting the exercise thing (again!).  New boss (thankfully he's quite nice if you feed him cake - just not after midnight).  400-odd emails in my inbox after a two-week holiday (that excludes the fifty-odd I read and replied to whilst I was away, and I'm not even important!)  A mountain of washing that still needs to be conquered.

I had intended to make a low-fat turkey chilli for lunch, but then I realised I hadn't organised myself well enough for lunch at work (this was at 3.57am, just before the alarm call) so I decided to whack together a little prawn noodle salad, thus saving me from temptation at the salad bar in the canteen at lunchtime.

Healthy luncheon

Ordinarily, when I'm at my base site, I'll have a jacket potato and salad.  Trouble is, salad is about the only thing they do well and I usually end up with pasta or rice salad and coleslaw and all manner of other lovely salads, covered in dressings crammed on to my plate, meaning that I'd probably have done better to have something else.  But making my own instead, even if it meant cooking noodles before 5am, meant that I managed to stay relatively safe during day one.


Despite eating lots of rubbish on holiday, lugging around a 15kg toddler meant that I came home 4lbs lighter than when I went.  We walked several miles most days and this is a long way when you're only two.  When you're thirty-five and carrying a two-year-old it seems even further.  I now not only need to see a chiropractor about my hip pains (which keep interrupting my running) but also my bad back and neck from too many piggy backs.  I'm keen to keep up the weight loss momentum so healthy eating and low-impact exercise will be replacing cake and toddler carrying for the next few months.


The recipe today came from my Leiths Simple Cooking book.  I adapted it based on what I had in my fridge and it worked quite well for a lunch box meal.  The flavours were delicate, it was filling enough for me to miss out on my afternoon snack that the diet allows and it made me feel thoroughly virtuous.  Definitely a diet make-again as it's less than 300 cals.


Serves 1 (adapted from Leith's Simple Cookery)

• 1 nest medium egg noodles (I used Blue Dragon, 158 cals for the nest)
• 100g cooked and peeled King Prawns
• 3 radishes, finely sliced
• 3" chunk cucumber, cubed
• 2 spring onions, cut diagonally
• 1/2 red chilli, finely chopped
• 1/2 tsp nam pla (fish sauce)
• a couple of sprigs of coriander, chopped
• a few mint leaves, chopped
• pinch of soft brown sugar
• splash soy sauce
• 1 lime

1. Cook the noodles according to the packet instructions.  Once cooked, drain then run under the cold tap.
2. Cut the lime in two.  Squeeze the juice of one half of the lime into a small bowl and stir in the nam pla, soy sauce, sugar, chilli, coriander and mint.
3. Mix the vegetables, prawns and noodles together then pour over the dressing.
4. Squeeze the juice from the other half of the lime over the dish just before serving.

BBC Spaghetti Pomodoro with Chilli Prawns

Do you believe in horoscopes?  I do and I don't.  The rational part of me wonders how the same set of rules can apply to one-twelfth of the population?  And can how different astrologers see different things in the same set of stars? The romantic part of me wants to believe in fate and destiny and that sometimes a higher power is in operation.

There's one particular astrologer whose monthly forecasts I read.  She gives these really long, comprehensive insights with each horoscope and sometimes they're so delightfully vague in over the length that she does indeed cater for pretty much anything happening to anyone in some veiled comment or another.  I tend to read them when I'm having a bit of a navel-gazing time in my life.  Introspective and uncertainty always drives me to look for someone else to give me the answer.

My other foible is that I tend to read them towards the end of the month so I can say 'Oh so that's why xyz happened' rather than at the start of the month when she'll say something that I interpret to mean I'm going to win the lottery when in fact at the end of the month, I actually just found a forgotten tenner stuffed in the pocket of my winter coat or something similar (this month I did win £3.10 on the Euromillions though).

Not quite Pimms jelly

Of course, this month she said that I was due the best weekend of the current decade, ever, over the weekend of 12-13th May.  Well excuse me, but if that was my best weekend of the decade then I'm in for a bloody bumpy ride up until 2020!  But equally, she was right about a career decision that I'd been pressured to make.  She suggested waiting for the right thing to come along.  I chose not to do as I was told and wait.  All without reading the horoscope first so I like to think she's right.  About me and the other half billion Capricorns in the world.

One other thing she mentioned was the current Venus retrograde which would put a kibosh on some of my creative plans. And yes, life has now tampered with my blog plans for today and tomorrow.  So instead of a nice Pimms jelly, planned in advance of the jubilee celebrations and with the hot weather we had been having in mind, I've now had to bring you a pretty pleasant summer pasta dish from the BBC Good Food website at the last minute.  Fresh, storecupboard stuff.  Quick and easy for a last minute dish after a long day at work.  And healthy too.

I also blame the Venus retrograde for compromising my plans to make my jubilee bundt tomorrow.  An action-packed day of work followed by a Jubilee party at Miss A's nursery (I'd intended to make cake for that too but the week has just vanished) and a trip to the doggie doctors in the evening has left me severely short on time and inspiration.  Now wondering what the June horrorscope will hold but of course, I can't look for another thirty days.

Recipe for the prawn dish is here

Pappardelle with Prawns and Samphire

Years ago, if I'd had to pick a cookery show to watch, anything with Rick Stein would've been way down the list.  I always used to think of him as 'the guy who only ever cooks fish' and whilst that's probably still quite true, having watched clips of his stuff on Saturday Kitchen, he's quite grown on me to the point that I have one of his books in my Amazon shopping basket.  Of course, it's still unpurchased as there's always something else I'd rather buy, but at least I can pretend I'm being adventurous.

The first time he hooked me into something was actually with a fish dish.  But this one had samphire in it. For some reason I became a bit fixated on the idea of samphire - I'm really not sure why and I certainly don't remember what he cooked it with - but it was one of those things that I just had to have.  Of course, living nowhere near the sea any more and what with it being seasonal local produce, the chance of getting some has never arisen in the intervening years.  Until Friday.  When I found myself with a generous handful of samphire and no clue what to do with it.

I have no idea how long it keeps for so I felt bound to try and cook with it within a day or two.  Ewan Mitchell, blogger at Tonight's Menu and creator of the Olympic Food Challenge, suggested a recipe that he recently made with Lemon Sole.  That's another ingredient on my hit list before the end of the year, but living in land-locked Wiltshire fresh fish at short notice is a bit of a challenge at times.  Not having a local fishmongers, I ended up settling on making something up with prawns based on a little bit of Googling about samphire.  And actually, it wasn't all that bad.

Lots of green, healthy looking stuff (swimming in butter!)

For the second day in a row, I feel quite proud that I've eaten something seasonal - even if the produce isn't exactly local with it.  But at least it's not been imported thousands of miles on a freight plane.

Samphire is touted as 'the asparagus of the sea' and it's supposed to have a really salty taste.  I have to admit that I was expecting it to taste like a mouthful of seawater, but actually, it's not that salty.  Or maybe my palate has just become accustomed to too much salt???  From the reading I did, people recommended to not salt the dish.  In this case, I would highly recommend seasoning the pasta a little before finishing as the large, flat ribbons of pasta can be quite bland if picked up sans samphire.  I normally only buy unsalted butter, but for this I'd probably go for slightly salted and then add lashings of pepper to the pasta before serving.

To give flavour, I added some lazy chillies for some heat, garlic for flavour and then sprinkled the top with chopped parsley and served with lemon to squeeze over.  I don't know if this is a sensible seasoning combination, but I liked it.  The samphire has a slightly bitter tang to it so there seemed to be a good range in the dish - bitter, salty, sour, spicy and sweet from the prawns.  If nobody else likes this dish, I know one person who would - my wonderful Grandma who would've been 83 today.  There's nobody else I would've rather had dinner with tonight.

Serves 2

• 250g pappardelle pasta
• 200g king prawns
• 25g slightly salted butter
• handful samphire
• 1 chilli, deseeded and finely chopped or 1tsp lazy chillies
• 1 clove garlic, finely chopped
• small handful parsley, finely chopped
• lemon wedges to serve

1. Cook the pasta according to the package instructions.  Drain and return to the pan, tossing in half of the butter and season with some black pepper.  Keep warm by placing a lid over the saucepan.
2. Wash the samphire and cook in boiling water for three minutes.
3. Whilst the samphire is cooking, melt the butter in a frying pan over a medium heat and cook the garlic and prawns until they just start to turn pink and the garlic softens.  Drain the samphire.
4. Add the chilli, samphire and pasta and to the prawns and warm for a couple of minutes, ensuring everything is well combined.  
5. Serve sprinkled with the chopped parsley and lemon wedges.

Prawn and Chorizo Skewers

What makes you choose to cook someone else's recipe? Is it the glossy, photography in the beautifully bound book?  Or if you're a blog fiend, would you choose a recipe where the person has had the time and patience to photograph every step and then spend endless amounts of time photographing the final product (unlike me who will take a quick picture before diving in face first).  Or do you pore over the index wondering what recipe will fit the ingredients that you have to hand or fancy?  And if you find what you're looking for, turn to the page and find it pictureless, would you still make it?

I ask because tonight's recipe test came from a book called 4 Ingredients (sic) - Special Garden Gourmet Edition.  It came free from Ocado when I purchased two tubes of Garden Gourmet herbs.  The book states it's value to be £9.99, yet if I'm honest, I wouldn't give it a second look unless it was free (as it was) or if it was on sale in my local discount book store for a couple of pounds.  Why?  Because it's all text and no pictures.  Call me fussy, but I generally like to see what I'm going to make before I make it.  And I honestly only picked this recipe in sheer desperation because I had all the ingredients, having earlier consumed the greek yogurt that I had forgotten I needed for tea tonight.

Take my plan to bake cake to ply my project manager with this week.  I've been flicking through Cake Days from the Hummingbird Bakery this evening.  Every recipe I've looked at has been accompanied by an arty picture of the product.  There are plenty of pictureless recipes in the book, but they've not garnered a second glance.  If, however, I ever find myself with five spare green eating apples and in need of cake, I might give their Apple Crumble Cupcakes a go - but only because I'd've looked through the index for an apple recipe.  I only looked at this recipe because I needed an example to support my current train of thought.

I realise that my blog is more a 'I tried this recipe, and this is what I thought' than me selling you my own creative talent so I'm not really sure if my photos matter or not.  I have tried to take a picture of the product of every recipe.  Some posts have several pictures (not always of the cooking process!) but none of them will make the average person go 'Wow, I really really want to make that'.  I would imagine (maybe I'm wrong here) that when reading my blog, people look for the thumbs up or down with the picture as secondary information.  Plus my pictures are more how the average cook who doesn't have several hours to artfully photograph their creations can achieve.  Don't get me wrong - I love food photography porn as much as the next person (especially that posted by @HarbourHussy on Twitter - seriously her posts should come with a warning message first) but I have neither the time nor the artistic bent to take great food photos.  Maybe that should be next year's challenge?

Anyway, back to today's recipe.  Such a simple recipe probably doesn't deserve such a lot of pontification, but I love to waffle so waffle is what you now have.  As I said, I lacked the greek yogurt to try the tandoori prawn skewers from the March edition of Good Food (and my cucumber had gone mouldy too) so instead I went with this prawn and chorizo option.

Just a quick camera phone picture - better than nothing!

It sounds pretty straight forward.  Slice the chorizo into rounds, fry for a minute on either side then thread onto skewers, wrapping a prawn around each chorizo slice.  But a lack of picture left me wondering do I thread the stick straight through the centre of the chorizo round so it's flat or do I thread the stick from one edge to the other so the chorizo is upright?  I went for the flat option, but when I then came to cooking the skewers, the prawns were lifted up off of the heat from the pan so didn't cook properly.  It would've worked well on a barbecue as the chorizo would've been partially below the bars, but in a flat pan, it just didn't work.

The trouble is, threading hot chorizo onto skewers was hard enough when poking the sick straight through the flat face, but as my slices were quite thin, to do edge to edge would've been even more fiddly and this was supposed to be a simple recipe.   A picture definitely would have helped solve this dilemma, but alas, free books are usually made on the cheap.  It was a good recipe for something that only had four ingredients - you make a dressing out of olive oil and some Garden Gourmet Italian Herbs - and it tasted appropriately summery to match the lovely sunset that happened this evening.

Will I make it again?  Yes.  Will I make anything else from the book?  Only in sheer desperation for this blog.  I doubt I will ever pick the book up again once this year is over.  Which might be a shame and it might be sacrilege but when time's tight, I want minimal effort to be put into seducing me into choosing a recipe.  Maybe I'm missing out...?

Thai Prawn Curry

Eight years ago today, I took the opportunity of 'Leap Day' to propose to my husband.  As much as I may whine about him, he took the proposal in good humour and didn't immediately reach for his laptop (they didn't have iPads and iPhones back in the dark days) and book himself a one way ticket to Dar es Salaam.

I asked him this morning if, after nine years together, eight years since we got engaged, seven years of marriage, six pets, five cars, four foreign holidays (mini breaks don't count), three different residences, two lost loved ones (my grandma, his mum) and the birth of one child if he would still marry me if I was to propose today.  "That would be bigamy" he said.  I'm sure there's a joke in there, somewhere, but humour isn't me strong point.  Apparently people laugh at me, not with me.  Which is the kind of thing a husband can say to his wife after so long together, without fear of divorce.  Or at least in this house, he manages to get away with that.

He gets away with quite a bit.  Like the way he very rarely makes me a cuppa.  He drinks about twenty cups of coffee a day, but if I want one, I have to ask (sometimes via text!).  I don't get offered.  Or his little habit of how he points out something needs doing so I'll feel guilted into doing it to prove a point, rather than me telling him to just do it himself.  I do, however, draw the line at certain things (re-tiling the roof, laying a patio, cleaning the dogs' bottom glands) and pay people to do things.  If he could find a way to get me to pay him for making me a cuppa, trust me he would.

But tonight, in the spirit of recognising the eight-year anniversary (or is it two because of that whole leap year thing??), he kindly offered me a share of his gravy from his customary chicken-and-Uncle-Bens-Express-Tomato-Rice to go with my dinner.  Then he looked a bit closer.  "That's prawns, right?  You don't really have gravy with prawns, do you?"  At last.  He's learning!  There's hope for his culinary journey yet.

The recipe is from Good Food (again).  Quick, easy and tasty Wednesday night fodder.  I've never had a Thai red curry before so I'm unable to comment on its authenticity.  However, I will say that I found the tomatoes to be overpowering in their acidity and ended up adding a pinch of sugar and a teaspoon of fish sauce to the recipe to try to balance that out.  It was still lacking even after this so I gave it a good squish of lime juice too and, whilst it was tasty, who knows if it was really meant to taste like that?

Not sure Bisto would enhance the flavour...

I suppose to really understand the subtle flavourings, I would need to try it in a proper Thai restaurant.  Pre-baby, we used to frequent a little restaurant called The Thai Barn in Bradford-upon-Avon which does the most amazing Thai food.  Even the husband likes it.  I'm hoping that one day the 'rents might get round to coming down for the weekend and babysitting so the husband and I can finally get a night out together.

In fact, Thai food was another one of the inspirations for this challenge and I'm ashamed that it's taken me this long to try even the simplest of recipes.  One of the things that planted the seed of the idea was watching a challenge on Masterchef where the contestents were asked to make some dish or another with a sweet chilli dipping sauce.  I suddenly realised that whilst I could make a good stab at the main dish, I wouldn't have a clue how to make the sauce - instead relying all the time on Blue Dragon's Sweet Chilli Sauce with Kaffir Lime (I could bathe in that stuff).

So I'll be updating the list of recipes I want to try with a few Thai-inspired ideas and pondering how I'm going to learn what an authentic red curry tastes like in the meantime.  Watch this space.

If you want to try today's recipe, you can find it here.  Do read the comments below the recipe though, I think they really make the difference to the dish.

Prawn rice noodle salad

The trouble with cooking for one is that you often end up with piles some special ingredient with a limited shelf-life and having to eat it for days on end.  Kind of like the Christmas turkey, you have to keep looking for different and interesting ways to use ingredients.  Or just eating the same thing over and over again.

This weekend saw me with prawns and rice noodles a-plenty.  And I really wasn't in the mood for them after Friday's lovely Singapore noodle-fest.  But, this challenge is all about looking for different recipes and being a little adventurous, which is why my lunch today is a prawn and rice noodle salad - with mango.

Sweet and meat is kind of like marmite.  You either love it or hate it.  Growing up, whenever it was gammon steak for tea, there was one camp inhabited by my mother and grandfather where pineapple on the side was a crime (they had a fried egg instead) whereas my grandma and I embraced the contrast of salt-pink gristle and oversweet, metallic-tinged pineapple rings alongside lashings of cauliflower cheese (heaven) and oven chips (god how I hate those things).

Please excuse the tidemark round the box...

But sweet and seafood is an entirely new thing for me.  The ingredient seems very pan-Asian but seeing as how the furthest East I've been is Turkey (the place, not the bird) I couldn't say if it's anywhere near authentic.  But I had all the ingredients to hand and it sounded portable so game on.

It's different.  I adored the dressing, but still not sure about the salad as a whole.  Probably a 'grower'.  I'm not saying I wouldn't eat it again, but I wouldn't go out of my way to make it in my current lifetime.  I don't know anyone else who would eat it if I cooked it.  I know people who would eat bits of it (my mother the prawns but she'd hate the mango and peanut butter, the child would eat the mango) but unless I am ever faced with visitors with distinguished tastes, the next time I eat this will be when I throw caution to the wind in my late fifties, take a gap year and backpack round the far East.  Like I said - not again in my current lifetime.

And please excuse the tidemark around the box in the picture...trying to save on the washing up, I mixed it in the box - lazy or good for the environment????