meemalee

Smoky Bacon and Watercress Noodle Soup There's a sudden chill in the Spring air, and I feel like I need warming up, but I don't want to indulge in something too stodgy.  This noodle soup is sweet, smoky and slightly sharp - which makes for a satisfying, but light and refreshing dish.  It takes no time at all to make and uses mainly store cupboard ingredients, so is perfect for a week-night meal.  This dish is a recent invention, but it's already become a favourite at home.  You can switch the leafy herbs according to what's available - try mizuna, peashoots, or a friend of mine made a lovely suggestion of using wild garlic which is in season right now. Smoky Bacon and Watercress Noodles  ( this also appeared in The Guardian's COOK supplement on 15 March 2014 ) Serves 2 Ingredients 6 rashers of smoked streaky bacon 500ml chicken or vegetable stock 2 tbsp caster sugar 300g fresh udon or rice noodles 2 tbsp light soy sauc...

Miso Salmon, Green Tea Soba Noodles, Stir-fried Shimeji Mushrooms I don't believe in diets, but sometimes I feel like I'm stretched too tightly, uncomfortable in my own skin like the bug man in Men in Black. Times like those, I still want to eat my fill, but I don't want to have to have a lie-down afterwards. This Japanese-influenced dish does the trick - the dressed noodles are bright and zingy, whilst the salmon is sweet, comforting and savoury. Even better, after a bit of advance prep, it only takes 15 minutes to cook. Miso Salmon with Soba Noodles  Serves 2 All ingredients are available in larger supermarkets, health food stores or online from the Japan Centre. 2 salmon fillets, about 150-200g each, skin still on  150g dried soba noodles (I used matcha ie green tea soba)  Groundnut or other neutral oil for frying 1 spring onion, green and white parts, finely sliced  1 tsp black sesame seeds  For the salmon marinade: 1 rou...

Ramen egg in situ People complain that it's hard to get around in Japan because you're literally lost in translation. This isn't true for a number of reasons which I won't go into now, but especially when it comes to food. Most restaurants, even the high-end ones, have amazing plastic models in their windows called " sampuru " which show you pretty much exactly what you're going to get; when you get inside, the menus often contain pictures; and a lot of more casual places make you order in advance from a machine which has photos of all the dishes (it's a bit like buying a car park ticket, but what you get in return is a hell of a lot more fun). Choosing noodle options in Osaka I loved using these machines because you could easily build up the craziest order possible without any confusion - press this button for extra noodles, that button for tempura on the side - but my favourite button was the one which got you a ramen egg. A r...

Ramen Burgers Hot on the heels of the food trend known as the  cronut comes the Ramen Burger . Made popular by Keizo Shimamoto, writer of the blog Go Ramen! and now ramen chef in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this culinary mash-up is a sister to MOS Burger's famous rice burger , this time using ramen noodles as the unlikely burger receptacle - ie the ramen is the burger bun. And like MOS Burger, its roots come from Japan - unsurprising as Shimamoto, a second-generation American Japanese-American, ditched his career in finance to study the art of ramen in Tokyo itself. Looks good, huh? The  Japanese forerunner  to the ramen burger is more traditional - all the usual elements are there, including cha shu pork, naruto fishcake, menma bamboo shoots, spring onions - portable ramen - whereas the American Ramen Burger is a proud fusion, much like Shimamoto himself. The most famous of the old-school ramen burgers comes from  Furusato-tei  in Kitakata Cit...

A friend of mine was mocking the recent craze for food mash-ups - cronuts , doissants, townies, what have you. She suggested the world should come up with a dish combining noodles and rice called "nice", so I mentioned to her that us Burmese already have a dish comprising rice, noodles AND potatoes (the Atkin's diet was never going to work in Burma). This triple-carb beauty is called let thohk sohn (or let thoke sone ) which literally means "hand-tossed everything", but I've seen it called "rainbow salad" which, to be fair, makes for pleasanter nomenclature. Let thohk sohn is perfect picnic fare, as well as a pretty awesome desk lunch. Triple carb joy, plus some carrots and white cabbage Eaten cold or at room temperature, it's technically a salad (the Burmese for salad is " a-thohk " ie "tossed"), but its flavours and textures make it as far from a droopy bunch of green leaves as you can possibly imagine. I...

Tea Eggs I've not been able to eat soft-boiled eggs recently, so I've been trying to find ways to pimp hard-boiled ones to make them more interesting. One of my favourite methods is to turn them into Tea Eggs  (aka Marble Eggs and Tea Leaf Eggs) - a classic snack throughout Asia which probably originated in China, where eggs are hard-boiled, cracked gently, and then simmered in a mix of tea, soy and spices to achieve a beautiful crazy paving effect all over - and a flavourful kick. Tea eggs are easy to make and it's incredibly satisfying to see the cobweb patterns appear. Cinnamon, Star Anise, Tea Leaves Marbled Tea Eggs 6 eggs 2 tbsp black tea leaves or two black tea bags - I like Lapsang Souchong for smoky flavour, though Pu-Ehr is more usual 2 tbsp dark soy sauce  1 tbsp light soy sauce 2 tbsp sugar  4 star anise  2 cinnamon sticks 1 tsp five spice powder 1 tsp of cracked black peppercorns Hard boil the eggs in a saucepan of wate...

A friend of mine who runs my favourite pub* recently told someone that I had some brilliant stir-fry recipes right here on my blog. I was forced to admit that there weren't any (save Burmese Pork and Beans ), partly because I figured most of you lovely readers would know how to make them, but mainly because most of my recipes burble around in my brain and only occasionally make it on-line. This is one of the recipes that I've been meaning to share for ever, but then I get distracted by a moth or a giant panda . Pig cheeks. Vaguely fashionable, still cheap as chips, available at canny butchers, Waitrose and Morrisons. It is a truth universally acknowledged that pig cheeks, like ox cheeks, need to be slow-cooked to be tender and delicious. And though I have been known to braise or stew them, god knows I wasn't blessed with a lot of patience, and so I experimented with cooking them in various ways (even one of those stir-fry jobs) before discovering that they're staggeri...

This weekend I was totally going to make marshmallows using Bertie Branning , my shiny red Kitchenaid mixer, when I found out you needed a sugar thermometer. So I thought s*d that for a game of soldiers and decided to make a mahoosive pork pie instead. Partly because it's Christmas time and nothing marks the season better for me than fat wodges of meaty pie, and partly because I was inspired by my very short stint as a pop-up pie assistant (PUPA) for the fabulous Bray's Cottage . Not that I had all the correct equipment for making a pork pie either. Apparently you need a pie mould of some sort. All I had was a big cake tin, which is why I've ended up with a pork pie bigger than my head. But, hells, it looks good and it tastes even better. Super traditional hot water crust pastry combined with untraditional Asian spiced filling. Fusion - I'm all over it, me. Meemalee's Mahoosive Pork Pie For the jellied stock 4 pig's trotters 4 white onions 2 carrots 2 celery sta...