She doesn’t just sell sushi!

One of the regular stalls at the St Nicks market in Bristol on Friday is SheSellsSushi and it is one of my favourite, even if I have never actually had the sushi from there…. yet!

My usual lunch order with the stall is the bento box containing a choice of two dishes from the menu. I usually go for the Donburi, which is slow cooked beef rib in a teriyaki sauce combined with some octopus (or duck) balls (takoyaki).

Donburi Beef

However Lisa, on the stall has been recently selling steamed Hirata bun, so in my bento box this time, I once more had the Donburi, but this time I went with the Hirata bun.

This was a charcoal bun (not what I initially thought was a squid ink bun) with delicious tender pork belly, sorting onions and tasty sauce.

This was a charcoal bun (not what I initially thought was a squid ink bun) with delicious tender pork belly, spring onions and tasty sauce.

The bun was light and fluffy, the pork tender, all in all great flavour. I really wanted another one. I do like the takoyaki I usually go for, but now, I will always go with the Hirata bun.

The Donburi beef was as usual delicious, the flavour is perfect, you can sometimes overdo the teriyaki, but this was well balanced and so tasty. Served with rice and spring onions.

I have spoken to others who really recommend the sushi, so I think I will have to try that next time (with a Hirata bun).

Asian inspired

It’s being a while since I did any stir frying so last night I was inspired to get the wok out and cook some Asian inspired dishes. My first was Thai style stir fried pork with pal choi and cashew nuts.

Thai style stir fry

This dish was my take on a meal I use to eat a lot when I worked in Oxford. In the covered market in Oxford there was a lovely little eatery called Sasi’s Thai that cooked and served delicious Thai dishes. One of my favourite was the stir fried pork with pak choi, Thai basil, vegetables and cashew nuts. I have tried many times to recreate it and have got a reasonable facsimile of the dish now.

I took some pork belly and cut it into chunks before roasting it off in a hot oven. A long slow cooking might be better, but even with just twenty odd minutes in a hot oven, it still managed to render the fatty pieces of pork belly down into tasty chunks. This is set aside. I don’t mind preparing my own vegetables, however I did have a pack of rainbow stir fried vegetables from M&S that I had bought, which had been reduced, and included carrots ribbons, red cabbage, spring onions, baby sweetcorn and pak choi. I added some red pepper and mushrooms to the mix. I started by heating up a little oil in the wok on a high heat. To this I added the vegetables and tossed them around. I then added some soy sauce, fish sauce and a little vinegar. Turning the vegetables once more I then added the cooked pork. The dish was done, once the pak choi was limp. In the past I would add some spinach leaves and basis leaves, alas I had none in the fridge. I have tried to grow Thai Basil in the garden, but have not had much joy there. It’s quite challenging to find it in my local stores.

Alongside the pork stir fry I also made sweet and sour pork balls. For this I first cooked chunks of pork belly in the oven. These were done in a covered roasting pan, they were covered with foil. What I was trying to so was actually slow cook them, but this was challenging as I was short on time, but also the oven was quite hot, as at the same time I was roasting the other chunks of pork belly for the stir fry dish. This was cooked for about twenty minutes, the pork should look cooked, but not caramelised as if it had been roasted. The result is soft tender pork. This was cooled. I meant to coat the pork in flour, but didn’t, so they went straight into a batter mix of self-raising flour (I actually used gluten-free flour), egg and milk. The key is less about the quantities but getting the consistency right. It should coat the back of a spoon, if the batter is too thin then the pork doesn’t get coated enough, too thick and you get thick stodgy battered balls of pork. The pork was deep fried in small batches in hot sunflower oil. I was really pleased with the results, the batter was crunchy and crisp, with the pork tender and full of flavour. The pork balls were served with a homemade sweet and sour sauce which included baby sweetcorn and red pepper.

With those two dishes (and as I did have hot oil on the go) I served some crispy rice noodles, deep frying dried rice noodles, along with regular cooked rice noodles.

Overall the meal went down well and everything was eaten.

Time for some dumplings

Time for some dumplings

I did think that I might miss the Temple Quay market this week because of the rain, however it stopped so off I went.

There were fewer stalls this week, and fewer regulars, but even so there was a great choice of food. I thought the rain might have put people off, but the queues were already really long. The queue for the Thai stall was already across the square!

I did start queuing at the Scoff and Relish stall as the salad and grilled chicken sounded great and looked fantastic too, being chargrilled on their tiny portable barbecues. I also liked the idea of the accompanying scoff balls, savoury scones. Alas they were struggling with the demand and the queue wasn’t moving and the food wasn’t quite ready. Maybe next time…

In the end I went with Ah Ma’s Dumplings. There was a slow moving queue here too. The stall has these huge towers of bamboo steamers laden with freshly steamed dumplings containing a choice of fillings. There was no tiger prawn, scallop and leek (probably sold out) today, so the choice was pork and ginger, beef and spinach, chicken and coriander or vegetarian.

ah-mas-dumplings

I went with the veggie shitake and cashew pan fried dumplings along with the pork belly with hoisin bao.

I was impressed and tempted with the dumpling pots complete with vegetables, noodles and broth, likewise the sides of Asian salads sounded very interesting. That day they had carrot & courgette ribbons with a tahini, honey, lemon dressing; the other choice was sweet chilli pickled cucumber with toasted black sesame seeds.

The dumplings were really impressive, beautiful steamed dough that because of the pan frying. Inside was a filling that was deep, tasty and even a little meaty, but they were vegetarian (well ‘ish they are pan fried in the same pan as the pork and chicken ones, so if you are vegetarian you might want to have them steamed instead).

The bao was delicious, the slow roasted pork belly was both sour and sweet, full of interesting deep flavours and very tender. The steamed dough made is substantive. I have seen neater and tidier bao buns before, but the flavour of the filling made up for this.

Ah Ma has a growing reputation, having been mentioned as one of the top sixteen street food stalls in the UK in both the Metro and Olive magazine. In my mind that is a well deserved reputation, delicious food, beautifully made and presented and lots of interesting choices of flavours and textures. I hope to visit them again.

Roast Pork Belly with Roasted Vegetables

Crispy crackling, tender pork and tasty roasted veg; yes it was a great lunch and delicious.

Crackling

The pork was slow roasted in the oven, this I have found is always the best way to cook pork belly, it also renders out a lot of the fat, so ensuring that the final outcome is tender pork with minimal extra fat. The flavour is intense and compared to something like pork fillet, which can be cooked quickly, it does not compare to the flavour of roasted pork belly.

About 30-40 minutes before the end of cooking time, I added some onions, carrots and parsnips to the roasting tray. Twenty minutes later I added apple and mushrooms. These cook wonderfully with the pork and have a really intense flavour.

Roasted Veg

I served the pork alongside the roasted veg, roasted King Edward potatoes (they worked well) and some carrots and steamed broccoli.

Is this self-catering?

Generally when we go on holiday we go self-catering, mainly as it gives us the option to eat when and where we want to. The problem with self-catering is that you don’t always get a decent kitchen and nearly always the equipment leaves a lot to be desired. I want to cook a nice meal, what usually happens is that I get so frustrated with the lack of space, lack of decent pans, blunt knives and rubbish cookers that I get all annoyed.

On a recent holiday after struggling to cook a simple pasta dish in the kitchen in our self-catering accommodation I was so fed up that when I was in the local Sainsburys I decided to purchase a processed meal and heat it up in the oven. To be honest I was quite surprised by how nice it was. Yes if you got all the ingredients yourself and cooked from fresh, yes it would be much nicer, but in the assumption that you have useless cooking facilities, this was certainly much easier.

We had the Roasted Pork Belly with slow cooked roast potatoes and red onions, served with a tangy apple and cider sauce.

If you are regular reader of this blog, then you will know I have a fondness for pork belly so as a result I know what it can be like and what it should be like. The dish is quite simple to “cook” place in a pre-heated oven for 35-40 minutes. No slicing, no dicing and no preparation.

So what was it like?

It was rather quite nice. The combination of pork belly and potatoes worked well, the pork was quite tender and tasty, though I could tell it had been cooked and then heated up. It could have done with some more onions, whilst the potatoes were a little too salty for my tastes. The cider sauce was really nice, this did need to be heated up separately, but easily done in the provided microwave. Both myself and my wife enjoyed eating it and she said it was the best meal we had on that holiday, though to be honest it didn’t have a lot of competition!

A little secret, we had it again a few weeks later when we were back home, and then I did have some decent cooking facilities…

Pork Belly

You don’t always have to use expensive cuts of meat to make a wonderful meal, sometimes the cheapest cuts cooked really slowly can have fantastic flavour and texture.

Turn on your oven to its highest temperature.

Place the pork belly in a roasting oven, season, and roast on the high temperature for about ten minutes, then turn the oven down to about 160℃ and cook for at least another hour depending on size and thickness. Cooking for longer results in a more tender piece of pork. However what I have been doing recently is cutting the belly into squares and coating in a spicy marinade before finshing off in the oven for another 15-20 minutes.

Spiced Pork Belly

Usually I like to cook pork belly for a long slow time in the oven.

I also use a faster technique with squares or cubes of pork belly. It was a variation of this technique that I used to cook a oriential inspired spiced pork belly.

The key factor for me was time, I would like have marinated the pork, but didn’t have the time. So I took the slab of pork belly and cut it into squares about two inches.

These I then placed in a hot oven and roasted for about twenty minutes.

Meanwhile I created a sauce for the pork, mine consisted of a splash of sunflower oil, balsamic vinegar, maple syrup (though you could use honey) black pepper, spices and I also added a Knorr stock pot.

I took the pork out of the oven and tossed it in the sauce before spooning the reminder over the pork.

The pork was then placed back in the oven for another 15-20 minutes.

Removing the pork from the oven, I cut each “square” into three slices and served with stir fried vegetables and noodles.

Roast Pork Belly

I really do like a nice piece of pork belly, especially when roasted in the oven.

I use to be only be able to buy pork belly in slices, but more recently it has become much easier to buy pork belly in one piece. This makes it much easier to roast whole in the oven, not that it isn’t nice to roast small cubes of pork belly.

I use kitchen towel to dry the pork belly before cooking. Then when cooking, to start in a very hot oven (to ensure you get nice crispy crackling) before turning down to a much lower temperature , say 160℃ for a couple of hours. This way you get a wonderfully crisp crackling, tender moist meat and great flavour.

Now in terms of flavour, I do much prefer using “proper” pork as opposed to the mass produced stuff you can buy.  The pork pictured was “outdoor reared” and tasted really good.

Roasted Pork Belly

The traditional way of cooking pork belly is to slow roast it in the oven for a couple of hours.

I placed the belly pork on the root vegetables and seasoned it. I then placed this in the really hot oven, turning the temperature right down to 160. I then left the pork to roast for about two hours. This may not seem long, but it wasn’t a huge piece of pork like a leg joint.

Sometimes though you don’t have the time…

Another method I use is to score the skin on the belly and then cut the pork belly into one inch cubes (3cm). Place the cubes of pork on a roasting tray, and cook for about 30-40 minutes in a hot oven. Ensure that the pork belly is really dry before putting it in the oven. I seasoned mine with black pepper. You don’t need to add salt, but it does help to remove some of the moisture.

The end result is tender pieces of tasty pork with a crispy crackling.

I served mine with salad and crusty bread.

Chicken with Lentils

This is my simple and quick way of cooking a wonderful French peasant style dish of chicken, pork, sausage and lentils.

Place some chicken thighs and drumsticks in a roasting pan, add some chunks of pork belly. You could use a jointed chicken if you wanted. Drizzle with olive oil and place in a hot oven and roast for about 25-30 minutes.

Cook some large pork sausages in the oven, as these take less time, put them in a little later.

In a large pan, soften some pancetta, diced onions and peppers. Once soft, add a knob of butter and some flour, stir well. Now add herbs, wine and stock. Cook for about ten minutes.

In a hot frying pan, cook some chopped mushrooms.

Prepare the dish.

Take the cooked liquid, add the roast chicken and pork. Slice the sauages and add them and the mushrooms to the pan. I used tinned Puy Lentils, but you could use cooked lentils or a tin of another kind. Mix well and heat through.

Serve with crusty bread.