Nom Noms with the Numbles!

Greetings, foodies, Fubsy here with some grub to satisfy those grumbling tummies….::Grabs wine from the 1st photo for a big glug…..::

Let me start by going waaaaaay back into my past. Sometime in the eighties, there emerged a model onto the fashion scene called Lorraine Pascale. She looked a bit like this: And yes, I fancied the hell out of her way back when, particularly because when I was younger, you didn’t tend to see that many black females with shaved hair on London’s streets. And I’ll be damned if she wasn’t a beaut. ::Sigh……::

Anyway, she kinda disappeared off the scene, and it feels (probably incorrectly, knowing my sieve-like memory) like it was almost as quickly as she had arrived on it. And that was it for some years…silence…I kept occasionally recalling her, especially as I have a very close friend who has a similar gap in her teeth, and who also shaved her hair for a while. But she essentially moved out of the spotlight, until just a couple of years ago, when she suddenly turned up as the host of a cookery show. It seems that, all this time, she’d been re-training herself in the culinary arts, and had become a proper cook and stuff. Being a food fan, I of course watched. Well, ogled, really, as she returned looking pretty much as delicious as when last she shared some centre-of-the-stage action. A beautiful woman presenting a cookery show; bliss….. Thankfully, Lady C also likes her, for the same reasons. Her food’s pretty good, too. Most of it is relatively easy to cook, well presented, and very, very tasty.

This one is no exception (in which we halved everything from a serving of 4 to one of 2). It’s easy to prepare, quick to make, and absolutely delicious.

Honey soy-glazed salmon with stir-fried bok choy.

Ingredients:
2 small-medium bok choy
A few scallions/ spring onions
1-2 cm (0.5-1in) peeled fresh ginger
2 salmon fillets
A couple of medium squeezes/ 3 tablespoons of honey
50ml (just under ¼ cup) light soy sauce
Pinch of chilli flakes or powder
1 lime
1 pack, or approximately 150g (5¼ oz or 2/3 cup) straight-to-wok noodles
[Lady C Edit: If you cannot find straight-to-wok noodles, cook your own, rice or egg and use the measurements above]
1½ teaspoons sesame seeds
Small handful of coriander leaves
Sesame oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
[Lady C Edit: Most of the recipes we use are going to be metric, so even though we give you the conversions, don’t ignore a recipe you come across just because it isn’t in imperial. Use something like http://onlineconversion.com to convert your measurements, or check out the Recipe Convert app by Red Binary if you’d like to avoid moving from computer to kitchen all the time.]

Directions:
1 Trim the bok choy to release the leaves, then rinse and pat them dry with kitchen paper [Fubsy edit: pretty essential that the leaves are dry so that they remain crunchy and crisp when all the cooking is done]. Trim and roughly chop the scallions/ spring onions (both the green and the white bits) and peel and grate the ginger.

2 Put the honey, soy sauce and chilli flakes or powder into a mug or small bowl and whisk everything together with a fork. Quarter the lime and set both aside.

3 Put a large frying pan and a wok or sauté pan on a medium heat with a small glug of sesame oil in each.
[Lady C Edit: Sesame oil can be pretty potent so feel free to use a small amount of that with-no more than a teaspoon in each pan – and round that out with a bit of peanut or vegetable oil, as we did to keep the sesame oil from overpowering the veg.]

4 Season the salmon fillets well with salt and pepper, and fry them skin side up in the frying pan for 5 minutes.

5 Meanwhile, stir-fry the bok choy, scallions and ginger in the wok or sauté pan for about 3 minutes until the leaves are wilted.

6 Next carefully flip the fish fillets over to cook on the other side for about 4 minutes

7 Add the noodles and sesame seeds to the vegetables and toss together well, then continue to cook for a few more minutes, keeping everything moving around regularly.

8 Turn the heat up on the salmon and pour half of the honey sauce over. Allow to simmer for a couple of minutes, spooning the sauce over the salmon as the mixture thickens and becomes syrupy.

9 Pour the remaining sauce over the noodles, tossing it through well, and then season with salt and pepper to taste.

10 The salmon is cooked when it is no longer translucent but an even pale pink through to the centre.

11 Divide the noodles between four serving plates. Sit a salmon fillet on top, drizzle some of the syrupy sauce from the pan over and serve with a wedge of lime and a scattering of coriander leaves.

Our Take:
The original recipe called for 100g (8oz or ½ cup) of bok choy. Pretty precise! And also, we thought, a little stingy, as this meant just the one bok choy. So we added another – the end result was a pretty perfect portion, we think. We also added just a little more ginger than called for, but that’s more of a preference thing than anything else, it does depend on how much you like ginger – we like it quite a bit, so a little extra gingery-ness was certainly not going to hurt us.

Also, all the cooking times are pretty essential – try not to take any longer with the times than listed. By keeping the cooking times so short, you ensure that all of the ingredients have their moment to shine on your tongue – with each forkful, a different combination will leap forward to be enjoyed, and yet – at the same time, the cooking time is long enough so that the melding of flavours just about begins too, which itself becomes the foundation flavour that all the others are built on when you taste them. [Lady C Edit: Doesn’t he talk pretty? Sooooo pretty…*drags him out of the room for a quick “reward”] We spotted this and decided to mix the honey, soy sauce and chilli flakes together before beginning to cook, instead of doing so during the cooking – as the original recipe suggests. Unless it’s a pretty slow cook, I like to get all such prep work out of the way – it makes for less stress when it comes to the actual cookery stuff.

We really enjoyed this dish. The fish will be soft, moist, and should fall apart when done, the noodles are of course very moreish, and then there’s the crunch of the bok choy. Deeeelish. I couldn’t find a link to the recipe online, but her book is definitely worth a look, and is available here: http://www.amazon.com/Lorraine-Pascales-Fast-Fresh-Easy/dp/0007489668/

Let us know what you think in the comments below – would you try this, would you adapt it, would you walk over hot coals to get to it, or would you pour hot coals over me instead – you kinky bestids…..?

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Bethlanai

Apparently it is Beth's Job to get on Slaus's nerves.

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