I absolutely love simple suppers like this – from chopping board to table in 15 minutes or less! The River Cafe Cookbookis full of delicious, quick recipes – this one is loosely adopted from their ‘spaghetti in a bag’ recipe. I love the mix of spaghetti, prawns, chilli and tomato from their recipe, but am not so keen on the eponymous ‘bag’ – a tinfoil parcel in which the dish is cooked and served. The thought of accidentally biting on some tinfoil somehow takes the joy out of eating it for me!
I also prefer fresh tomatoes to the tinned ones in the River Café’s recipe. Larger tomatoes, peeled and deseeded, in place of the chopped cherry tomatoes here would give a smoother sauce, but I quite like the little bits of tomato skin and anyway, life’s too short for peeling tomatoes!
Ingredients (serves 2)
180g spaghetti
3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 large clove garlic, peeled and very finely chopped
1 red chilli, deseeded and very finely chopped
220g cherry vine tomatoes, chopped
1 packet (150g) cooked king prawns
2 tbsp basil, roughly torn
Method
1. Place the garlic and chilli into a small saucepan.
2. Pour the olive oil over the garlic and chilli and set the saucepan over a medium heat. As soon as you hear them starting to sizzle (about 30 seconds), add the tomatoes to the pan and mix well. Season with salt and pepper, reduce the heat to low and stir intermittently until the tomatoes have broken down and the sauce is reduced to a nice consistency (about 10 minutes).
3. Cook pasta according to packet instructions.
4. When your sauce is nice and reduced, mix in the prawns and the torn basil leaves. Mix the sauce with the cooked pasta and serve immediately. Buon appetito!
I keep getting massive food envy from Instagram, especially when I see people’s pictures from a restaurant in London called Xi’an Impression. These thick, unctuous noodles – Biang Biang Noodles, my fellow Instagrammers’ helpful hash tags informed me – looked like nothing I’d seen before. It seemed unlikely that such deliciousness would be available in any of Bangor’s fine eateries, so I set out to making my own!
I found this video on YouTube and the guy made it look surprisingly easy! I started by making the dough – converting his recipe from imperial measurements (140g for a cup of flour; 225ml for a cup of liquid) and… it was an unmitigated disaster! I had to throw the first batch of dough in the bin, it was gloopy and disgusting. I got lazy with the second batch and, instead of using the mixing with chopsticks method preferred by the video, I pulled out my trusty Kenwood chef with a dough hook (adding the water in splashes until it had the springy, doughy, texture I was after) and it was perfect.
The very best thing about this recipe is the sizzle and the amazing smell of the garlic, chilli and onions as you pour the hot oil over them in the dish – it will be hard to go back to Pot Noodles after you’ve tried these!
Ingredients
280g strong white bread flour
1 tsp salt
180ml hand-hot water (have a little extra in your jug, in case you need to add another splash to the dough as it’s mixing)
30ml sesame oil
5 spring onions, finely sliced
3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
4 tsp crushed dried chilli flakes (this makes it quite spicy – use less if you prefer a milder dish, or more if you like it really hot)
2 baby pak choi, leaves picked
Handful of bean sprouts
60ml groundnut oil (sometimes called peanut oil in recipes)
1 tbsp Chinese black vinegar
1 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
1 tbsp bouillon powder
Method
1. Sieve the flour into a bowl and add the salt. Tip into an electric mixer with a dough hook.
2. With the mixer on its lowest setting, add the warm water to the flour in splashes, waiting until one splash has combined before adding the next one. You may not need all the water – when the mixture has formed into a springy dough ball, that’s enough. Leave the mixer to knead the dough for ten minutes. Place the dough in a bowl, cover, and set aside for 30 minutes.
3. Remove your dough from the bowl and place on a lightly-floured surface. Roll it out slightly so that it takes a loaf shape, then divide into four even-sized pieces. Roll each piece into a thick sausage shape, about 3 inches long. Dip each piece into sesame oil so that it is fully coated, place on a plate, then cover the plate with clingfilm and leave in the fridge for an hour. You can use this time to crack on with prepping the rest of your vegetables as everything comes together quite quickly when the noodles are ready.
4. Lightly flour your work surface and rolling pin, and roll each piece of dough into a thin rectangle. Lightly press a chopstick into the rectangle at two evenly-spaced junctures (so that your strip has got three even demarcated sections). Now the fun begins!
5. Take a side of one of your rectangles of dough in each hand and gently shake it up and down, smashing it against the board as you go (apparently the ‘biang’ noise it makes as it hits the board is where biang biang noodles get their name!). The best way I can describe this motion is that it’s a bit like playing the wobble board! The dough will stretch as you shake it, and will start to come apart in three long noodles where you indented the dough. Pull the three noodles apart and set aside when you repeat with your three other pieces of dough. When you are half-way through making your noodles, place a large and a medium sized saucepan of boiling water and keep them both on a rolling boil. Put your groundnut oil into a wok but don’t put the heat under it yet.
6. When your noodles are made, quickly pop them into the large pot of boiling water and cook for three minutes. Put the pak choi leaves and beansprouts into the medium pot of boiling water and blanch for a minute and a half; drain and set aside. Mix the soy sauces, vinegar, and bouillon powder in a bowl, then mix with your pak choi and beansprouts and keep warm over a gentle heat. Drain the noodles, and divide them between two warmed bowls.
7. Heat the groundnut oil in the wok until it starts to smoke. Divide the spring onions, then the garlic, then the chilli flakes between the two bowls of noodles. Try to keep the garlic and chilli towards the middle of the bowl.
8. Using a ladle, pour some of the hot oil over the chilli and garlic in each bowl. Listen to that sizzle!! Breathe in that delicious smell! Add a little more hot oil to each plate – you probably won’t use all that you’ve heated up. Add the pak choi and beansprouts in sauce to each plate and eat immediately!
I really need a new scarf; this one has made an appearance almost every day this week!
I had some leftover champ (Northern Ireland’s version of colcannon – mashed potato with spring onions instead of cabbage) from Sunday’s pork belly dish and some homemade coleslaw from the pork sandwiches I made the next day to use up, so on Tuesday I decided to try my hand at crab cakes! I’ve tried making fish cakes with freshly-made mashed potatoes before and they have just fallen apart in the pan. These crab cakes worked out really nicely though – I think the starch probably builds up in cold mash, meaning that they stick together a lot better.
The mix was very much a combination of things we had in the fridge; you could use different herbs, or leave out the chilli, garlic and/or ginger if you prefer.
Ingredients (serves 2)
For the crab cakes:
Leftover mashed potato (I had about half the champ from the pork belly recipe, so probably 250g equivalent in raw potatoes)
228 g white crab meat (I used Ocean Finest, currently on offer in Morrison’s!)
1 red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
Juice of 1/2 a lime
Zest of 1 lime
small bunch of parsley, finely chopped
2 spring onions, finely chopped (you could use 2 more if starting with plain mashed potato – mine had spring onions mixed through it already)
2-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and finely grated
2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely grated
2 eggs
150g breadcrumbs
For the Sriracha mayonnaise
2 tbsp mayonnaise
1 tbsp Sriracha
Juice of half a lime
Method
Couldn’t be any easier; simply put all of the crab cake ingredients in a bowl…
… and combine (you can see my sous chef, Gwen, in the background here if you look carefully!)
Shape the mix into patties (I used a mould for two of mine, which made two HUGE crab cakes, as you can see below! I would probably just do the old fashioned method of shaping them by hand in future)
Pop these in the fridge while you make your salad (I just tossed some watercress, rocket, cucumber and tomato with a tablespoon of balsamic).
To make the Sriracha mayonnaise, simply combine all of the ingredients in a small bowl and set aside.
Beat the two eggs in a small bowl; mix the breadcrumbs with some salt and pepper in another small bowl. Heat a tablespoon of oil in a deep frying pan.
Dip each crab cake in the beaten egg, then the breadcrumbs, then into the pan, moving them around so that all of the breadcrumbs turn golden and the crab cakes heat through. When they’re done, pop them on a piece of kitchen roll before plating them up with your salad and sriracha mayo.
Pop these in the fridge while you make your salad (I just tossed some watercress, rocket, cucumber and tomato with a tablespoon of balsamic).
Yvo Cooks 