Wagamama Roasted Honey Pork Ramen

This weekend was the Japanese Grand Prix but I have to admit I didn't watch it - as I've said before, it's my fiancé who is the F1 fan anyway, though I've definitely gotten into it since living with him! I was busy today making the flowers to go on top of Ros's wedding cake (which has made me realise I won't have time to make my own wedding cake, a shame but it could be a lot of last minute stress!). I did make a Japanese meal for dinner though in the spirit of my blog challenge Formula 1 Foods.

I've had the Wagamama recipe book for several years but hardly ever used it; when I was thinking about making a Japanese meal I immediately took it from my bookshelf and was pleasantly surprised at the number of recipes in it I liked - I don't know why I never really used this book before!


 





















I chose a dish called roasted honey pork ramen - ramen are a type of Japanese noodle. It was really easy to make though I adapted the recipe slightly to use up some vegetable stock I had in the fridge (rather than the chicken stock the recipe called for) and I left out the bamboo shoots as I don't like them. The recipe also suggested that you cook a pork fillet and then slice it but I used two small pork chops (I was going to buy fillet but they were reduced in the supermarket and I thought I may as well get a bargain) which I sliced up first and then cooked. It worked really well and the pork had a similar taste and texture as when I've had char siu pork in Chinese restaurants.

So this is my version of the recipe:
To serve one, you need

1-2 pork chops, with the bone and any fat removed and the meat sliced
1 tbsp. bbq sauce
1 tsp runny honey
100ml vegetable stock
ramen noodles
2 spring onions, trimmed and sliced
broccoli to serve

Preheat oven to 200C. Place the pork slices in a roasting tin lined with foil, and toss with the BBQ sauce. Bake for 20 minutes; meanwhile start cooking the broccoli or any other veg you want with it. After the pork has been in the oven for 20 minutes, add the honey and return to the oven for five minutes. Heat the vegetable stock and cook the noodles - I used a packet of straight-to-wok noodles so they only needed a few minutes heating through. Add the spring onions to the vegetable stock and heat through.

To serve, spoon the noodles and spring onion into a bowl and add as much of the stock as you like if you want this to be more of a broth-based dish. Top with the pork and serve with broccoli or other green veg.

I'm sending this to Formula 1 Foods as the challenge this time is Japan.

Easy Slow Cooker Spicy Pulled Pork

Pulled pork in a bread roll is one of my boyfriend's favourites. I've made it before but there are many different recipes; last time I made a spice rub which I rubbed over the pork, and made a liquid broth that it sat in inside the slow cooker; at the end you can reduce the sauce in a saucepan to serve with the pork.

There is also this much quicker recipe which cooks the pork dry. It comes from The Slow Cooker recipe book and is a recipe for Spicy Pulled Pork.

To serve 4 generously, you need:
2 onions
approx. 1.5kg boned and rolled pork shoulder
2 tbsp. brown sugar
2 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp. mustard, American or Dijon or similar
2 tbsp. tomato ketchup
1 tbsp. cider vinegar or white wine vinegar
salt, pepper
bread rolls and lettuce to serve

 

The recipe says you should slice the onions but you will actually be resting your pork shoulder on top of them; without a liquid the pork would otherwise stick to the bottom of the slow cooker. So instead I recommend slicing the onions in half, and slicing off the root so they sit flat and then resting the pork on top.

Mix all the other ingredients in a bowl and spoon the sauce over the pork, getting it right inside the folds.

Put your slow cooker onto slow for 6 hours or your closest setting and that's it!

It was lovely coming home to the pork already cooked; all I had to do was carefully lift it from the pan and shred it, and fill the bread rolls. OK and cook some chips as well!



I'm sending this to the Slow Cooked Challenge, hosted by Janice at Farmersgirl kitchen, as her theme this month is spicy.

Barbecue chicken with potato wedges

This is a really simple way of making your own barbecue sauce, and a recommended recipe for chicken and potato wedges to go with it. It's not that fast as the wedges take about an hour in the oven but it's easy and tasty so has become one of my go-to meals for a lazy Sunday evening.

You need:

3 tbsp tomato ketchup

3 tbsp brown sugar

1.5 tbsp soy sauce

1.5 tbsp worcestershire sauce

Simply mix all the ingredients in a small bowl

 Use to coat either chicken legs or chicken breasts (or thighs, for that matter). Make small slits in the meat with a knife to allow the sauce to get inside.

To make potato wedges, simply slice up some potatoes, toss in a little oil and seasoning such as paprika and lay out across a foil-lined baking tray. Bake in the oven for an hour, turning occasionally. Bake the chicken at the same time; how long it takes will depend on what cut of chicken you have chosen.

Serve with any leftover barbecue sauce and some green salad.

Slow Cooker (Crockpot) BBQ Chicken

I got a slow cooker (crockpot) for my birthday back in April and I've been enjoying trying out different dishes. I really like the fact that I can put it on in the morning and come home from work to find my dinner cooked. I have a slow cooker recipe a book (two now, in fact) but have also been looking online for recipes. I can't find where I got this recipe from any more but it's very straightforward.

To serve two, you need: 

4 chicken thighs (they shrink when slow cooked)

1 cup ketchup

2 tbsp Dijon mustard

2 tbsp brown sugar

2 tbsp soy sauce

1 pint chicken stock

Put the ketchup, mustard, brown sugar and soy sauce in the slow cooker

Add the chicken stock and mix

Add the chicken breasts - you don't need to brown them first.

The heat and timer settings will depend on your slow cooker; I have a setting called "keep warm" which cooks on high for 3-4 hours then keeps the food warm until you turn it off, so it's ideal for making when I am at work. I came home to beautifully tender chicken and a tasty sauce.

The chicken definitely shrinks when you cook it for this long and slow cookers are probably better for larger joints of meat but I still think this turned out well.

Serve with vegetables and mashed potato. If you want or have time, you can reduce the sauce in a saucepan and add a little cornflour to thicken it, and serve over the chicken.

I'm sending this to the slow cooker challenge, hosted by Janice at Farmersgirl Kitchen, as her theme this month is barbecue.

Burger Making Lesson at L'Atelier Des Chefs

For my boyfriend's birthday I booked us both into a burger-making lesson at the Atelier des Chefs near St Paul's in London. He loves burgers and I'd much rather he ate homemade ones than supermarket versions, and - I hope he won't mind me saying this - he doesn't know how to cook, so it would be helpful if there was something he could make if push came to shove! Also, I thought this would be a fun activity for us to do together.

I've been to the Atelier des Chefs before (their Oxford Circus branch) a few years ago on a corporate cookery evening, which I really enjoyed - the idea is that you learn to cook a meal then sit down and eat it afterwards. They offer all sorts of lessons of different lengths and at different prices, ranging from a £15 "cook, eat and run" where you can make a burger and eat it on your lunch break, to a French cooking masterclass for £144.

We got really lucky, as I had booked the class for what was probably the first sunny Friday of the year, so the other people who had reserved a place (you don't pay in advance) didn't turn up - they were probably having a drink in the pub like the rest of the Square Mile seemed to be doing! So whereas the week before, we were told there had been 15 people in the class, on this occasion there was... just us! I've no idea how much we would have had to pay for a private cookery class but the £36 each for the burger making lesson (which also included making potato wedges and onion rings with a glass of wine thrown in) was definitely excellent value!

Some of our ingredients

After washing our hands we met our chef, who explained what we would be doing and that we would receive the recipes afterwards by email (which never happened but I found them on the website). Then we got right down to it, being shown the right way to chop an onion, then crushing garlic and herbs and cutting up the potatoes into wedges. We seasoned the potatoes with a cajun spice mix and salt, and drizzled them with oil, and they went straight in the oven.

To make the burger we had to remove the fat from a huge steak, which was very hard - when it came to trying to remove a very thin film of fat running along the side of the meat with a very sharp knife, I managed to cut myself, and had to leave the rest of the work to my boyfriend and the chef while I bled into the sink!

As well as the steak we cut up chunks of pork fat which was going to be minced together.

I was quite pleased to see the mincer we were using was a KitchenAid attachment; I want one for my KitchenAid now! I didn't really see it in use as I was busy turning over the potato wedges, which were looking very tasty at this stage, but I caught a glimpse of my boyfriend merrily mincing steak for our burgers and took a couple of quick snaps.

We also made a barbecue sauce, which was amazingly simple. Fry onion and garlic then add all the other ingredients to the pan and simmer: bay leaf, brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, tomato sauce, cayenne pepper, cider vinegar, water, salt, dijon mustard and sunflower oil. You barely need to do anything and it tastes delicious.

The minced beef and pork fat was mixed in a bowl with herbs and large flakes of sea salt. We got our hands in and mixed it then shaped it into a giant ball.

Then we shaped it into five patties, to feed ourselves and the kitchen staff.

Next we moved onto the onion rings. We'd already sliced some onions into thick rings, then oil was heated in a deep fat fryer. We mixed a beer batter, dipped the onion rings, and carefully slid them into the fryer; they took less than a minute to cook then were lifted out and allowed to drain.

Here are the cooked onion rings

The burgers only took a few minutes to fry on each side. My mouth was really starting to water now!

Finally the potato wedges came out of the oven and we were ready to serve. The buns had been lightly toasted in the oven in the last few minutes while the potato wedges were cooking, which is something I haven't done at home before but it was really nice. We filled our buns with a burger, rocket, onion and tomato for those who wanted it.

And here it is, in all it's glory - a completely homemade burger, spicy potato wedges, beer-battered onion rings and barbecue sauce. I think my boyfriend, who has never even chopped an onion before, could barely believe he had made all this!

Here I am enjoying the fruits of my labours.... the food was delicious, probably one of the best burgers I've ever eaten, and I made it myself! The potato wedges were much better than the ones I make at home, so I will have to bookmark the recipe, and the barbecue sauce was tangy and worked perfectly with the rest of the meal. The onion rings were also probably the best I've ever had. The class was really good fun - the chef was highly skilled but also a good people-person and we had a great time learning from him and asking questions and chatting as we went. I highly recommend the Atelier des Chefs and I'd really like to try out some more of their classes!