Yam Neua (Thai beef salad) with sticky toasted rice

It might look complicated, but this tasty beef salad makes a delicious meal and is deceptively easy to make. One of my favourite recipes of all time, but beware - it's spicy!! I can safely say that this will not appeal to you if you like your salads dressed with salad cream.
Ingredients

• Thin frying steak (sliced into thin slices). This can be substituted for prawns if desired.
• One or two red chilli peppers, minced
• Fresh ginger to taste, minced
• Two large cloves garlic, sliced crosswise very thin
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• Fish sauce
• Juice of a lime
• 1/2 a small cucumber (seeds removed), peeled and sliced
• One large tomato, cut into wedges
• A handful of button mushrooms
• 3 shallots, or 1 small onion, sliced very thin
• A nice bunch of coriander
• 1 pack Thai fragrant rice

Preheat a grill.

For each person to be served, take one cup of rice. Rinse well - this is really important! Now, add to a saucepan one and a half cups of water per person. Bring to the boil, add the rinsed rice, bring back to the boil, then down to a simmer and cover. Check the rice periodically while preparing the rest of the recipe to make sure it's not sticking to the base of the pan. When all the water has gone, remove from the heat but leave covered.

While the rice cooks, mix together the garlic, ginger, fish sauce, chilli, lime juice and sugar in a bowl. That's your salad dressing. Told you it was simple!

Add the shallots, tomato and cucumber, stir well and cover.

Fry the beef/prawns in a pan. Allow to cool and add to the salad. Stir well again.

By now, you should have a pan of cooked rice with a really sticky consistency and all the water should have been soaked up by the rice. Take a rolling pin and pound the rice for a 30 seconds - this will break up the starches in the rice in readiness for the next step, which is to spread the rice over a baking sheet. Place it under the preheated grill until it starts to crisp. Break into lumps and serve with the salad.

Hoi-Kiew-Wan (Mussels in green curry)

Not as hot and spicy as it sounds, but delicious all the same! The mussels can be substituted for pretty much anything - prawns, chicken, beancurd, vegetables. Serves 4 as a starter without the rice or 2 as a main course.

Preparation: 20 minutes.
You will need:

• 1kg rope-grown mussels
• Kaffir lime leaves
• 1 lime
• Lemon grass
• 1 bunch spring onion
• 1 red chilli, de-seeded
• 1 cup button mushrooms, sliced
• 3 tsp Thai green curry paste
• 1/2 block creamed coconut
• Long grain rice

Rinse 3 cups of rice in cold water, and set it to boil with the juice of half the lime, along with the lemon grass and kaffir leaves. These flavours will infuse and make the rice fragrant. Stir occasionally for the next fifteen minutes, to stop the rice from sticking to the pan.

Meanwhile, clean the mussels, pulling off any beards and discarding any shells which may already be open. Set aside and reconstitute the coconut milk in a little hot water. (Tip: three minutes in the microwave should soften up the block of coconut milk.)

Finely chop the spring onion and chilli, and fry it in a little vegetable oil until the onion softens. Add the curry paste and cook a little longer, before removing from the heat. Add the sliced mushrooms, the remainder of the lime juice and the coconut milk, and stir gently. Taste it - it should smell and taste delicious! Remove from heat until rice has been cooking for ten minutes.

Now add the mussels to the sauce. Stir frequently for the next five minutes. The mussels will open and steam gently in the sauce. Place in a large bowl, discarding any shells which haven't opened. Pour some boiling water over the rice before serving, remove the lemon grass and kaffir leaves, and serve with the mussels.

Citrus tuna steaks with pepper rice

Abandon all thoughts of tinned tuna - give it to your cat and grab some of this! 

Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking: 15 minutes

• Fresh - not frozen - tuna steaks
• Garlic, parsley, lemon, lime
• Long-grain rice
• Red peppers
• Spring onions
• 1 fresh red chilli, bunch of coriander (optional)

For each person to be served, take one fresh tuna steak and marinade it in a little sea salt, freshly-milled pepper, a little lemon zest, some garlic and parsley.

Meanwhile, boil up enough long-grain rice to serve everyone. About 10 minutes into cooking the rice, start frying the tuna over a low heat in a mixture of butter and olive oil. Don't worry about the health risks of using butter! You're never going to live forever anyway, and - fact! - butter tastes much better than margarine!

While the rice is cooking, dice some spring onion and red pepper. Prepare roughly 1 part fresh veg to every 5 parts of rice. Don't worry about being too specific with measurements, but don't overdo the veg. You can optionally add a little chopped fresh ginger at this point, for added excitement. Those who like to live dangerously can add chopped deseeded red chillies at their peril!

Arrange the rice on a plate and serve with the tuna steak on top. Garnish with a twist of lime and coriander.

Spaghetti con frutti di mare

This spaghetti recipe demonstrates the old maxim that simple is best. No complicated spices or hard-to-obtain ingredients - it's all available quite cheaply from any supermarket.
Cooking time: 10 mins - serves 2

You will need:

• Dried spaghetti
• 2 large tomatoes, diced
• Tomato puree
• 3 cloves garlic
• Fresh parsley
• One red chilli
• Whatever seafood you can find - mussels, prawns and squid are good, as is fresh crab meat
• Olive oil
  

Take a large saucepan of lightly-salted boiling water and add some dried spaghetti. This will take around 10 minutes to cook on a medium-to-high heat. If the pan is too hot, the spaghetti will stick to it.

Heat some oil in a frying pan, and add the diced tomatoes. When they stop sizzling, add the tomato puree, a splash of water and reduce the heat to a simmer. Chop and add the garlic and chilli, and chop the parsley (but don't add it just yet!)

Now you just need to concentrate on getting the spaghetti right. When it's al dente, take it off the heat and add the seafood, which should be cooked inside a couple of minutes. Drain the spaghetti, add it to the pan and stir in the parsley. Serve immediately with extremely fresh bread.

Conchigle con salsa della noche (V)

A delicious and cheap meal, with a delightful range of textures and tastes.
Preparation: 20 minutes - it's not as complicated as it sounds!

• Olive oil
• Conchigle (pasta shells)

For the sauce:

• Butter
• Plain flour
• Skimmed milk
• 150g Gruyere or Gorgonzola cheese (depending on your tastes)
• Walnuts - the fresher the better - halved
• A handful of button mushrooms
• Fresh garlic
  

In a saucepan, bring some lightly salted water to the boil. While the water is boiling, grate 150g of the cheese and set it aside. You might want to substitute the Gruyere for Gorgonzola, but don't use Cheddar - save that for a tasty Ploughman's lunch with pickled onions, fresh bread and a pint of foaming nut-brown ale!

By the time the cheese has all been grated, the water will have boiled, so add to the pan a drizzle of olive oil (this will stop the pasta sticking together) and drop in four handfuls of conchigle. Any pasta will do, but conchigle (pasta shells) seem to hold the sauce quite well. The pasta will probably take about ten minutes to cook, during which time you will need to make the walnut sauce.

Now in another saucepan, you will need to melt three tablespoons of butter. Melt it slowly - you don't want it burning - and then add three tablespoons of flour. Stir quickly, until there are no lumps, then add half a glass of skimmed milk. Keep stirring, because the mixture will go lumpy again quite quickly.

After a few moments the mixture will thicken again, so add another half glass of milk and repeat the procedure until you have a smooth white sauce - not too thick and not too runny. You'll probably end up using about two or three glasses of milk.

Now add a little freshly milled pepper, then add the cheese and return the mixture to the heat, stirring all the while to maintain a smooth consistency. Stir in a handful of halved walnuts and set aside.

Now take a piece of pasta from the pan, and taste it to make sure it's not undercooked. If it's "al dente" ("to the bite") then remove it from the heat and allow it to finish cooking in the hot water.

Nearly there... in a frying pan take some more olive oil and some sliced button mushrooms. Cook gently for a minute or two, adding a little chopped fresh garlic near the end.

Add the mushrooms to the cheese and walnut sauce, and stir before draining the pasta and pouring the sauce over it. For a contrasting texture, serve with wild rocket and proper Italian breadsticks (the ones that don't have the name of the supermarket on the box.) French lager seems to go well with this meal, bizarrely.

Site relaunch

I'm testing a tasty bit of code at the moment, a really simple ASP content management system which I would like to use to relaunch Hamletweb to make it a bit more user-friendly, not least for me! This is a test blog, really - more news as it comes in...

Talking of tasty things, I'm going to start using this blog to reprint a few of my favourite recipes starting in a few minutes! Feel free to comment, etc.