Sichuan Green Beans with Crispy Minced Pork
We ate this at the Jumbo Floating Restaurant in Hong Kong’s Aberdeen Harbour a few years ago. It was the wish of a lifetime for me to visit Hong Kong and I loved every minute of it. I dragged my poor jetlagged husband into all the food experiences I could find – eating in back street canteens, Michelin-starred cafes, and this iconic floating restaurant. We ordered some familiar dishes and then asked for a recommendation from the waiter, who came back with this – charred green beans with a scattering of spicy pork mince. It was wonderful; it’s a Hong Kong classic, available in many forms and as street food as well as in high end restaurants. It’s typical Chinese – well balanced between meat and vegetables, making a little meat go a long way, and adding flavour with sparkles of taste from carefully chosen spices. If you possibly can, for really good Chinese food at home, do invest in a few genuine Chinese ingredients. I’m lucky to have some excellent Chinese groceries in Manchester’s Chinatown not far away, but you can also buy specialist ingredients on the internet. For this dish, you do need Sichuan pepper – which looks like red peppercorns but is in fact quite a different spice and not related to pepper. It has a unique taste, almost like a floral explosion on your tongue and overused, it can make your mouth go numb! Keep the use of it sparing, until you know how much you like it, but don’t leave it out. The other less common ingredient that most classic recipes for this dish use is Pickled Mustard Greens – which is a bit like a Chinese version of kimchi. I did get some, but I really think you could substitute kimchi, or even fresh cabbage chopped up and cooked in salted water, as it’s the chopped vegetable texture and salty-fermented taste you mainly get from it. Many recipes leave it out. I learned a lot about this dish from searching the internet, and I think my version is closest to Maggie’s, from OmnivoresCookBook.com – thanks Maggie! I cooked it with egg fried rice and another Chinese dish with a little more sauce (beef with black bean sauce) and it was perfect for my family – we scraped the dishes clean. Serves 4 Timings – 30 minutes
In a bowl, marinate the pork mince with the Shaoxing wine, soy sauce, garlic and ginger – put them all in together, mix well and leave to the side as you cook the beans. In a large frying pan, cook the beans with a little oil over a medium heat until they are looking a bit charred and blistered – they will lose their firmness and volume. This takes about 15 minutes, keep moving them about. Take the beans out of the pan and keep them aside. Dry fry the Sichuan pepper for about 1 minute, to warm it up and release the fragrance. Crush it in a mortar if the pieces are big and put it back in the pan. At this time, if you are accompanying with egg fried rice, start to fry your rice. Add the pork mince to the pan and fry it, breaking up the pieces with your spatula. This takes about 10 minutes, the pork releases fat to fry itself and will end up quite browned and crispy. You will smell the ginger, garlic and Sichuan pepper in a delicious combination. Add the pickled vegetable, stir well and add the beans back in again. Stir again and mix. Taste; add a splash of soy sauce, a little sugar or a little water – this should not be totally dry although it is not a dish with a lot of sauce. Serve with your egg fried rice and let the Sichuan Pepper dance a tango on your tastebuds….
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Melanzane Parmigiana (aubergine bake) (vegetarian)
Cheesey, tomato-ey, melty, fragrant with herbs, layered with silky aubergine. Really, really, nice. This is served as a side dish in Italy, or as part of a starter. I like to eat it as a veggie main course lunch, with some good bread and a green salad. You can make it ahead and heat it up when needed, which makes it very flexible and easy on the cook – always a good sign. Flustered cooks do not a good meal make, I think. It’s also very transportable, you can make it up, cook it, and transport it covered and warm as your contribution to a family meal. Or take it, cooked and kept warm, over to a friend in need, whether she just needs a comforting cuddle and some good food, or leave it on her kitchen table to be dipped into at need when the baby at last goes down to sleep. Please adjust the herbs and spicing, if you are taking it over to a new nursing mother she might not appreciate the garlic! Serves 4 as a side dish or 2 as a main dish for lunch. Timings – 90 minutes, or less if you use a ready made tomato sauce.
Make the tomato sauce: fry the onion gently in some oil in a heavy pan until soft, about 5 minutes. Add the dried oregano and the crushed garlic, fry to release the aromas, then tip in the tin of tomatoes. Add about half a can of water, or red wine if you like the richer flavour. Add the Worcester sauce, marmite and season with salt and pepper. Let the sauce bubble away for 20 minutes while you prepare the aubergine. This is a basic tomato sauce which you can use for pasta bake, for putting onto spaghetti, for using as the base for pizza sauce etc. The possibilities are very nearly endless, and it’s so much cheaper (and better) than buying ready-made sauces. Wash, top and tail the aubergine and then slice into rounds about the thickness of a pound coin. Fry in a heavy frying pan in oil for about 5 minutes per side – you might have to do this in batches as you shouldn’t crowd one in on top of the other, they all need time to get at the oil. Add more oil as you fry, they do absorb quite a bit. As they turn golden and soft, take them out and drain on kitchen paper. Pre heat the oven to 200°C. In an oven proof dish, layer up the vegetables, cheese and sauce. Start with a layer of aubergine, then a couple of slices of fresh tomato, then a layer of tomato sauce, dot that with pieces of mozzarella and a sprinkling of cheddar and a few basil leaves. Then the next layer of aubergine and so on. You can be quite generous with the tomato sauce for a looser dish or less generous for a firmer dish, depends what you are after. I like a more sauced dish as a main, or a less sauced one for a side, but it’s up to you. Finish with a layer of aubergine and sprinkle the parmesan over the top. Bake in the oven for 40 minutes until light brown on top and bubbling. The herbs will have released their fragrance and the cheese will have melted into the tomato sauce. If you let it cool down a bit before serving, it will be firmer, and the flavours even more deliciously melded. |
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