Anyway, one more of the Waitrose cards I've picked up recently. This had a pretty picture of the dish on the front and was trying to plug some spice paste, which I decided against, purely because of the packaging - it looked like it was straight out of the 1960's. Instead I googled for alternatives and found this one which introduced an interesting concept to me, which I might explore more in the future. The ingredients below serve 4 - 5 people.
Ingredients
400 g pork fillet
1 carrot
¾ Chinese leaf cabbage
250 g shiitake mushrooms
4 salad onions
300 g fresh egg noodles
3 tbsp butter
4 tbsp plain flour
1 tbsp curry powder
1 tbsp garam masala
1 tsp cayenne pepper (optional for extra spice)
500 ml boiling water
1 tbsp grapeseed oil
1 tbsp soy sauce
Method
- Trim the pork fillet, cut into strips and set aside in a bowl.
- Peel, wash and thinly slice the carrot. Wash and shred the Chinese leaf cabbage. Brush the mushrooms and cut into strips. Place all of these in a separate bowl.
- Slice the salad onions, but keep separate
- In a frying pan, melt the butter on medium-low heat.
- When it starts bubbling, stir in the flour and keep stirring for about 20-30 minutes until the roux turns lights brown.
- Now add the curry powder, garam masala and cayenne pepper to the roux, while stirring and let cook for about half a minute, then remove from the heat.
- Pour the boiling water over the curry roux and stir to remove any lumps and form a sauce.
- In a wok pan, heat up the oil on high heat, and brown the pork strips for 5 - 8 minutes until nicely brown.
- Stir in the carrot, Chinese leaf cabbage mushrooms and stir-fry for 3 - 4 minutes.
- Add the noodles and the curry sauce and stir-fry for a further couple of minutes.
- Divide up between bowls, drizzle some soy sauce on each and sprinkle some salad onions, then it's ready to serve.
Preparations took a bit longer than expected and I should perhaps have prepared the meat and vegetables on the evening before, but I felt a bit lazy and didn't. The roux is definitely worth making in advance. In fact at the point when it comes off the heat, it can just be allowed to cool down and then frozen. The amounts given resulted in 112 g, which worked fine for this recipe. The stir-frying is fairly quick on the whole.
The roux was the bit that interested me most - I've not made a roux with just flour and butter. Normally I'll add milk and some seasoning into a béchamel sauce. But this is quite an interesting approach - to swap out some of the roux flour for spices.
On the whole, this was quite a nice dish, unfortunately I used unsalted butter for the roux and also reduced salt soy sauce, so the whole thing was a bit on the tasteless side. I came to realise that reduced salt soy sauce, although it sound good, actually means we use more of it at a time, so not really healthier. The bottle emptied fairly quickly and so I've decided to go back to the regular stuff. I've also started using reduced salt stock cubes and again notice I need to add extra salt. Once the soy sauce is in, things are good.
Oh and before I forget, I was actually talking to my Sister Bip, while I cooked and completely missed that I'd bought hot curry powder, which I used in the curry roux. Not just that - garam masala means hot spice mixture and of course I put in the cayenne pepper, so the whole thing had quite a kick to it, but I had yoghurt on standby, in case it was too hot to eat. But as it turned out, it wasn't.
Finally due to an administrative error, I also forgot to get spring onions and peeled a regular onion instead, but that wouldn't have worked to sprinkle over the noodles, so I skipped it entirely and used some of the spare Chinese leaf cabbage, because it's quite nice uncooked as well - sweet and crunchy. In fact we had it instead of lettuce in our salad tonight and Lundulph commented that this might well be the way forward.
