I’m writing this on the plane as we travel home from our Spanish getaway, where we’ve been this past week.
CB and I can’t wait to get back into our kitchen and cook something that passes as a decent meal. The place we were staying had literally 4 restaurants to choose from – none of them good, each of them extorting every last pence out of our weakened £££. Whereas I was determined to take each meal in my stride – aided by many glasses of red wine and one particularly memorable cocktail hour – CB purged herself of ill feeling by drafting (and redrafting) angry TripAdvisor reviews on her phone.
She doesn’t know if she’ll post them as she’s already feeling better about the whole thing.
We also look forward to touching down in London where not everyone is a white British pensioner, and where rich tea biscuits are not actual currency. Seriously, it feels like we’re fleeing an ex-pat cult. CB handled the passport admin while I desperately mouthed our SOS to the flight attendant: TAKE US BACK TO LONDON WHERE PEOPLE DON’T THINK THAT A FROZEN BBQ PIZZA IS A LOCAL SPANISH DELICACY.
Anyway, onto this meal which is completely unconnected to Spain and finally puts paid to CB’s long-held view that anything in a tube prefixed with ‘easy’ is trash (in this case ‘easy’ lemongrass paste) . You should give this a try – it’s easy and tasty, no trash in sight.
Five Spice Pork and Egg Fried Rice
Ingredients
- Pork
- 400g pork fillet, chopped into 1cm bitesize pieces
- 1 garlic clove, finely chopped
- 2 mild red chillies, deseeded and finely diced
- 2 tsp ‘easy’ lemongrass paste
- 1 tsp Chinese five spice
- 2 tbsp soy sauce
- 1 onion
- 1 red pepper
- 2 tbsp sunflower oil
- thumb size piece of ginger
- 1 tbsp honey
- 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
- 1/3 small bunch coriander, leaves only
- 200g brown rice
- 1 tbsp vegetable oil
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 small onion or 2 scallions, sliced finely
- 2 tbsp soy sauce
Egg Fried Rice
Directions
- Tip the pork into a bowl, along with the garlic, almost all of the red chillies, the lemongrass paste, five spice, and 1 tbsp of the soy sauce. Mix well, cover and set aside for 20 mins to marinate.
- Use this time to prepare the rice. Cook the rice as normal – we use brown which should take 25 mins to cook. Beat the eggs and dice the onion – put these to one side for now. The rice will keep if it’s done before your pork.
- Also use this time to deseed and slice the pepper, dice the onion and chop the ginger (20 mins is enough time for all this veg prep surely!).
- Once the pork has had its marinating time, heat 1 tbsp oil in a wok and stirfry the pork for 4 mins until browned and cooked through. At the same time in a separate frying pan for the rice, heat 1 tbsp oil and saute the diced half onion for around 5 minutes.
- Push the meat to one side of the wok, add the remaining tbsp oil and cook the onion and red pepper for 2 minutes until they’ve just lost their crunch. Finally, add the remaining tbsp soy sauce, honey and balsamic vinegar and cook for a final minute before removing from the heat. Garnish with coriander leaves roughly torn.
- Finish up the egg fried rice by adding the rice to the frying pan and stirring until it’s totally heated through. Push the rice to the side, and crack the eggs into the cleared space. Scramble in the corner for 20 seconds or so then mix into the rice. Add 3-4 tablespoons of soy sauce to the rice and mix a little more until piping hot. Bon appetite!