meemalee

Seared Pork Patties on a Bed of Noodles, Herbs and Salad with Pickled Vegetables I've made another cookery video with the folks from VoucherCodes  (the first one was for ohn no khao swe - Burmese Coconut Chicken Noodles). This time around, the theme is Affordable Alfresco - perfect for the lovely summer we're having right now, so I decided to adapt one of the salad dishes from my book Noodle!. This dish originates from Hanoi - its full name is Bun Cha Ha Noi. Bun refers to the noodles* and Cha refers to the meat patties. Apparently Bun Cha is the second most popular dish in Vietnam after their national dish of pho. You can see why this might be the case as it delivers a lot of punch - sweet and smoky meat over piquant herbs and salad wrapped up with soft, cooling noodles. You'll also be interested to know that it's super-quick to make and the ingredients are all easy to find - you can use entirely British produce. What's more, out of all th...

Stop sniggering at the back Many, many years ago, while we were still at university, my husband and I were mildly obsessed with a messageboard on a community website called b3ta . One of the (rather puerile) delights thrown up by this board was the strangely hypnotic video below, with its shades of Torvill and Dean . Even now, I'm prone to lustily singing out its emphatic refrain - although always, always in the privacy of my own home. You see, if you aren't already aware of the colloquial meaning of the word "bukkake", it's probably best that you don't Google it, as it's really, really NSFW*. However, if you do Google the phrase " bukkake udon ", you'll find this wonderful dish from Japan which is perfect for cooling you down in this muggy, summer weather. Udon noodles are doused in tsuyu - a chilled mirin and dashi-based sauce - and then crunchy, salty, zingy toppings of your choice are tossed all over the top. Bukkake...