foodporn – Page 2 – neato.co.nz

– Marinate thinly sliced beef in a mixture of about 1 tablespoon of honey, 1 tablespoon of soy sauce, a teaspoon of crushed garlic; a generous pinch of salt, and pepper for as long as you can bear.

– Slice up 3 spring onions quite small

– Chop the chunky stems off a bunch of pak choy; and cut the bigger leaves in half.

– (Here’s where most of the waiting for as long as you can bear takes place…)

– Heat up a wok with a bit of oil; then add the beef (leaving as much of the marinade behind as possible. The idea here is to brown the meat, not stew it.)

– When the beef has mostly browned; add the spring onions.

– Once the spring onions have wilted; toss in a package of noodles. I used hokkien this time; other times, I use singapore noodles.

– Once the noodles have had a minute or so to cook; add the pak choy, and the remaining marinade; and keep eveything moving until the pak choy has wilted, but is still a little crispy.

– Bowl. Eat.

Asparagus Risotto

This is just a fairly standard sort of risotto. I trimmed the asparagus tips off for garnishing, and chopped the stems thinly. I finely chopped the zest of a lemon, and set aside the lemon juice for deglazing. As an underlying flavour base, I used 4-5 shallots diced finely.

I blanched the asparagus stems in water, and once they were finished; cooled the water down with a block of frozen chicken stock from the freezer.

In the main pan, I heated some garlic infused olive oil; and added the lemon zest. Once that was fragrant, I added the shallots. When the shallots softened, I added four small handfulls of risotto rice to the pan; which I gently fried until it started to get a little colour. At this stage, I deglazed the pan with the lemon juice. Once the lemon juice evaporated, I started to incorporate the chicken stock. When the risotto was about half complete; I added the asparagus stems to the pan, and moved the asparagus tips into the stock to warm through.

Once the risotto finished; I put it into a couple of bowls, and topped it with freshly grated parmesan and the asparagus tips.

Next time around, I’m going to pass on blanching the asparagus – the idea behind that was to get some asparagus flavour into the chicken stock. It didn’t make that much difference flavourwise, and it was a bit brutal texture-wise.