Stir-fried pork belly

Pork belly stir fry
Pork belly stir fry

Chinese crispy belly pork, or siew yoke, is fabulous stuff, but it only stays crispy for a day or so. The day-two-wangy-crackling is, of course, also a problem with belly pork you’ve cooked in a western style, and this stir fry works really well with any leftover roast belly. You don’t need to strip the crackling off, but sadly, it will not be resurrected by any cooking method; it still tastes good, but if you’ve plenty of leftovers you might choose to remove it as I did here. Save any fat that renders out of the pork as you roast it to push the flavour of the pork in the stir fry up a notch.

Don’t keep your pot of tom yum paste (my favourite brand is Mae Ploy, which comes in a 400g tub you can keep for months in the fridge) just for tom yum soup. It makes a fantastic quick marinade for seafood, and works really well as a sauce ingredient. In this dish, it provides the spice and piquancy to make a great base for a sweet/sour style sauce, rather nicer than the mouth-puckering sort you’ll get at the local takeout because the sourness in the paste comes from lime and tamarind rather than white vinegar.

Rich pork and sweet peas work really well together. I’ve cooked this pork with sugary mange touts and sweet sugarsnap peas. If you can only get one kind of pea, substitute the other with frozen petits pois.

To serve 2-3 people, you’ll need:

500g leftover roast pork belly
200g mange tout peas
200g sugar snap peas
3 cloves garlic
10 spring onions, chopped
1 or 2 red chillies, to taste
1 tablespoon soft brown sugar
2 tablespoons tom yum paste
100ml Chinese rice wine
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
Juice of a lime
1 tablespoon rendered fat from the pork or flavourless oil to fry

Chop the pork into bite-sized pieces, and set aside. Chop the garlic finely and slice the spring onions and chillies.

Bring the pork fat or oil up to a high temperature in your wok, and throw in the garlic, chillies and spring onion with the sugar. Stir fry for about ten seconds, then add the pork to the pan with the tom yum paste, rice wine and soy sauce. Continue to stir fry for two minutes, then add the peas, pop a lid on the wok and leave to steam in the sauce for a couple of minutes while you put some rice out, until the peas are bright green and barely cooked.

Remove the stir fry to a warm serving dish, and add lime juice to taste. Serve immediately.

Tom yum soup

Certain foods are perfect for times when you’re feeling a bit under the weather. Depressed? You need hot wings. Exhausted and frazzled? Mashed potato. Hormonal? Chocolate cake.

Right now, I’m sitting here with a streaming nose and stuffy head. It’s not swine flu, it’s hay fever. And there’s one sure-fire way to nip a stuffy head in the bud: tom yum. This hot, sour Thai soup is flavoured with some of the world’s most powerful aromatics, spiked with tongue-numbingly hot chillies and should be served hot enough to melt your spoon. Fantastic stuff.

You’ll need to make a trip to the Chinese supermarket for most of the ingredients here. To save yourself time when making soup later on, you can freeze any leftover kaffir lime leaves, chopped galangal and lemongrass in airtight containers.

To serve two, you’ll need:

1 litre homemade stock – pork or fish stock both work really well here
1 tablespoon tom yum soup paste (available at Chinese supermarkets and some Western ones too)
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 lemongrass stalks
5 kaffir lime leaves
2 inches galangal
2 small shallots
3 bird’s eye chillies
1 tomato
1 carrot
12 fresh shitake mushrooms
8 fresh prawns (with shells and heads if possible – as usual, none of my local shops had any with shells on, which elicited loud cursing from me)
1 handful beansprouts
1 handful coriander
Juice of two limes

Wallop the lemongrass stalks with the end of a rolling pin until they are ragged, slice the galangal into thin coins, and remove the central stalk from the lime leaves. Slice the shallots finely, chop the chillies, dice the tomato, chop the carrot into julienne strips and slice the mushrooms. And breathe. Once you’re done with the chopping, you’ll be pleased to hear that you’ve done most of the work.

Bring the stock to a simmer, and stir through the tom yum paste and fish sauce. Add the lemongrass, galangal, chillies and lime leaves, and simmer for five minutes. Drop the tomato, shallots, mushrooms and prawns into the bubbling stock and cook for another five minutes.

While the tom yum is cooking, squeeze the juice of one lime into each of two soup bowls. Divide the raw beansprouts between the two bowls. When the five minutes are up, ladle the soup, aromatics and all (some people like to remove the lime leaves, lemongrass and galangal from the dish, but they will continue to flavour the soup once it’s in the bowls) into the bowls. Garnish with generous amounts of coriander and serve immediately.