Three words, my friends: green papaya salad.

For the green papaya salad at Esarn Kheaw on Uxbridge Road in London is one of the most earth-shatteringly beautiful things on God’s Great Big World of Earth. Really, it’s astonishing. Go there; try it. It’s a revelatory experience. It’ll make you swear out loud. Through a mouthful partially-cogitated unripe papaya you will noisily burble the words ‘fuck’ and ‘me’. People might not know that’s what you’re saying. You might not know that’s what you’re saying, but I will, because I predicted it here on this blog merely seconds ago. As you may remember.

I must warn you of something, though. You WILL become addicted to the green papaya salad at Esarn Kheaw. You WILL go back again and again and probably even again. And you WILL sometimes end up offended or frustrated by the service. You might even be overcharged.

But there is hope for you as there has been hope for me. For I have the secret to eternal happiness. Yes, I do.

I tried making green papaya the other day after watching this vid and it worked a ruddy treat. A right royal ruddy treat. Honestly, it was bang on. And as easy as expelling urine from one’s genitals. Unless one is elderly. In which case it was very very slightly more difficult.

But does this mean I never have to darken the door of Esarn Kheaw again? Well… no. You see, there’s another problem. It’s called tom kha gai. It’s a rich, coconutty chicken soup with chillies, lime juice and galangal. Now, this one I’ve made at home before, and to very good effect. But whereas my papaya salad comes exceptionally close to the Esarn Kheaw original, alas, my tom kha gai, good as it is, doesn’t. Theirs, I’m afraid to say, is fucking amazing.

And then there’s their sausages. They don’t look much when they arrive. In fact they look like the dinner of an idiot; like a few barely cooked chipolatas with a small packet of KP thrown over them and a raw chilli resting on top. But like so many things in Thai cooking, the secret is in the balance of flavours. Hot salty sausage, crunchy peanuts, blisteringly-hot raw chilli and a few slices of sweet pickled ginger. This is not the dinner of an idiot – this is the creation of a genius.

There are other goodies: khanom jeep – Chinese style dumplings of pork and prawns with deep fried garlic and thick, sweet soy sauce provide a welcome respite from the chilli onslaught, and their tom yum soups are as tom yum soups should be – face-scrunchingly sour, salty and hot.

In fact all of the soups I’ve eaten there have been brilliant, as have all of the salads. The stir fries probably won’t change your life and although the curries are OK, they’re nothing compared to what you can make at home if you’ve got the patience to make your own pastes.

So, for now, despite everything that’s happened between us, Esarn Kheaw still has her spicy nails in me. And unless I can learn to equal her sausages and tom kha gai, it looks like it’s going to stay that way.

Thai green papaya salad

Serves 1

If you’re not too familiar with far eastern salads, I’d recommend eating this in your local Thai restaurant a few times before making it at home. It’s quite an unusual dish by western standards and you need to get a good feel for the balance of sweet, sour, salty and hot.

Thai people use a really big pestle and mortar to make green papaya salad, but if you don’t have one, you could probably get away with a large, sturdy bowl and a rolling pin. If you do it this way, make sure you chop the peanuts quite finely before you start. You can get green (unripe) papaya from Thai grocers.

It’s best to make one serving at a time. A medium-sized green papaya is enough for two servings.

Ingredients (per serving)

A large handful of shredded green papaya
A small handful of dried shrimps, chopped
1 small Thai red chilli, chopped
About 4 green beans, chopped into 2cm lengths
Half a clove of garlic, peeled and chopped
1 large handful of cherry tomatoes, halved
2 small handfuls of roasted peanuts (it’s fine if they’re salted)
1 tablespoon of palm sugar
1 tablespoon of fish sauce
1 tablespoon of lime juice

Method

First you’ll need to peel the papaya, then shred it. The easiest way to do this with a julienne tool. It looks like a peeler but it cuts things into very thin strips. If you’d rather do it with a knife there’s an explanation of the technique at the beginning of this vid. Once shredded, set the papaya aside.

Add to the mortar the green beans, red chilli and garlic and pound for about 10 seconds. Throw in the peanuts and dried shrimp and pound for another 10 seconds. Add the palm sugar and tomatoes and pound again, lightly.

Now introduce the lime juice, fish sauce and a large handful of shredded papaya. Give one last quick bruise and mix.

Lastly, taste the dressing – it should be salty, sour, hot, and a little bit sweet. If the balance isn’t quite right, adjust with your seasonings.

Green papaya salad is wonderful on its own, with some sticky rice, or with a few raw vegetables on the side (cucumber, green beans and wedges of white cabbage are particularly good). What am I saying? It’s not ‘wonderful’ – it’s fucking astonishing! Make it immediately or I’ll kill you in the face!

Pig’s cheek is, quite simply, one of the finest hunks of meat you’ll ever taste. Yes ‘hunks’. If anything deserves the appellation ‘hunk’, ladies and gentlemen, pig’s cheek is it.

It’s an over-sized meat oyster. It’s a dense, unprocessed nugget of porky joy. It’s a pocket-friendly porcine flesh wonder. It’s a savoury meat handful. Pork marketers can buy these descriptions off me for a reasonable fee. That fee is six pig’s cheeks, half a chorizo picante and a bottle of good cider.

Pig’s cheeks with cider and chorizo

Ingredients

6 pig’s cheeks
115g of chorizo picante (cured, spicy chorizo)
A 500ml bottle of decent cider (I used Weston’s Organic)
About 2 glasses of water
A handful of finely chopped parsley

Method

Slice the chorizo into 5mm coins and add them to a medium-hot frying pan with no oil. Once they’ve browned up, remove them with a slotted spoon, leaving the red oil from the sausage in the pan.

Lightly season your pig’s cheeks on both sides and place in your hot, chorizo oiled pan. Leave for a few minutes, then when they’re nicely coloured, flip them and do the same to the other side.

Now add your pig’s cheeks, your chorizo and your bright red chorizo oil to a large saucepan along with the cider and a two of glasses of water.

Cover the pan and lower the heat to a simmer. Every now and then take the lid off and give everything a stir – if ever things start looking a bit dry, add more water.

After about two and a half hours, check the pig’s cheek with a fork. If it’s super-tender, you’re nearly done. Now, with the lid off, keep things simmering until the sauce has reduced to just a few tablespoons.

Last of all, add your parsley and serve along side a mound of root vegetables, roughly mashed with lots of butter.

OK, sometimes I’ll be in the mood to create, and on those occasions I’ll happily shut myself away for a few hours to labour over something difficult involving galangal. Other times I really can’t be bothered, I just want delicious food, now. Is that too much to ask?

Well, no actually. Where I live, in Shepherd’s Bush, there’s a cornucopia (I’ve never written that word before; good name for a futuristic chiropodists) of amazing places to eat. Wonderful Thai (Esarn Kheaw), Damascene (Abu Zaad), pub food (The Princess Victoria), Polish (Patio), West Indian (Ochi), even amazing Eritrean (The Red Sea). And you wonder why I haven’t posted any recipes recently?

I have to say, though, magical as these places are, and strange as it might sound, I’ve actually started to miss my own cooking. So yesterday I promised myself I’d go home and make something from scratch.

Well that thought lasted about an hour. By the time I left work I just wasn’t in the mood for chopping, so I said to myself, “Sod it, I’ll try that Chinese on Uxbridge road”.

Is this all getting a bit too autobiographical? Should I really be giving you all this detail? You would tell me, wouldn’t you? It’s just I don’t want to turn into one of those bloggers who blithers on: “Oh, then I did this, and then I went to the shop and then I came home and you never guess what…” Yeah you’re right I’ll never guess what because I’ve just hanged myself.

Oh, fuck it, I’ll finish the story anyway. Basically, I accidentally walked straight past the Chinese (I was kind of joking before but this really is dull now) and I couldn’t be bothered to go back and find it, so I just picked up a chilli, a lemon and a bunch of parsley (like some kind of lone maverick) from the grocer near my house (am I really still typing?) and decided I’d just make something up when I got home (I think we’re in ‘renegade’ territory now) probably involving pasta (yes pasta, motherfucker!)

By the way, Oliver Stone, don’t even think about it, OK? I own the copyright to this shit, so forget you ever read it. If I get wind of some kind of Hollywood smash involving pasta and/or parsley and lemon I will come down on you like a tonne of bricks, whether you are involved or not, Oliver Stone. And I’m talking metric tonne which is heavier than an imperial ton so don’t start thinking, “A ton? that’s not too bad” either. Because it is; it’s very bad indeed.

Enough! The point I am trying to make is this: If you can’t be bothered to cook, cook the recipe below, because it’s an absolute piece of piss and it tastes really nice.

Maybe I’ll just write that next time.

Linguine with chilli, garlic, parsley and lemon

With a dish this simple, the quality of the pasta is very important. Don’t buy cheap, supermarket own-brand stuff for this. In fact, don’t buy cheap, supermarket own brand pasta, ever. Why? Firstly it tends to be really smooth-textured, so sauces don’t really stick to it. Second, the packet instructions are normally wrong, and leave you with something hopelessly overcooked. Lastly, good pasta is still a really cheap dinner. I normally buy De Cecco, in the blue and yellow packaging , it’s about £1.50 and it does about five portions. Good food doesn’t really get cheaper than that.

Ingredients

200 grams of linguine
Extra virgin olive oil
Sea salt
Half a lemon
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 large red chilli, de-seeded and finely chopped
2 handfuls of freshly grated Parmesan
2 handfuls of parsley, coarsely chopped

Method

Get the biggest saucepan you’ve got, fill it with water, and put it on to boil. Add a big pinch of sea salt, then, once it’s bubbling furiously, drop in your pasta.

When there’s six minutes to go, pour about two tablespoons of extra virgin into a small saucepan and put it on a medium heat. Now add your chopped garlic and chilli, along with another big pinch of sea salt. Stir and fry until the garlic is nice and brown, then take off the heat.

When the pasta’s done, drain it and return it to the big pan. Now add your fried garlic and chilli, and put the pan on a low heat. Chuck in your parsley together with a good squeeze of lemon, and mix. The lemon juice should combine with the oil to make a kind of dressing. If it looks a bit dry, add a little more olive oil.

Add a handful of your Parmesan and give one last mix.

Serve with the leftover Parmesan sprinkled on top. Like I say, piece of piss.

You could serve it with some roast potatoes and a bit of gravy. And I’d admire you for it. Or you could do what I did. Which is this.

Thai-style pork hock salad with crackling and prawns

For the salad

1 pork hock.
12 tiger prawns, cooked.
A handful of cherry tomatoes, halved.
2 sticks of lemongrass, finely sliced.
3 lime leaves, finely sliced. (Cut away the stalks first.)
2/3 of a long cucumber, seeds chucked and flesh sliced.
Half a banana shallot, finely sliced.
A handful of radishes sliced lengthwise.
A small carrot, cut into thin strips.
A big handful of mint leaves, picked.
A big handful of coriander leaves, picked.

For the dressing

Half a large clove of garlic.
2 thin, long red Thai chillies, de-seeded if you want to be safe.
3 to 4 teaspoons of palm sugar.
2 juicy limes. More if they disappoint.
Some fish sauce.

To finish

2 teaspoons of ground, roasted rice (Optional but nice. And easy enough to make.)

Method

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius (gas mark six) and put a large saucepan of water on the hob to boil. Take the hock, score the skin in regular intervals and plunge it into the boiling water. Make sure all the fat is submerged. Simmer it for two minutes and take out.

Season it all over with salt and pepper, put it on a baking tray and shove it in the oven to roast. After two hours, pump the heat up to 220 (gas mark seven) for half an hour, or until the crackling looks crunchy.

Now make the dressing. Take a pestle and mortar and add a small pinch of salt along with the garlic and chillies. Pound them into a rough paste. Now add the juice of two limes, around the same volume again of fish sauce and three teaspoons of the palm sugar. Dissolve the sugar into the dressing by crushing and mixing with the pestle. Taste it. It should taste equally hot, salty, and sour with a bit of sweetness rounding it off. Some limes are juicier than others, and batches of fish sauce vary in saltiness, so feel free to adjust the proportions.

Next: prepare the rest of the raw salad ingredients and add them to a large bowl.

By now, your glorious pork hock should have cooled a bit. Remove the crackling and break into bite-sized bits. Pull the meat off the bone and slice it up quite thinly. You don’t have to put all the meat in the salad. I put a third of it aside, shredded it, and made a version of this.

Add the prawns, pork and crackling to the bowl, along with the dressing and the ground roasted rice, if you’re using it. Mix it well with your hands and eat it straight away with a fork.

By the way, I should credit Mark Hix, here. This recipe was inspired by a brilliant Vietnamese-style creation of his, what I made once.

Fried halloumi salad with chilli and crispy garlic

Get yourself:

4 baby aubergines (the ones that are about as long as your finger).
1 large courgette.
Half a red onion.
3/4 tin of mixed beans (mine were chickpeas and fava beans).
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped.
Half a large red chilli, de-seeded and equally finely chopped.
5 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil.
A handful of coriander leaf and stalk, chopped coarsely.

Warm the oil on a low heat and add the chopped garlic and chilli. Keep stirring until the garlic is golden-brown and looks crunchy. Then take off the heat and sieve, retaining both the flavoured oil and the crispy bits.

Slice the courgette in long diagonal lengths, about 5mm thick, and do the same to the aubergines. Peel your onion and slice in into rounds, again, about 5mm thick. Douse your veg in the flavoured oil, keeping aside one tablespoon for later on. Now season the veg with a good pinch of salt and put under a hot grill, or if you have a griddle pan: use that. As they are cooking, add your beans to a pan and begin to warm them through. Once your vegetables are soft and look nicely roasted, remove them from the grill and add them to a large bowl with your warmed beans. Add the juice of half a lemon and mix.

Now it’s time to fry your halloumi. Add the remaining spicy oil to a medium-hot non-stick pan and fry the cheese until brown on both sides.

To finish, add the chopped coriander to the salad and check the dressing with your finger – it may need another squeeze of lemon. Then lay on the fried cheese and garnish with a sprinkle of the crispy garlic and chilli mix. Hearty veg, zesty dressing, salty cheese: rude-bwoy-inna-Kingstan!

But I have a confession to make: despite being weaned on tinned oxtail soup I had, until yesterday, never experienced the joys of its cheek. Knowingly anyway. Apparently butchers sometimes hide it in their mince. Can’t think why, it’s delicious. It’s courser grained than most beef cuts and has a far stronger flavour – ever so slightly offally. But don’t be put off by this, it does what kidney does to a good steak pie: lends a deep savouryness to the gravy.

Like most ‘forgotten cuts’ it does take a bit of cooking, and like most things that take a bit of cooking, it’s even better the next day. So my advice to you is this: fix a quick pasta dinner, wolf it down, make a start on the stew below and let it bubble away late into the night. Then, the next day, all you need to do is whack it on the stove and boil some potatoes for a bit of mash. Or you could do what I did and accidentally go to the pub for a few hours and pick up some chips on the way home. Cheeky.

Ox cheek in beer

You’ll need:

4 tablespoons of vegetable oil.
2 large onions, sliced.
3 carrots.
2 sticks of celery.
1 ox cheek.
About 300ml of good English beer (I used Bishop’s Finger – very nice too).
3/4 pint chicken stock (you’ll get away with a cube).
2 bayleaves.
4 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar (the cheap stuff is fine for this).

Put a large heavy-bottomed saucepan on a low heat and add a tablespoon of oil. Drop in your onions and fry them until they’re an even brown colour. This could take twenty minutes.

As they’re doing, chop the carrots, celery and cheek into two centimetre chunks. Slip the meat into a freezer bag with the flour and a generous pinch of salt and pepper. Massage the bag until the meat is evenly coated in the mix, then take it out and set it aside.

Remember to give your onions a stir from time to time. If they’re ready before you’ve finished the next step, take them off the heat.

Add three tablespoons of oil to a hot sauté pan and fry the cheek pieces on each side until they look like little cubes of mahogany. Remove from the pan and put  in a bowl. Now tip out any left over oil from the pan, return it to the hob and add a few splashes of the beer. This will give you a chance to loosen any stuck-on bits with a spoon. Once the bottom of the pan is clean, pour this mini gravy into the bowl with your ox meat.

Your onions must be brown by now, so add to them your carrots, celery and the balsamic vinegar and turn the heat up to medium. Once all the vinegar has reduced away to nothing, add your beery ox.

All that remains now is to add the rest of the beer, the chicken stock, bay leaves and lots of salt and pepper, and let it simmer, covered, on a very low heat for around two hours or until the ox cheek is meltingly tender.

What I’m trying to say is, this weekend shun Mr Kellogg and go with me instead.

Hot smoked mackerel with beans and a fried egg

Like the Full English, it doesn’t really warrant a recipe. Buy mackerel, buy beans, buy eggs – make hot. You might want to remove the packaging  first, and in the case of the egg – crack it into some sort of pan – but that’s the only real guidance I can give you. And if you need that sort of help then presumably you’re reading a crumpled print out of this page, which somehow found its way under the stairs in your gran’s house, where you live. The thought of which leaves me with mixed feelings.

1. Happiness – that someone liked this post enough to print it.

2. Disappointment – that this Judas then decided, not only to crumple it up, but to ‘lose’ it in a weird place.

3. Pity – for you, because you actually live underneath the stairs at your gran’s house, and what’s more, think it’s perfectly acceptable to put a bag full of shopping directly into a hot oven.

There is of course a small chance that you’re a normal person, and you’re thinking, ‘they don’t look like ordinary baked beans’.

Actually, you’re right. I made those from a can of butter beans, a can of tomatoes, a clove of garlic, a teaspoon of mild curry power (always great with smoked fish, think kedgeree) and a splodge (13ml) of Reggae Reggae sauce – all cooked together until very thick.

Which is something, my eagled eyed reader, you quite plainly are not.

It was a chicken dhansak from the Shezan restaurant on Great Horton Road. I remember the waiter asking whether I wanted rice or something he called ‘chapattis’. I plumped for the latter. He could have brought me a pile of judges’ wigs and I wouldn’t have questioned it. Thankfully he didn’t, as that wouldn’t have worked with the cumin in the sauce.

Looking back, that dhansak was about as authentic as a shoddily blacked-up Uri Geller, miming to I Shot The Sheriff (the Eric Clapton version) with a broken tennis racket for a guitar. That’s right: it had pineapple in it. Nonetheless, at the time it was a stuff of wonderment.  Sour, sweet, spicy and thick with lentils, that meal changed my life. From that day to this, I have had an unhealthy obsession with eating and making curry.

Karahi Lamb with Chickpeas and Roasted Cumin

If you’ve ever been to one of the quality Pakistani eateries in the UK (places like Tayyabs and Lahore Kebab House in London) you’ll be familiar with the joys of karahi lamb: a dry, rich, dark curry cooked in a wok. I have eaten more than a few of these in my time, and over the years have developed my own version. Here it is.

You’ll need:

700 grams of boneless lamb shoulder cut into chunks.
3 tablespoons of vegetable oil.
1 small bulb of garlic, pureed.
1 tin of tomatoes, drained of juice and pureed.
2 teaspoons of whole cumin seeds.
2 teaspoons of ground coriander seeds.
1/4 of a teaspoon of turmeric.
1 teaspoon ground black pepper.
1 teaspoon of sea salt or 1/2 a teaspoon of table salt.
1/2 teaspoon of chilli power.
2 bay leaves.
1 tin of chickpeas, drained.
2 tablespoons of finely chopped coriander leaf.

First, roast your cumin seeds in a hot, dry pan until they smell like spicy toast. Shake into a pestle and mortar, grind and set aside.

Fry the garlic paste in hot vegetable oil for two minutes and then add the lamb pieces. Stir-fry over high heat until the lamb is brown.

Now drop in the ground coriander, turmeric, pepper, salt, chilli and bay leaves and mix. Keep mixing and frying for two minutes, then add the drained, pureed tomatoes, the chickpeas, and a pint of water.

Simmer on a low heat until the lamb is tender, which could be up to an hour. If within that time it looks like it might catch on the pan, add more water. Once the lamb is soft keep simmering until you have quite a dry sauce – one that just coats the lamb and chickpeas.

Take the wok off the heat, stir in the roasted cumin power, sprinkle with the chopped coriander leaves and serve with a stack of warmed shop-bought chapattis. Or if you prefer – a pile of judges’ wigs.

This is my first post. I have no idea what to say. Maybe I’ll say “nipple”. Maybe not. How exciting: the unknown.

I know, I’ll start off with a recipe.

Chorizo noodles with lettuce and egg

I’m a big fan of busting open a sausage and frying the insides to a crunchy gravel. I’m also a big fan of stir fried lettuce. Trust me; it’s good. Put the two together, add some noodles and a few other bobs and you’ve got yourself a hearty and intensely savoury dinner.

To make this you’ll need:

2 fresh chorizo sausages, skins removed.
Half a large carrot, cut into thin strips.
Half an onion, sliced.
6 leaves of cos lettuce, snapped up.
1 egg, beaten with a pinch of black pepper and a few dashes of sesame oil.
150 grams of cooked and cooled egg noodles.
2 tablespoons light soy mixed with 1 teaspoon of dark soy and a pinch of sugar.
1 teaspoon sesame oil and a handful roasted peanuts to serve.

Add the skinned chorizo to a smoking hot wok with a splash of vegetable oil to stop it sticking. Stir-fry on a high heat until it starts to crisp up, three minutes or so. Add the onion and keep everything moving.

When the onion is soft and the sausage looks nice and crunchy add the carrot and lettuce and mix. Now push the contents of the wok up to one side and add the beaten egg into the space you’ve made. Let it sit for ten seconds. Then scramble it. Once the egg is cooked mix it with everything else. If your carrot and lettuce char a bit while they’re waiting on the side of the wok, all the better.

Throw in the cooked noodles along with the soy sauce mixture. Keep stirring and frying until everything is evenly combined. Now turn off the heat and smatter your noodles with the sesame oil and peanuts.

Give one last stir and apply enthusiastically to the lower face.