Thanks The Guardian.

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.

Real vindaloo, the Catholic Indian dish from Goa, is one of the best curries you can eat: soft pork simmered in a paste of garlic, fragrant spices, a touch of vinegar and, yes, a fair few red chilli peppers. But it doesn’t have to be blisteringly hot; the chillis involved are those long, dried ones, which are normally pretty tame. Unlike curry house ‘vindaloo’, the part they play is as much about colour and flavour as it is heat.

One downside of proper vindaloo is the time it takes to make. You need to marinade the meat overnight, and if you’re using pork shoulder (which you should), it’s going to need simmering for quite a few hours.

The good news is, there’s a stunning Goan fish dish called rechade, which uses a very similar paste, but takes a fraction of the time to make.

I made a version of it the other day, which I served with a crunchy apple and red onion salad, and I’m telling you, it was special. So, next barbeque, you know what to do.

Goan-spiced mackerel with apple and red onion salad

Ingredients

Two whole mackerel, gutted and cleaned

(For the marinade)
6 cloves
6 cardamom seeds (take them out of the pods)
2cm of cinnamon bark
1 teaspoon of black peppercorns
Half a teaspoon of fennel seeds
Half a teaspoon of ground turmeric
A big pinch of salt
6 fat cloves of garlic
6-8 long dried red chillis soaked for 15 mins in warm water and seeds removed
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger
1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon of sugar

(For the apple salad)
1 Braeburn apple, cored and finely diced
1 small red onion, finely diced
A pinch of salt
Half a small green chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
A handful of finely chopped coriander leaf and stalks
The juice of a lime

Mix the red onion with a pinch of salt and set aside.

Grind the spices in a pestle and mortar, a coffee grinder or whatever you normally use, then add the mix to the rest of the marinade ingredients and blitz in a blender.

Take your gutted and cleaned mackerels and make diagonal slashes in the skin, on both sides, at 2 centimetre intervals.

Massage your marinade into the fish, making sure to get it right inside the cuts.

Next, add the rest of your salad ingredients to your salted onion and mix through.

Now, pan fry – or even better – barbeque your fish on a medium flame for about 5 minutes each side . Don’t worry if it chars a bit, that’s a good thing. Oh, and if you do fry it and there’s any leftover marinade in the pan, make sure you spoon that over the top of the fish.

Serve the mackerel straight away, with the apple salad on the side.

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.

Thanks to Donna.