Indonesian noodle salad

This one surprised your Dad by being so good - he's not a natural vegetarian. You liked the peanuts best, but did enjoy dipping the noodles in the sauce.

It's adapted from a recipe I found in Olive magazine - their's has raw veg instead.

Makes enough for three. You'll need:

1 egg per person (hardboiled, and halved)
medium egg noodles
1 yellow pepper, sliced
2 green peppers, sliced
1 carrot, peeled and finely sliced into batons
1 onion, finely sliced
roasted peanuts - a scattering per person
1 lime, halved
ketjap manis - a tablespoon per person
a little olive or sunflower oil

Sling the onions in a pan with a little olive or sunflower oil, and cook until they've softened. Add the pepper and carrot, and fry for another 5 minutes or so, until they are tender.

Cook the noodles in boiling water for 3-4 minutes until they are tender. Drain, and add to the vegetables in the pan. Mix everything together, and dish out into three bowls.

To each bowl of noodles add an egg and a scattering of roasted peanuts. Drizzle with a little ketjap manis, and squeeze a little lime juice on top.

Chicken and courgette stir fry

We spent the day doing Christmassy things - buying our tree, decorating it, and then making biscuit decorations.

Tea was a bit secondary, to tell you the truth. Maybe it should have been turkey in honour of the festivities.

You'll need:

noodles
some cooked chicken (I roasted some chicken legs yesterday, and there were a few left over, so I just pulled the meat off them and then chucked the bones in a pan to make some stock).
a large courgette, thinly sliced lengthways
an onion, thinly sliced
a carrot (or pepper), thinly sliced
a tablespoon of soy sauce
a sprinkling of dried ginger (sadly there wasn't any fresh ginger lurking at the bottom of the fridge)
a teaspoon or so of honey
sunflower oil
sesame oil

Firstly, get the noodles sorted out. Bung them in a pan with some boiling water to cover them, and cook for 3 minutes or so, until they're done but not soggy. Drain.

Mix together the ginger, soy sauce and honey in a small bowl.

Then, heat the sunflower oil in a large frying pan on a high heat (we use a heavy, dark green Le Crueset one - but that's only because the wok went rusty years ago). Add the vegetables, and stir round until they start to soften a little (probably 2-3 minutes). Chuck in the chicken, and swish about for another couple of minutes until it reheats. Add the ginger/soy sauce/honey mixture, together with a teaspoon or so of sesame oil, and let it bubble away in the pan.

Add the drained noodles, and stir for a minute or so, until the noodles are reheated. Serve as soon as possible - noodles seem to go cold terribly quickly.

We ate this with some steamed broccoli (drizzled with a little soy sauce).

Salmon with lemon and ginger

Another of the "oh, stick it all together in a foil parcel and it'll taste fabulous" recipes. Very useful, epsecially when you're in the middle of watching Shaun the Sheep, and want something quick to bung in the oven for tea.

You'll need:

a couple of pieces of salmon
a couple of inches of ginger
half a lemon, sliced into small chunks
lots of black pepper

Take two large squares of foil, and plonk each piece of salmon in the middle of one, skin down. Squeeze a little lemon juice over the top from the lemon chunks, and scatter them non-artistically around and over each fish. Peel and finely slice the ginger, and place on top of the salmon. Finish off with a good screw of black pepper.

Close the parcel so no steam can escape, and stick in the oven (at about 180 degrees) for around 20 minutes or so - it all depends on how thick your slices of salmon are. Once they're pale pink, you're onto a winner.

We ate this with noodles, stir fried with broccoli, onion and carrot. Chopsticks were quite popular...

Pork and vegetable stir fry with noodles

Your dad came back late from the Big Chill today, so you had tea on your own in the kitchen - not completely on your own, as I sat next to you at the toddler-sized table, and attempted to drink a cup of tea.

This is one of your favourites - it works just as well for big people, but they don't get quite as excited by the idea of squirting a tiny fish full of soy sauce all over the noodles.

If you're making it for us three, you'd have

pork - I used a couple of lean pork chops today, but you could use pork loin instead
an onion, sliced
a pepper, sliced
some carrot, finely sliced lengthways
some spring onion
a clove of garlic, sliced
fresh ginger, finely chopped
(you could also add some beansprouts, celery, or anything else crunchy)
noodles

Cut the pork into thin strips. I stuck them in pretty much as is today, but you could always marinade them for an hour in a little soy sauce mixed with rice wine, a spoonful of honey and a little fresh ginger grated on top.

I do the noodles first - then they're ready and waiting to go into the pan/wok once everything else is done. It's a right pain faffing on with kettles of boiling water/draining noodles once you're in the middle of making sure the stir fried veg doesn't stick. So get them sorted - add some boiling water, and cook for about 3 minutes. Drain using a colander, and then rinse under the cold tap so they stop cooking, and hopefully don't stick together.

Heat some oil (preferably sunflower rather than olive) in a frying pan/wok until it's very hot. Chuck the pork in, and keep moving around so it doesn't stick too much. Once the pork's turned white, and started to go brown, chuck in the garlic and ginger, and stir fry for 20s or so. Add the veg, and stir fry for a couple of minutes. Try a piece to see if it's still too crunchy, or just cooked enough. Carrots are a good bet for this.

Anyway, at this point hurl the noodles in. Swish about, taking care to not let them stick ti the bottom. They inevitably will, and you will swear once you're washing the pan up, but nevermind.
You could add some soy sauce/rice wine at this point, if you feel so inclined, or leave it plain, so everyone can add their own afterwards.

Serve. Get the chopsticks out. We've taken you to Wagamama enough, so you should be pretty good by now.