Quick & Dirty Japanese Curry

Knowing time would be limited this evening, I got myself ahead with some beef chunks, slowly cooked the day before ... nothing special, just a couple of bay leaves, the meat and covered with water, slow cooked at 125C for maybe four or five hours.

Cooled overnight and ready to turn into something this evening I decided upon Japanese Curry, a simple dish of meat, vegetables and a flavour stock cube which is the key to the dish.

Not having such a magical stock cube, I added my own flavours: beef stock, tamarind, black pepper, fish sauce, Worcestershire Sauce & Maggi Chilli Sauce. For vegetables, I added sliced carrots and some frozen peas.

Cook through at 180C for about an hour and we're ready to eat ... just needing a quick thicken with some arrowroot at the end.

Rather than rice, I served with chips ... yes, cooked in goose fat.

Sino-Cymric Shredded Lamb

Probably about as bonkers as it can get, but how about a sort of Sino-Cymric dish for dinner?

Sino-Cymric? Hell, yeah, Japanese Welsh Fusion! It's so out there it can't possibly have been done ...

The Welsh: Lamb. Shoulder of, boned and rolled around a fascine of sage, thyme and rosemary.

The Japanese: Wasabi, Yuzu, Rice Vinegar & Chillies.

On purpose? Well, no. We'd been out for the day, got back about six without enough time to cook this joint, but I have a cunning plan ...

To do this, get hold of the following:

• Lamb joint - boned, rolled and stuffed with herbs
• Garlic & Lemon
• Yuzu, Rice Vinegar & Chillies
• Potato, Butter & Wasabi
• Vegetables - Sprouts, Carrots & Peas

Lamb

Place your joint on an oven-proof plate, garlic bulbs alongside, lemon wedges, too. Salt over.

Cover with kitchen foil and commit to the oven at 180C (350F?) for a good hour and a half.

The lamb will now be technically cooked, but pretty tough. It really wants another couple of hours at a lower temperature to soften up, but we didn't have the time ...

So, out it comes, allow to just cool off and now get in there with your hands, peeling off all the sinews and membrane.

Shred with the fibres and you'll have a pile of meat.

Lamb like this is still very fatty and can be overfacing unless paired with sharp and spiky flavours. We'll be doing a Wasabi Mash, but let's cut through the meat itself.

In a skillet, load in the meat and pour over some rice wine vinegar and some yuzu juice. Chillies, too. Gently heat through while you prepare your vegetables and top up with a little water here and there.

The meat will soften and take on all these flavours.

Wasabi Mash

Boil some white potatoes.

When soft, mash with generous amounts of butter and mash in some wasabi to taste.

Vegetables

Steam 'em alongside the mash.

Serve

Put the lot together onto a plate, mash in the middle, mound the meat up on top and vegetables around the side.

Pulling the meat down through the mash and catching some of the sweet vegetables, gorgeous! Loved it!

Do again? Probably not, largely because I never do the same thing twice, but elements will make it into future dishes.

Japanese Beef & Bamboo

I love LIDL!

We've one just over the road from work, which I like to stroll around on a lunchtime every now and again ... and come away with all manner of random.

Last visit, I bagged a jar of bamboo shoots.

Ingredients

Keeping it really simple, I decided upon a clean, spicy dish of Beef & Bamboo for which I used: minced beef (500g for two people), jar of bamboo shoots, green beans, spinach, ginger, garlic, chilli, black pepper, fish sauce, Worcestershire Sauce and coconut oil.

Beef

Some folks are fine with their minced beef cooked for as little as quarter of an hour. Personally, I like it well cooked through, nice and slow. Browned off in a lidded pan with some coconut oil, given a damn good splash of Worcestershire Sauce and maybe a pint of water, lid on, heat lowered and left to slowly cook through for about and hour, maybe longer.

Bamboo

The jar was simply bamboo shoots in water. Nothing else added. I still drained and washed it through and added to the beef.

The beef is now cooked but still has a little liquid in there ...

Green & Spice

Green beans added, along with garlic, ginger, chilli, black pepper and fish sauce.

Stir through and continue to reduce with the lid off.

Once the liquid was almost reduced, I added in spinach. How much really is up to you. I used what we had, which was maybe half a bag - a bag being (I don't know ...) 260g? I really don't do weights and measures.

Spinach wilted, stirred through and liquid completely reduced, we're ready to eat.

On its own it's fine! I served a little white rice alongside for me and a few salad potatoes for my Mrs.

Scallop & Seaweed Soup

I don't need to say that chicken broth, from bones, is one of the healthiest things you can eat. Packed full of goodness, all manner of micro-nutrients and all manner of health benefits.

Seaweed, too, with super-amounts of calcium and protein-wise, almost as rich as legumes.

Let's put the two together ...

Chicken broth is simply a case of gently simmering bones for several hours to soften and extract the goodness. As a side note, if the bones are soft enough to crush, you can make a paste out of it ... experiment with flavours, but mace is good and it's nice combined with chicken livers to make a pâté.

I digress ...

We have our stock. Seaweed, I buy dried. Reconstitute in the stock.

Now add flavours: fish sauce, chestnut mushrooms, thinly sliced carrot, garlic, ginger, chill and onion.

Just prior to serving, sauté off a couple of scallops each and drop into the middle.

Sea Vegetable & Enoki Mushroom Soup

Here's a quick and easy way of getting your iodine, unsupplemented ...

Dried sea vegetables, procured from the supermarket Japanese section, steeped in bouillon (or bone broth if you have some) and spiced up with ginger and chilli. Make more interesting with some mushrooms - enoki variety in my case.

Mushrooms are packed with yet more antioxidants, making is one seriously heart-healthy starter.

Sea vegetables are not only a fantastic source of iodine, but possibly a unique source of vanadium. Reading up, vanadium appears to play a multi-faceted role in regulation of carbohydrate metabolism and blood sugar.

If somebody with a better grasp of biochemistry than me (that's everyone, then) can offer further insight, I'd be very grateful. Let's hear from you in the comments.

Beef, Spinach & Egg Broth

Leftovers are great!

All manner of fun, fast combinations can be made from leftovers and this was one such dish.

With some beef left over from the previous Sunday and some poaching liquor reserved from the previous day's salmon, I set about putting together a quick, nutritious broth.

Use whatever broth you have to hand - bone broth would be excellent, poaching liquor, or just make up a stock on the fly.

Finely slice some pieces of meat and drop these in - for me, it was beef ... which worked curiously well in the fish stock!

Add some bulk to the broth with seaweed, spinach, shredded greens, kale, something green anyway. I love the combination of beef and spinach, and spinach is right in season at the moment, so spinach it was.

Flavour up with finely sliced chilli and fresh ginger chopped into thin sticks.

Make up a Japanese omelette.

One egg, touch of water, whisked thoroughly and poured out into a frying pan to make a thin, almost crêpe-like omelette. Set aside.

Once the meat has softened, greens wilted and flavours combined, serve out into a bowl.

Roll up the omelette and slice up, dropping the little rolls into the broth.

Steamed Cod with Japanese Vegetables

Simple, clean, honest flavours in a light, colourful dish.

Almost raw with all ingredients cooked as little as possible, if at all.

Begin by peeling and slicing carrot and daikon. Place in a bowl and splash over a generous amount of mirin - Japanese rice vinegar. Set aside.

Prepare the fish by simply lining a steamer with kitchen foil, laying the fish on a couple of slices of lemon, topped with ginger and maybe a little sea salt. Set aside.

Quarter the pak choi and set aside.

When ready eat, place the steamer over and cook the fish in the hot steam for literally a couple of minutes - this is perfect for white fish like cod, which will cook rapidly. Insert the tip of a knife into the middle of the fish and touch your lip - still cold, steam for another minute, or so, checking regularly.

In a dry pan pre-heated, toss in the pak choi and cook through as little as you can - just enough to take the raw edge off and permit a little sweetness to come from the warmth while retaining all the crunch.

Meanwhile, drain off the excess mirin from the carrot and daikon, toss in a chopped red chilli, stir in some chopped coriander and a few seeds - sesame is obvious; I didn't have any so a sprinkle of flax seeds fitted in perfectly.

Take a mound of the carrot and daikon and place in the middle of a wide bowl. Lay the pak choi around on side and the fish on top, garnishing with some chopped red chilli and perhaps a leaf of coriander.

Enjoy the crisp, clean flavours.

Japanese Curry

Introduced to Japan by the British rather than the Indians, as an approximation of hot curried food.

So popular now in Japan it is simply called 'curry' and you will find curry roux packets widely available ... except for back here in Blighty, so I guess I'll have to dream up my own concoction.

Imagining this to be more akin to Beef Mulligatawny, as in the famous Heinz soup, just thicker, I set about a spice blend akin to that and kept it very simple to ground coriander, ground turmeric and some chilli powder.

How so?

This looks to be one of those meals that seems to have cooked forever, can be re-heated and probably is, combining fresh ingredients each time.

I sat a pound of casserole beef in some water at 125C for a few hours on Saturday morning. I don't recall how long, but a long time. Chuck it into a slow cooker ... job done.

With softened beef, collect the water for a gravy later.

Seal the meat it in some coconut oil and tossed in the dry spices - coriander, turmeric and chilli powder. Be ready to pour in some water! That spice concoction is like mustard gas!

You could just use a garam masala blend, but my wife really does not like something in that blend, so I didn't.

Sprinkle in a beef stock cube and some arrowroot in water to thicken. Traditionally, flour would be used, but wheat really is bad so we're going to stay well clear. At a push, sorghum flour might be okay but we only need to thicken it.

Let it colour and finally pour over the reserved water, stirring in a teaspoon of tamarind paste and some ground black pepper.

Intermission ...

Tamarind? Is that even paleo?

Well, I don't quite know - it is a member of the Fabaceae family, and so technically a legume, although we're just using the seed from inside. Seed? Yes, the seed. So, um ... paleo?

Well, I don't know ... Either way, tamarind has a unique sour flavour which is the absolute key to this dish. In the spirit of paleo, I did my hunter/gatherer thing and collected a tub of pure tamarind extract from the local supermarket and tasted it. It didn't kill me and had a curious flavour. Being the largest and strongest in my tribe, I took the challenge! I'll eat some and see if it's okay ... it was!

Back to the main feature ...

Toss in a chopped carrot and some peas and then transfer back to the ovenproof dish.

Cook at 180C for a couple of hours.

Serve out with some rice, dressing the dish with some fresh coriander leaves.

White rice is one of those ingredients that is peripheral to the paleo diet, tolerable, but not ideal. Beyond paleo, Perfect Health Diet authors Paul & Shou-Ching Jaminet would call this a "safe starch" and it is with this in mind that I am perfectly happy to include white rice as part of what I would call a paleo+ diet.

Hot & Sour Crab, Scallop and Spinach Soup

Sweet, salty, sour and hot ...

Simple to put together, seriously flavoursome and really nutritious.

Here's how ...

Open a can of crab meat and get it warming up. Moodle the chunks of crab to release the fibres into the liquid.

This is salty! Pour on some hot water to dilute the saltiness.

Add in some flavours and aromatics - I used some ginger, a couple of cloves of garlic, two lime leaves and half a Scotch Bonnet pepper.

Drop in a couple of handfuls of spinach leaves. Lower the heat to a gentle simmer.

Fry off some scallops alongside, then at the point of serving, ladle out the soup into a bowl, place the scallops on top and garnish with a lime wedge and some shredded basil.

The keen eyed among you might well see what you think is corn!

Yes, I put some corn into the soup! Why? Well, I'll leave you to chew on that one ...

Maybe I'm experimenting ...
Maybe I did it just to annoy paleo purists ...
Maybe I just had a can left in the food cupboard and cannot abide wasting food ...

Besides, doesn't Robb Wolf eat corn?

Scallops with Sea Vegetables

Having boiled down the carcass of chicken or poussin from a previous meal and made beautiful healing broth, a second boiling can be made for a more delicate, subtle flavoured soup.

Something like this ...

Take some seaweed, packed with iodine, magnesium and other goodies which be elusive in paleo food sources picked from modern farming, and immerse in the broth.

Dried seaweed is perfectly good, and you will find bags of such produce in the World Foods section of your supermarket.

Once the seaweed has reconstituted, clean up a couple of scallops.

Scallops are a further source of magnesium, an excellent pack of vitamin B12 and concentrated source of selenium, particularly.

Warm a little butter in a frying pan until it just browns and drop the scallops in. Scallops should need little more than a half a minute on each side to just colour up and warm through, while retaining all the softness.

Set the scallops into the soup, maybe hinting with a drop of walnut oil for heady aromatics.

Drink deep and partake of all that nourishing goodness of rare micronutrients.

Wood Pigeon Stir Fry

Actually a member of the dove family, the wood pigeon is a wild bird which gleans fatty pink breast meat with a game flavour from its diet taken from open fields or gardens and lawns; young shoots and seedlings are favoured, as well as certain fruits and berries.

This delicious meat is best served slightly pink and can be fast cooked as whole breast or cut into small chunks for stir fry.

Let's get frying ...

Prepare the breast under running water and inspect carefully for shot. How carefully you inspect the meat will depend upon whether you've ever crunched a tooth on a piece of shot ... it's not good! Once this has happened to you ... trust me, you will inspect game meat very carefully!

Cut up the breast into bite-sized pieces.

Slice up some stir fry ingredients - whatever takes your fancy, although red, green and yellow peppers work very well indeed, as do mild chillis chopped into good slices.

Prepare some "noodles" by julienning complimentary vegetables such as mooli or cucumber.

Using a hot wok, sear the breast pieces and using the fat which renders out to prevent sticking, toss in the vegetables. The wok should be smoking hot.

Serve with a good helping of the juliennes and a generous portion of stir fry over the top. Feel free to use some chilli sauce or a squirt of lemon juice over the top.