Brown Rice with Chorizo and Egg

I don't tend to buy many food magazines, but somehow I seem to accumulate piles of cut out recipes.  We pick up the free Waitrose magazine every month which always seems to have lots of lovely things to cook, and this, coupled with recipes I snip out of newspapers, or photograph from friends' cookbooks means I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle to keep them organised. 

So I've decided to use this blog to keep a record of the ones we've cooked, enjoyed, and would like to make again.  This should mean I don't need to keep so many bits of paper around the kitchen...  we will see how that goes!  Some blog posts might have photos to accompany them, but many won't.

Anyway, here is a lovely 'midweek' recipe that I found in the Waitrose magazine last month.  It's really versatile because you can add in any ingredients that need using up (at this time of year I like/need to throw in a chopped courgette to pretty much anything that I make!).

Brown Rice with Chorizo and Egg

Serves 2

125g chorizo (about half a Lidl chorizo), chopped
8 (or more) cherry tomatoes, halved
1 tsp hot smoked paprika, plus extra to serve
2 garlic cloves, crushed
250g cooked brown rice (the recipe says to use a packet of ready cooked, I cook my own)
100g green beans, chopped (or any other green veg - courgette especially)
2 tbsp chopped dill (I subbed this with basil)
2 eggs (recipe says soft-boiled and halved, I found it quicker/easier to fry them)
2 spring onions, trimmed and sliced

In a large frying pan, cook the chorizo for 5 minutes, or until golden brown - it releases plenty of oil so you don't need to add any.

Add the cherry tomatoes and cook for a further 2 minutes.

Stir in the paprika and garlic and cook for another minute or so, until fragrant.

Tip in the rice and beans, season with a little salt and add a splash of water.  Cover with a lid, turn to the lowest heat and cook for 5 minutes until the beans are tender.

Fold in the dill (or other herb), top with the egg (softboiled or fried - poached would work too), and scatter over the spring onions with extra paprika if wanted.

My husband likes this served with extra chilli sauce.

A Week in Saigon - A Fertile Land

The highlight of any trip to Vietnam has got to be the food.  As a cuisine it's incredibly fresh and full of vibrant flavours.  Vietnam, particularly in the south, in the Mekong Delta, is a very fertile land and large amounts of fruit and vegetables are grown there - not forgetting rice as well.

Fresh fruit was on sale everywhere in Saigon.  There were numerous market stalls full of it, but also many Vietnamese ladies carrying huge baskets of various fruit around, selling it to passers by as they went.

We took a day trip out into the Mekong Delta and saw an amazing amount of food being grown.

 Cocoa pods,

 Jackfruit,

 Papaya,

 Pomelo

 

And fields and fields of rice.  This lovely lady - a friend of our guide - took us across her paddy fields.

She picked us all some longan - the small lychee-like fruit seen all over South East Asia.

And then back at her house she picked us coconuts from her tree and gave us all a drink of fresh coconut water.

It seems that in Vietnam it's very easy to 'eat local'!

Off to Malaysia for Lunch

Brunei is a tiny country and the nearest border with Malaysia is less than an hour's drive away from where we live.  Of course as Brunei is a dry country, most expats make fairly regular trips to the border in order to bring back their duty-free allowance of alcohol!  We are lucky not to have to do this as we are able to use the Naafi to buy liquor -  but last weekend we decided that we'd like to go 'abroad' for lunch, and headed for Kuala Lurah border post.

We left our car in Brunei and walked across the border - Here's Rob next to the 'Welcome to Limbang' sign.

There's really not much in Kuala Lurah, just a small and rather scruffy selection of market stalls and roadside restaurants that have sprung up on the border... but of course there's a duty free shop.

The restaurants are mainly tin huts often with a motorbike or two parked inside, or a barbecue set up outside a house.  We were highly amused to see a car pull up at one, and the driver pull a dead baby crocodile (about 50cm long) out of the boot!  She walked into one of the restaurant kitchens...  we decided not to eat there!  (Wish I'd been a bit quicker with the camera to get a photo too).

I loved this artistic menu!

The duty free shop had some interesting drinks not found in the Naafi.  We bought a bottle of the Chinese rice wine on the right of this picture to use for cooking.

We ate in a little cafe.  As soon as we sat down the Chinese owner came up to us and said 'Beer?'  It seemed a real treat to have a lager with lunch when eating out so of course we said yes... and yes again when he asked us a second time!

A nasi goreng (fried rice) for me, mee goreng (fried noodles) for Rob and 2 beers each came to the grand total of 9 Bruneian dollars - about 4.50 GBP.  Cheap and delicious!

We were also very excited to get FOUR stamps in our passports as we went through the Bruneian and Malaysian border-posts, going into then back out of Malaysia.  I think our passports are going to fill up pretty fast while we're living here.