Chinese pork & mango with noodles

I've been experimenting again... I love Chinese pork and I love fresh mango, so having both in the fridge I decided to try a recipe using them. This was the result...

500g Diced pork, marinaded in Flava-It Chinese Marinade for an hour
Olive oil for cooking
3 cloves garlic crushed
1 dessert spoonful of mixed herbs
1 large carrot grated
1 red onion, sliced finely
1/2 pint (or a large handful if it's easier!) sliced green beans
1/2 diced skinned mango
up to 1/2 pint boiling water
1 green Oxo
1 chicken Oxo

Egg noodles - 1 portion per diner, heated through in boiling water until soft but not sticky, then drained

Heat oil with garlic and herbs in a wok. Add Chinese pork and brown all round, adding just enough boiling water to prevent it sticking, add both crumbled Oxos. Cook for 5 minutes until cooked through. Add carrot, onion, beans and mango and heat through. Add more water to prevent sticking as needed.

Cook until hot through but not too long or the vegetables will be soggy.

Serve on drained hot egg noodles.

Serves 4. Preparation and cooking time is around 30-35 minutes.

Home-made Chinese pork with vegetable rice

Making delicious Chinese pork at home is incredibly easy with this simple marinade.

Preparation and cooking time is around 30-35 minutes.

Following on from last week's post about how to mix up the Chinese marinade that we'd binned the instructions for,  we had need to do it again yesterday.  A trip into our local Tesco had produced 4 pork chops, reduced in price, so we added them to our trolley. Once home we cut the pork from the chop bones, and sliced the meat into thin strips, then laid them into a roasting tray. Mixing up our Flava-It Chinese marinade with the sweetened soya milk we poured it over the pork strips, covered the tray with foil and popped it into the fridge until this evening.

The first thing to do, before cooking the pork, was preparing the vegetable mix. A raid of the fridge produced some mushrooms, a handful of mangetout, red and yellow peppers, and a courgette, all of which were sliced into small pieces (around 2cm max). Adding 3 crushed garlic cloves and a small red bird's eye chili (deseeded and finely chopped), a small red onion chopped, a few green olives halved, and some small plum tomatoes cut into quarters, we were ready to start cooking.

Hubbie set to with the rice (we used Tesco own brand Arborio risotto rice - half a cup per person) and water (a pint and a half) with a couple of stock cubes and a sprinkle of mixed herbs added to make the stock for cooking the rice in the paella pan, whilst I plugged in the teppenyaki grill and cooked the marinaded pork on it. The pork cooked really quickly, and turning it over midway meant it was browned on all sides.  (A big plus was that, unlike when we cooked the marinaded ribs in the oven, the grill cleaned up very quickly afterwards. The oven tray from the ribs had to soak for almost 2 days before all the baked-on marinade finally came off!)

The vegetables were added into the rice once it was almost cooked (test the rice by tasting a small bit, if it's still chewy it needs a few minutes longer) along with the cooked pork. Mix well into the rice and add a bit more boiling water if needed (there should be a bit of liquid in the pan, rather than be very dry). Heat through until all the veg are hot through, and remove from the heat.

Serve in bowls whilst still very hot. Yummy!

Oh look, it's all gone! :)

Oops! No instructions... how do I mix this marinade?

You know that moment when you decide you are going to use something from your pantry and then realise that you have no instructions as to how to use it? Well I had one of those a couple of days ago... in my case it was with some Flava-It Chinese Marinade packets which my son and I had happily emptied from packets into a airtight storage jar on the spice shelf whilst sorting out said pantry a week ago.

It's been a while since I'd used the Marinade last, and I had a vague memory that it used something like yoghurt to mix with the marinade powder to make the coating, but I wasn't sure. Another problem is that said son is currently on a dairy free diet for a couple of months, so yoghurt as a mixer was out of the question. So what to use instead? Water would be too thin, so I tried ALDI's Acti Leaf sweetened soya milk instead. Mixing a couple of tablespoons of the marinade powder into a cup of soya milk, and then poured into a plastic tray into which I popped the pork ribs to be marinaded, wrapped the whole tray in foil, put it in the fridge overnight, and forgot about it!

We had intended to have the ribs the following night, but we were sidetracked by some gorgeous smoked river cobbler and some chilli, ginger and lime mackerel, which soon became a rather delicious rice and fish dish. Meanwhile our ribs were still happily marinading in the fridge. Realising it was a use it or lose it moment tonight, I brought out the tray, removed the foil, not sure how the soya milk would have worked, and was astonished to find the ribs looked really well marinaded. The smell was good too, so I transferred them to a rack over a deep tray and into the oven they went, on Gas mark 6 for around 35 minutes, turned after 20 minutes so both sides cooked evenly.

I have to say that they were gorgeous when cooked. Leaving them to marinade for that bit longer really helped the flavour to infuse through all of the meat, and it proved that sweetened soya milk is a perfectly good substitute for yoghurt, or whatever it was I was supposed to have used!

Moral of the tale is: don't be afraid to experiment!