Spicy Asian Noodle Salad with Lobster

With spicy dressing, juicy lumps of lobster and fragrant bean thread noodles this Spicy Asian Noodle Salad is like a vacation in your mouth.

AKA Vacation in Your Mouth

There’s just something special about lobster but you can also sub tiger prawns or shrimp.

Yes, please to Comfort Food
When someone offers to send you a copy of a cookbook called Adventures in Comfort Food: Incredible, Delicious and New Recipes from a Unique, Small-Town Restaurant, you do not turn them down. You say, “Yes, please!” After all, here we are coming into the cool season and comfort food is what it’s all about. This particular cookbook is full of recipes from chef and owner, Kerry Altiero, of the small town award-winning Maine restaurant Café Miranda, which brings comfort food up a whole bunch of notches, serving favorites like Lobster Mac and Cheese and Brussels Sprouts in Cream and dressed up hot dogs.

As Chef Altiero says in the introduction; “We offer a huge menu that mixes traditional American fare with Italian, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Thai, vegan . . . whatever strikes our fancy. Our motto is “Because We Can.” We serve wonderful, surprising, innovative food that defies expectations and wins over all kinds of eaters. This cookbook will help you do the same at home, whether you are cooking for world-weary sophisticates or picky toddlers. Your kitchen may never be the same.”

And while I am under no obligation to tell you only nice things about this book, I must admit that I have only nice things to say. Most of the recipes have just a handful of ingredients and the simple preparations let the freshness and quality of those ingredients shine through. If that appeals to you as much as it appealed to me, I am pleased to tell you that I also have one copy to give away! Make sure to scroll down to the bottom of this post and enter the drawing.

Vacation in My Mouth
How these cookbook blog tours work is that we are given a list of recipes that can be shared. I was most intrigued by the dish called Vacation in Your Mouth, from the Party Food chapter, so that’s the one I chose. I mean, really. With a title like that, how could I resist?

Years and years ago, when I was living in Brazil, a dear Burmese friend taught me how to make a fresh and refreshing salad with softened bean thread noodles, crispy fried ground pork and dried shrimp, all tossed in a lime vinaigrette with chilies and cilantro. I used to make it all the time in a great big bowl, because it was a family favorite and then, because I struggled to find the dried shrimp, it got out of rotation.

This beautiful dish from the Adventures in Comfort Food cookbook reminded me of what we had been missing, albeit it on a fancier, smaller scale. And I realized that the dried shrimp are not absolutely essential. Lobster works too! Okay, I admit we may not have it with lobster every time, but I will definitely be serving this again, perhaps with shrimp or even crab meat.

I made the recipe pretty much as written, except for substituting a spicy pepper for the poblano, which was one of the chef’s suggestions, and I couldn’t find baby romaine so I bought a local green for scooping up the salad.

Serves 2

Ingredients
For the salad:
4 oz or 113g cooked lobster meat
1 poblano pepper, seeded and minced (Or sub a spicy pepper of your choice.)
2 scallions, green and white parts, sliced on the bias
Juice of 2 limes
2 tablespoons or 30ml extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon or 15ml Thai fish sauce
6 leaves basil, preferably Thai, shredded
4 sprigs cilantro
1⁄4 cup or 44g Thai bean thread or rice vermicelli noodles, soaked and chopped (I about doubled this because I couldn’t for the life of me get the bean thread noodles apart to weigh out only 44g.)

For garnishing:
Pinch kimchi flakes
1 teaspoon black sesame seeds
2 sprigs cilantro
2 thin rounds of lime
10 leaves romaine lettuce

Method
Mix together everything but the garnishes.

Spoon the mixture into martini glasses.

Make sure to include all the good limey, salty juice. Sprinkle with the kimchi flakes, black sesame seeds and cilantro.

Garnish with a lime round on the edge of each glass. Place the glasses on a plate and arrange the romaine leaves around them, attractively.

Fill leaves with mixture—crunch!

The chef’s drink suggestion: A nice Moscato with a little bit of sweet goes well with the spicy flavors. Or perhaps enjoy with a nice simple beer such as a Sebago Saddleback Ale.

Tell me that doesn't look like a Vacation in Your Mouth?! 

Enjoy!

Buy your own copy of Adventures in Comfort Food: Incredible, Delicious and New Recipes from a Unique, Small-Town Restaurant by following this link.

*This post contains affiliate links. I received a copy of the cookbook for review purposes with no other compensation.*

Ceviche - As it should be

Many a thing is called ceviche out in the world of restaurants. Some add tomatoes or avocado or mango or other abominations. I’ve even seen grapes! This dish is made exactly as I remember it from my childhood time spent in northern Peru, with fresh seafood, fresh lime juice, purple onions, cilantro, salt and chili peppers. That’s it. And boiled yucca on the side. 

About a year after my parents divorced, my father moved from Venezuela where we had all been living together, to a small oilfield company town in northern Peru called Negritos. If you’ve been in the mountains and the rain forests of Peru but never ventured to the northwestern coast, you might be surprised to find sand dunes to rival those in my current home, the United Arab Emirates. Negritos is set near the most western point of mainland South America, Punta Pariñas, with a beautiful coast in front and a massive desert at its back. I spent every summer there for several years, until Daddy moved again.

I don’t know that it was much of a place for being an adult but it was heaven for a child. I’d take off for hours, exploring rocks and sand dunes and crevasses, finding shells and fossils, building forts with the neighbor kids and “tightrope” walking on the pipes between the enormous town water tank and, well, town. (Shhhh! Don’t tell my father – the pipeline was strictly off limits.) My older sister and I shared a little blue Honda 70 motorbike and sometimes I’d ride the dunes on it, but most days, exploration was on foot and I’d often carry pen and paper, in case inspiration struck and I needed to write something down. I was deep into my Harriet the Spy phase then. Returning home, I’d drive my stepmother to distraction by taking off my shoes and socks and making two little piles on my bedroom floor with the sand that had accumulated in them. It was fun to see how big the piles were some days, as if it told me how far I had walked somehow. In retrospect, I must have been a strange child.

A big treat - I’m telling you it was a small town! – was to go to the small airport in the next town over and eat in the restaurant there. I’ll let you absorb that. We went to the airport just to eat. Watching the planes take off and land was a bonus. I always, and I mean always, without fail, ordered the shrimp ceviche. It was perfect. A healthy plateful of shrimp, swimming in lime juice with lots of sliced onions and just enough chili. The resulting liquid is called leche de tigre or tiger’s milk and when all the shrimp were gone, I’d sip it with a spoon and nibble on the boiled yucca that was always served alongside.

My father’s company also had a very rustic, open plan brick house on a beautiful beach called Punta Sal, which we were able to use on weekends and holidays. It was even farther north, in fact, about halfway to the Ecuadorian border. There we’d make our own ceviche, with fresh grouper hooked from the water by a local fisherman called Polo. Burnished and wizen by too many years in the fierce sun, Polo lived in a makeshift shanty right on Punta Sal and made his living fishing off of a raft of old logs bound together by frayed rope and luck. He'd come door-to-door with his daily catch and often let the more adventurous boys (my husband among them) "help" him fish.

When I eat this ceviche and I close my eyes, I can hear the waves crashing, smell the sea breeze and feel the dried crusty salt left behind by the water, tight on my sunburned skin. Hope you do too. (Sometimes I even smell jet fuel, but that one's probably just me.)

Ingredients
6 -7 limes or more if yours aren’t very juicy. You need about 1 cup or 240ml juice.
13 oz or 370g fresh firm white flesh fish – I used Hammour or local grouper
1 large purple onion (about 3 1/2 oz or 100g, before peeling)
1 teaspoon flakey sea salt or to taste, plus more for boiling the shrimp
1 large bunch cilantro or coriander leaves (About 1 3/4 oz or 50g)
1-2 hot red chili peppers (I used two!)
12 1/3 oz or 350g fresh shrimp, already cleaned and deveined

To serve: The traditional accompaniment to a bowl of ceviche is yucca, boiled till tender in lightly salted water. Try to get your hands on some – it’s called different things in a variety of countries: Manioc, cassava, mogo, manioc and aipim, just to name a few. Peel it and wash it well before boiling. Once boiled, split it down the middle and pull out the fibrous threads before serving. Its flavor is somewhere between a potato and a parsnip and the mild taste and starchiness counterbalances the acidic, spicy ceviche.

Method
Juice your limes and put them in a non-reactive bowl. Glass does nicely.

Remove all the bones and cut your fish up into bite-sized pieces. I use jewelry pliers to get the pin bones out.

Immerse the fish in the lime juice and stir well.

Wash the cilantro thoroughly with cold water. Sometimes it takes more than one rinse to get rid of all the dirt but it’s worth taking the time to make sure it’s completely grit free. Spin the cilantro dry in a salad spinner or tied up in a dish towel. You can discard the stems but as long as they aren’t really thick and hard, I like to mince them very finely and use them. Chop the leaves roughly and set aside.

Slice your onions as thinly as you can manage and mince your red chilies.

Add the onions and the chilies to the fish along with the sea salt. Give everything a good stir and use your spoon, preferably a wooden one, to poke the pieces of fish back into a single layer under the lime juice.

Pile your chopped cilantro on top of everything but don’t stir yet. Just let it all hang out.

Bring a pot of water to the boil. Add a little salt, just as you would do for boiling pasta.

Add the shrimp to the pot and turn the heat off. Put a lid on the pot and set a timer for about three minutes. This parboils the shrimp but they will finish "cooking" in the lime juice.

When the time rings, remove the shrimp with a slotted spoon. Let them cool slightly and then add them to the bowl with the fish.

Now you can give it a good stir. Poke the bits of fish back under the lime juice.

Cover the whole bowl with cling film and refrigerate, stirring occasionally, for several hours or until the fish is completely opaque and “cooked” by the lime juice. I left mine overnight because it was going sailing with us the next day. If you are traveling with ceviche, make sure to keep it on ice until you are ready to serve it.

Serve with boiled yucca for a traditional treat. (See note with the ingredients list above.)

Enjoy!

Broccoli Chicken Couscous Salad

Lean chicken breasts pan-fried till golden, lightly steamed broccoli, tomatoes and radishes in a quick lemon yogurt dressing with red chili makes a tasty, healthy meal after weeks of indulgence. 

This salad is made up of the vegetables I had on hand so please use the ingredient amounts as a guide and feel free to substitute your favorites, add more or omit whatever doesn’t suit you.

Ingredients (to serve two as a main course or four as a starter)
For the salad:
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
Sea salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
Olive oil
1 cup or 150g couscous (medium grain)
1/2 medium-sized head of broccoli
9-10 small sharp radishes
9-10 cherry tomatoes
1/2 cup or about 50g sprouted mung beans
Large handful cilantro or fresh coriander leaves

For the dressing:
Juice 1/2 large lemon (about 1/8 cup or 30ml)
1 small purple onion
1-2 small hot red chilies
2 heaping tablespoons plain yogurt
1/8 cup or 30ml olive oil
Sea salt

Method
Cut your chicken into bite-sized pieces and season liberally with salt and the ground cumin.  Stir it around so the pieces are seasoned all over.

Heat up a non-stick skillet and pan-fry the chicken until golden on all sides using just a tiny drizzle of olive oil.   Remove from the heat and allow to cool.

Put a pot of water on to heat for steaming your broccoli.

Cut the broccoli into florets then cut the florets in quarters.

Steam them until they are still crunchy.  This takes just a few minutes.  Remove your steamer with broccoli from the hot pot and set aside to cool.  Reserve the water for making the couscous.

Put your couscous in a pot or metal bowl and add a 1/2 teaspoon of salt.  Add just enough boiling water (From the broccoli steaming pot, if you’ve plan ahead!) to cover the couscous plus a bit extra.  Put the lid on and leave it while you get on with the rest of the salad.

Slice your radishes and halve your cherry tomatoes.  Chop the cilantro very roughly.  You want some nice big leaves still.  Finely mince the red chilies and thinly slice your onion.

In a bowl that will be big enough for tossing your whole salad, add in lemon juice, the onion and the chilies.  Let them steep for a few minutes.  This takes the sharpness out of the onion and infuses the juice with the heat of the chilies.

Add in the plain yogurt and stir.   Now drizzle in the olive oil and stir well.  Give the whole thing a small sprinkle of salt.  Set aside.

By now your couscous should be done.  Remove the lid and fluff it up with a fork.  Leave the lid off and allow it to cool further.

Add your radishes, tomatoes and mung beans to the salad bowl.

Heap on the couscous.

Toss well to coat everything with dressing.  Now add in cooled broccoli and the cilantro.  Toss again.

Finally, add in the chicken pieces and toss for the last time.

Enjoy!

Lora’s Avocado Tomato Feta Salsa

When I lived in Kuala Lumpur, I got together once a month with a lovely group of ladies, ostensibly to play Pokeno.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, we did play, but the best part of the evening was definitely the potluck meal we shared.  We took turns hosting and if we were playing at your house, you were responsible for the main course.  The rest of us brought appetizers and side dishes and salads and desserts.  I don’t remember who was hosting when Lora made this lovely salsa but, after that, we hardly ever let her sign up to make anything else.  And, of course, she had to share the recipe.  I made it again a few weeks ago for my sweet neighbor’s even sweeter daughter’s third birthday celebration.  All the accompanying parents seemed to love it and even some of the children were digging in, with the tortilla chips.  Its delicious flavors made me miss my Pokeno ladies so I was grateful for new friends.

Ingredients

2 ripe avocadoes

4 red ripe Roma tomatoes, chopped (Lora says:  You can substitute, but make sure they are quality tomatoes. It makes a difference!)

1 small purple onion

1 small red chili pepper or 1 green jalapeño

1 bunch cilantro or fresh coriander

4 oz or 85g feta cheese

1/4 cup or 60ml olive oil

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon salt (I used Maldon flakes.)

Method

Mix your salt, cumin, vinegar and olive oil to make a dressing in the bottom of a mixing bowl.

Cut the avocados into halves.  Remove the seeds and, using the tip of your knife, cut just down to the peel, going first one direction and then perpendicular.  

Scoop the avocado out into the bowl and toss lightly with the dressing.

Core and chop the tomatoes.

Share a little with your helper, if he has been a good boy.  

He adores tomatoes! 

Mince your pepper, removing the seeds if you would prefer your salsa to be less spicy.  

Peel and dice the onion.

Trim the tough stalks off of your bunch of cilantro.  Chop the leaves roughly.

Crumble your feta cheese, if purchased whole.  

Add the tomatoes, pepper, onion, cilantro and crumbled feta to the avocado bowl.  Mix everything gently.

Chill, covered, in the refrigerator, until ready to serve.  If you can leave it for half an hour or more, that would be good since it allows the flavors time to merge.  

Serve with warm toasted pita wedges or tortilla chips.

Enjoy!