Not Just a Man's World

While we were away on one of our walking trips we were having a horrid moment.  After three nights of pub dinners and a particularly gruelling couple of days of rain and unpleasant walking conditions we found ourselves staying at a B&B that allowed take-aways.  This is quite a rare occurrence and there was a tempting Thai menu on the sideboard.

We’d had enough of the steak and ale casseroles and pies and the chips and jacket potatoes, none of which really fit our diet but become a necessity when it’s the best thing on offer to recover from one day of walking and fuel up for the next one.  I hadn’t had any Thai food for a year and it was much longer for Chris, so we went for it.

It was an amazing meal.  We ordered three or four main dishes to share between us and a couple of rice portions.  By the end of it we agreed that we could have easily foregone on the rice and we were overwhelmingly taken by the simple nature of the foods – apparently all quite Paleo friendly.  On top of that the flavours were brilliant with huge diversity in the flavour between each dish.

So we came home fired up with the idea that I should cook more Thai dishes rather than Indian curries, since the Thai dishes had the benefit of speed over the Indian ones.  Of course, on further investigation I found that nearly every recipe contained fish sauce, oyster sauce or something similar, which I wasn’t sure about from a Paleo perspective (and I didn’t have in the house).  So it was back to making it up based on the flavours I’d tasted.  This recipe does contain gluten-free soy sauce though.  If you don’t want to use soy sauce at all then don’t cook this recipe.

This was the recipe from my first ever attempt and it was right on the mark.  Not only that but it’s really easy to do and the final cooking stage takes a matter of minutes.  Brilliant for a quick dinner.

Apologies for the non-Paleo nature of the photo.  I’m using mangetout to put nitrogen back into the soil at the allotment plot and it seems a waste to not eat it.  On balance I feel it’s not too bad on my diet or digestive system so it’s been our green veg of choice over the summer (mangetout is ridiculously productive).  In the recipe below I’ve substituted another green veg which works well in this – broccoli.

Paleo Thai ginger and chilli pork

Ingredients (serves 2-3):

3 pork loins, thinly sliced
2 large onions, chopped into fairly large chunks
1 ½ cups of broccoli, cut into tiny florets (they need to be able to soften slightly in stir fry in a short time)
½ bunch of spring onions (3-5 spring onions, depending on their thickness), sliced thickly
3 tbsp gluten-free soy sauce
Juice of half a lime
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1 inch ginger root, finely chopped
1 green chilli, deseeded and thinly sliced

Directions:

1. Half an hour before cooking mix together the soy sauce, lime juice, garlic, ginger and chilli and then mix together with the pork.  Cover (or mix together in a sandwich bag) and leave to marinade for 30 minutes.
2. When ready to cook, heat some oil in a pan until smoking.  Add the pork and marinade juices and stir-fry swiftly over the high heat for a couple of minutes until sealed all over.  You’ll need to keep it all moving lots while you do this.
3. Add the vegetables to the pan and continue to stir-fry on a high heat for another 3-5 minutes, keeping everything moving so that it doesn’t brown.  The aim is to get to the point where the vegetables are still crunchy but have the raw edge taken off them.
4. Serve immediately – be aware that the heat retained in the food will mean that the vegetables continue to soften up a bit once served up.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: pork chops in a spiced sauce
2. Paleo recipes: pork in mushroom cream sauce (primal)
3. Paleo recipes: honey glazed pork
4. Paleo recipes: Italian pork with lemon and garlic