We were treated to some amazing Asian food a few weeks ago when we visited an ex-colleague of mine. He and his wife have their roots in Hong Kong and they have also travelled in Japan a lot, so I think we were served some pretty good stuff by any standards. Oh and she's a trained chef.

One of husbands favourites out of all the goodies we were given that evening were the crispy deep fried Vietnamese prawn and turkey spring rolls. And I think they probably were mine too. I asked my friend for the recipe and he gave me the one they'd loosely followed as well as the recipe for the Japanese gyozas which also were amazing and which I will try at some point.

My sister has also really gotten into Asian food and it's been all bamboo steamers, katsucurry and chopsticks for quite a while with her. Only yesterday she WhatsApped me a picture of a gyoza miso soup she'd made for lunch. She doesn't do it to make me feel inferior. I know because she also shares the details of experiments that go wrong. Like the dumplings even the visiting dog refused to eat. To make it worse the dog was a labrador, I'm not sure I've ever seen a lab refuse anything.

But I decided to start my Asian exploration with the spring rolls as husband really loved them, and it's our special food as well. When we first started going out we'd often finish the night getting those large £1 veggie spring rolls from a little take away near Leicester Square. So I want to surprise him when he comes back with amazing tasty and crispy spring rolls. Although I suspect it won't be a total surprise as I already divulged this to all in Facebook so he will have seen it.

I didn't have any turkey mince so decided to go meatless. Also because of my current obsession with losing some weight I obviously had to modify the recipe. I left out the noodles and just used prawns and a stir fry vegetable mix of carrots, cabbage and edamame beans. I deep-fried half of the batch and oven-baked the other half to see how much difference the deep-frying makes. Sadly it does make a bit of a difference. The oven baked ones were absolutely ok, but just not quite as nice and crunchy and crispy as the deep-fried ones.

But like my bamboo steamer wielding sister said when I proudly sent her the pics, we are not likely to eat these that often, so it doesn't really matter if I deep-fry them when we do.

My Vietnames spring rolls two ways, the oven baked ones to the left and the deep-fried to the right.

I particularly loved the dipping sauce. I accidentally put in some shallot. I thought it was on the recipe, but it wasn't. But actually it works really well. So feel free to add shallot or leave it out.

This is the original recipe and my friend has substituted the pork with turkey mince and also used spring roll pastry rather than rice paper as did I.

My friend's wife (the chef!) - had commented on the picture I put on Facebook, that my spring rolls "look legit"! Now I know how the MasterChef competitors feel when Marcus Waring likes their sorrel sorbet or pigeon bonbons.

Vietnamese prawn and vegetable spring rolls with nuac cham dipping sauce

(makes about 10 medium sized spring rolls)

10 sheets of spring roll pastry
200 grams of uncooked prawns, deveined and finely chopped
1 cup of stir fry vegetables (cabbage, carrot etc), cut into thin strips
1 egg
2 tbsp fish sauce
1 shallot, finely chopped
1 tsp sugar
Salt
Pepper

Nuoc Cham dipping sauce

1/2 shallot, finely chopped
3 tbsp fish sauce
1/2 - 1 red chilli, finely chopped
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
2 tbsp freshly squeezed lime juice
1 small grated clove of garlic
2 tsp sugar

Mix the chopped prawns and vegetables in a bowl, add in the egg, fish sauce, shallot, sugar, salt and pepper and mix well.

Take one sheet of spring roll pastry and add filling to the bottom of the sheet forming it into an even rectangular shape (there are great videos to show if you're not sure how to do this). Fold the sheet over the filling and fold in the sides neatly, roll all the way up. Brush the end with a tiny around of water to  seal the roll.

Keep both the stack of pastry sheets as well as ready spring rolls covered until you've done all. Otherwise they may dry.

To bake in the oven brush the spring rolls with vegetable oil on both sides and place on a wire rack in a 220 C oven. Turn a few times while baking. Bake for about 15 minutes or until crisp and brown on both sides.

To deep-fry, place 2 cm of vegetable oil in a sauce pan. Heat until small bubbles form when you place a handle of a wooden spoon in the oil. Place the rolls in the oil, don't overcrowd the pan. Once they are a nice colour on the bottom turn them around and cook on the other side. This should only take about 5 minutes. Take the rolls out and place on paper towels to soak some of the oil.

For the nuoc cham mix all the ingredients together, and that's it - you're done.

Serve the spring rolls with lettuce and the nuoc cham.

And so this was Christmas, another year gone. Tomorrow is first day back at work, yikes.  We took all the Christmas decorations down today, very disciplined we are. Well, technically we are not, husband is. But I did all the work inside the house, took down the different lights around the house and packed away the other decorations, stripped the Christmas tree and folded it back into it's box. We have an artificial one you see, because as much as I love a real tree and the smell of it, it makes me too sad to kill a real tree and then just discard it after Christmas. So artificial it is and it is quite pretty and has served us 7 or 8 Christmases I think. Every year it seems to be harder to get it back into it's original box. I don't think it wants to go.

And husband took down all the decorations outside. It's important we have very clearly agreed areas of responsibility, because he is very stubborn when it comes to the methodology and order he wants to proceed and he doesn't take my (excellent) advice at all. So during our years together we have learned to do our separate bits and just occasionally help the other who has got completely tangled in wires. Otherwise we keep to our individual areas. Apparently lots of passers by stopped and told husband how much they had enjoyed our lights while he was working there in our front garden in his cute bright red reindeer Christmas jumper. The man is always dressed up for the occasion.


I am determined not to feel sad about this or dwell in thoughts about how much I was looking forward to the break, all the plans I had and how happy I was at the prospect of two weeks of freedom and cooking. No, none of that. I will look forward to the longer days, summer and BBQ season.

Luckily we've been relatively sensible this holiday season and I've managed to squeeze some running and gym in, so I am not the size of a house. That's a comfort.

Nevertheless I still wanted to do a light dinner today. We ate a lot yesterday. We met up with my old work colleagues, we were 10 adults and 3 kids and we had a very noisy and fun day. We met in Henley-on-Thames where one of the group lives to have dinner at his house, but first met for lunch in a local pub, The Little Angel. service was a bit haphazard and slow, but food was very good. It was soup of the day for starters for both of us, husband had chicken for his main course and I had a prawn and chorizo linguine, which was very nice.

We then had a walk around the pretty town centre and by the river where there was a little play area for kids and a coffee shop with tea for husband. And we then slowly made our way to my friend's house where we were given drinks while he and his wife started preparing the most amazing Asian food. Their family roots are in Hong Kong, so they cooked a few things from different Asian countries. There were Korean vegetarian dumplings with a dipping sauce, Chinese lettuce wraps with two different fillings - a vegetarian tofu and a turkey mince one, Vietnamese fried spring rolls, Chinese aromatic duck pancakes, Japanese Gyozas and a very clever noodle salad made with sweet potato noodles, which thank God they hadn't done themselves from scratch. There was enough cooking genius there to make anyone feel inadequate already. Although I had no time for such thoughts because I was busy stuffing my face.


The dessert was perfect too, after all the spices and tastes, some fresh melon and mango and a delicate and not too sweet mango swiss roll. Our hostess is actually a trained pastry chef, so it was faultless.


Husband loved it all too and was going on about the spring rolls all the way from Henley back to London. So I asked my friend for the recipe and he send me this one. They had substituted pork with turkey mince, because several of the party don't eat pork and also used spring roll pastry rather than rice paper wrappers, which gives me confidence. I once tried vegetarian spring rolls, but they came out all wrong, they sort of exploded a bit, so they looked awful, but they also tasted horrible and the texture was all wrong. So not a roaring success really. I'm sure was the rice paper.

My today's salad is not pretending to be a completely classic Nicoise salad, but utilises most of the same ingredients. I had some string beans but they were looking a bit sad and past their best before date, so I left them out. And I used quail eggs rather than normal eggs, because I happened to have some. Not that I am the kind of person who just happens to have quail eggs lying around any time, but I bought some for Christmas and hadn't used them.

I served the tuna from the pan rather that on top of the salad to keep it warm, but particularly if you leave it quite raw, it's nice to slice into strips and serve on the salad platter.

Pan seared fresh tuna steaks on Nicoise salad bed

Tuna:
2-3 tbsp olive oil
4 sustainable tuna steaks
Zest and juice of half a lime
Juice of half an orange
Splash of soy sauce
1 tsp dried oregano
Salt
Pepper
Vegetable oil and a knob of butter to fry
Lemon wedges to serve

Baby lettuce, romaine or iceberg lettuce
Rocket
Handful of small heirloom tomatoes or 2-3 large ones
2-3 spring onions
1 cucumber
Black olives
1 tbsp Cappers
5-6 anchovies
12 quail eggs or 4 chicken eggs
16 small salad potatoes (or new potatoes)
Fresh herb of choice, basil would work nicely, I used dill.

Dressing:
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Juice of half a lemon
Salt and pepper


Place the tuna steaks on a plate or bowl and add all the marinade ingredients. Make sure all steaks are evenly covered with the marinade. Leave to sit covered in the fridge for at least  a couple of hours.

To prepare the salad slice or chop your tomatoes and cucumber, you can core the cucumber if you like. Thinly slice the onion, pit the olives and chop the herbs.

Boil your potaoes in salted water until you can easily pierce them with a fork. Drain, drizzle with some olive oil and sprinkle on a pinch of the chopped herbs. Cover with kitchen towel to soak up the steam and keep warm until serving. You can add the to the salad whole or slice, half or quarter. I left mine whole because I wanted them to keep warm.

Hardboil the eggs. Bring water to boil and place eggs in water carefully with a spoon. Quail eggs take two and a half minutes and chicken eggs 10 minutes. Drain and leave for a minute then cover with cold water for a short while. Peal and half if using quail eggs, quarter if using chicken eggs.

Heat the oil and butter on a pan and sear the tuna steaks on high heat to your desired doneness. Tuna is supposed to be server raw inside, so it only needs a quick sear on both sides.

Assemble the salad on a large platter the way you like, either in layers or sections. Mix the dressing ingredients and drizzle over the salad. Cut the tuna into strips and serve on top of the salad, or serve as whole steaks from the pan.