Eating Spaghetti with Chopsticks

I had lunch with a couple of colleagues recently at this restaurant called Spaghetti Goemon. Spaghetti Goemon is a chain from Japan specialising in Japanese-styled pasta.

I was slightly amused that Spaghetti Goemon has this slogan - Eating Spaghetti with Chopsticks.

I didn't think eating spaghetti with chopsticks was anything special because in our house, we very often eat our pastas with chopsticks. (Having said that, the food at Spaghetti Goemon was pretty good! But that's for another post in the future.)

Back to spaghetti with chopsticks.

My mother-in-law likes to cook spaghetti with prawns, meat, garlic and Chinese celery.

This weekend, she was inspired to cook spaghetti with crayfish. This was really good - she fried quite a bit of garlic, then added the crayfish and other seafood. When the crayfish is almost done, she took them out and added the cooked spaghetti to the wok. Then, she seasoned the spaghetti with some salt and pepper and when everything is done, she added the seafood back to the wok, along with quite a bit of the pasta water and a generous sprinkling of chopped Chinese celery.

I really enjoyed this dish. It's as enjoyable as laksa spaghetti. Next on my to-cook list is cooking tom-yum spaghetti.

Green Mango Salad

I love all the refreshing salads I got to eat on my recent trip to Bangkok.

Since I didn't know what to do with the lone green mango I had in the fridge, I decided to make my own version of green mango salad.

Ingredients
1 green mango, shredded
1 garlic, minced1 small shallot, sliced finely
1 tsp of Thai chilli flakes (These are quite spicy, so add according to taste)
2 tsp of lime juice
Fish sauce to taste
A handful of peanuts and cashew nuts, toasted well
1 tbsp of dried shrimps,  washed and fried with a little oil

What I did
1. Mix the mango, garlic, shallot, lime juice and chilli flakes together
2. Add some fish sauce to taste
3. Mix in the dried shrimps and nuts just before serving

Enjoy!

 I really liked those green mango snacks you get to buy along the streets 

of Bangkok. You can eat them with some sticky, fishy sauce or pink sugar. 

Yummy!

Green Mango Salad with salted crabs - from the streets of Bangkok. Yummy!

Easy 3 Minutes Salad

This is one variation of my 3-minutes salad.

This is really really easy to make and extremely hard to go wrong.

All you need for this salad are:
- A large bowl of baby spinach
- A handful of raisins
- Some toasted sesame seeds
- A sprinkling of Japanese seaweed mixed seasoning (the kind you add to Japanese rice to make onigiri - mine is a mix of seaweed, bonito flakes and sesame seeds)
- Japanese sesame dressing

Mixed everything together and you get an appetizing, refreshing salad!

The Japanese seasoning mix - It comes well seasoned 

so you don't have to add any salt or seasoning to the salad

This salad can be made in different ways but with the same combination of Japanese seasoning and sesame seeds. For example, you can use:

- Rocket Leaves or Butterhead Lettuce

- Dried Cranberries instead of raisins

- Balsamic vinegar dressing instead of Japanese sesame dressing

You can also add some raw salmon slices to dress up this salad.. or go fruity with some canned peaches and cherry tomatoes.

Whatever the combination, it shouldn't take you a lot more than 3 minutes to put this salad together.