Chinese Marinated Pork with Peanut Noodles

After the success of my Chinese Chicken Noodle Soup, I decided to venture further into the world of Chinese-style cooking.

Having gone through a recent Peanut Butter *on everything* phase, I salivated when I spotted this recipe (from the Nigella Express cookbook) for Sesame Peanut Noodles.

A perfect accompaniment for my meat dish…

As you may already know, I love my marinades (Tuscan Lemon Chicken or Honey Soy Salmon, anyone?). I fancied trying a nice Chinese style pork marinade this time. Pork is underrated, I think. And so much cheaper than chicken or beef!

I found a cracker on the Allrecipes.co.uk website, but have adapted it ever so slightly to suit myself.

I’d encourage any keen novice cook to deviate from a recipe; it’s good to experiment!

So, I did my marinade first. You can make this the night before, if you’re super organised:

Ingredients (Serves 4):

• 500g pork loin steak (you can use pork chops if you’d prefer)
• 100ml light soy sauce
• 2 x tbsp Worcester sauce
• 6 x garlic cloves, put through the crusher
• 1 x tbsp sesame oil
• 1 x tbsp whole black peppercorns
• juice of one whole lemon

First, I mixed everything together in my dish, minus the pork. It smelled terrific.

I then thoroughly coated my meat in the marinade. Get it all nice and rubbed in. Cover with cling film and leave to marinate in the fridge for at least an hour (preferably overnight).

When it was time to cook, I removed the cling film and put the dish into a preheated oven at 190 degrees for 40 mins.

With around 20 minutes left to go, I set about making these gorgeous noodles to go with it:

Ingredients (Serves 4):

For the dressing:

• 2 x tbsp toasted sesame oil
• 1 x tbsp light soy sauce
• 3 x tbsp sweet chilli sauce (ok… it was more like three BIG squirts)
• 100g wholenut peanut butter
• juice of half a lime

For the noodle salad:

• 120g pack of mangetout & babycorn
• 100g beansprouts
• 1 red pepper (deseeded and diced)
• 2 x spring onions (finely sliced)
• 4 x medium egg noodle nests
• handful of fresh, chopped coriander
• sesame seeds (as many as you’d wish to sprinkle at the end)

First, I soaked my egg noodles in boiled water for four minutes, before dunking into a bowl of iced water (if you have “ready to eat noodles”, you can skip this part), and set aside.

I made my peanut dressing, mixing the toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, sweet chilli sauce and peanut butter together, then squeezing in the lime juice. It doesn’t look pretty, but all good things…

… come to those who wait.

(Still not pretty, eh? It tastes good, I promise.)

I stir fried, in a little sesame oil, my mangetout, babycorn, red pepper and spring onions, for a couple of minutes.

In went the beansprouts and noodles for a further three minutes.

I drizzled over my peanut dressing, making sure to coat everything nicely. Get right in aboot it!

Time to get the pork out of the oven! Get everything plated up, before sprinkling over your sesame seeds and some lovely, fresh, chopped coriander. Mmmm…. voila!

Enjoy 🙂 x

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