Salt and pepper pork

I've made this a couple of times, it's really easy and tasty - zingy, really. You can get the Szechuan peppercorns in Chinese food shops, they're reddish and give an amazing flavour. Serve the dish with some salad leaves like iceberg or romaine lettuce.

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoonful of Szechuan peppercorns
• 1 tablespoonful of black peppercorns
• 500g of lean pork (shoulder or leg or, well, whatever a chop is made of)
• 2 tablespoonfuls of rapeseed or ground nut oil
• 2 tablespoonfuls of sea salt flakes
   

Method

1. Put the peppercorns into a pestle and grind them finely with a mortar. Mine weren't all that fine, to be honest.
2. Chop the pork into little cubes, and cut off any fat.
3. Mix the ground pepper with the pork and set aside for 20 minutes or so.
4. Heat the oil in a large frying pan or wok, until it starts to shimmer and smoke slightly.
5. Add the pork to the oil along with the salt.
6. Fry at a high heat, stirring, for about five minutes until the meat has started to brown in places.
7. It's done! Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon so that you don't get an oily dinner, and serve on top of a fresh crisp salad.

Thai pork salad

This salad is called 'larp'. No idea how to pronounce it, but who cares, this is light, fresh and tasty. I got the recipe from a booklet of summer salads by Jane Baxter, which came free in The Guardian. I doctored it slightly to account for some fussy eaters (including myself).

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon of brown rice
• 2 tablespoons of olive oil
• 400g of pork mince
• Half a red onion
• 2 fresh red chillies
• 1 small bunch of mint leaves
• 1 tablespoonful of fresh coriander
• 1 tablespoon of lemongrass paste
• The juice of 1 lime
• 1 pinch of paprika
• 2 romaine lettices

Method

1. Toast the rice in a dry pan. The grains start to pop, a bit like popcorn. At this point, put the rice into a pestle to cool down, then get a volunteer guest to grind it to powder.
2. Heat the oil in the pan, and fry the pork for five minutes.
3. Drain the cooked pork on kitchen paper and set aside to cool.
4. Chop the onion, chillies, mint and coriander finely.
5. Roughly chop the lettice.
6. When the pork is cool, mix it with the lemongrass paste, paprika, onion, chillies, mint, coriander and lime juice.
7. Sprinkle the ground rice on top, and serve with the lettice.