What to Cook This Weekend from Papaya Salad to Oxtail Stew

My suggestions for what to cook this weekend include everything from our char siu pork omelette recipe and a green papaya salad to a Spanish rabo de toro oxtail stew. I’m also suggesting a Cambodian pickled lime soup with chicken and my grandmother’s traditional Russian beef stew recipe for solyanka, which is what I’m making for dinner on Sunday night.

The monsoon season or rainy season seems to have ended here in Cambodia – it’s very unpredictable and can end anywhere between end of October and mid-November, but we’ve had a few days without rain and there’s no wet weather predicted for the week ahead.

It’s autumn or fall here in Cambodia but the weather has still been warm, yet this evening there was a chill in the air that to me says an early winter is coming. Sure, it might get humid again but I’m going to take the cool weather while I can get it and use that as an excuse to make some soups and stews.

If you’re a first-time visitor to Grantourismo, What to Cook this Weekend is a very random weekly-ish recipe series with ideas for often easy, occasionally challenging, but always memorable weekend meals. We publish the series weekly, unless life gets in the way.

My weekend cooking suggestions for you might include dishes we’re cooking here at home here in Cambodia, which we think you might enjoy, recipes that we’re developing and testing out for our various cookbooks, or recipes we’d like to cook if we had the time, which we think you’d like to try.

All of our recipes come from our recipe archives, which are jam-packed with thousands of recipes: from family recipes and nostalgic recipes from our childhoods to recipes for dishes from around the world that we learnt to cook on our travels and dishes that we cook at home here in Siem Reap.

Now, before you scroll down to my suggestions for what to cook this weekend, I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-funded. If you’ve enjoyed our recipes, please consider supporting our work by buying us a coffee. We’ll put that coffee money toward cooking ingredients for recipe testing.

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What to Cook This Weekend from Green Papaya Salad to Rabo de Toro Oxtail Stew

Saturday Breakfast – Char Siu Pork Omelette Recipe

If you haven’t made Terence’s char siu pork omelette recipe, which was last week’s edition of Weekend Eggs, our 12-year-old series of recipes for egg dishes from around the world, then I encourage you to make it for breakfast today.

If you’ve made and enjoyed Terence’s very moreish char siu pork recipe – or this decadent crab omelette recipe, which is one of our most popular eggs recipes, and this soft scrambled eggs with Chinese barbecue pork and chives – then you’re going to love his char siu pork omelette.

Terence created the recipe to use up leftover char siu pork, so if you don’t happen to have some Chinese barbecued pork tucked away in the fridge as we did this week, then I recommend you make that first. If you’re up for a second cooking project, make some homemade Sriracha sauce too.

Many home cooks think a pan is a pan – but it isn’t when it comes to an omelette pan. To achieve the correct shape for a perfect omelette, you need the right pan. For a four egg omelette like the omelette you’ll be making for this recipe, you need a 20cm (8-inch) omelette pan. These pans have steeper and taller sides than many all-purpose fry pans.

Char Siu Pork Omelette Recipe with Crunchy Sprouts, Chinese Celery Leaf and Sriracha

Saturday Lunch – Green Papaya Salad Recipe from Cambodia

I’ve been craving Cambodia’s bok lahong or nhoam lahong, Cambodia’s famous green papaya salad, all week, so today’s lunch is this fragrant, crunchy salad that’s a little funky, a little spicy, a bit sour and salty, and a tad sweet.

Typically eaten for lunch or as a late afternoon snack, this bespoke Cambodian salad is made to order, and has cousins in Laos (Tum Som), Thailand (Som Tum), and Vietnam (Gỏi Đủ Đủ).

Here in Cambodia, there are green papaya salad stalls at markets, vendors make bok lahong to order from mobile carts they park on the roadside, and you can order the salad at restaurants, but I like to make at home. It’s not only scrummy, it’s also a cinch to prepare.

A wooden mortar and pestle is best for pounding salads such as these, as well as dips and relishes, as you want to soften them or bruise them, you don’t want to pound them to a paste.

But if you don’t have one, yes, you can use the kind of stone or granite mortar and pestle that’s typically used for making curry pastes and Cambodian kroeungs, the herb and spice pastes that form the basis for so many Cambodian dishes.

It’s also a fantastic salad for a Cambodian or Southeast Asian style picnic or barbecue, and we have lots of Cambodian barbecue recipes to go with it.

Cambodian Green Papaya Salad Recipe – How to Make Cambodia’s Bok Lahong

Saturday Dinner – Rabo de Toro Oxtail Stew Recipe from Jerez in Southern Spain

This recipe for a melt-in-your-mouth Rabo de Toro oxtail stew will warm you up tonight. It comes from Jerez in Southern Spain, where Terence first learnt to make the dish way back in 2010 on the year-round global grand tour that launched Grantourismo.

Our recipe makes a classic slow-braised dish that needs a long cooking time, but it will reward you with rich, robust flavours. The recipe is inspired by the rabo de toro that we ate at Bar Juanito in Jerez.

Just like the Moroccan tagine Terence made in Essaouira, Morocco, this rabo de toro is not a dish you start thinking about making at 6.30pm and expect to serve the same night. It requires hours of slow cooking so get to the butcher and put it on as soon as you get back.

And if you love a good old-fashioned traditional beef stew, do check out this collection of our best stew recipes.

Rabo de Toro Oxtail Stew Recipe from Jerez in Southern Spain

Sunday Breakfast – Best Asian Eggs Recipes

For Saturday breakfast inspiration why not browse our latest collection of best Asian egg recipes for breakfast, brunch, lunch, snacks, and dinner, which I just compiled this morning?

The round-up includes everything from a half-boiled eggs recipe for the classic Singaporean and Malaysian kopitiam eggs, a Chinese tea eggs recipe for marbled eggs steeped in an aromatic stock of tea, spices and soy, Japanese egg donburi recipes, a Thai son-in-law eggs recipe, and Indonesian boiled egg curry recipes.

I’ve also added recipes for egg bhurji, a delicious classic Indian spicy scrambled eggs with a little twist courtesy of a different scrambled egg technique, and an akuri recipe for Parsi style scrambled eggs with tomato, coriander and green chillies.

If you’re a lover of savoury egg dishes then you’re going to love this collection, which I created for this week’s edition of Weekend Eggs. It doesn’t include all our Asian eggs recipes, just a selection of some of my favourites.

You’ll have to browse our Weekend Eggs archive for more egg recipes from Asia, the region we’ve called home for the last 12 years.

Best Asian Egg Recipes for Breakfast, Brunch, Lunch and Dinner from Weekend Eggs

Sunday Lunch – Cambodian Pickled Lime Soup Recipe

For Sunday lunch, I’m making this Cambodian pickled lime soup with chicken recipe for sngor ngam ngov, a slightly sweet, slightly sour, citrus-driven soup brimming with succulent chicken and aromatics such as lemongrass and coriander.

It’s one of my favourite Cambodian soups and I don’t make it nearly enough. Yet it’s easy to prepare, and it’s a nourishing and comforting soup that’s made for these challenging times, and it’s made to be shared.

You’ll need fish sauce. While fish sauce is used in Cambodia, not everyone likes the funky-salty taste of fish sauce, so, yes, you can use salt, but fish sauce is best.

We try to use Cambodian fish sauce with Cambodian dishes, but that’s harder to find outside Cambodia, so by all means use a Thai fish sauce or Vietnamese fish sauce, which are more widely available and available online.

Palm sugar provides balance and Cambodian palm sugar (we use it in its creamed-honey like form) provides earthy-sweet flavours. If you don’t have access to palm sugar, you could use brown sugar or raw sugar, but will probably want to use a little less than we recommend.

You’ll find pickled limes in brine in your Asian market, supermarket or grocery store. You’ll probably have a greater chance of finding brands of pickled limes from Thailand such as Golden Thai Kinnaree or Thai Dancer. If you can’t find these, you can use Moroccan preserved lemons. Or you could make your own pickled limes or lemons.

Comforting Cambodian Pickled Lime Soup with Chicken Recipe for Sngor Ngam Ngov

Sunday Dinner – Russian Beef Stew Recipe

I’ve been craving this traditional Russian beef stew recipe for solyanka, which makes a delicious hearty stew or heavy soup that’s a little sour, a little sweet, and was a whole lot saltier back in its day, so this is what I’m making for dinner on Sunday night.

I’m missing my Russian-Ukrainian family and the boisterous Sunday dinners around my grandparents dining table, so I’m going to cook up something of a mini-feast of the kind my grandmother used to make this Sunday.

I’ll make a Russian garden salad, maybe some stuffed cabbage rolls, and definitely this beetroot potato salad. I might even make a batch of piroshki, as we have to do the long drive to Phnom Penh in a few days, so we can take some to eat on the way.

If you’re not nostalgic for Sunday family meals from the Seventies and there’s just the two of you, you could easily serve this with mash potatoes and a green salad – rice works too; as does pasta – and you’ll probably have leftovers for the next night, which you can also freeze.