Thai-style beef salad

This is a fast tasty and rather refreshing dish that you can make in a matter of minutes if you like. The thing is to have everything at hand when you make it and you will be fine. You want your beef hot and your salad as fresh as it can be so preparation is the key.

You will need

2 x 150g/5oz fillet tails

Vegetable oil

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

¼ head Chinese leaf

2 ripe tomatoes

2 banana shallots

½ cucumbers

3 spring onions

Handful fresh basil leaves

Handful fresh coriander

2 tsp palm sugar, from a 'cake' of sugar or golden caster sugar

1½-2 limes, juice only

90ml/3floz fish sauce

2 red bird's-eye chillies

Lime wedges

First in a big bowl make the dressing, take the palm sugar, lime juice and fish sauce and mix into bowl. You might want to great or crush the palm sugar if it from a cake as it needs to dissolve in the dressing. Once you have mixed that together then take the bird's-eye chillies and split them in half then slice them as fine as you can and add that to the dressing.

Now slice the Chinese leaf, roughly quarter the tomatoes, thinly slice the shallots, dice the cucumber, slice the spring onions and rip the basil and coriander and add then to the blow one at a time.

That only leave you your beef to cook. Now fillet tails are the tail end of the fillet of beef that is trimmed of before cutting the fillet in to steaks. It is perfect for this kind of salad. Cut the meat into thin strips, and then simply oil it and season with salt and pepper. Then in to a very hoy frying pan cook the meat until you have sealed the out the pinker the better but you might like it more well done.  Then tip the meat into the salad bowl and just toss everything together.

Finally just garnish with some lime wedges and sit back and enjoy a real salad with a nice kick to it.