Aka bánh cua chiên if I didn’t screw up my Vietnamese… Grandma showed me how to do this–then I proceeded to forget most of what she’d said, and this is my attempt to recreate the recipe at home…

You’ll need:
-240g crab meat, coarsely chopped
-1 tsp salt (or 1 tsp nước mắm)
-1 tsp sugar
-Sprinkling of pepper (optional)
-2 garlic cloves, chopped or crushed
-2 shallots, sliced

-1 egg
-50g batter mix (mine says bột bánh cóng. Sometimes sold as tempura mix or batter mix in Asian markets, and basically some combination of rice and wheat flour and thickeners such as cornflour or tapioca starch. A quick googling using my newly-found Vietnamese-fu tells me that you can get the batter mix by mixing four fifths rice flour and one fifth wheat flour, so that’d work out as 40g rice flour, 10g wheat flour and 1 tsp of cornstarch [1])
-3 tblsp water

Dipping sauce: your choice of sriracha sauce, or some other dip. I used Mai Pham’s sweet soy sauce because I had leftovers in the fridge. Basically, mix all the ingredients listed below, let it rest for 10 minutes, and serve at room temperature.
-3 tblsp sweet soy sauce
-2 tblsp water
-1 tblsp minced ginger
-1 tsp ground chili paste (tương ớt tỏi)
-2-3 Thai bird chilies, cut into thin rings

For the fritters:

Fry the garlic and the shallots together for about 30s, until fragrant. Mix the crab, the salt, sugar, pepper and garlic/shallots together, and leave together for a bit. Taste a bit, and adjust salt/sugar if needed.

Meanwhile, mix the egg, the batter mix and the water: the result should be a thickish dough. Add the crab mixture, and stir until well coated.

Heat up about 3 tblsp. oil in a wok or frying pan.

Take a tablespoon (NOT the round, deep ones you use for measuring, but the actual soup spoons that you use for eating. It’s important to have something elongated and shallow), and scoop out from the mixture. Dump this in the wok. It’ll be a bit messy at first, but then the heat will kick in, and the mixture will congeal together as it cooks. Repeat until the pan is full. Turn over after a few minutes, when the bottom part is golden. Fry on the other side.

Drain on paper towels, and put the next batch in.

The proper way to serve this is as a snack with the dipping sauce; however, you can also eat this with rice and some fried vegetables (we used peppers).

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[1] I’m aware there are different batter mixes for different dishes, but quite frankly, for the use I’m putting this to, this doesn’t matter much.

OK, I realise I shouldn’t be posting quite so many recipes, but I couldn’t resist this one when Anh put it online as part of the Delicious Vietnam blogging event (a collection of blog posts celebrating the food of Vietnam, which incidentally has my own bì cuốn–and which netted me Luke Nguyen’s Indochine cookbook when I won the prize draw!).

Bánh chuối nướng literally means grilled banana cake (see how my vocabulary is improving? ), and it looks something like this:

Have I got your attention now?

(recipe under the cut)
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(aka gà xào dầm gừng sả, lit. fried chicken with pickled ginger and lemongrass)

Yes, it looks gooey (that would be the cornstarch plus a liberal appliance of high heat), but it’s so very yummy. The flavours of the lemongrass, ginger and vinegar all combine for an explosion of taste right where it matters. My sis’s favourite dish when she was younger. Not my favourite dish (I tend more towards the shrimp and crab end of the spectrum), but it’s still such good comfort food.

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(I know, bánh ướt thịt nướng doesn’t translate to that–means “wet cakes with grilled beef”, but it makes for a good dish title )

I found this recipe in Bach Ngo’s The Classic Cuisine of Vietnam (a book which, incidentally, I heartily recommend). It’s an awesome way of melding lemongrass and sesame, two very yummy ingredients. I suspect, from comparing the name and the final result, that I’ve missed something (a bánh ướt is a wet rice paper wrap, kind of like bánh cuốn, whereas the original recipe wraps the meat in dried bánh trắng rice papers–like the ones for spring rolls. But I might have missed something there, quite possibly by misinterpreting the book…), but what the heck, it’s still awesome to eat! The book offers to roll it up in rice papers, but since the batch I made was so large, the H and I ended up exploring variations: we served it with bún, and also with rice and salad and herbs.

And our beef with rice and salad (yes, the brownish patch of blurriness in the uppper left-hand patch of the picture is the H, who was too hungry to wait until I’d finished the pictures)

(more behind the cut, to spare you the pictures and lengthy text)
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ETA: following Ravenous Couple’s suggestion, I’m making this my entry for the Delicious Vietnam blogging event. Delicious Vietnam, co-founded by Anh and Hong and Kim of Ravenous Couple, is basically a celebration of Vietnamese cuisine–recipes and love paeans to this wonderful food. December is the last edition, hosted by Anh–if you want to cook up Vietnamese food, get going to win fabulous prizes (and cook awesome food, naturally. It’s kind of a win-win situation).

OK, it’s hard to explain the appeal of this, so I’ll start with a picture of the finished dish rather than a close-up of the meat:

(rolls, courtesy of Flickr and stu_spivack).

Now that I have you salivating…

Bì cuốn is a perennial favourite of mine, but (at least in France), it’s not easily found in Vietnamese restaurants; and the recipes for this are few and far between. I ended up translating mine from a Vietnamese cooking website [1]. Bì means “pork skin”, and cuốn, of course, refers to anything that is rolled. And that’s what you get: cooked, shredded pork with pork rinds to give it a nice crunchiness, all wrapped up in a fabulous salad-rich roll, and dipped in nước mắm. Doesn’t it sound awesome?

So, onwards to the recipe!
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Was saving a proto-draft of a short story, and realised that all my temporary story titles were either the main character’s names (“Red Station” was initially called “Linh” after one of the two main characters), or the setting (“Breath of the Nine Dragons” remained “The Mekong story” for quite a bit). Hum, wonder what that says about me?

In other news… We had a friend over for dinner, and cooked a delicious duck magret. If anyone is interested, here is the recipe. It actually feeds four people rather than three.
-2 duck magrets (100g meat/person, or thereabouts)
-2 tablespoons liquid honey
-2 tablespoons sesame oil

Mix honey and sesame oil to form a thickish marinade (if too thick, add a little hot water to dissolve the honey). Marinate for about 30 minutes. Then fish the meat out, set it in a frying pan over medium heat for 3-4 minutes on each side, until the pan is full of grease. Pour out the grease, deglaze the pan with a little hot water, and put the meat back in, as well as the marinade. Wait a few minutes for the sauce to thicken.

Grill 2 tablespoons sesame seeds in a dry pan over high heat (careful, they burn fast).

Slice the meat in small, artistic amounts, and serve with the sesame seeds and a little of the sauce. Goes wonderfully with homemade mashed potatoes [1].

(generic pic off Flickr which looks like our magret–I was hardly going to stop while serving the food and take pictures–friend would have looked at us very oddly)

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[1]Not Thankgiving fare, I know, but then I don’t exactly celebrate. I hope everyone who is celebrating is having a fabulous time, though.

Just a reminder that you have until Nov. 1st to enter the Master of the House of Darts competition, which comes with lots of neat prizes . You can enter via a comment or a repost, but for the best chance to win, don’t forget you can make up an Aztec recipe! So far, we’ve had prickly pear juice, chicken mixiotes, Aztec brownies, poultry with spicy fruit sauce, and gummy hearts that look like real hearts (not a recipe per se, but good enough as Aztec food ). Come and join in the fun, either here or here!

(the less experiences cooks can also tell me who their favourite character in Obsidian and Blood is )

(mostly posting this because a couple of people, including desperance, were interested. This is cooking 101–I knew how to do this before I left my parents’ house, and God knows I knew next to nothing cooking-wise back then–so don’t expect any great revelations…)

So… rice. I was 20, I think, when I realised that the way I’d learnt to cook rice didn’t correspond to what the majority of French people expected. The French way of cooking rice is a bit like cooking pasta: boil water with salt, put rice in water, drain in a colander.

Which is pretty close to a heresy in my book (and in a looot of other people’s books if they’re not French), so as I promised: here’s the way I cook rice. As usual, making no particular claims; just what I learnt (and adjusted).

Picking your rice: what I always get is jasmine rice, the new crop if it’s that time of the year (though be aware the new crop isn’t as dry as the older ones, which means you might need slightly less water. We’ll come back to that later). You can cook jasmine rice on a stove with a basic nonstick pan; some varieties, such as Japanese rice and glutinous rice, can’t be handled that way (you need to steam it in a special container, or to have a rice cooker).
Whatever you pick, get starchy rice, and not the varieties that come with the starch all but removed like Uncle Ben’s or the stuff that’s on Western supermarket shelves. Arborio is also unsuitable for this; and I’ve had variable luck with Basmati, which sometimes has a tendency to burn the bottom of the pan; I suspect the rice needs way more water than the jasmine, but I could be wrong about this…

Storage: store rice in a cool dry place, away from light. You don’t want beasties getting into it; otherwise it’ll keep almost forever, but will lose its fragrance as time passes (I once ate rice that was 3-4 years old. Not bad, but kind of funky–like everything was off with it). My maternal grandmother mixes 9/10 jasmine rice, 1/10 glutinous rice; which gives a nicer texture once it’s cooked.

Rinsing rice: you need to rinse the rice before you cook it, to get rid of the excess starch. Rinsing is probably a misnomer, because it’s more a case of washing. Basically, take the amount of rice you want, put it in a casserole dish or a bowl, put some water, swirl the rice around a bit until the water gets opaque. Dump the water, put more water, rinse again, and so on for a few rounds. Most of the time I stop at 4, but that’s because I’m lazy. (I was always told 7 times was the right number). A lot of cookbooks will advise you to rinse the rice until the water runs clear. That’s an exaggeration: the water never gets clear. (rice is mostly starch, and the water gets clouded with starch. If it didn’t, it would be because you’d removed the starch altogether…). You HAVE to rinse the rice, otherwise the flavour will be lost in the starch excess. Especially jasmine rice, which has a delicate aroma that is easily crushed.

Quantities? I’m not crazy about the imperial system, but rice is definitely a staple you measure by volume, and not by weight. I use 300mL of uncooked rice for a 2-person meal, which is 1.5 rice cooker cup (note that a rice cooker cup is around 200mL, unlike an imperial measuring cup).

Adding water: now that the rice has been washed, put it into your pan. A nice, thick bottom is a good idea, in order to spread the heat evenly; and a nonstick pan is also a good idea, because there’s still starch in your rice, and the grains are going to cling like limpets to the bottom of the pan. Then measure out 1.25 times the volume of rice in water: if you put 1 cup rice, add 1.25 cup water, and so on. (I tend to adjust a bit depending on how old–and dry–the rice has got).

Steam cooking: cook on high heat (the water should be boiling) until the “eyes” form. The rice is still wet, but lots of little holes are beginning to form as the steam lifts from the grains.

Final cooking: when the “eyes” form, turn the heat to the lowest setting you have. Cover, and leave to cook for about 20 minutes. Don’t lift the lid during that time, or the steam will escape: I was always told this would ruin the rice. I suspect what really happens is that the water goes away, and the rice burns on the bottom. Plus, dry rice just doesn’t taste very good.

A word of warning: I’ve not tried any of that on a gas stove (me and gas don’t get along), so you might need to adjust a bit. Also, from my mom’s experience, cooking rice on an induction stove is a little trickier. I suspect it’s because the temperature of the pan adjusts more or less instantly when you turn off the heat, and the final cooking stage is much more difficult when you can’t count on the residual heat from the pan itself. If anyone wants to chip in with induction stove experience, feel free!

And if you have any questions/comments/disagreements, please do post them.

OK, so no pictures, but my latest cooking experiment, a quick way of jazzing up Asian egg noodles when the cupboard is (nearly) bare. This goes well with strong-tasting dishes (I wouldn’t advise serving it with something bland, as it’s somewhat bland itself).

You will need:
-two nests (half a packet) egg noodles
-1 teaspoon ground ginger
-1 tablespoon chili-garlic sauce
-1 tablespoon fish sauce, OR a solid pinch of salt, OR 1 tablespoon oyster sauce (slightly different effects depending on what you use for salt content).
-1 tablespoon sesame oil
-1 garlic clove, chopped (or to taste)
-handful of spring onions, green and white part separately, chopped into little pieces

1. Cook the noodles in boiling water. There’s a trick to that if you don’t want an unholy tangled mess, which, first, take the nests from the wrapper and comb through them to untangle (do NOT dump into the boiling water tangled, or it will only get worse). Second, after you dump the noodles into boiling water, stir regularly, until the boiling starts again. Should be 2 minutes. Don’t leave more than that, or they get over-soggy. Then rinse the noodles under running water until most of the starch has gone away (it’s hard to describe; but mostly the noodles don’t feel quite so sticky). Keep untangling as you can. Personally, I’ve never quite managed to keep them separate, but that probably reflects more on my general cooking skills than anything else. If you’re not going to use the noodles straight away, leave them in cold water until needed.

2. Put a wok/frying pan with oil on high heat. Add the chopped garlic, the white part of the green onions, and fry for about 30s, until fragrant. Drain the noodles, and put them in the work. Swirl and keep untangling. Work in the chili-garlic sauce, the fish sauce/salt, and the ground ginger, making sure to mix well so all noodles get equal amounts of spices. Do this until the moisture is all but gone and the noodles are starting to brown. Then add in the spring onions, work in the sesame oil, and take off the heat.

Serve with a dish with a strong taste, as they’re still somewhat bland (it’s a bit my equivalent of white rice for egg noodles).

Also, having been hit by real life (again), this blog is going to remain in sort of in zombie mode for one further week. I could say I’m getting lots of fascinating ideas for blog posts, but mostly all I want now is some chocolate, a hot tea and a silly movie.

PS: btw, how many readers of this blog would be interested in a post on basic rice handling and cooking? I’ve never done it because it seems so obvious and I’ve been doing this my entire life, but it seems wrong to post so many Asian recipes and never tackle this at all… (hint: it is NOT about boiling a lot of water with a pinch of salt, flinging the rice in it, and cooking until the grains are perfectly separate).

Not recipes per se, but my latest escapades…

Tomato sauce: was cooking ravioli, and quickly throwing together a tomato sauce from 210g of tomato paste. Which, of course, tastes horrible. I followed H’s advice and put in a tablespoon of sugar, but it still didn’t work. Mmm, time to get creative… I had a jar of dried tomato paste in the fridge, so I threw a heaped teaspoon of that in the mix; taste the thing, still wasn’t satisfied. It lacked… umami, for want of a better word? I swear I reached for the bottle of nước mắm, but the thought of having a fishy-tasting tomato sauce stopped me at the last minute. Fortunately, I had fermented soy paste in the fridge–you can see where this is going, right? Threw in a little more sugar in addition to the teaspoon of soy paste, and pronounced myself satisfied. I then very carefully asked the H what he thought of the tomato sauce before admitting what I’d put into it… (he liked it, but his enthusiasm wavered a bit when I explained the composition process).

Bò bún: it helps if you think of bò bún (and other bún dishes) as a giant salad–yes, there’s meat in it, and warm rice vermicelli, but it’s not really a hot dish (and please please don’t microwave it, as I’ve seen a number of takeaway places do. It tastes horrible, and the soy’s gone all limp). So, accordingly, I made my bò bún with honey-dipped beef & shallot for the meat, and salad, soy and the remnants of a cucumber for the veggies. Mmmm… (also, it’s not real bò bún in my book unless the rice vermicelli are swimming in a ton of nước mắm–think of it as vinaigrette, except that it’s not a dribble you put on the salad, but several tablespoons…)