May 23

Com chien: fried rice

Tags: cooking experiments, , , , , , 2 Comments »
(aka cơm chiên)

This is my leftover dish, where I throw pretty much everything I have in the fridge together with some leftover rice. It recently benefitted from a great post by kitchen tigress on how to improve fried rice: namely, put in lots of unami flavour (nước mắm, shallots, dried shrimps, maggi sauce…). The post also covered lots of other interesting things to do to get the perfect fried rice, but I’m afraid my courage failed me there. I’m going to post the recipe that corresponds to the picture, but I honestly never make the same fried rice twice, as it so heavily depends on actual leftovers in my fridge. This is definitely a recipe that calls for experimentation and is pretty forgiving altogether.

I apologise for the fuzziness in the rice measurements–this is something I do by eye and with the rice cooker cup, and I’m well aware not everyone will have one of those around!

(if you need tips on how to cook the rice, see here)

Com chien: fried rice
Print
Recipe type: Main
Author: Aliette de Bodard
Prep time: 10 mins
Cook time: 10 mins
Total time: 20 mins
Serves: 4
A quick and simple way to recycle leftover rice.
Ingredients
  • 1.5 cup uncooked rice (careful, it’s the cup that comes with rice cookers, so that’s 270mL of rice) + 1 7/8 cup water (aka 340mL water), or the equivalent in cooked rice (basically, cooked rice for 3 people)
  • 2 tablespoons dried shrimps
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 tablespoon fish sauce
  • 140g corn kernels
  • 5-6 shallots
  • A few drops maggi sauce (optional)
Instructions
  1. Some time before starting the recipe, cook the rice (this is *really* best done a day ahead, which is why this is a great dish for leftover rice. Otherwise it gets a bit hard to actually fry the rice…)
  2. Beat the eggs and the fish sauce together. Mince the shallots as fine as you can.
  3. In a frying pan, put a little oil, and cook a proto-omelette (basically, you want the eggs firm, but in bits and pieces–sort of like scrambled eggs, but firmer). Put the cooked eggs aside.
  4. Put the shallots in the frying pan, and cook them until soft and fragrant. Then add the dried shrimps and the corn, and swirl a bit until they’re hot.
  5. Add more oil in the pan, and then the rice bit by bit, breaking it up as you go and making sure it’s well mixed with the garnish. Then add a few drops maggi sauce if using, give it a few more swirls, et voilà!
  6. Serve hot.
Notes

This is also great with little flecks of crab, or pretty much any combination you can think of (for once, I’d actually advise against garlic, because it doesn’t mesh so well with the eggs and fish sauce). If adding ingredients like chicken or pork, which have next to no umami, don’t forget to increase the amount of dried shrimps/shallots/maggi sauce!
(while in Vietnam, we ate this with the local Tet sausages, which made a great addition)

 

Apr 04

Caramelised pork

Tags: blog, cooking experiments, , , , , 9 Comments »
(OK, so, strictly speaking, this started out as thịt thưng, a dish of pork from Central Vietnam, which is similar to xá xíu in philosophy–it’s sugary and rich. But I misread the recipe in Bach Ngo’s Classic Cuisine of Vietnam, and cooked it entirely the wrong way. The final result bears no resemblance to the intended recipe, but it was so yummy it seemed too good to waste)

Caramelised pork

Caramelised pork
Print
Recipe type: Main
Author: Aliette de Bodard (adapted from Bach Ngo)
Prep time: 10 mins
Cook time: 25 mins
Total time: 35 mins
Serves: 4
A sweetly pungent dish, easily made
Ingredients
  • 250g pork shoulder or pork butt
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 2 shallots
  • 1.5 tablespoon sugar
  • 1 tablespoon fish sauce
  • 6 tablespoons water
  • 2 tablespoons light soy sauce
  • 3/8 teaspoon five spice powder
  • Sprinkling of black pepper
  • Cooking oil
Instructions
  1. In a mortar, mash together the garlic, shallots and sugar. Add the fish sauce, water, soy sauce, five spice powder, and black pepper.
  2. Slice the meat in small, chopstick-size chunks.
  3. Heat the oil in a heavy-bottom saucepan on high fire. Add the pork, stir until browned.
  4. Add the sauce mixture. Turn heat to medium high. Cover and cook for 15 minutes; uncover periodically to shift the meat around if needed.
  5. Take lid off, crank heat to high, and cook until the sauce has evaporated and the sugar has started caramelising.
  6. Serve with rice. (and stir-fried broccoli. Or dồ chua and sliced cucumber)

Mar 27

The best stir-fry broccoli recipe EVER

Tags: cooking experiments, , , , , 3 Comments »
OK, so this is the single best recipe for stir-fried broccoli I have seen anywhere. It’s simple, it’s fresh, and it brings out the taste of the vegetables wonderfully. It’s also the one recipe that makes the H crave broccoli (he hated broccoli when I steamed them, but now he’s practically begging me for some). I got it from Irene Kuo’s Key to Chinese Cooking, and made a few modifications (which basically amounted to varying the broth because Asian-style chicken broth can be freaking hard to find in France, and adding the stems into the recipe).

Stir-Fried Broccoli

The best stir-fry broccoli recipe EVER
Print
Recipe type: Side
Author: Irene Kuo
Prep time: 5 mins
Cook time: 5 mins
Total time: 10 mins
Serves: 2-4
Says it all in the title…
Ingredients
  • 1 bunch broccoli (about 2 pounds)
  • 3 tblsp oil
  • 2 quarter-sized ginger pieces
  • 1/4 tsp sugar
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tblsp toasted sesame oil
  • 1/2 cup chicken stock, vegetable stock, or water (well worth getting some stock, it enhances the flavour)
Instructions
  1. Prepare the broccoli: break off the flowerets, and get them down to manageable size (ie, cut them up in bits you can grasp with chopsticks, but no more. You don’t want broccoli purée, and this is very much a recipe that benefits from having whole flowerets inasmuch as it’s feasible). Take the big stem, peel the hard skin off, and cut it into thin coin slices.
  2. In a wok on high heat, put the oil, and wait until hot. Add the ginger, press it down, and wait a few moments, until it becomes fragrant. Add the broccoli, stir very rapidly for 5 seconds, then turn the heat down to medium-high, and stir until the flowerets are a bright, shiny green.
  3. Add the salt and the sugar, stir rapidly, then add the stock.
  4. Cover, and cook on medium-high heat for 2:30 minutes.
  5. Uncover, and cook, stirring rapidly, until all the liquid is gone. Then dribble the sesame oil on top of the broccoli, give them a few tumbles with the spatula to distribute the oil equally across the broccoli.
  6. Serve hot, at room temperature, or cold (we like ours hot, usually with dishes that are heavy or with strong tastes, which covers pretty much 90% of Vietnamese dishes :D ).
Notes

Remember to fish out the ginger before you serve it! (grated ginger is OK, but an entire nub of ginger can be a bit of a surprise to find down one’s throat, as the H can attest).

Mar 21

Bun tau xao cha chien cai bac thao: bean threads with Chinese cabbage and cha chien

Tags: cooking experiments, , , , , , 1 Comment »

Aka bún tàu xào chả chiên cải bắc thảo (I think), or what to do with a Napa cabbage and some leftover chả chiên that’s a little past its use-by date… It’s got a nice sweet kick that balances the cabbage-y taste of the Napa very fittingly.

Bean Threads

Bun tau xao cha chien cai bac thao: bean threads with Chinese cabbage and cha chien
Print
Recipe type: Main
Author: Aliette de Bodard
Prep time: 30 mins
Cook time: 15 mins
Total time: 45 mins
Serves: 2-4
A quick and easy dish, full of nourishing flavours
Ingredients
  • 60g bean thread noodles
  • 1/2 Napa cabbage, sliced
  • 250g chả chiên/chả lụa, sliced
  • 1 spring onion, sliced
  • 1 tablespoon hoisin sauce
  • 1 cup chicken stock
Instructions
  1. Put the noodles in cold water for 30 min.
  2. Meanwhile, wash and slice the cabbage, the chả chiên/chả lụa and the spring onion.
  3. Mix the hoisin sauce into the chicken stock.
  4. After 30 min have passed, drain the noodles, and cut them into quarters length-wise.
  5. In a wok on medium heat, put in a dash of oil, and fry the chả chiên/chả lụa for 1 minute, until warm.
  6. Then add the spring onion and the Napa cabbage, and fry quickly for 2 minutes.
  7. Add the noodles and the sauce. Mix so that everything is covered with sauce, and adjust heat to a vigorous simmer.
  8. Cover, and cook for 10 minutes (you’d think there’d be plenty of sauce left, but the truth is that the noodles will gobble it up, and nothing will be left by the time you take the cover off). Serve in a hot dish.
Notes

The difference between chả lụa and chả chiên is that one is steamed/boiled while the other is fried. I had the second one, but they’re fairly interchangeable (the chả chiên is slightly better because it renders less water and fries better–not to mention that it comes pre-fried, as it were, but it’s not really vital). You can bulk this up with a bit more cabbage and a bit more noodles if your guests are hungry.

Mar 15

Nem nuong (barbecued minced pork patties)

Tags: cooking experiments, , , , , No Comments »

Aka nem nướng. There are a lot of ways to do this: notably, whether you put baking soda in or not (baking soda makes it more bouncy, but I’m not a big fan of using it). The traditional version of this involves pounding the meat into a paste, either by hand or with a food processor. Given how easy it is to get minced meat, though, I feel like I’d rather spend more time eating than following tradition, even if it means the feeling of the meat will be a little off compared to the traditional version.
(hum, OK. Looking in my Vietnamese cookbook suggests that what I mean by “traditional version” might be off, since the recipe includes shrimp and what looks like two cuts of pork I can’t quite identify, in addition to a banana and a starfruit…)

(recipe adapted from Bach Ngo’s The Classic Cuisine of Vietnam)

Nem nuong (barbecued minced pork patties)
Recipe Type: Main
Prep time: 2 hours
Cook time: 20 mins
Total time: 2 hours 20 mins
Serves: 4-6
A classic Vietnamese patty.
Ingredients
  • 500g minced pork
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 2 shallots
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon sugar
  • Sprinkling of pepper
  • 2 tablespoons thính, roasted rice powder (see below)
  • For dipping: Nước mắm or nước lèo
Instructions
  1. Chop up the garlic and the onions.
  2. Mix everything (except the dipping sauce!) into a bowl, and let the mixture rest for 2 hours.
  3. Pre-heat the oven to 180°C.
  4. Shape one tablespoon of mixture into a flat patty, and put it on aluminum on the oven grate. Repeat until you run out of meat.
  5. Put the oven on broiling mode, and grill for 10-15 minutes, until brown. Then turn the patties over, and grill the other side.
  6. Serve with rice papers, salad, soy and a selection of herbs (coriander, rau ram, mint,red perilla, hung que/Thai basil…): each guest takes a rice paper, dips it in water, and lays it on the table. Then they add meat, salad, soy, and whatever herbs they feel, before rolling into a cylinder shape. Dip into nước mắm, and enjoy!
Notes

To make roasted rice powder, take two tablespoons of rice grains, and put them on a frying pan on medium-high heat. Keep stirring the grains until they turn golden, then immediately take the pan off the heat (the rice will continue cooking for a few moments, until it cools down, so you don’t want the powder burnt). Then grind to as fine a powder as you can manage, either with a spice mill or a mortar and pestle. When I say “golden”, you’re aiming for this colour, BTW.

Mar 03

Quick and dirty chicken soup

Tags: cooking experiments, , , , , , , , No Comments »
 

And back to some cooking experiments. This is what I made yesterday with our leftover grilled chicken, which badly needed sprucing up. Mostly made it through a combination of leafing through a cookbook and what I had on my shelves (it started out as some kind of Singaporean soup, but then I didn’t have the crab or the pork or the shrimps, and I tossed out ingredients of the list at a high clip while replacing them with stuff in my fridge. The final product has no resemblance whatsoever to the recipe I was reading).

I have no pictures because it was late and I was tired, and dragging a soup bowl full of piping-hot soup to my desk–where the best lamp for pictures is–looked likely to cause a local flood. Sorry.

To tide you over, and because blog posts look sad without illustrations, here’s a stock placeholder image from Wikipedia that sort of bears a vague resemblance to my final product yesterday (except for the bit where it’s Burmese and has peanuts, but you can mentally edit those out of the picture, right? :) )

(picture taken by Wagaung, used under under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

 

Quick and dirty chicken soup
Print
 
Recipe type: Soup
Prep time: 5 mins
Cook time: 10 mins
Total time: 15 mins
Serves: 2
A quick and easy chicken noodle recipe
Ingredients
  • Soup Base
  • 150g chicken, cooked, and shredded
  • 2 nests egg noodles
  • 8 cups water
  • 1 tablet instant chicken/vegetable broth (dosage for 2 cups, YMMV. I used one tab of the Knorr organic vegetable bouillon; it’s not on their website as it’s probably a Europe-only product, but the vegetable broth on the US website sounds very similar)
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 1 0.5cm-thick (0.2″) nub of ginger
  • 1 tablespoon nuoc mam
  • 1 teaspoon five spices
  • 1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
  • Garnish
  • 8-10 fresh coriander stems, loosely chopped
  • 3 spring onions, green part only, chopped into rings (optional)
Instructions
  1. In a saucepan, heat the water until it boils.
  2. Meanwhile, finely grate the garlic and the ginger. Put a frying pan on the stove, some oil, and fry the mixture until it turns golden.
  3. Add the garlic-ginger mixture, the chicken, and the tablet of instant broth into the water.
  4. Adjust the heat until you have a high persistent simmering (bubbles shooting to the surface regularly, but water not yet boiling in great gouts). Mix gently until the tab is dissolved. Add the nuoc mam, the five spices. Taste and adjust; it should be salty with a kick, but not too much.
  5. Leave everything to mingle together for about 5 minutes.
  6. Put the noodles, and wait for them to cook.
  7. Add the sesame oil, mix well, taste and adjust with more nuoc mam if needed. Lower the heat.
  8. Prepare two soup bowls as follows: half the coriander and half the spring onions. Then serve half the soup in each.
 

Also, in cooking-related news… I think the H has developed a taste for sautéed broccoli. I made him some one night from the Irene Kuo cookbook–and ever since, when I ask him to bring home vegetables, he’ll come back with a bunch of broccoli and a hopeful air. Should I be worried?

Jan 30

Banh cua chien (fried crab fritters)

Tags: blog, cooking experiments, , , , 1 Comment »
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…

Banh cua chien (fried crab fritters)
Print
Recipe type: Appetiser
Prep time: 10 mins
Cook time: 40 mins
Total time: 50 mins
Serves: 4
A nice crab finger food.
Ingredients
  • Filling
  • 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
  • Batter
  • 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
  • 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
Instructions
Fritters
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Heat up about 3 tblsp. oil in a wok or frying pan.
  4. 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.
  5. Drain on paper towels, and put the next batch in.
  6. 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).
Dipping sauce
  1. Mix everything and let the mixture rest at room temperature for 10 minutes.
Notes

For the dipping sauce, you can also use sriracha sauce.

 

[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.

Jan 06

Banh chuoi nuong (banana and coconut pudding)

Tags: blog, cooking experiments, , , , No Comments »

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? :D ), and it looks something like this:

Slice of cake

Have I got your attention now?

(recipe under the cut)
Read More »

Jan 05

Ga xao dam gung sa (chicken with lemongrass and macerated ginger)

Tags: blog, cooking experiments, , , , , , , 6 Comments »
(aka gà xào dầm gừng sả, lit. fried chicken with pickled ginger and lemongrass)

Lemongrass chicken

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.

Ga xao dam gung sa (chicken with lemongrass and macerated ginger)
5.0 from 1 reviews
Print
Recipe type: Main
Prep time: 20 mins
Cook time: 30 mins
Total time: 50 mins
Serves: 4
A wonderful mix, tart and spicy and redolent with the smell of lemongrass (recipe from Bach Ngo’s Classic Cuisine of Vietnam).
Ingredients
  • 300g chicken
  • 1 stalk lemongrass
  • 2 tablespoons fish sauce
  • 2 tablespoons ginger, pounded with mortar and pestle
  • 2 tablespoons rice vinegar
  • 6 tablespoons water
  • 1 teaspoon cornstarch
  • 1/2 teaspoon sugar
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 1 large onion
  • Sprinkling of black pepper
Instructions
  1. Mix the ginger and the vinegar. Set aside.
  2. Prepare the lemongrass stalk: discard any dried outer leaves, discard the upper two-thirds of the stalk, and slice the remainder paper-thin. Slice the chicken into bite-sized pieces. Put the chicken in a bowl along with 1 tablespoon of the fish sauce, and sprinkle black pepper. Add the lemongrass. Mix, and set aside.
  3. Mix the cornstarch, sugar, water and remaining fish sauce, and set aside.
  4. Chop the garlic, and slice the onion into wedges.
  5. In a large-bottom casserole dish on medium fire, put in oil, and fry the garlic for ~30s, until fragrant. Add the onion, and cook until soft. Add the chicken, and fry for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Cover, and cook for an additional 5 minutes. Then stir in the ginger-vinegar mixture and the cornstarch-fish sauce-sugar one. Mix well. Cover again, and cook for 5 minutes. Then uncover, set heat until the sauce boils, and finish off by congealing the sauce (basically, make the cornstarch boil and thicken).
  6. Serve with rice.
Notes

The lemongrass stalk can be replaced with 1 tablespoon dried lemongrass, but it will need to be soaked in warm water for 2 hours and chopped very fine.

Read More »

Dec 23

Banh uot thit nuong (lemongrass beef with sesame seeds)

Tags: blog, cooking experiments, , , No Comments »
(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.

Served with rice
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)
Read More »

Previous Entries