Cheating a bit with this one:  I adapted it from Rasa Malaysia. The original recipe had a bit more water in the sauce and required draining the vegetables thoroughly; I’m afraid I could never quite manage that (unless maybe popping them in a salad spinner…), so I skip the water part and rely on a bit of the water from the blanched vegetables to dilute the sauce.

Served here with chả lụa and rice (a bit of a fusion dish since I don’t really think bok choy is much of an item in South Vietnam; but it’s way easier to find here than some of the more typical stuff).

Baby bok choy with chả lụa

(aka chuối nướng: grilled bananas) OK, so I know fully well that this isn’t really how you do grilled bananas. Normally there should be sticky rice sprinkled with grated coconut that you wrap around the bananas before wrapping the lot in banana leaves and throwing it on the grill. However, grated coconut is rare in this house (and let’s not even mention banana leaves…). So let’s see about the stripped-down version, which only has three main ingredients and requires very little work to turn out awesome…

(the picture was taken with the leftover sauce; normally it should be more bananas draped in sauce, rather than a Frankenstein soup halfway to chè stage. Promise, next time I’ll try it with the sticky rice)

Grilled Bananas

(aka cải bắc thảo xào trứng thịt)

Cabbage and shrimp

This is a dish inspired by one of Andrew X Pham’s recipes for cabbage and eggs: I thought the final result lacked a bit of protein so I added a few marks of indulgence…

(aka mì hoành thánh: noodles with wontons)

Aka one of my Sunday lazy dishes: I buy the wontons pre-made from the XIIIe Arrondissement, and then make the soup come together fairly quickly. The version in the picture lacks a bit of vegetables: I’d usually throw in two handfuls of fresh spinach/ arugula, or one bok choy (all per person), in addition to the spring onions–except of course I seldom have greens left in my fridge on a Sunday evening! It’s a fairly effortless dish that only requires a bit of attention while it’s simmering on the stove.

Noodle soup

I’m pretty sure the traditional recipe for this doesn’t include the sesame oil or the five-spices, but I really like the taste of the broth with those two ingredients thrown on.

Aka thịt kho tàu: braised pork (that takes care of the first two words; kind of unsure what “tàu” means, my dictionary suggests “Chinese”, which seems a bit odd, but why not). This is a classic, hearty family dish that’s often part of a Tết spread (along with bánh chưng and other classics); best spooned over rice and with some kind of pickled veggies to offset the richness. Recipe mostly made up through peering at a few posts and at my Vietnamese recipe book.

The traditional version of this uses pork belly, but I thought it was a bit of a fat overdose and went for a mixture of half pork belly half pork shoulder (you do want fatty pieces of the pork though, don’t take filet mignon). I also upped the number of eggs to have one per person, but it’s purely a matter of taste (the traditional eggs for this are ducks’ eggs, which are way smaller and allow people to each have their own!).

You’ll need nước màu (caramel sauce) to make this: you can buy it at your local Asian market, but it’s far cheaper to make your own. See here for instructions (not for the faint of heart!).

Thit kho tau

And here’s the recipe:

So… unlike in Vietnam, it gets pretty cold in France in the winter, as should by now be evident. For those cold and snowy winter nights (and your yearly cheese overdose), French cooking has precisely the thing: tartiflette!

Tartiflette is basically potatoes with lardons and reblochon (I think of it as a Savoyard dish, but apparently it’s a recent invention, derived from an older dish called péla–though the H also thought it reminded him of provencal dishes. I’m not an expert). Today you’ll find tartiflette on the menus of pretty much every other Savoyard restaurant, and it’s a typical skiing season dish.

Without further ado…

Tartiflette

This is the H’s contribution to the food blog: a prune pudding that enables you to get rid of your stale bread leftovers. He used to do it with milk, until lactose intolerance struck: this version was done with almond milk instead–which is much easier to digest for me

(aka tôm kho tộ, braised shrimp in claypot–not quite sure what the difference is between “kho” and “kho tộ” is–there probably is a subtlety I’m not well versed in…)

This is a very simple dish to make; what’s daunting is the number of ingredients required, though a well-stocked Vietnamese/Chinese pantry should have most of what you need. I rarely have both spring onions and coriander in my fridge (since neither of them really keeps well), so I made the most of it this time. Plus, they make the picture all pretty

I don’t have a claypot (they’re not really easy to use on an electric stove), so I made this in our Le Chasseur Dutch oven–very handy for that kind of thing, as long as you remember to heat it up gradually and gently (bit like a claypot, really…)

Tôm kho tộ

(aka gà kho gừng, braised chicken with ginger. The scallions and coriander are well worth adding, as they put in a note of freshness the dish is sorely lacking otherwise. I cooked mine in a covered wok because I’m lazy, but if you have a spare claypot, it’s also nicer to let the flavours develop. One of the adjustments I made to the recipe was lengthening cooking time, as there’s hardly any point in braising something for 5 minutes…)

Gà kho gừng

Aka nấm xào dầu hào, mushrooms pan-fried in oyster sauce. This was basically my lazy dish for yesterday night, taken from Irene Kuo’s Key to Chinese Cooking and slightly adapted to what I had on hand (the original recipe mixed straw and button mushrooms, and also undercooked a little more than this, but I was peeling a grapefruit at the time and forgot to take the mixture off the heat…)

Mushrooms in oyster sauce