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)

]]> http://aliettedebodard.com/2012/04/04/caramelised-pork/feed/ 9 http://aliettedebodard.com/2012/03/27/the-best-stir-fry-broccoli-recipe-ever/ http://aliettedebodard.com/2012/03/27/the-best-stir-fry-broccoli-recipe-ever/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:00:28 +0000 aliette http://aliettedebodard.com/?p=4585 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).

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.

]]> http://aliettedebodard.com/2012/03/21/bun-tau-xao-cha-chien-cai-bac-thao-bean-threads-with-chinese-cabbage-and-cha-chien/feed/ 1 http://aliettedebodard.com/2012/03/15/nem-nuong-barbecued-minced-pork-patties/ http://aliettedebodard.com/2012/03/15/nem-nuong-barbecued-minced-pork-patties/#comments Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:00:35 +0000 aliette http://aliettedebodard.com/?p=4770 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)

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)

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?

[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.

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)

By and large, Vietnamese cuisine doesn’t do desserts, at least not in the Western sense: a plate of fresh fruit is always suitable for serving at the end of meals, no matter how lavish they might be. Vietnam doesn’t really do pies, baked chocolate cakes, pièces montées, or the full range of pastries you can find in, say, France.

However, there are a few desserts, which tend to be very small doses of concentrated sugary goodnesss. This is one of them, and it’s dead simple to make. All you need is a few bananas, some sliced sandwich bread, and coconut cream, et voilà, you’re done!

The recipe is from Anh’s A Food Lover’s Journey: since I basically copied it from Anh’s blog, I invite you to check it out at that address.

Just a few notes on the process from me: bananas, especially ripe ones, are a pain in the %%% neck to slice lengthwise, so don’t worry if they end up a bit mashed in the process. You want thin slices, though.

If you’ve ever wondered about the difference between coconut cream and coconut milk: both are made by mixing the liquid that’s actually inside the coconut (coconut water) with the pulped flesh of the coconut. Depending on how much flesh vs. water you got, you either have milk or cream: cream has a very high content in pulp flesh and thus a creamier consistency. So the 200mL are definitely coconut cream (milk would see you not put enough coconut in the mixture).

Anh took the crust away on her bread; I found that with white bread, the crust was basically so soft that I could leave it on and this did not detract the pudding from settling in. I didn’t have any brown sugar, so I put in 80g of caster sugar, dissolved it in warm coconut milk, and did fine.

The baking pan: I wouldn’t line it with baking paper, honestly. With me, the baking paper got soaked through by the coconut cream, which made it all but impossible to separate it from the cooked pudding. A standard (porcelain or metal) pan plus a good knife should work fine.

The process of putting the cake together is very much lasagna-like: layer of banana, layer of bread dipped in sweet coconut, layer of banana, … I sprinkled some sugar on top of the last (banana) layer in addition to 2-3 tablespoons of neutral oil, which enabled the thing to caramelise in the oven. The cooking time for me was closer to 1h00 at 180°C, and then 15 extra minutes at 200°C: the insides were still not congealed together at the one-hour mark, and the top hadn’t yet got that caramelised sheen.

And here is the beast, fresh out of the oven!

(and promise, there will be a post that isn’t about eating or baking yummy stuff soon)

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.

]]> http://aliettedebodard.com/2012/01/05/ga-xao-dam-gung-sa-chicken-with-lemongrass-and-macerated-ginger/feed/ 6 http://aliettedebodard.com/2011/12/23/banh-uot-thit-nuong-lemongrass-beef-with-sesame-seeds/ http://aliettedebodard.com/2011/12/23/banh-uot-thit-nuong-lemongrass-beef-with-sesame-seeds/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:02:31 +0000 aliette http://aliettedebodard.com/?p=4220 (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)

Bonus picture: here are the shrimps skewers we made this weekend (not posting the recipe because though they look good, the cooking process clearly needs to be streamlined before it’s anything like efficient).
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