Nov 24

Duck magret

Tags: blog, cooking experiments, , , , , No Comments »
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 [1]. If anyone is interested, here is the recipe. It actually feeds four people rather than three.

Duck Magret

(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)

Duck magret
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Prep time: 40 mins
Cook time: 15 mins
Total time: 55 mins
Serves: 4
A quick and delicious way to prepare duck magret
Ingredients
  • 2 duck magrets (350-400g total)
  • 2 tablespoons liquid honey
  • 2 tablespoons sesame oil
Instructions
  1. Mix honey and sesame oil to form a thickish marinade (if too thick, add a little hot water to dissolve the honey). Carve grooves into the magrets with a knife, to let the marinade penetrate better, and marinate for about 30 minutes.
  2. 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.
  3. Grill 2 tablespoons sesame seeds in a dry pan over high heat (careful, they burn fast).
  4. Slice the meat in small, artistic amounts, and serve with the sesame seeds and a little of the sauce.
Notes

This goes wonderfully with homemade mashed potatoes.

[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.

Oct 27

Basic rice cooking and handling

Tags: blog, cooking experiments, , , , 6 Comments »

(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 saucepan; 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.


The rice in its bowl after a couple of washings. Look, you can almost see the grains!


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.


The “eyes”. Aren’t they pretty?


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.

Sep 26

Quick perfumed egg noodles

Tags: cooking experiments, , , , , 4 Comments »
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).

Quick perfumed egg noodles
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Prep time: 10 mins
Cook time: 10 mins
Total time: 20 mins
A quick way to jazz up egg noodles.
Ingredients
  • 2 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
Instructions
  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.
  3. Drain the noodles, and put them in the wok. 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.
  4. 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).

Aug 04

Xa xiu (char siu, barbecued laqué pork)

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Ok, this is a slight cheat. Xá xíu isn’t, per se, a Vietnamese dish (it’s Cantonese), but it’s long been a childhood favourite, and you find it in a few Vietnamese dishes (with egg noodles, or in buns). Like my phở recipe, this is just an approximation: the best xá xíu is actually found in specialised shops (or in a Chinese restaurant if you’re in the West), which will have the actual resources to do the dry roasting. This is also not the traditional recipe for oven-baked xá xíu (which requires meat hooks, and lets the meat cook while suspended in the oven)–I don’t have that kind of equipment, and my oven is too small anyway. But it definitely tastes divine like the real thing. If you happen to have a craving…

I usually make this in big batches, because monitoring the cooking is the key bit, and I might as well do that for a lot of meat. It freezes wonderfully, so you can make a lot, and always have some on hand for those hunger pangs.

A word of warning: this is best done with a fatty part of the pork, because the cooking process I use dries the meat. Having tried it, I definitely advise against using filet mignon or leaner cuts of the pork.

This serves, a lot of people? I generally have enough for 3 or 4 meals (well, 3, but that’s because the H is too busy wolfing this down!)

(from Irene Kuo’s Key to Chinese Cooking, a book I cannot recommend highly enough. I kept the ingredients and the marinade but changed the cooking method)


The pork in the marinade

Xa xiu (char siu, barbecued laqué pork)
Print
Recipe type: Main
Prep time: 3 hours 10 mins
Cook time: 50 mins
Total time: 4 hours
Serves: 6-8
The classic Chinese roast.
Ingredients
  • 2 lbs pork butt (1 kg “échine de porc” if you’re French, spare rib roast if you’re British. Any piece of the pork with reasonable fat content will do. NOT the belly though, too much fat in there)
  • 3 tblsp soy sauce
  • 2 tblsp fermented bean paste (the salty kind. You can substitute hoisin sauce, but it won’t taste quite the same)
  • 1 tblsp Shaoxing wine
  • 2 tblsp ketchup
  • 2 tblsp fruit juice (pref. orange or pineapple or something acidic, pref. without added sugar. I usually throw in our latest Tropicana purchase. This batch was made with pineapple, mango & lime juice)
  • 1 tblsp sugar
  • 1 tblsp. honey
  • 2 cloves garlic, chopped up coarsely and crushed
  • 1/2 teasp 5-spice mix
Instructions
  1. Cut the pork butt into small bits–I do mine by eye, they’re something like 15-20cm long, 5-7cm thick, and 5-7cm high? Doesn’t matter much, you just don’t want the meat to be too thin or too thick, and you want a decent length that you can later slice. Mix everything else into a marinade.
  2. Throw the pork in, and leave to marinate for 3-6 hours, either at room temp or in the fridge.
  3. Pre-heat oven to 180°C.
  4. Take an oven dish, and line the cuts of pork: you want them in a single layer (they can touch each other, but they can’t be piled atop each other). Brush them with half the marinade, and put them in the oven for around 30-40 minutes. By now, the pork should be cooked (check this before moving on to the next phase).
  5. Turn the oven to the grill setting at around 210°C (I think it’s grill? In my oven it’s the thing that turns on just the upper resistor. It looks like it’s broiling for a US oven?). Basically, you’re waiting for the sugar in the sauce to caramelise: when it does, the pork will go from being vaguely brownish to a brighter, deeper colour tinged with red (it won’t look as red as the picture, though, that’s just the flash playing tricks).
  6. This is where you absolutely have to keep an eye on what’s going on in your oven: the margin between caramelised and burnt is very thin, and you don’t want to be on the wrong side… It’s a fairly fast process (5-10 minutes).
  7. When the bits of meat start being done, turn them over, brush the exposed side with the marinade, and wait again for the caramelisation process to happen. Depending on your oven, you might have to do this in several passes. Feel free to remove the bits of meat that look done as they look done–in my oven (which is very small), the caramelisation doesn’t happen at the same time for every chunk of meat, and I’d rather have the bits of meat a touch cold rather than charred black…
  8. Remove pork from oven, and cut into slices to serve.
  9. Serve with rice, sliced cucumber and dồ chua (pickled vegetables). It’s also wonderful in sandwiches; or, if you feel courageous, you can do xá xíu buns.

 


The cooked pork

Jul 26

Chocolate and pineapple brownies

Tags: blog, cooking experiments, , , , 2 Comments »
Aka the recipe I made when I found myself with an extra can of pineapple and some leftover chocolate. You would think that the pineapple would not go well with the chocolate–but it does, trust me. It’s actually a very yummy combination, the pineapple bringing the moisture and sugar that the chocolate lacks.

 

Chocolate and pineapple brownies
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Recipe type: Dessert
Author: Aliette de Bodard
Prep time: 20 mins
Cook time: 20 mins
Total time: 40 mins
Serves: 6-8
A wonderful mix of tart pineapple and gorgeous chocolate.
Ingredients
  • 100 g dark chocolate
  • 1 can pineapple slices (340g, 10 slices)
  • 140g sugar (be prepared to throw in some of the juice from the can if the mixture’s too liquid, or to adjust the flour if it’s too dry)
  • 120g flour
  • 1 bag vanilla sugar (8g sugar and a dash of vanilla extract otherwise)
  • 2 eggs
  • 125g butter
Instructions
  1. Pre-heat oven to 180°C (gas mark 6)
  2. Melt the chocolate and the butter, let the mixture cool down for a bit.
  3. Meanwhile, dice the pineapple slices into smallish bits (I go for the width and length of my fingertip).
  4. Mix the sugar, vanilla sugar, and the eggs. When the above chocolate-butter mixture has cooled down, add it and mix everything until the dough is smooth.
  5. Prepare a low cake mould by brushing its sides with a little butter and a little flour. Pour the dough into it.
  6. Cook for around 20 minutes: the cake should be still moist.
 

There you go–enjoy!

ETA: adjusted quantities following further experimentation

Jul 08

Carrot cake

Tags: blog, cooking experiments, , , , , 1 Comment »
So, here’s the variant on the carrot cake…

Carrot cake
A picture, though it’s really hard to make this look good, as it basically lacks contrast of any kind. It does taste like all kinds of yummy, trust me on that.

Adapted from kitchen tigress, who got it in turn from Angela Nilsen. I replaced those ingredients I didn’t have, and adjusted the quantities of oil, which seemed a bit excessive. Like most carrot cakes, this came with an icing layer, which was basically sugar and butter. I dislike both, and the cake tastes good enough without them, so I skipped that part without much remorse.

Carrot cake
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Recipe type: Dessert
Prep time: 10 mins
Cook time: 1 hour
Total time: 1 hour 10 mins
Serves: 6-8
A light and moist carrot cake without icing.
Ingredients
  • 85 g pecan nuts, chopped into pieces
  • 1 tablespoon orange blossom water
  • 2 tbsp orange juice
  • 115 g chopped-up prunes (substitute raisins if prunes are lacking)
  • 225 g flour
  • 5 g baking soda (half a packet)
  • 1 rounded tsp ground cinnamon
  • 175 g sugar
  • 100 g sunflower oil (about 1/4 cup)
  • 3 eggs
  • 280 g finely grated carrot (3-4 carrots)
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 180°C (thermostat 6/7).
  2. Sift the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and sugar together until well-mixed (this is more important than usual, because you really want that spoonful of cinnamon to spread in the cake, otherwise you could be in for an interesting surprise after the cake is cooked).
  3. Fold in the eggs one after the other, followed by the orange juice and orange blossom. Dribble the oil in, mixing thoroughly until you have a thick dough.
  4. Add the nuts, prunes and carrots. Mix well.
  5. Flour and butter a cake mold, and put in the oven for 45 minute-1 hour, until golden and risen.

 

Jun 29

Banh mi chien tom (shrimp toast)

Tags: blog, cooking experiments, , , , , , 2 Comments »
Aka bánh mì chiên tôm. Literally, fried bread with shrimp. It’s hard for me to explain about shrimp toast. It’s always been one of my favourite foods, though I didn’t actually eat so much of it when I was younger; but when I started cooking for myself, it was one of the first recipes I tried to reproduce. And, boy, those do bring back memories…

Banh mi chien tom (shrimp toast)
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Recipe type: Appetiser
Prep time: 40 mins
Cook time: 15 mins
Total time: 55 mins
Serves: 30-40 toasts
The best shrimp appetiser ever.
Ingredients
  • 250g shrimp, shelled and deveined (defrosted frozen shrimps are perfect for this)
  • 1 egg white
  • 2 tablespoons flour
  • 0.5-1 teaspoon salt (depending on how salty your shrimps are. Frozen ones tend to have more salt content, at least where I hail from)
  • dash of pepper
  • 0.5 teaspoon sugar
  • 2 cloves garlic, chopped
  • 3 spring onions, white parts only, chopped (or a small shallot)
  • extra water and/or flour
  • 2 ficelles (a ficelle is a narrow baguette. Get a baguette if you can’t get one; or get some other sliced bread and cut it into small enough pieces)
Instructions
  1. Pre-heat the oven to 180°C.
  2. Mash the shrimps, the garlic and the spring onions into a paste, either by hand, mortar and pestle, or food processor. Then fold in everything else except the bread. It should resemble a spread; adjust water and flour quantities accordingly if it doesn’t.
  3. Cut the ficelles into slices about 1-2cm thick (see picture for an idea of the size), and spread the paste on them.
  4. Now this is where it gets a little bit tricky: spread a thin coating of oil on top of the spread paste (we found out this weekend that the smallest of the measuring spoons, the 1/8 teaspoon, is pretty good for this, but it’s a painstaking job).
  5. Put them on an oven rack covered with aluminium foil, leave for about 15 minutes, or until the top turns golden. Enjoy!
Notes

If you don’t mind the extra grease, the traditional method for cooking this is frying on both sides in a pan.

 

Jun 23

Pad Thai

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My recent cooking adventures: I went shopping for cooking supplies, timing this precisely with the opening day of the sales in Paris because I’m a klutz. All in all, it could have been worse: there weren’t many people in the cooking department–presumably because most people don’t shop for frying pans and saucepans during the sales :) I was looking for two things, a garlic press and a lid for my wok. Garlic press was a failure, as everything was so horrendously expensive (more than 5 times what I paid for my old garlic press in the 13th District, our local Asiatown). Lid worked out OK, though: I got this neat little thing that fits on pans of various widths. It’s got a valve for letting steam escape which I don’t need (a lot of wok cooking is steam cooking in the pan, which, er, needs the steam?), but which you can open or close, but it was better than most of the alternatives (which were either horrendously expensive, pierced with holes that I couldn’t close, or just plain not practical). As a note, I really wouldn’t have thought it was that hard to buy a pan lid…

Recipe-wise, I tried making chả lụa (Vietnamese sausage), which didn’t turn out great (I will try again, as I think I’ve got a fair idea of what went wrong during the recipe), and I finally found a pad thai recipe that worked for me, by dint of sheer adjustments with the condiments.

It’s below, though note that the authenticity of the recipe is totally not guaranteed. I’ve never had this anywhere but in the United States, so I’m mostly reproducing what I ate…

Pad Thai
(my picture for it is awful due to major camera failure, so I’m using one from Steve Snodgrass. It mostly tells you what the dish ought to look like, and I make no pretense that mine was this pretty, especially since concentrated tamarind is inky black and tends to stain food the same colour…)

Pad Thai
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Recipe type: Noodles
Prep time: 20 mins
Cook time: 15 mins
Total time: 35 mins
Serves: 4-5
My version of the Thai street food classic
Ingredients
  • Dish
  • 200g dried rice noodles
  • 4 eggs (1 per person).
  • 4 shallots
  • 16 large shrimps
  • 4 cups bean sprouts
  • 4-5 spring onions (green part only, cut into 1-inch pieces)
  • 4 tablespoons roasted peanuts, coarsely chopped
  • optional: one piece tofu, fried and cut into small pieces
  • Sauce
  • 4 teaspoons tamarind concentrate (this is the tamarind concentrate, the dark sticky paste, NOT the fresh tamarind pulp soaked in water)
  • 1/3 cup boiling water
  • 2.5-3 tablespoons fish sauce (the 35° fish sauce kind. If not using this, put 4 tablespoons in. If you’re wondering what the fuss is, check out my resources page)
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon chilli paste (or pepper if chilli isn’t your thing).
Instructions
  1. Cook the noodles by dunking them in boiling water for 2 minutes. Drain and rinse them.
  2. Make the sauce: dissolve the sugar in the water, add the tamarind concentrate, the fish sauce and the chilli/pepper. Taste: it should be balanced, with no strong taste of any of the ingredients dominating the mix. Adjust if needed.
  3. Cooking’s best undertaken in two batches, though if you’re impatient you can put everything together (but it’ll be less effective, and a little awkward to handle). Split the ingredients in half, roughly. Beat two eggs into an omelette and set aside.
  4. Heat up a wok on high heat.
  5. First off, cook the chopped shallots until fragrant.
  6. Add the shrimps and cook until pink.
  7. Push shrimp and shallots to the side, and put the beaten eggs in, stirring them to scramble them. Let them cook until they’re firm, then hack them into small pieces with your spatula (think sprinkling of scrambled eggs here. If it helps, you can take them off the heat and use a knife).
  8. Put the shrimps and shallots back in.
  9. Add half the noodles and half the sauce, and stir everything for a minute or so. Then toss in the bean sprouts, the peanuts and the spring onions (or chives), give it a whirl or two, and serve.
  10. Repeat for second batch with the remaining ingredients. Serve hot, et voilà!

 

Coming soon: my major cooking adventure, aka how I undertake a Vietnamese dinner for a bunch of friends.

Jun 16

Rice cooker cake

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Rice cooker cake

Rice cooker cake

So… the results of my cooking experiments, aka, Filipino puto (more or less this recipe, dividing the quantities by 4, switching the amounts of milk and water around, and replacing the margarine by oil). Basically, a simple process: instead of steaming in a steamer, put the mixture in the rice cooker and bake it there… It went mostly well, except for the slight snafu, which had me folding the baking powder into the beaten egg and causing the expanding reaction to be wasted on, er, a beaten egg… Hence the slightly flat look of the thing: it was meant to rise much higher [1]. Also, it’s missing toppings–apparently, grated coconut is nice on it, but the H doesn’t like coconut… But it’s fairly nice all the same.

I do have to add that cooking a cake in the rice cooker is not for the faint of heart: after beating all the ingredients together, you put them into the rice cooker, set it on “cake”, press the button, and trust that the cooker is smart enough to work out the optimal baking time… (yes, I know I’m trusting it to cook perfect rice. Yes, it’s perfectly irrational).

[1] We discussed this on facebook, but I’m not quite sold on the explanation that the thing didn’t rise because of the low temperature and non-stick coating in the cooker–many blogs mention baking cakes in rice cookers with no trouble, and now that I’ve had time to reflect on the whole non-stick thing, I’ve baked cakes in non-stick molds before, and they rose all right… Any pointers welcome, but I’m inclined to suspect my bad timing with the baking powder…

Jun 03

Ginger and cha lua noodles

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(still writing the Imaginales report–mostly been holding that one because I don’t have the pictures yet…)

So, for reasons it would be too complicated to explain, I’m not at home at the moment, and so, when it came time to cook dinner, I found myself with a dearth of ingredients.

The original plan had been to cook chả lụa with egg noodles and soy sauce, but it had to be scrapped when I found the soy sauce had gone slightly funky (it was 5 years old, and mostly tasted like the salt had taken over). So I was left with ye old nước mắm sauce–which is nice, but quite insufficient to make a dish (chả lụa already has nước mắm in it, so they’re hardly contrasting ingredients). Fortunately, there was a spice shelf…

The finished dish

Ginger and cha lua noodles
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Recipe type: Noodles
Prep time: 10 mins
Cook time: 20 mins
Total time: 30 mins
Serves: 3
A quick way to spruce up noodles when the cupboard is (almost) bare.
Ingredients
  • 4 bunches egg noodles (180g dried)
  • About 5 thickish slices of chả lụa/Vietnamese ham (enough meat for 2-3)
  • 5-6 spring onions
  • 1 tablespoon nước mắm/fish sauce [1]
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
Instructions
  1. Cut up the chả lụa into rectangles, about 2cm x 0.5cm wide (see picture for an idea of the size). Cut up the spring onions into slices, separating the white parts from the green part. Make thinner slices of the white part.
  2. Cook the noodles: bring the water to a boil, throw the noddles in, and wait for the water to boil again (2 minutes, or check the instructions on your pack of noodles). Then drain, and rinse in plenty of cold water to remove as much starch as possible.
  3. Bring a frying pan or a wok to medium heat with some oil: put in the white part of the spring onions, and fry until fragrant (about 30-1min).
  4. Add the ground ginger, the fish sauce, and the meat: stir very quickly in order to coat evenly with the seasonings, and wait for a few minutes (not so much to cook the meat, as to make sure everything is homogenous).
  5. Then throw in the noodles with some oil, and toss together until everything is evenly coated. Wait a few minutes for the noodles to become hot again; and add the spring onions. Withdraw from heat and serve.

 

Very, very lazy dish. It would work equally well, I suspect, if you replaced the chả lụa by another meat with a strong taste (xá xíu/roast pork is the one that comes to mind, but any marinated meat will do).

[1]I had Thai fish sauce, which is way weaker than table-grade Vietnamese fish sauce (the one I usually have in my kitchen is 35°. If you happen to have this one, I’d put in 2 teaspoons instead of the tablespoon. If you don’t have a grade on your fish sauce bottle, chances are it’s 20°, and you’ll do fine with the 1 tablespoon).

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