Dec 23

Banh uot thit nuong (lemongrass beef with sesame seeds)

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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.

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)
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Mar 18

Thit bo xao hanh tay (stir-fried beef with onions)

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Aka lazy (wo)man’s recipe. This is a mainstay of Chinese/Vietnamese takeaways in France–there are many, many variants depending on whether you marinade the beef (and what there is in the marinade, which can range from soy sauce to nước mắm), and what you then serve it with. Amusingly, the Vietnamese name of this is thịt bò xào hành tây, literally “beef meat sautéed with Western onions”!

The beef

(yes, the pic is slightly scary due to poor lighting. I swear this tastes better than it looks).

As it happened, I had leftover yellow onions from last week’s phở, and extra limes from buying a whole bag. So I marinated in nước chấm :) This would actually be better served with rice vermicelli, but I had leftover egg noodles which needed consuming. See? Frankenstein cooking.

Thit bo xao hanh tay (stir-fried beef with onions)
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Recipe type: Main
Prep time: 40 mins
Cook time: 10 mins
Total time: 50 mins
Serves: 2-3
A favourite takeaway dish, with plenty of onions to give it zip
Ingredients
  • 300g beef, sliced very thin
  • 2-3 yellow onions
  • 2 fat garlic cloves, crushed or sliced
  • nước chấm, to taste
  • 3 spring onions, sliced
  • 2 nests egg noodles (or enough for two people)
  • sesame oil (optional)
Instructions
  1. Put the meat into a bowl, and mix it with 1 clove crushed garlic. Put just enough nước chấm to cover the beef slices). Wait for a bit (I usually leave it half an hour. If you’re really patient, you can wait until the marinade turns the beef brown by dint of lime acidity. Haven’t worked out a reliable formula for that yet).
  2. Meanwhile, cook the noodles. The best primer I’ve found on dealing with egg noodles is over here; I never could follow the instructions, though. Mine always get tangled. So my standard strategy goes something like this: untangle noodles, throw into boiling water, stir around until the water starts to boil again, take casserole off the heat, rinse noodles under cold water, and put noodles back into the pan filled with cold water. So far, so good. Mine still get hopelessly tangled, which is why I cut them into pieces after they’ve gone cold. Yeah, I know, cheating. But you know, it works.
  3. Set the noodles aside, and let’s tackle the onions. Chop them into small pieces. Fry them in an oiled wok, along with the remaining chopped garlic clove on low-medium heat, until they’re suitably soft (basically, until the bad sharp taste goes away). Then turn the heat up, and add the beef and its marinade. Cook for a few minutes, until the beef is cooked through and through. You probably need to add a bit of water at this stage, to keep everything moist in a sort of gravy.
  4. Drain noodles, add them to the stir-fry, mixing vigorously. When they’re cooked to your taste, remove the wok from the heat. Fold in the spring onions, and add a dash of sesame oil if you feel like it (just a small amount, as you don’t want the taste of that to overwhelm the marinade).

 

Et voilà!

NOTE: If you do decide to go for rice vermicelli rather than egg noodles, the procedure is the same, except you’ll probably want to skip the sesame oil (it doesn’t go well with rice vermicelli, in my limited experience).

Dec 15

Pasta Bolognese

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Time for a classic…

Variant of a recipe found in The Virgin Student Cookbook (Beverly LeBlanc): I basically tweaked the veggie quantities, and added some chilli sauce to give the sauce a little extra twist (the original recipe used wine, which we don’t have in the house).

The H isn’t a fan of chilli, so this is just a teensy bit spicy–if you like your food hotter than that, you might want to throw in extra chilli garlic sauce.

Pasta Bolognese
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Recipe type: Noodles
Prep time: 5 mins
Cook time: 40 mins
Total time: 45 mins
Serves: 4-6
An Italian classic–with a kick!
Ingredients
  • 1 carrot
  • 1 onion
  • 2 garlic cloves
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 300g minced beef
  • 1 tablespoon plain flour
  • 2 cans (800g) chopped tomatoes
  • 1 tablespoon ketchup
  • 1 tablespoon chilli garlic sauce (I used Lee Kum Kee’s, which has the advantage of being mild. Your milage might vary here)
  • 1 teaspoon mixed herbs
  • dash of salt
  • dash of pepper
Instructions
  1. Chop up the carrot and the onion into smallish pieces.
  2. In a large pot, put the olive oil, the carrot and the onion on medium heat, and let everything fry for about 8 minutes, until the carrot is tender.
  3. Chop up the garlic very finely; add the beef and the garlic, and stir in until the beef is cooked (a few minutes).
  4. Sprinkle the flour over the beef, and stir it in until it’s been absorbed by the mixture.
  5. Add the canned tomatoes with their juice, the ketchup, the mixed herbs, the chilli garlic sauce, and finally salt and pepper to taste. Stir in everything.
  6. Put heat on low setting and let the whole thing simmer for about 20-30 minutes, until the extra liquid has evaporated and the sauce has become thick.
  7. Serve with pasta and grated cheese.
Notes

Variant: for putting in lasagne, halve the amount of vegetables (carrot, onion and tomato) in order to make the sauce tighter.

 


Nov 17

Pho bo, the (almost) lazy recipe

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Ok, so this is my fast recipe for phở (without pre-canned MSG or paste). Making no claims that it’s been handed dow for generations, or anything like that–it’s just what happens to satisfy my phở craving when I’m in the mood.

Pho bo, the (almost) lazy recipe
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Prep time: 15 mins
Cook time: 3 hours
Total time: 3 hours 15 mins
Serves: 4-6
Ingredients
  • Broth
  • 3.5-4 litres water
  • 1 cube of instant vegetable broth (optional)
  • 1 carrot, cut in fourths
  • 500g beef cut into chunks (I use sirloin steak cut into thinnish slices, and later eat that with the broth)
  • 2 garlic cloves, chopped into small pieces
  • 8 tablespoons nưởc chấm (if you don’t have nưởc chấm handy, try 2 tablespoons of undiluted fish sauce)
  • 1 celery stalk (optional)
  • 1 pack bánh phở noodles (375g).
  • Spice mix
  • 1 cinnamon stick
  • 2 anise stars
  • 1 shallot studded with 6 cloves, (for more kick), one yellow onion studded with 6 cloves
  • 5 cardamom pods, crushed with the flat of a knife
  • 1-inch ginger piece
  • Garnish
  • Fresh soy (to taste)
  • Chopped green onions (to taste. I use one spring onion per person)
  • Coriander leaves (to taste. I use 3-4 coriander stalks per person)
  • Thinly sliced sweet onions (to taste. I generally don’t use that because I don’t often have onions in the fridge)
  • If you’re lucky enough to have húng qué around (Asian basil), then you’ll want to throw that in.
Instructions
Making the broth
  1. Put the spices in a mesh ball if you have one (I don’t use it, but I end up having to fish everything out of the broth)
  2. Let’s do the broth first: drop everything except the noodles into the pot, bring to a boil, skim off the impurities (we’re not using bones, there’s going to be fewer of them). Then cover and let it simmer for a good 2+ hours. I tend to do 2 hours because I’m usually very hungry by that time, but the more you let it simmer, the tastier it’ll be.
  3. Taste the broth. If it’s too bland, add in more fish sauce.
Cooking the noodles
  1. Fish out the spices and the beef (if you used the mesh ball, take that out. I tend to dump everything in and strain the broth through a colander, and then fish out what I need, ie the beef and the bits of garlic).
  2. Prepare the noodles according to the inscriptions on the packet: generally, boil water, drop them in, and wait a few minutes for them to go soft. If you found fresh ones, you more or less need to dip them into hot water, and they’ll be ready.
Assembling the soup
  1. Put 1/4th-1/6th of the noodles, the equivalent proportion of the meat and of the broth. Then a handful of chopped spring onion, some coriander, and a handful of soy.
  2. Alternatively, you can put the garnish on the table and let everyone help themselves.

An idea of how much garnish goes into my phở bowl (didn’t have soy this time around)

Et voilà!

Afterword
You’ll have gathered that the broth is what makes or breaks this. Everyone has their own mix of spices and fish sauce to get to this point (though the anise stars are generally a mainstay)–feel free to add or substract if you’re not convinced by it.
The traditional phở is made with beef bones and roasted spices and has thin slices of beef round instead of the sirloin slices I used, but it requires a lot more supervision than this. See Mai Pham’s Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table, Andrea Nguyen’s Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, or Wandering Chopsticksif you’re interested.

If you’re in a hurry and don’t have the 2+ hours, you can boil the broth for 30 minutes, and add in a spoonful of phở paste in every bowl. It’ll compensate for the weaker broth taste.

On the broth: if you’re really not in a hurry, you can put it in the fridge and let the fat bubble up to the surface before skimming it. If you didn’t use over-fatty pieces, it shouldn’t be too greasy, but there’s still going to be fat in it. Then boil the broth again after taking it out of the fridge. Also, the broth freezes pretty well (the broth, not the noodles, the meat or the spices. Just the liquid).