(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 gà xào sả ớt. A classic of Vietnamese cuisine that I hadn’t got round to revisiting… I got started by a peak at Bach Ngo’s Classic Cuisine of Vietnam, and then went to consult my bible, aka Trầm Kim Mai’s Từ Điển 1001 Món Ăn Việt Nam (Encyclopedia of 1001 Vietnamese dishes). To say that they both had radically different ideas of the dish would be understatement of the century (Bach Ngo’s version didn’t even have the chillies, which is a bit embarrassing for a dish named after them…). I was intrigued by the presence of kẹo dậu phọng, Vietnamese sesame and peanut candy, in Trầm Kim Mai’s recipe, but of course I didn’t have the actual candy at home, so it was a bit hard to add to the mix: I ended up using chopped peanuts, sesame and honey to replicate the addition of the candy to the chicken. The result is… intruiguing, to say the least, sweet and hot at the same time and all made of yummy!

(most recipes for this I’ve seen online use nước màu, Vietnamese caramel sauce)

(why yes, I had no coriander either… well worth adding though, it adds a welcome note of freshness to the dish)

(aka gà ngũ vị hương)

I have been busy with various other projects (and wrestling with RL!), and somewhat neglecting this blog… Still working on a short story and trying to make it behave, but in the meantime here’s a recipe to tide you over. This was inspired by one of Mai Pham’s recipes in Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table, albeit a bit modified to actually grill the chicken. It requires planning a bit in advance since you’ll basically be marinating the chicken with its skin on, which takes quite a bit of time.

The chicken in the picture was cooked in our oven’s rotisserie, but you can also roast the chicken in a dish in your oven (I’m no expert in roasting chicken–the only way I know that works involves cutting the chicken in half; feel free to chime in if you’ve got better ideas!). It’s best served with a dipping sauce (I used nuoc cham, but you can also make a ginger and lime dipping sauce)

Aka gà hấp rau răm. This started out as gà xé phay, a classic appetiser from the North/Centre. See, I had those rau răm leaves from the supermarket, so I thought I would make it from Bach Ngo’s Classic Cuisine of Vietnam. That was before I thought, “Hey, remember that cookbook you brought from Vietnam? See if you can find the recipe in there”. Fifteen minutes later, I was still seating at the table with the cookbook open at the page of the recipe, and the dictionary open on my knees–flipping through pages, muttering and cursing, and pausing only brief to google a tricky word that wasn’t in the dictionary or in my personal vocabulary. The variant in the book looked like an interesting recipe, except that a. I didn’t have most of the ingredients listed, and b. some things were plain odd, for instance the marinating of the onions followed by a complete omission of said onions from the subsequent bits of the recipe (or the surprise appearance of the rau răm about halfway through the recipe).

So I did what I usually do: went wild. Most of the stuff I didn’t have either got substituted or nixed; and the stuff I didn’t understand got fixed by referring to the Bach Ngo recipe. The end result is… pretty unconnected to either of the two recipes, but it tastes pretty good!

Do try to find rau răm if you can: it’s really one of those recipes that tastes quite different if you do the usual mint substitution.

For the nước chấm recipe, see here.

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?

(aka gà xào dầm gừng sả, lit. fried chicken with pickled ginger and lemongrass)

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.

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And on a more cheerful topic–we had two lemongrass stalks leftover from a previous meal, and I was looking for a way to use them. Ended up making lemongrass chicken, which tasted awesome. So before I forget how I came to this result, here’s the lowdown.

The recipe is a mix between two Lemongrass Roasted Chicken recipes: one from Wandering Chopsticks’ blog, and the other from Mai Pham’s Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table. They both used a whole chicken, which I couldn’t find at this time of the year (usual provider on holiday, as befits the month of August), so I made do with chicken breasts.

There you go. Shiny and yummy.

EDIT: now with picture!