(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 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.

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”!

(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.

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).