Most local Chinese restaurant in our city has “Vietnamese Salad” in the appetizer section of their menu. It is a big plate of assorted shredded vegetables with thick chili sauce. The chili sauce is really something and I have always been very fond of this. I came across the recipe from a friend’s of my mother. Vietnamese salad sauce from scratch!
Vegetables used are of three colors: red, white and green. Tomatoes and carrots for red, jicama for white and green beans for green. All vegetables are cut as thinly as possible. The sauce is drizzled generously on top of vegetables. For final touch, sprinkle ground peanuts and garnish with fresh coriander leaves.
The sauce refrigerates well. We enjoyed it the next day with our french fries.
Back to the salad, is it really Vietnamese dish? I have no clue.
The sauce is made with fresh chilies and various sugar-based ingredients such as palm sugar, castor sugar and sweet soy sauce. Lime juice and tomato sauce give the sauce the much-needed sourish flavor. Easy and nutritious! Okay, I am not sure about the nutritious part. But it sure is yummy.
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Ginger-laden food always makes me all warm inside. With simple ingredients such as sesame oil, soy sauce, chicken, ginger and shiitake mushroom, easy and nutritious dish can be prepared.
Ginger is cut into matchstick shapes and stir-fry over high heat to release the flavor. All the other ingredients are then cooked over high heat to seal in the essences. Water is added midway through cooking and then braised slowly to tenderize the meat and bring everything together.
Serve with steamed rice and I assure you, it can be your favorite Chinese cooking.
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Chinese cuisine has many, many braised pork dishes. It is almost impossible to list them all out, but one of the widely loved is “Braised Pork with Soy Sauce”. The rich brown color sauce sometimes is just enough to finish up a bowl of steamed rice.
Each Chinese family has their own version of this dish. Ours are very simple to cook. I still laughed at myself how my craving for this made me googling for hours looking for the recipe because I couldn’t get my mother on the phone.
It is best cook with a claypot. It distributes heat evenly and slowly. Pork belly is marinated for a couple of hours before cooking. The garlic cloves are not peeled, but rather just pounded lightly to bruise. The skin will keep the garlic whole, that way the garlic slowly infused the dish, rather than giving out the whole garlicky flavor to it.
The second step of the cooking is braising. The slowly simmering lets it cook naturally, the meat really takes in the flavor of all ingredients. Hard-boiled eggs are added last. Constant stirring is the key, if the liquid evaporates too quickly, add more hot water.
Naturally pork belly has more fat than other part, so leaner part of the pork can be used as substitute. Using all lean meat will sometimes result in tougher dish. Use the pork belly sparingly, if you will. But the beauty of braised pork dishes is in the use of fat.
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I am a sucker for gooey-sweet egg noodles laden with sweet soy sauce.
No garlic or shallots needed for this fried noodles recipe, and I am very sure you are not going to taste the difference. It uses spring onions and chinese celery. Tomatoes sweetens it further and chili just bring it to the next level!
No fresh egg noodles in the pantry? Dried egg noodles can be used, cook half the time as directed in the package.
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This pickled cucumber, shallot and chili is a must in Indonesian one-dish meal, such as fried rice, fried noodle or vermicelli. It is also a nice condiment for claypot rice. Always served cold, cucumber pickles is great to be taken with warm rice and noodles.
We even use this in our homemade burgers!
The trick to get this right (as it was done here) is to seed the cucumbers before pickling, that way the pickles will not be too soggy. The vinegar and sugar compliment cucumber and shallot is just icing on the cake. Don’t worry about the chili. Remove the seeds if you will, but generally the chili will lose some degree of the spiciness after soaked in vinegar and sugar mixture.
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