Grilled Vegetables with "Boiled" Salad Dressing

I grew up in a city that supplies most of the south of Vietnam's vegetable need so vegies have always been a huge part of my family's diet, especially when meat was something we could only afford once in a while and even when we did, it was in small quantities. However, the only salad I ever ate before getting out of the country was my city's signature dish: escarole salad. My grandmother has her own "recipe", which turns out great salad most of the times. I say most because now that she's older, her taste bud has changed a little bit. She's still a wonderful cook though. Oh, I forget about the occasional watercress salad too. I wasn't such a big fan of that though. To me, watercress, when raw, has this strange peppery taste. 

Anyway, so when I came to the US, I realize that there are so much fewer and at the same time so much more varieties of greens here. How do I explain this? I guess that is with respect to what I was used to. Okay, it's common to find things like kales and chards, etc here but at the same time, it's not as easy to find watercress, bitter melons, water spinach, etc. So what the dining hall offered in terms of vegies was either broccoli or cauliflower most of the times. That left me no choice but turning to the salad bar. I suppose that is always a staple at any college dining hall. I had no trouble eating iceberg, or romaine, basically any kinds of lettuce. But I was always hesitant when it came to consuming spinach or the like raw. It certainly is an acquired taste. Culinarily, I have grown significantly over the years. Who says that a US college education is only about academic achievements? That's something I will have to talk about in another post though.

So I do eat salads now that I cook for myself, but I don't really like the same old lettuce, cucumber, tomato. So when I saw this salad featured in Food and Wine, I was so happy. Why? One of my favorite roots was there! Beets! Have I mentioned that I love love love beets? I do!!!!! My grandmother used to make beet potato and carrot soup often. I think that's where I learned how to eat and love beets. Anyway, this recipe is perfect for when you want to entertain and are sick of doing some sort of a chopped salads. It takes a little bit more prep than most salads, but the result is going to be refreshingly wonderful, at least I find it to be so. 

Here is mine, of course you should let your creativity takes you to other sorts of plating. 

INGREDIENTS:

Adapted from Hugh Acheson's recipe

Make 8 servings

12 baby beets, assorted colors, trimmed
12 baby carrots, peeled and trimmed
8 baby turnips, peeled and trimmed
16 medium asparagus stalks, trimmed
8 baby leeks or large green onions, or even better, ramps, trimmed*
4oz arugula
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

For the dressing:
2 egg yolks
1/2 tsp honey
1/2 tsp dry mustard
1/4 cup sherry vinegar
1tsp all-purpose flour
Pinched of cayenne pepper
1tsp butter
1/4 cup heavy cream
1Tsp + 2tsp lemon juice
1/2tsp finely grated lemon zest

*If you only have access to regular leeks, cut them into quarters.

METHOD:
Preheat the oven to 400°. Put the beets in a baking dish, cover with foil and roast till tender, about 35-40min. Let cool, peel and cut into halves and place on a baking tray.

In a large pot, bring salted water to a boil, add carrots and boil until crisp-tender, about 3-4 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to remove the carrots to a baking tray. Add the turnips, cook for about 3min until just tender. Remove to the tray. Add the asparagus, cook until bright green, about 2min. Remove to the tray. Add the leek, cook until just tender, about 1min.

Halve the carrots and turnips. Toss with olive oil and salt and pepper. Put aside until shortly before serving.

In a heat-proof bowl, mix the first 6 ingredients of the dressing together. Place the bowl over a pot of simmering water (make sure the water only simmers and not boils), whisk constantly until the mixture just thickens. Remove from heat, add butter and cream. Then add 1Tsp lemon juice and the lemon zest. Mix well. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Before serving, light a grill. Put the vegetables on for a few minutes until a nice char/grilled marks forms. In a large bowl, toss the arugula with the remaining 2 tsp lemon juice and 2 tsp olive oil. Add some salt and pepper. (I know I know, salt and pepper went into the dressing too but it's important to season everything along the way and not just rely on the dressing.) Line each serving plate with equal amount of arugula. Place the grilled vegetables on top, as whimsical as you would like. The dressing could be passed around at the table or poured on top of the salad, whichever way you prefer. Enjoy!

Simple Chocolate Truffles

This is Pierre Hermé's "black-on-black" truffles recipe. It's simple, it's delicious. What more can you ask for in a chocolate recipe? I have to warn you, though, that making truffles is a messy task. But I can assure you that it's absolutely worth it! Try making them once and believe me, you won't return to the truffles that have months as their shelf-life. You might not be able to stay away from your favorite local chocolatier(s) but those mass-produced, preservatives-laden ones? Forget it!

INGREDIENTS:

Make about 3 dozens

9 oz/260 g good quality bittersweet chocolate (Valrhona Caraïbe recommended), finely chopped

1 cup/250 g heavy whipping cream

3 Tbs/50 g unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces, at room temperature (it is important to have butter at room temperature)

Good quality Dutch-processed cocoa powder 

METHOD:

Put the chopped chocolate in a heatproof bowl large enough to hold all the ingredients. Make a well in the middle.

In a sauce pan, bring the cream to a full boil, then pour the hot cream into the center of the chocolate. If there is a skin on top of the cream, strain the cream through a fine mesh. Use a flexible rubber spatula to gently stir the cream into the chocolate in concentric circles increasing in size until the ganache is smooth. Let it rest for a minute.

Add the butter piece by piece, stir gently to blend, make sure each has completely integrated before the next one is added. 

Put the ganache in the refrigerator. When it is cool, cover with plastic wrap and chill for at least 3 hours. It can stay chilled overnight.

Put a generous amount of cocoa powder into a bowl. Sift the powder if you see lumps. Place a sheet of parchment/waxed paper on a baking sheet. Scoop about a tablespoonful of the chilled ganache for each truffle, put the dollops on the lined baking sheet. I used a small ice cream scoop for ease but you could just use a spoon.

Dust the palms of your hands with cocoa powder and roll the mounds of ganache between your palms to form rounds. There's no need to make them perfectly spherical, they could be edgy just the way truffles the mushrooms are. Drop each ball into the cocoa powder, roll it around so that it is well coated and then gently toss it between your palm to shake off the excess powder. Once it is finished, return it to the lined sheet. 

This is how they look like, in various stages of doneness:

I made these using Valrhona Caraïbe but with Guittard cocoa rouge so they look a little, well, rouge.

The truffles can be served as soon as they are made or they can be stored in the refrigerator for a day or two, covered and away from food with strong odors. I find that a tin can/box lined with parchment/waxed paper is perfect to keep these.

You could play with adding your favorite kind of pepper powder or finely chopped candied orange peels, or some liquor (adjust the amount of cream to accommodate the extra liquid), or steep peppercorns in the cream before adding the strained cream to the chocolate (PH has a recipe using Sichuan peppercorns). The choices are endless, well, sort of! Have fun making them by yourselves, or with friends and family!

Molten Chocolate Cake

a.k.a Chocolate Lava Cake. This is an extremely quick and easy dessert to make. What's even better is that it's one of those recipes that work for small family, i.e. of size 2. Or if you live by yourself, you can make the batter, bake one, and keep the other for the following day. One last thing, it's sure to please. Well, if a non-vegan is not pleased, you definitely need to check if that person needs Zoloft (or something along that line) instead!

INGREDIENTS:

2 servings

1 egg

1 egg yolk

2 oz chopped good bittersweet chocolate*

2 Tsp sugar

2 Tsp butter, and more softened butter

1 Tsp all-purpose flour

Cocoa powder

Pinch of fine sea salt

*If you can afford, use something like Valrhona. I can't so I settle for Callebaut. 

METHOD:

Preheat the oven to 450ºF.

Mix the flour and salt together.

Grease 2 5- to 6-oz (or 3 4-oz ones)ramekins with softened butter. (Greasing well will ensure your cakes invert easily later.) Coat with the cocoa powder, tap out the excess. You could also use good old all-purpose flour but the cakes will have some white flour spots later. If you are going to sprinkle powdered sugar over your cakes anyway then it really doesn't matter.

In a medium bowl over simmering water, melt the chocolate and butter. Let cool.

In another medium bowl, whisk the egg and egg yolk and sugar until the mixture just turns pale. Add the melted chocolate and butter, mix well. Fold in the flour.

Divide the batter equally between the ramekins. Place the ramekins on a baking sheet and bake for 8-9 minutes, until the outside third is set but the middle two-thirds is still jiggly. You might have to experiment with your oven temperature and baking time as oven temperatures can vary greatly and 30s more could wreck the whole thing. Well, that's an exaggeration, you will still have some chocolate cakes. What you won't get is the oozing goodness. 

Cool the ramekins on a rack for a few minutes. Invert onto plates and serve immediately with vanilla ice cream and some berries, or just powdered sugar, or whatever you fancy. If you do decide to serve with ice cream, let the cake cool down a bit more or it will melt your ice cream very very quickly. But it's hard to wait. I can never be patient enough to wait (hence the messy picture below) knowing what I will get spooning into that small little cake!

Here's what I had:

I served mine over a candied orange wheel and raspberry sauce, topped with ice cream. And please please pardon the terrible sugar decoration, it was a rushed experiment.

The batter can be kept in the refrigerator for up to a day. In that case, let them cool down to room temperature before baking.

Dry Wonton Mee

I can't remember when I first ate this dish. It's probably during my third year in Singapore (we were so poor my friends and I rarely ever ate out during our first two years there). I think I ate it at my school's canteen. NJC's canteen had a few of my favorite dishes and I always got them whenever I managed to get down quickly enough before a long line formed. The left most store served fried hokkien mee on Tuesdays and Thursdays (I think), and the right most store had briyani (whose name I asked my roommate multiple times before I got it) on Fridays. Of course there's always yong tau foo with its forever long line and the noodles store where I could get wonton mee, or sometimes mee pok. 

The concept of dry wonton noodles had been foreign to me. There are places in my hometown that serve wonton noodles too but they were always the soupy type, perhaps because the weather was always cool enough for a bowl of piping hot noodles. Well, I don't know since when this has been one of my favorite dishes to eat. Now, I make it sometimes, trying to duplicate the taste but sometimes I'm more successful than others. And knowing me, when I felt that it's close enough, I was too lazy to put down the list of ingredients that I put in and so I later forgot about it. Those were pre-this-blog days of course. Now, I try to pay attention to what I use, and how much so that I could share with you all. (I'm amazed by my generosity sometimes.)

So here it is:

INGREDIENTS:

2 servings 

2 bundles of wonton noodles (I particularly like one brand that's only sold at a Viet grocery store here) 

12 round wonton wrappers*

6 large shrimps (or about 1/2 per wonton)

3 oz ground pork

2 Tsp chopped chives

1 large clove of garlic, finely chopped

1 Tsp finely diced fresh water chestnuts (or jicama)

1.5 Tsp soy paste**

1 tsp corn starch

Baby bok choy

2.5 cups homemade (or low-sodium) chicken broth

Spring onion, for garnish

2 Tsp vegetable oil

2 tsp ketchup

Hot sauce (to taste)

3 tsp soy sauce

1 tsp oyster sauce

1 tsp soy paste

*These are sold in hundreds (I think) so I normally freeze them and put them out to thaw about 1.5h before I wrap them. You might want to freeze them in small portions if you don't have a family of 10.

**You might wonder if soy sauce is a good substitute. Well, I think soy paste works better because it's less liquidy, and also tastes different.

METHOD:

Clean the shrimps, chop into small pieces, mix with the corn starch and some soy paste. Set aside. At this point, you probably wonder why corn starch is used here. Well, this is how my friend's mom has always made her wontons. Later on, I read somewhere that the corn starch creates a high pH environment which gives the shrimps the "springy" feel just like when you order them at restaurants. Neat huh?

Mix the ground pork, chopped water chestnuts, chives, and garlic. Add freshly ground black pepper and the remaining soy paste. Mix well. 

Scoop about a Tsp of the pork mixture onto a wonton wrapper, add shrimps, wet the edge with water and seal from one side to the other, make sure no air bubbles are trapped.

Bring water to a boil in a tall sauce pan. Blanch the bok choy (these leaves cook very quickly). Remove. Add the wontons and cook for about 5-7 minutes in boiling water. During the last 2 minutes, use a noodle strainer to blanch the wonton noodles. Note that the blanching time varies, depending on what type you get so make sure you check. Remove the noodles when they are al dente. Strain all the water away. Remove the cooked wontons.

Meanwhile, warm the chicken broth. In a bowl, add 1/3 cup of the broth and the last 6 ingredients. Mix well. Add the strained noodles and toss. Season the remaining broth, divide into 2 small bowls, top with chopped spring onion.

Place the noodles on a plate, arrange the wontons and bok choy around it. Serve with the bowl of broth on the side. 

And in the words of Alton Brown, "I bid you good eats!"

Bún Thang

I am at a loss as to how to translate the name of this dish. Bún is basically the general term for any type of round rice noodles, but I actually don't know what thang means. What I know, though, is that this dish originates from the Hanoi. I once had it there but I remembered not liking it at all. So I was very skeptical the summer before last when my friend's mom said that this dish would be on the menu when I visited. To be honest, I was hoping there would be something else I could eat. (I didn't say anything though, that would be too rude.) But as it turned out, I was pleasantly surprised! So I asked for the recipe and what I got was a list of ingredients. Yeah, that's how it works, no measuring, just the experience of making a dish multiple times. 

This dish, unlike phở or bún bò, does not have a lot of herbs or spices so it relies solely on the broth. This means if you are going to make it and you have no time to make a good one, just don't bother making it. Also, the not-so-great feature of this dish is that it does not have vegetables. Some people serve this along with bean sprouts but I don't think the original version has them. It's just a bowl of noodle soup for you to gulp down.

Since last summer, I have tried to duplicate this dish twice but I still don't have precise measurements yet so this really is just a rough guide.

INGREDIENTS:

6 servings

2 lb pork bones

1 boned-in skinless chicken breast

2 oz dried shrimps
2 eggs, beaten
3-4 oz pork roll (available at Viet stores)
1 large yellow onion
1 piece of ginger
1 medium dried squid
Small round rice noodles
Vietnamese mint
Mắm tôm - shrimp paste

METHOD:
Warning: The shrimp paste has a very very pungent aroma. It smells much worse than fish sauce to unaccustomed nostrils but completely mouth-watering to the accustomed ones ;).

Trim the chicken breast to remove as much fat as possible.

Broil the onion and ginger.

Grill the dried squid. It's best to do this over charcoal fire but since I live in an apartment, I use methanol gel instead.

Soak the dried shrimps in warm water for about half an hour.

Bring water to a boil, add the pork bones and bring the water back to a boil for about 3min. Pour the water out, rinse the bones carefully with cold water before returning them back to the pot together with cold water. Bring to a boil for about 5 min and reduce heat, let the bones simmer for about 2h. Use a fine mesh to remove the gunk floating to the top while cooking. In the last half an hour, add the chicken breast, the grilled squid, and the broiled onion and ginger to the pot, cook till the chicken is done. Drain the shrimp water into the broth pot. Season with salt to a somewhat undersalted side if you are willing to try the shrimp paste. Remove the chicken breast, let cool.

Discard the bones, keep the broth. Pork bones tend to have high fat content so what I normally do is make the broth, cool it in the refrigerator overnight so that all the fat solidifies and floats to the top. I then strain then broth through a fine mesh/cheese cloth to remove the fat so I end up with a nice broth without having to consume all the fat.

Bring water to a boil in a different pot, add the noodles and cook for about 3min. Rinse with cold water to stop the cooking and let drain.

Shred the chicken.

Grind the dried shrimp using a pestle and mortar. The texture is better this way but if you are lazy, a food processor does an okay job.

Cut the pork roll into fine strips.

Season the beaten eggs with some salt and pepper, then make the thinnest "omelet" possible. Let cool, roll it up and cut into very thin strips.

Chop the mint finely.

Assemble the bowl: place chicken, shrimp, pork, eggs, and chopped mint over the noodles. For an aesthetic effect, place them in a way that creates color contrast. Carefully ladle the boiling broth over the noodle, serve with some shrimp paste. This is perfect for a cold day!!!