Viet World Kitchen

Tamarind Glazed Lamb Ribs Recipe

Despite being a low-meat eater, I do enjoy gnawing on a good rib now and then. Pork ribs are typically what I cook when the urge emerges, but this recipe, adapted from Jennifer McLagan’s Odd Bits cookbook, features lamb ribs. Never had them? You should, especially if you love the gaminess of lamb.

Odd Bits is about trying or revisiting cuts that are often overlooked these days because many consumers gravitate toward tender, boneless meat. If you like rack of lamb, the spare ribs are an extension of it that you may have not tasted. I'm not sure where lamb spare ribs go after the fanciful rack is rendered; they ought to be sold right next to each other. That said, lamb spare ribs are wonderful. They have a decent amount of fat so that during cooking, the fat’s rich flavor permeates the flesh. They are also reasonably priced.

Sometimes that lamb goodness can be too much, which is why McLagan’s Asian-inflected recipe intrigued me. The tart-sweet spiciness of the tamarind glaze cuts the gaminess of the lamb. Fish sauce lends an umami undercurrent. Instead of fresh chile in the glaze, I substituted Sriracha chile sauce because it had tart-sweet heat to match the other ingredients. At the table, we tried adding Indian masala chilli sauce to the leftover glaze and it was superb, if not better than Thai Sriracha. Squirts of lime juice further brighten flavors.

Finally, this is great winter fare. The ribs get baked in the oven until tender and then rebaked with the glaze. (Hint: With the advance cooking, it’s great for holiday entertaining.) You could grill the ribs outdoors, weather permitting.

Red Wine and Beef Stew in Claypot (A Franco-Viet Experiment)

Because of France’s occupation of Vietnam from 1883 to 1954, many people assume that Viet cooking is heavily influenced by French foodways. While there are a handful of old French cookbooks written in Vietnamese, pure French cooking was mostly for those who could afford the ingredients. 

As cultural survivalists, Vietnamese cooks wove French elements into their traditions, just like they did with other cultures that they came in contact with over the ages. That’s why Vietnamese food can confound as much as it delights. Beefy classics such as pho noodle soup and beef stew with tomato, lemongrass, and star anise are prime examples of fusion Vietnamese fare. There are so many Eastern and Western elements in those dishes that it's hard to simply call them Viet-Franco food.

On the other hand, Viet cooks can be inventive in replicating foreign culinary concepts, such as a beouf Bourguinon. That’s what I pondered as I set about making a red wine and beef stew, an cool weather dish that seemed fitting with the season. I typically rely on Julia Child’s master Zinfandel of Beef recipe from The Way to Cook when making a beef stew. This time around, I combined JC’s techniques with some borrowed from Jennifer McLagan’s new book, Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal. While there are a number of Asian-inspired recipes, most of McLagan’s recipes are western in nature. The point of the book is to encourage cooks to look beyond the usual “middle cuts,” such as beef and pork tenderloin, to discover the delicious appeal of ears, tongues, feet, and tails.

Asian cooks don’t have much issue with this concept as evidenced by the tripe and chicken feet at dim sum! Nevertheless it's good to be reminded of their exceptional flavor and textures. Asian markets have a wealth of odd bits but how often do we buy them nowadays? Not as much as our parents and grandparents used to as they practiced a head-to-tail approach to eating.

McLagan’s classic beef stew recipe was unfussy, called for igniting the red wine (pyrotechnic cooking always intrigues me), and baking the stew. She used rounds of beef shank. I had this frozen chuck roast from my annual share of a grass-fed cow:

As I was reviewing the recipes by Child and McLagan, I thought: How would I make this dish if I lived in Vietnam during the French colonial period? What if I had to cook for or with a French person during that era?

Ruhlman’s Twenty Leads to Kaffir Lime Fried Chicken Recipe

Believe it or not, I’ve never made American-style fried chicken. My husband loves to chide me about how the recipe that I included in Into the Vietnamese Kitchen is fried chicken light, the modest pieces coated in bread crumbs or panko and fried to a crisp, served with a fish sauce-inflected sweet-and-sour sauce. He grew up with large pieces of chicken coated in flour and fried to a crisp. While that was a standard for him, it was exotic to me. When we shared an apartment in college, my brother and I sometimes ate Kentucky Fried Chicken as a novelty splurge.

Chinese lemon chicken and Korean fried chicken were good but not the same as old-fashioned American fried chicken, my husband contends. While we were in the South last year, we had wonderfully salty, crisp fried chicken at Uncle Lou’s in Memphis. I was looking for a good guide to making American-style fried chicken and decided to let Michael Ruhlman lead me.

North Indian Egg Curry Recipe (Anda Masala)

It was about ten years ago when I first tasted an Indian curry made with hard-boiled eggs. It was at a dinner hosted by an Indian-American friend who’d planned a menu of her family favorites.  Her mom was in town and among the dishes that Aradhna prepared was an egg curry. The soft-chewy texture of the whites and richness of yolk was unexpected and captivating.

Up to that point, my curry experiences were with meats, seafood, and/or vegetables. Boiled eggs? It never occurred to me until that day to use eggs as the protein element in a curry. On the other hand, how could I have been blind for so long? Viet cooks simmer boiled eggs in caramel sauce. Chinese cooks simmer eggs in tea. Why not simmer the eggs in a thick sauce? Duh!

I’ve occasionally thought about the dish since then but didn’t go looking for the recipe. It’s not the first curry that comes to mind when I think of an Indian dish to prepare. However, this past weekend, while reading Julie Sahni’s Savoring India, a cookbook that’s rich in history, culture, and photography, I came across this recipe for “eggs braised in fragrant gravy.” Sahni’s recipe for anda masala comes from Uttar Pradesh in northern India.

I had some great local eggs and tomato from the farmers’ market so I was game. Plus, the recipe was very simple. Despite its ease, the dish involved classic Indian approaches to layering flavors that involves frying up cumin seeds during the initial tadka process, cooking down the onion until it starts to caramelize, adding the spices and simmering with the wet ingredients (tomato and water, in this case).

The result was fabulous and achievable with little stress. If you’re a vegetarian or new at Indian cooking, this is a good recipe to try.

Stir-Fried Pork with Black Beans and Green Beans Recipe

Having worked on this tofu book for about a year and a half, I’ve found myself eating a mostly low-meat diet. For that reason, there are often bits of meat sitting in the fridge that I have to use up. This week, there was about 12 ounces of pork shoulder steak lingering. Looking for an easy, Chinese-y way to use it up, I made this stir-fry, based on a Hunan recipe from Fuschia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. She described “Farmhouse Stir-Fried Pork with Green Peppers” (Nong Jia Chao Rou) as a popular peasant dish but I found that the flavors were fit for a king.

I had no sweet Italian peppers, as called for in the recipe, so I substituted tender Romano beans from the farmers’ market. A Fresno chile lent color and a tiny bit of heat. Balancing texture, color, and flavor is key to stir-frying just like it is with any cooking.

The most remarkable aspect of this stir-fry was the seasoning of the pork. With just a bit of light and dark soy sauce and Shaoxing rice wine, the pork took on a wonderful velvety, deeply savory quality. Rory remarked that it was bordering being lamblike. The key was using a fat (well marbled) piece of pork shoulder. You know I love grilled pork shoulder steaks. Next time you’re at a market buy an extra one for this stir-fry.  We gobbled it up with rice.

I suppose that if you don’t want to eat pork, chicken thigh would be work as a substitute. Instead of the green beans, try Anaheim or Pasilla chiles, if you like. Lovely sweet Italian peppers should be coming into season in a few weeks. I typically get mine from Hmong farmers.