Viet World Kitchen

Pan-Seared Egg Tofu "Scallops" with Sweet Chile Sauce Recipe

Welcome to 2012! As you may know, I’ve been preoccupied with tofu. My obsession has mostly been with the kind made from soybeans – the typical stuff eaten by countless people in Asia and beyond. But "tofu" is also a generic term used to describe a wide range of jelled and solidified foods in the Chinese repertoire. For example, some Chinese cookbooks use “almond tofu” to denote the sweet almond–flavored dessert solidified with seaweed-based agar agar. (In the Viet mindset, that’s a type of thach/jelly.) Burmese tofu, also called Shan tofu, is made like polenta with ground beans and water. Japanese sesame tofu is delicate and divine; find out more about goma dofu from Just Hungry. 

Then there’s egg tofu that comes in a tube. It looks like a tiny torpedo and feels like a filled balloon in its plastic casing. Sold at Chinese markets, egg tofu is made with eggs and soymilk, with an eggy richness that prevails. Egg tofu is popular with my Taiwanese and Hong Kong friends, who enjoy it simply fried and bathed in sauce.

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.

Grilled Lemon Basil Chicken

My dear friend Linda came down from San Francisco for an impromptu lunch yesterday. I was too tired from having finished the Asian Tofu manuscript (hurray!) to make an elaborate meal for us. I needed something quick and easy. 

Linda loves big flavor and chile heat. My solution was in a lovely bunch of lemon basil (bai maeng-lak) that I’d purchased on Saturday from the Hmong vendor at our farmer’s market. If you’re not familiar with lemon basil, get a hold of some.

This is the fresh herb season and I typically overdose on lemon basil. Their delicate, light green leaves are slightly peppery with elements of lemongrass, basil, and mint. Lemon basil is not widely used in Vietnamese cooking as we have herbs such as kinh gioi and tia to. (See the Herb Primer for details.) However, lemon basil is used in other Southeast Asian cuisines. For example, the Thais employ it in soup with shrimp. (I recently it on a crostini topped with the sardine in spicy tomato sauce.)

Alternative Thanksgiving: Butterflied Roast Chicken with Curry Leaf

 
You may have read earlier how my family gave up on eating roast turkey for Thanksgiving. We turned to chickens and game hens for our alternative Thanksgiving menus. Here’s another confession: I hate to turn the bird in a hot oven. I’ll do it when it’s necessary but frankly, when I’ve got a bunch of guests over, perhaps had too much wine to drink, and want to have a relaxing time, I don’t want to flip the bird. The spewing fat and hot oven can ruin things.

My solution to avoid turning the bird is butterflying, which is basically removing the backbone and flattening the bird out. The result looks like an open book.

The advantages of roasting a butterflied bird are these:

• No need to flip the bird: All the skin is facing upward. The butterflied bird bonus is more crisp skin.
• Quick roasting time: It’s splayed out flat so all the parts are done at the same time. The breast doesn’t dry out.
• Great flavor: You can easily get under the skin to season the flesh and tuck herbs in between. Plus herbs put under the bird contribute flavor too.  Stuff the stuffing, as well.
• Easy to cut: Tableside carving of a whole bird is a special skill. A butterflied roasted bird sits flat and is easier to cut up in front of a crowd. On the other hand, you can be Asian and cut the bird in the kitchen and present it in large bite-size pieces. Guests using chopsticks may appreciate that!

I've butterflied game hens too and things are just the same, just smaller. You can grill a butterflied bird quite nicely too.