Viet World Kitchen

Vietnamese-American Thanksgiving Salad Recipe

After my family fled Vietnam in 1975 and settled in California, we took in American holidays with gusto. My sisters and I studied recipes in cookbooks, magazines, and newspapers, trying to understand our new situation. My frugal mother clipped coupons and roasted free turkeys for years. One Thanksgiving, she admitted that she wasn’t fond of its dryish meat. Uh-oh, we were trying to fit in as best we could, despite the fish sauce vapors in our kitchen and my dad harvesting fresh banana leaves from the front yard with a machete.

To have Thanksgiving without turkey seemed un-American at the time. But mom had had enough. She instead roasted big chickens stuffed with sticky rice seasoned by cognac, shiitake mushroom, thyme and butter (see the recipe in Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, the rice chapter). Roasted chestnuts with butter and cilantro was her go-to side.

Chinese Chicken Salad Recipe and Video Tip

Over the weekend, I found a rarity at my local farmer’s market: a head of iceberg lettuce. I love its delicate jade color and flavor, despite many others thinking that it’s a declasse vegetable. Iceberg is crunchy and cooling. For Vietnamese food, I like to tuck it into banh mi and cellophane noodle and fried tofu rice paper rolls (bi cuon chay, see page 161 of Asian Tofu for the recipe). But to savor a lot of that gorgeous iceberg lettuce that I picked up, I looked to making Chinese chicken salad.

The chicken ‘salads’ in most Chinese cookbooks don’t resemble what is served in American restaurants. They lack fried crunchies and have little, if any, lettuce. What many people in the States know as Chinese chicken salad is a New World thing.

Where did Chinese chicken salad come from? According to Celia Chiang of the renowned Mandarin restaurants in San Francisco and Beverly Hills, she came up with the salad. She laid claim to it in The Seventh Daughter, her award-winning cookbook and memoir. Cecilia is a feisty woman and you don’t want to mess with her. The Chinese chicken salad that she presents in the book calls for flash frying chicken, shredding it, then tossing it with iceberg lettuce, cilantro, fried rice noodles, lots of roasted peanuts and a dressing of warm oil, mustard powder and five spice powder.

Cecilia’s approach was interesting with its earthy dressing, but I was looking for the Chinese chicken salad with lots of fried wonton skins, rice noodles and a sweet-savory hoisin-based dressing. No canned mandarin segments for me; they seem to dilute the flavors, despite their charming look. I went hunting for my ideal Chinese chicken salad.

Impromptu Potato Salad Recipe

After learning how to cook a pot of rice and folding up dumplings, my mom gave me the task of making potato salad for our family. It wasn’t a boiled potato, pickles and mayo affair. It was Salade Russe, a magenta combination of beets, potato, carrot, egg, and onion seasoned with a vinaigrette. The Russian-French preparation is part of the Vietnamese repertoire, a tasty remnant of the country’s colonial past.

While I still make salade Russe nowadays, it takes a little planning because I roast the beets to concentrate their flavor. Plus, the salad needs to thoroughly chill to taste extra good. When I make the potato salad of my youth, I follow my recipe on page 186 of Into the Vietnamese Kitchen.

When I’m with my husband walking to the store and we decide to make potato salad for a dinner of grilled meat, I take a simplified route. What you see here and the recipe below is what I made earlier this week. No beets were involved. We had the potato salad with grilled ribs and a green salad.

Serious Eats Cooks up Asian Tofu (+ book giveaways)

Photo by Maren Caruso

This week, SeriousEats.com is featuring the Asian Tofu cookbook. It's part of their "Cook the Book" series in which they pick a noteworthy book and then present a number of recipes from the publication. There's also a giveaway of the selected work. In 2009, they featured Into the Vietnamese Kitchen in a similar fashion; Serious Eats has also cooked lots from Asian Dumplings. 

Right now, Asian Tofu is under Serious Eats's microscope. Caroline Russock is currently in charge of the column, and she knows her stuff. On Monday, Caroline started things off with these comments:

Tasty Tofu Recipes in March Sunset Mag

From Sunset magazine. Tofu, bacon and avocado sandwich.

Over the weekend, a local newspaper reporter interviewed me about the Asian Tofu cookbook. One of her questions was: Do you see a rise in the popularity of tofu in America?

I paused for a few seconds to figure out an appropriate response, and the March issue of Sunset magazine was it. I’ve been a long-time subscriber to the magazine, which focuses on lifestyles in the American West – the region’s food, travel, gardening, and decor. Sunset has been around since 1898 and has a monthly circulation of  1.2 million plus readers. It has always been a great gauge for what’s trending in the mainstream American West. Last fall, food editor Margo True asked me to curate and develop a collection of innovative tofu recipes by chefs in the West.