Viet World Kitchen

Thai Sweet Chile Sauce Recipe

We’ve had a despicably cold summer in the Bay Area, the coldest since 1958! Dreary overcast skies greet us every morning. If we’re lucky, we get a few hours of sun and then it’s cool again.

Yesterday, my husband reminded me of the sweltering heat wave last August. My friend, novelist Monique Truong, just wrote to me about Brooklyn’s humidity.

I ought to be relieved to not experience global warming, huh? But as crazy as it sounds, the physical discomfort of sweating during the dog days of summer seems dreamy right now.

I figured that since the sun can’t burn through the clouds that I could at least enjoy flavors that evoke hot weather. That’s the genesis of this Thai sweet chile sauce.

Ever since I opened a bottle of the commercially-made stuff, I’ve wanted to make my own. The bottled version is terribly gloppy and cloying, without much personality. It didn’t seem like rocket science to prepare so I tinkered around in my kitchen to come up with this sweet chile sauce recipe.

Low-Cal Hmong Spicy Eggplant Recipe

I love eggplant but don’t always want all the calories that go with eating it. It’s a vegetable that’s often times cooked into rich foods, fried in oil or simmered in rich sauces. Even when I grill whole ones, either for Vietnamese eggplant with scallions or Indian bhaigan bharta, there’s some oil involved to enhance the vegetables plush qualities.

Giving into all the fatty eggplant pleasures -- deep-fried eggplant tempura, stir-fried eggplant in garlic sauce, baked eggplant parmesan -- seems inevitable. A low-calorie eggplant dish? Nah!

Never would have I thought of boiling eggplant. That sounded nasty when a Hmong farmer suggested it to me. It’s a common way for us to prepare eggplant, John Xiong assured me. He harvested some Chinese eggplant from his Fresno field and we went back to his home to prepare this dish, among others that hot afternoon in 2006.

The Hmong eggplant mash (called lws kubtshis tuav, don’t ask me for a pronunciation!) was enlightening. John and his wife, Bee, boiled their eggplants whole so they would not get water logged. When soft, they peeled them, then mixed the flesh into a fiery chile, scallion, and cilantro mixture that had just been pounded in their mortar.

The result was full of heat and herbal pungency. It was great scooped from the mortar onto balls of steamed sticky rice, but John said that it was rather lean. If you want to take it another step, he revealed, cooking it with some oil and add extra scallion. He did and it was richer tasting.

Grilled Okra Recipe

If people dislike okra, it's usually because of its mucilaginous (read: slimy) nature.  I know okra as a bright addition to tart-sweet Vietnamese seafood soups and an earthy fried Indian side dish. In those Asian preparations, okra doesn’t reveal its gummy nature. Rather, you savor its ridged skin and little round seeds. You marvel at its lovely spoke structure and graceful appearance.

Okra is native to Africa but traveled to India at some very early point in time; no one is sure when that happened. In the 19th century, okra found itself in Southeast Asia and it moved on to China after that.

The pod has a mild flavor and plays well with other ingredients. It’s also a relatively expensive vegetable most of the year. For those reasons, it rarely has a starring role and is often cooked with other ingredients.

Summer is okra season as the warmer months coax their tropical nature and foster growth. The quality of the pods during summer is spectacular. Last week, at the India Cash and Carry market in San Jose, CA, a group of women huddled around a particularly fresh box of unblemished okra, picking their purchase one pod at a time. My husband noticed the group and jumped right in. He ended up with 1 1/2 pounds of gorgeous okra.

15 Minute Chocolate Cake Recipe

My sisters and I took to baking western-style cakes soon after we got to America in 1975. There was so much butter, flour, and sugar that we could not resist beating up a batter to create cakes of all sizes and flavors. We used an old electric mixer that my dad picked up from a garage sale. We read recipes from French and American cookbooks, as well as magazines such as Good Housekeeping, which we’d get from the library.

We didn’t usually frost our cakes as that was time consuming. Plus, we saved making butter cream frostings and piping out fanciful decorations for my mom’s annual Christmas Yule Logs (Buche de Noel).  We mostly ate our cakes straight, with some seasonal fruit on the side. Asians like the combination of fruit and cake. Witness the popular strawberry and cream layer cake.

I bake cakes whenever I want to re-taste my youth or cheer up. (I needed some cheering up this week, as you may have noticed.) My cakes may be a simple sponge cake (banh bong lan) that I whip up, or a quick chocolate cake like this one, a riff on a recipe I clipped from a 1995 Gourmet article by Laurie Colwin, one of the most soulful food writers.

Pea Tips Stir-fried with Garlic Recipe (Qing Chao Dou Miao)

Spring is the harbinger for many good things to eat. I plant and eagerly wait for seedlings to sprout in my garden. I shop at markets to look for the new season’s crop of Asian vegetables. One of my favorite spring-time Asian vegetables is the little pea tip. Around now is when they’re just about right for farmers to harvest.

Pea tips (aka pea sprouts, snow pea shoots) are called dou miao in Mandarin. They are full of pea goodness, the embodiment of snap peas. Look for pea tips at Chinese markets in plastic bags. You’ll pay about $3 a pound as they are time consuming to individually pick by hand. Use within several days of purchase to enjoy this vegetable delicacy at its peak.

In the above photo, note the cutie tendrils. Tender tendrils are edible whereas older ones are akin to dental floss. I pluck them all off, for good measure. The occasional white pea bud is edible. Keep them, if you like, when prepping the pea tips for cooking.

Easy Asparagus with Soy Sauce and Sesame Recipe

If you're concerned about timing issues when it comes to cooking or if you just want to quickly put something healthy and good on the table, this simple recipe is for you. I purchased and prepped way too much food for our Tet feast on Tuesday night, and among the leftovers was a pound of asparagus. Not knowing what to do, I parboiled them in lots of salted water and kept them refrigerated. Why? Because prepping asparagus up to that point allows you to do whatever you want to them at the last moment. For example, you can add them to an omelet, toss them in a salad, stir-fry them with a little oyster sauce or coat the green spears in a little rich and savory-sweet dressing. 

For lunch today, I took the last approach for this recipe, which is from Shandong province in northern China. The dressing is seriously fast and easy. I have no qualms about admitting that I borrowed this idea from The Seventh Daughter, an engaging and informative cookbook by legendary San Francisco restaurateur Cecilia Chiang of the Mandarin.

How to Cook Dried Bamboo Shoot (Mang Kho)

Several people have emailed asking about how to cook dried bamboo shoot. I looked up the familiar Asian ingredient in all my books but for some reason, dried bamboo shoot is seldom mentioned in Asian cookbooks. It is a terrific and standard ingredient sold at Chinese and Vietnamese markets. Dried bamboo shoot is shelved at Asian grocery stores alongside other dried foodstuffs, such as dried mushroom, seaweed, turnip, squid, beans, etc. In Vietnam, the shoots are simmered along with pork, duck, or chicken for a classic rice noodle soup called bun mang. Such preparations are traditionally saved for special occasions, such as the Lunar New Year – Tet Nguyen Dan. Since Tet is coming up (in 2010, it falls on Valentine's Day!), I cooked up a bunch of dried bamboo shoot today in preparation for the holiday cooking ahead.

What is the difference between fresh and dried bamboo shoot? Fresh has a crispness whereas dried has a meaty quality. Both have that musty bamboo funk but since bamboo shoot has to be cooked for a long time, the funk disappears. Bamboo shoot is called mang (“mahng”) in Vietnamese and dried bamboo shoot is mang kho (“mahng koh”). Dried bamboo shoots are not hard, but rather leathery. Once reconstituted and boiled until chewy-tender, dried bamboo shoots have a chewy-tenderness and pleasant sweetness that’s not found in fresh or canned bamboo. Whenever I cook dried bamboo shoot, I marvel at how it transforms its cooking broth into a perfumy brew. If you’ve had Japanese ramen noodle soup, chances are that you’ve had dried bamboo shoot (called menma) as a topping. 

Book Review & Recipe: Momofuku Slow-Poached Eggs

I love eggs, particularly soft boiled, poached, and fried. I love the firmish white commingling with the rich yellow-orange yolk. Whether with toast, in banh mi, or atop a bowl of rice, eggs comfort and satisfy me. All I need is one and I’m complete. Little did I know that Chef David Chang and Peter Meehan’s new Momofuku restaurant cookbook would shine some extra bright eggy light into my life. Reviewers have praised the book but also commented that the recipes are not tailored for home cooks. I beg to differ as there are a number of simply brilliant ideas, such as Momofuku’s slow-poached eggs.

In fact, there are lots of wonderful takeaways from the book that go beyond the recipes, such as Chang’s frank humor and observations on race. “OS” sauce is Momofuku’s generic pan-Asian seafood sauce and the acronym stands for Oriental Sauce. Telling it like it is in a thoughtful-yet-brusque manner, Chang explains – as channeled through Meehan’s prose, in the recipe introduction for pan-roasted bouchout mussels with OS (page 100):

I enjoy appropriating the out-of-date and borderline-racist term Oriental whenever I get the chance. But I was one of the few Orientals working in the kitchen at Noodle Bar, and the rest of the round-eye crew wasn’t happy with the name. So we kept it under wraps. Since we’re here alone together, let’s call it what it is: Oriental sauce.

That’s not such an outdated term. It’s just one that’s used behind closed doors.

Few Glitches, Lots of Brilliance
It’s that straight-ahead tone that makes me overlook several Vietnamese misspellings in the book. If you’re going to use all the diacritics (accent marks), you should go all the way and across the board, regardless of culture and cuisine.