Category Archives: South East Asian

Chicken San Choi Bau

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Officially Autumn!

Changes in season are funny, on the one hand I don’t feel ready to wave summer goodbye. On the other, I like the colours in Autumn, and for some reason I always feel like pumpkin soup and crusty bread. And that’s not something to be sad about.

But if you feel you must hang on to some summery food for a bit longer yet, try this chicken dish. It’s really good for you – the flavours all come from lovely herbs and spices, rather than fats, and it tastes lovely and fresh, zingy, light, etc.

And yes, iceberg lettuce, there is a place for you in this decade. You can come out of hiding. I promise not to put you in a salad with hard boiled eggs and cubes of cheese.

I can in no way vouch for this recipe’s authenticity, because, well, I made it up, and I’m no expert in Thai cooking. If you can get hold of some (preferably free range) chicken mince, an iceberg lettuce, a few staple asian pantry ingredients and a few herbs, you’re away laughing, as we say here.
Chicken San Choi Bau of sorts
Serves two
2 tsp sesame oil
300g chicken mince (free range is kindest)
1-2 tsp crushed or minced garlic
1-2 tsp grated fresh ginger
1 stem lemongrass, bashed a little and chopped finely

1-2 kaffir lime leaves, finely chopped

1/2 a red onion, finely chopped
1 tsp minced chilli

1 Tbsp lime juice
1 Tbsp fish sauce
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp sherry
2 tsp finely grated palm sugar
fresh mint and coriander, chopped
iceberg lettuce leaves, to serve
Heat the sesame oil in a wok over high heat. Add the chicken, garlic, ginger, lemongrass, lime leaves and onion. Stir-fry until the chicken is just cooked through. Add the chilli, lime juice, fish sauce, soy sauce, sherry and sugar, and heat through. Take the wok off the heat and stir through the chopped herbs.
Serve in iceberg lettuce leaves, which you can roll up to make little easy-to-eat parcels. Or, you could leave the bowl of cooked mince on the table with a pile of appropriately sized lettuce leaves and let your diners help themselves. An extra squeeze of lime juice over the chicken before eating never goes astray, either!

Hot Smoked Salmon Pasta with Asian Flavours

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I read an article some months ago in the Listener about smoked salmon – in fact, now that I come to write this post, I find myself googling it – it turns out the article is available here. It’s a great introduction to salmon if you’re new to cooking with it.

We don’t eat a lot of hot smoked salmon – it is rather expensive as far as meat and fish go – but for every once in a while, it’s a really healthy option, it doesn’t require cooking, and tastes like luxury.

At the time of reading the article, I was seduced by the fresh-sounding flavours in the recipe for a ‘hot smoked salmon salad with hints of Asia’, and cut it out. It’s a recipe for a dinner party entrée-type salad with cos leaves, hot smoked salmon and salmon caviar. Reading back I now see it was invented for a ladies’ golf tournament at the Sheraton in Fiji, which is rather a different setting to my brief: at home in Porirua on a Friday night.

As you can appreciate, the dinner party entrée feeling quickly fell by the wayside, but I adapted the dressing into a pasta sauce and added in some extra veges, and lo, Friday night dinner was born. I love the asian flavours in Lauraine Jacobs’ dish, so kept all of those in.

If you’re looking for an easy, healthy, tasty, weeknight meal, but still something classy, this is a great option. Or, feel free to mess around with quantities and keep it as a dinner party entree, either as a pasta dish, or returning it to its original salad form.

Hot Smoked Salmon Pasta with Asian Flavours
Serves 4. Adapted from this recipe by Lauraine Jacobs.

Dressing/Sauce:
Note: you may like to increase this recipe if you like very ‘saucy’ pasta.
4cm piece of fresh ginger, roughly chopped
stalk of lemongrass, bruised and roughly chopped
6 peppercorns
1 small fresh red chilli (tip: I have a huge bag of little red chillies in my freezer from Moore Wilson’s; I use them for everything)
1 Tbsp fish sauce
1 Tbsp rice (or red) wine vinegar
pinch finely grated palm sugar
1 lime, finely grated zest and juice
2 Tbsp avocado (or olive) oil

Place the ginger, lemongrass, peppercorns and chilli into a food processor and whiz until finely chopped. I am lucky and have a tiny whiz designed for just this. If you don’t, just finely grate the ginger, pound the peppercorns in a mortar and pestle, finely chop the lemongrass and chilli, and mix all together.  Add the fish sauce, vinegar, palm sugar, lime zest and juice, and oil, and either whiz again or mix well together. Season and set aside.

Pasta:
280g pasta, fresh or dried, over to you
4 shallots, finely sliced
2 courgettes (zucchini), sliced diagonally
2-3 Tbsp red wine vinegar
baby spinach leaves
200g wood roasted/hot smoked salmon (I used Aorangi this time)
2 limes, cut in wedges, to serve (not crucial)
chopped fresh coriander, to garnish

Cook pasta according to packet directions. Meanwhile, spray a frying pan with a little oil, and gently cook the shallots and courgettes over medium heat, adding splashes of vinegar as required, just to keep them moist, soft and delicious. Once they’re just tender, add the spinach leaves and just stir over gently heat until the leaves wilt. Place the cooked and drained pasta in shallow bowls (toss with a little oil here if you feel it is deeply necessary), and arrange the courgette mixture on top. Gently flake the salmon into pieces and top the pasta with it, and drizzle the dish with dressing. Serve with lime wedges and garnish with chopped coriander.

Rice Paper Rolls

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I love rice paper rolls. They’re simple enough to make on a weeknight, can be as super healthy as you want, and seem somehow more impressive than the effort they require. My only complaint is that they’re not that photogenic.

OK, so maybe the problem is I’m not the greatest food stylist or photographer. Whatever. I’m still complaining.

You can put all kinds of delicious into rice paper rolls. This week, I used poached chicken as my main filling. I added soy sauce, sherry, brown sugar, five spice and fresh garlic and ginger to the poaching water following an Alison Holst recipe — often adding a bit of water to a marinade mix makes good poaching liquid! Then once the (whole) chicken breast has been cooked, remove it from the pan, let it cool and slice it thinly or shred it.

While the chicken cooks, you can get your salad-y type fillings ready. I had shredded cabbage, mung beans, grated carrot, chopped cashews, spring onions, mint and coriander.

Prawn or shrimp meat, lettuce leaves, cucumber, peanuts, and softened vermicelli noodles also make good rice paper roll fillings.

I don’t want to tell anybody how to suck eggs, but I needed pictures to help me make these the first time! So … for the rice paper novice: rice paper wrappers come in flat circles. You get a dish big enough to hold one whole, and fill the dish with warm water. Then you gently dip the rice paper in and let it soften. This only takes 10-15 seconds – less than that it’s still too hard to roll, more than that and you’re trying to pick up mushy rice glug from the bottom of the dish. Lay the softened wrapper on a board, or a clean black tea towel so it shows up in photos.

Lay a bit of filling in a strip about 2/3 of the way down the wrapper. I learnt the hard way not to try and fit too much filling in. This is about right:

Then fold up the bit at the bottom:

Then fold in the sides:

Then roll it up and all done.

Now for a tasty dipping sauce. I made chilli and lime. Mix together, and leave to stand for a few minutes:

1 lime, juice and finely grated rind
3-4 Tbsp water
3-4 Tbsp fish sauce
1 Tbsp caster sugar
2 cloves finely chopped garlic
the white part of 1 spring onion
as much finely chopped chilli as you can handle

Annabel Langbein also has a Vietnamese Dipping Sauce recipe that she hopefully won’t mind me sharing… 3 Tbsp fish sauce, 1 Tbsp sugar, 2 Tbsp rice wine vinegar and 2 Tbsp Thai sweet chilli sauce.

Yum!