Recipes: Nem Nuong + Chao Tom

 

NEM NUONG

Ingredients

• 2.2 pounds/1 kg of ground pork shoulder; if leaner meat is used, add a bit of oil to the ingredients
• 6 finely chopped garlic cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon of Alsa (or any brand) baking powder, 4 tablespoons corn or potato starch, 7 or 8 tablespoons water, all mixed together
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons thinh or roasted, finely ground rice sold at Vietnamese markets. This can be omitted if not available in your kitchen.
• 3 tablespoons fish sauce
• 1 head of lettuce
• 1 bunch of cilantro, mints
• 1 package of rice vermicelli
• 1 large cucumber, cored
• 1 peeled green mango
• 1 peeled plantain banana
• Rice paper

 

Instructions

• In a bowl mix the pork, salt, fish sauce, and sugar together. Then add the mixture of baking powder, starch, and water. Cover the bowl and chill in freezer for 4 hours, but make sure that it does not freeze.
• While waiting, wash the lettuce, cilantro, and mints and let dry. Slice the cucumber, mango, and banana as seen in the picture above. Cook the rice vermicelli noodle then drain it well. You can also prepare the nuoc cham (dipping sauce) at this time.
• Remove the meat from the freezer and add the roasted ground rice. Then use a food processor to grind the mixture to a paste.
• Spread the paste into a lightly oiled baking pan (20″x4″) about an inch thick. Bake it at 350 degrees F for 20-25 minutes; check to see if it is cooked at 20 minutes depending on your oven.
• When cooked, let it cool a few minutes then slice into strips of about 5″x1″ for rolling.
• Dip the rice paper into a bowl of warm water. Once it is soft, you can start rolling just as in the video below. Note that you should not wet the paper until you are ready to wrap.

 

NUOC CHAM OR DIPPING SAUCE

Mix the following ingredients in a bowl then modify slightly according to your taste. It shouldn’t be too sweet or sour. Substitute Splenda for sugar if you are diabetic.

• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 2 tablespoons fish sauce
• 2 tablespoons fresh squeezed lime juice or rice vinegar
• 3 tablespoons water
• fresh or preserved chili peppers as desired

 

CHAO TOM

Ingredients

• 1 pound shelled and deveined shrimps. The larger the shrimps, the crunchier the paste will be when cooked.
• 3 finely chopped garlic cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 tablespoon tapioca, corn or potato starch
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 head of lettuce
• 1 bunch of cilantro, mints
• 1 package of rice vermicelli
• 1 large cucumber, cored
• 1 peeled green mango
• 1 peeled plantain banana
• Rice paper

Instructions

• Mix shrimp, garlic, salt, pepper, sugar, starch, and oil together in a bowl. Cover the bowl and chill in freezer for 2 hours.
• While waiting, wash the lettuce, cilantro, and mints and let dry. Slice the cucumber, mango, and banana as seen in the picture above. Cook the rice vermicelli noodle then drain it well. You can also prepare the nuoc cham (dipping sauce) at this time.
• Remove the mixture from the freezer and grind in food processor until it is smooth, almost like a paste.
• Spread the paste on a small, oiled baking pan about an inch thick.
• Bake it in a toaster oven (use a regular oven if you double or triple the ingredients) for 15-20 minutes at 300 degrees F. Check after 15 minutes to see if the shrimp has changed color/texture as it may be cooked after 15 minutes depending on your oven.
• Let the shrimp paste cool down for a few minutes then slice the shrimp sheet into 15 or so slices.
• Dip the rice paper in a bowl of water and begin wrapping as in the video above. Do not wet the paper until you are ready to roll.

 

 

Tags: chao tom, nem nuong, nuoc cham, recipe

 

Today’s blog concludes my weeklong affair with the Vietnamese spring roll. As I’m helping my mom prepare the food for a small dinner party,

 

I figure I might as well make some videos of how the rolls are made. Tonight we’re serving nem nuong (baked pork flavored in ground, roasted rice) and chao tom (fresh shrimp ground into a paste and then baked). The first video demonstrates the wrapping technique; it’s really all in the wrist. Apologies in advance for going off the grid at the end of the clip–I totally blank out on the recipe for the sauce and do not know how to edit the last bit out on my laptop. This is what I get for making unscripted videos!

 

This second clip picks up where I leave off, and it’s how to make the dipping sauce:

 

The pictures below show the fruits of our labor. And yes, that’s calamari Vietnamese style for appetizer…

 

nem nuong and chao tom as the dry entrees (this is what the shrimp looks like)…

 

and then pho bo as the wet entree. These two pictures show two types of beef (one is raw then quickly cooked by the hot broth and the other with cooked beef):

 

This is my vegetarian pho:

 

Finally it’s Thai fruit cocktail (jack fruit, mango, papaya, mandarin orange, banana, palm nut) for dessert:

 

Raise your hand if you want to come over for dinner at Lily’s Cafe

 

All told, this batch of about 20 rolls comes out be about 50 cents a piece to make (I’m cheap labor) and can be done in under two hours, counting the time to bake the pork, prepare the condiments, and wrap everything.  I know more and more people are cutting back on eating out in these times to save their pocketbooks and waistlines, so if this video is useful to you, let me know and we’ll post more cooking lessons. My mom and I have a lot of fun in the kitchen together, and I don’t know a better way than filming our cooking to document our delicious culture. Oral history takes on a new meaning!

Tags: calamari, chao tom, dipping sauce, fish sauce, nem nuong, pho bo, Thai fruit cocktail, Vietnamese spring roll

 

I wake up with nothing green to wear today, but my reward for visiting my parents is starting the day with stuff that I usually eat at home (fruits, purple yam, fresh corn, etc.), except it gets served up like this:

 

That’s my version of a breakfast of champions. But my meal this morning quickly turns into a trade for manual labor…my mom is getting tired of the pattern in her zen garden, which by the way represents waves in the ocean. You are supposed to meditate on the waves and relax, but even this gets boring after a while:

 

So off I go with a rake her handyman made for her to clear the ground…

 

and practice with big circles that don’t look too great:

 

 

I find myself enjoying walking around and around in a circle a bit too much to be healthy:

 

This is what it ends up looking like–I know we have to find a real zen rake if we want to move from these amateur ranks:

 

The circle represents a single drop of water that can have significant ripple effect on the entire ocean. You might say it is an analogy to the cause and effect in life from the action of one, resulting in the impact on many. And here I thought I was just working off my carbs.

 

Speaking of carbs (you didn’t really think I was done talking about food just quite yet, did you?), we are then treated to a lunch of banh tom, or fried shrimp and yam cake. You know the drill by now…lots of preparations followed by three happy tummies…

 

and of course closed out with something wet. This is my meatless pho bo (beef noodle soup):

 

But wait, there’s more! This brings us to dinner and yet another version of the spring roll!  For dinner we are having ca nuong, or grilled orange roughy:

 

The tapioca paper is softened by dipping it in warm water and they layered with food–do you see the slices of green mango and plantain banana?

 

then rolled like a Vietnamese burrito:

 

And if you fail to wrap it nicely the first time, try and try again till you get it right…and repeat till you are so full you need a nap.

 

And that was my very zen St. Patrick’s Day with not a single green beer in sight. Hope yours was a good one, too.

Tags: banh tom, ca nuong, grilled fish, orange roughy, purple yam, shrimp, St. Patrick's Day, zen garden, zen rake

 

Vietnam is a nation of snackaholics. Go down any street or alley and you will find neighborhood markets or makeshift food stands hawking Vietnamese junk food. And by junk food I mean steaming hot, fresh made, homemade noodles, rice crepes, soups, desserts, and anything your heart desires. From morning till night there are snackers trolling for food.

 

Even back in the days before the emergence of the prosperous new middle class, the Vietnamese lived to eat as much as they ate to live. On my first trip back to VN in 1993, before the US lifted its trade embargo, I witnessed heartbreaking poverty on the streets of Hanoi. There was hustle without the bustle that we see now in present day VN; life happened in slower motion. I will never forget the woman, squatting in a wet market, who pined for my dirty Keds sneakers. If I could that day I would have given her the clothes off my back and the shoes she coveted. The guilt I felt of being a lucky Viet Kieu at that moment was jolting, but nothing surprised me more than how much life still revolved around food for them.

 

I remember watching a group of day laborers gathering in a circle in a small courtyard for lunch. Each man pulled out a multi-tiered, tin, cylindrical lunch box, and each of the stackable trays was full of something hot. They passed the trays around and everyone got to taste a bit of it. You might say it was a sort of potluck lunch, Vietnamese style. I can’t tell you if that was the only or the biggest meal of the day, but they relished the food, and to a pair of foreign eyes it seemed like an incredible banquet for a midday break. Their sandals were torn and their pants looked unwashed, but they ate well, I thought to myself, much better than some of my ramen meals as a grad student on a budget. OK, you busted me…I wasn’t exactly a starving student, but if there was a pair of expensive shoes I had to have (who said you shouldn’t look cute while snoozing through a contracts class) then that month saw more PBJ sandwiches than usual. 

 

The pictures you see above are some of this snack food I’m talking about. You can spot the banh cuon, which is a rice crepe that can be eaten with gio (steamed beef sausage) or fried tofu, with the usual sliced cucumbers, cilantro, blanched bean sprouts, and of course nuoc cham (diluted fish sauce). Sometimes the crepes are filled with ground pork and mushrooms.  The circular white rice cakes are banh beo, topped with mung bean paste, ground dried shrimps, and grilled green onions. Again, we also eat this with nuoc cham. But you know at Lily’s Cafe, a meal of snack food isn’t a real meal unless you also have something wet to go with the dry.  On this day it’s canh bong, a soup, in a light broth, full of carrots, mushrooms, chicken, kohlrabi, cilantro, and pork rinds (weird, I know, but it works if you can eat meat).

Tags: banh beo, banh cuon, canh bong, Hanoi, junk food, pork rinds, potluck lunch, snack, snack food, tin lunch box, trade embargo, Viet Kieu, Vietnam

 

This morning I had a meeting near the Knox/Henderson area of Dallas and then had lunch with a good friend at Chuy’s, a Tex-Mex joint on McKinney.  As we were chatting about the soap opera going on at her job and the jewelry we’ve been making on the side, I wished I had brought my camera to photograph the million hubcaps decorating the ceiling of this very colorful restaurant. I know I’d promised yesterday to stop blogging about food, but I am here to tell you I inhaled the vegetarian enchiladas the second they arrived. What can I say, Mexican food is a religion here to most of us. 

 

Prior to lunch, I had 15 minutes to kill so I went on auto pilot and let my long term memory guide me around McKinney to Knox to Abbott into University Park. This used to be my stomping ground when I was an undergrad at SMU, when a bunch of us would regularly meet for “liquid” lunches especially after exams. Or just on Thursdays. It’s a part of my life I no longer recall clearly, and as I drove around on instinct toward the university, I felt lost amidst new, unfamiliar construction and in misplaced nostalgia. There will always be parts of your life that you can never get back or particularly care to do over if you had the chance, but the memories of being young, really young, can sometimes be startling. Unsettling even, especially when your present revisits your youthful illusions in the context of  where you’ve been since then.  Good thing I had Tex-Mex to settle my head and stomach.

 

Speaking of filling my bottomless pit of a stomach, the pictures in today’s blog were taken at a seafood buffet restaurant (Best Buffet) somewhere in Plano. Such a place does not really warrant a mention for its novelty but this particular restaurant’s immense selection of food choices does. When I was in Belgium we went to a Chinese buffet restaurant that had a wok and teppanyaki, as well as the usual offerings of fried food, dim sum, salad, desserts, etc. This place was always packed because the all-you-can-eat concept is still relatively uncommon there, and because, well, such a cornucopia of offerings simply appeals to human gluttony everywhere. But this buffet in Plano would have satiated even the greediest of all gourmands.

 

Not only was there a wok station, there was also a grill for steaks, in addition to the six big areas of seafood, soups, sushi, fried foods, noodles, salads, fruits, and desserts.  I suppose it’s surprising to find this size of a buffet outside of Vegas. And the reason you only see pictures of seafood here is because after my first run of crab and shellfish, I couldn’t exactly pick up my blackberry again:

 

I’m really going to try to blog about something else next time.

Tags: buffet, Chuy's, Dallas, seafood, SMU, teppanyaki, Tex-Mex, wok