Rice Noodle Salad (Bún) with Vietnamese Turkey Meatballs

7 May

If you really want to split hairs, this salad—one of my all-time favorites—is not really a salad, so to speak.  More than anything, it’s a collection of crisp, crunchy vegetables—some pickled, some not—a handful of fresh herbs, and a brisk, punchy sauce, all piled on a bed of cool noodles.  It is, in essence, the embodiment of all the elements I love in a dish.  It is versatile, it is complex in its bite and flavors, but it is the perfect meal to make on a slow afternoon or evening, when your only pressing plans involve eventually sitting down with friends or family and enjoying a nice, casual meal with one another.

This dish may appear to contain far too many steps and ingredients for the casual home cook, but I promise you that a long list of ingredients—many of which are pantry and refrigerator staples—does not equal a prolonged sentence of kitchen labor.  Everything comes together in due time, with one item resting while another one steeps, some items cooking while others are being chopped.

This inspiration for this dish, beyond the dozens of Vietnamese noodle bowls I’ve eaten over the course of my life, comes from Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, that veritable bible of Southeast Asian cooking.  I’ve extolled the many virtues of Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford before, but it bears repeating that, if you are looking for an all-purpose Asian cookbook, you could do much worse than to get comfortable with a copy of this book.  Duguid and Alford, now separated, sadly, have spent years traveling throughout Asia, first as a couple, then eventually as a family of four.  Their traveling, while seemingly culinary in its focus, served as much as an education as anything else.  To be able to immerse oneself in another culture, or many cultures, so completely is just astonishing in its accomplishment.  Reading their books (and there are many from which to choose) is not only a gateway to an entirely new focus in cooking, but also in examining the role and history of food in the lives of people all over the world.

Last Year: Quick and Easy Citrus Crepes with Berry Sauce

Rice Noodle Salad (Bún) with Vietnamese Turkey Meatballs Recipe

Not into meat?  These baked vegetable wontons would be a great substitute for the turkey meatballs.

For the Salad:

1 pound rice vermicelli or dried rice noodles (soaked in warm water for 20 minutes, then cooked in boiling water for 2 minutes, then drained, rinsed, and set aside)

chopped salad greens (spinach, Napa cabbage, etc.)

pickled carrot and daikon strips (recipe follows)

bean sprouts

chopped cucumber, seeds removed

fresh cilantro leaves

fresh mint leaves

lime wedges

nuoc cham (recipe follows)

Vietnamese turkey meatballs (recipe follows)

Pickled Carrot and Daikon Radish Salad

½ pound peeled carrots

½ pound peeled daikon radish

½ teaspoon kosher salt

1 ½ cups water

¼ cup rice vinegar

2 tablespoons sugar

Using a very sharp knife or a mandolin slicer, cut the carrots and radish into matchsticks.  You should have about 4 cups of matchsticks total.  Place the carrots and radish in a large strainer, sprinkle over the salt, and toss well with your hands.  Place over a bowl or in the sink, and allow to stand for 20 to 30 minutes.

While the vegetables are waiting in the strainer, combine the water, vinegar, and sugar in a nonreactive saucepan and bring to a boil.  Remove from the heat and cool to room temperature (the mixture must cool almost completely, as the goal is not to cook the vegetables, but simply quick pickle them).

Rinse the vegetables in cold water, then squeeze dry and transfer to a medium bowl.  Pour over the vinegar mixture and stir gently to ensure all the vegetables become completely coated.  Allow vegetables to sit in vinegar mixture for at least 1 hour before serving.

Nuoc Cham

¼ cup fresh lime juice

2 tablespoons Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce

¼ cup of water

2 teaspoons rice vinegar

1 tablespoon sugar

1 small clove of garlic, minced

1 minced bird chile, or 2 crumpled dried red chiles

In a small bowl or small jar (I find that a jar works best), combine all the ingredients.  Stir or shake (if using a jar) to combine completely, making sure the sugar is completely dissolved.  This sauce can be stored in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.

Makes roughly ¾ cup sauce.

Vietnamese Turkey Meatballs

1 pound ground turkey

¼ cup minced shallot

¼ cup minced garlic

1 teaspoon sugar

2 tablespoons Vietnamese or Thai fish sauce

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

generous grinding of black pepper

2 tablespoons roasted rice powder, optional (recipe follows)

In a large bowl, combine all the ingredients.  Using your hands, mix everything together until they are completely integrated.  You can, at this point, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave it in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours, or you can proceed immediately to cooking.

Place an oven rack 5 to 6 inches from the broiler, and preheat your oven’s broiler on high.  Line a large baking sheet with a layer of foil.

Scoop a generous tablespoon of turkey mixture and, using your hands, form it into a tight ball.  Place on the prepared baking sheet.  Form all the turkey mixture this way.  You should end up with roughly 3 dozen balls.

Place the filled baking sheet under the broiler and cook meatballs for 10 minutes.  Turn meatballs over, then continue cooking until meatballs are entirely cooked through, yet still quite succulent (this should take around 15 minutes total, but could take up to 20 minutes, depending on the strength of your broiler)

Roasted Rice Powder

¼ cup uncooked jasmine rice

Heat a heavy skillet over medium high heat.  Add the rice and dry roast, stirring frequently, until the rice has turned golden brown all over.  Transfer to a spice grinder, clean coffee grinder, or mortar and pestle, and grind to a powder.  Let cool completely before storing in a well-sealed jar.

To assemble a noodle bowl:

Place a pile of noodles in a bowl of your choice (I like a medium-sized bowl with tall sides).  Top with chopped greens, pickled carrots and daikon, cucumber slices, sprouts, and herbs.  Add some turkey meatballs.  Pour over nouc cham to taste.  Add a lime wedge.

Serves 4-6 hungry people.

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Spinach, Fennel, and Pear Salad with Brown Butter Hazelnuts

3 May

Do you ever wonder what makes the perfect salad?  Not really?  Just me?  I’ve thought long and hard about this—because that’s what I do, my friends, I think about salad—and I have to say that the elements that make a perfect salad, though constantly evolving, are almost always related to one magical element: texture.

Sure, flavor counts (obviously), but I think a salad’s texture will make or break it faster than the time it takes to swallow your first bite.  No matter how good a salad might taste, I find that, if the greens are soggy, the vegetables limp, or the various add-ons mushy or pasty, it takes a bit of effort to make each bite go down.  This is, of course, no scientific study I am undertaking here, but just a very personal observation.  And since I eat a lot of salad, I’d like to think that my established findings on the quality of salad-making hold at least a bit of weight.  Even if they don’t, I have good news for you.  I think I just made a salad with the most pleasing texture I have ever encountered.

Crisp spinach paired with crunchy-thin slices of fresh fennel provide a lovely base.  Perfectly ripe pears, so juicy and perfumed, counter the crispness of the spinach and fennel.  Toasted hazlenuts, flavored with a smidge of sea salt and brown butter to make their nuttiness even more forward, accent the crunch of the salad, but also pair perfectly with the pears.  A light vinaigrette drizzled over everything provides a punch of fruity acidity and, though I am aware that I have now started naming attributes that don’t concern texture, I don’t even know how to stop talking about how much I love this salad.  Sure, it’s true that I like almost all salad, but this salad?  This is a salad that everyone will like.

Last Year: Ya Hala’s Hummus This is, hands down, the best hummus you’ll ever eat

Spinach, Fennel, and Pear Salad with Brown Butter Hazelnuts Recipe

½ cup whole hazelnuts

1 large fennel bulb, green fronds and core removed

juice of 1 lemon

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

large pinch of coarse sea salt

5 ounces spinach leaves, washed and dried

1 large ripe pear

Apple Cider Vinaigrette

juice of ½ a lemon

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

1 tablespoon unfiltered apple cider

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.  Arrange hazelnuts on a baking sheet, then toast in oven for 10 to 15 minutes, until the skins of the nuts begin to peel loose and the nuts appear dark golden brown.  Remove the nuts to a clean dishtowel, then wrap the towel around the nuts and allow to sit for a couple of minutes.  Then, with your hands, vigorously rub the hazelnuts in the dishtowel to remove the hazelnut skins.  Coarsely chop the de-skinned nuts (cutting them in half is just fine—you want nice big bites here), then set aside.

Slice the fennel to be as thin as possible, using either a mandoline or an extremely sharp knife.  In a medium bowl, combine the fennel slices and the lemon juice, tossing to coat all the fennel in the lemon juice.  Set aside.

In a small pan, heat the butter over medium heat.  Allow the butter to melt, then foam, then begin to sputter.  Stirring and watching the butter the whole time, allow it to turn a nutty dark brown.  Immediately pour the browned butter into a small bowl, then add the hazelnuts and toss to combine.  Add the pinch of sea salt and toss some more.

To make the dressing, whisk together the lemon juice, vinegar, and apple cider.  Drizzle in the olive oil, whisking all the while to combine until the dressing is thick and emulsified.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

Place the spinach in a large bowl.  Core and slice the pear into thin slices, then add the pears to the spinach.  Pour the fennel, with any lemon juice remaining in the bowl, on top of the pears.  Give the hazelnuts in brown butter a bit of a stir, then add half of the nuts to the salad.  Pour half of the dressing over the salad, then toss to combine evenly.  Taste the salad to see if you desire more dressing.  Add as much dressing as you deem fit (some people like more dressing, some like less, so I am leaving the finished amount up to personal taste).  Serve the salad with the remaining hazelnuts sprinkled over the top of each serving.

Makes 4 very large servings, or 8 side salads.

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Crisp Baked Vegetable Wontons

30 Apr

Tiny foods are the best.  Tiny sandwiches, tiny muffins, tiny cookies, tinier than average samosas, tiny, two-ingredient crackers—really, I could go on and on about my love of tiny foods.  The fondness knows no bounds.

But what to make of the fact that making tiny foods can oftentimes seem like a never-ending, cumbersome task?  There’s no way around it.  When you choose to make 36 tiny sandwiches instead of 8 normal-sized sandwiches, you’re going to have to put in some extra time.  But I am all right with that.

Maybe it’s because I am soothed by being in the kitchen, but the task of filling or folding or forming dozens of tiny little foodstuffs has never bothered me.  Truth be told, it can sometimes bother my back and neck (because no matter how much I mentally enjoy the repetitive motion of forming little cookies, standing upright with my head pointed down at a work surface is not the most forgiving posture), but that’s small price to pay for feeling so mentally sound at the end of a long marathon of cooking or baking.

Most importantly, however, is the fact that waiting for you at the end of your cooking trials is something delicious to eat.  When I made these delightful little wontons, filled with carrots, mushrooms, and cabbage, and perfectly seasoned with ginger and mirin, I took that thought to heart.  No, really.  To test the recipe, I made a half batch of crispy, crunchy wontons, and then, when they emerged from the oven, I proceeded to then eat them all.  Every single last one of them.  At first I felt sort of sheepish about what I had done, but I soon got over it.  They were delicious, I took the time to make them, so why shouldn’t I get to enjoy them?  Up until now, however, my husband and son were unaware of what they missed when I made these, because I never told them that I made them.  It was a stealth recipe test.  “Was” being the operative word here, because now, having admitted to the world (and my husband) what I did, I must make amends and whip up another batch of wontons for everyone.  And I do not mind one bit.

Baked Vegetable Wontons Recipe

Adapted from The Healthy Kitchen, by Andrew Weil and Rosie Daley

2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil

1 cup finely shredded carrot

1 cup finely chopped mushrooms (the original recipe called for shiitake or oyster mushrooms, but I used much more reasonably-priced cremini mushrooms and they were great)

2 cups finely shredded Napa or savoy cabbage

½ cup chopped scallions

2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger

2 tablespoons mirin

2 tablespoons soy sauce

24-30 small, square wonton wrappers

¼ cup toasted sesame oil, for brushing the wontons

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a large skillet, heat the 2 tablespoons of toasted sesame oil over medium heat.  Add the carrots, mushrooms, and cabbage and sauté until limp, about 5 minutes.  Add the scallions and ginger and cook for another 1 minute.  Stir in the mirin and soy sauce, and remove from heat.

Lay out 12 wonton sheets at a time.  With a pastry brush, lightly brush toasted sesame oil all along the edges of the wonton sheets.  Drop about 1 tablespoon of the vegetable mixture just a touch off the center of the diagonal middle of each wonton sheet, then fold the sheet diagonally so the opposite corners touch.  Using the tines of a fork, press down the 2 open sides (these would be the non-folded sides) of the triangle.  Fold in the two pointed edges that jut out from the folded sides of the triangle, and press them in place with the fork.  Brush the tops of each completed wonton with a bit more sesame oil.

Very lightly spray or brush a baking sheet with vegetable oil.  Arrange the completed wontons, about 12 at a time, on the baking sheet.  Bake wontons for 6 minutes, then turn them over and return to the oven to bake for an additional 6 minutes, or until the wontons are dark golden brown and very crisp.

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