Cooking: Dead simple viet style chicken noodle salad

I love Vietnamese food.  So many fresh flavours. Sweet, sour and salty. To rank my favourite viet dishes is pretty much impossible. Viet pork rolls, viet noodles soup, bun bo hue, rice paper rolls, typical stuff because I haven't really explored much further than that although I loved reading Pauline Nguyen's cookbook.

So last weekend (yes, a little behind in blogging) parents when to Prahran Market and came back with a box of 12 jam filled doughnuts and a roast chicken. Doughnuts were really good and delicious. Coated in a little sugar. Pure deliciousness. Anyways made a simple refreshing lunch with the roast chicken.

Ingredients: Rice vermicelli. Cucumbers and carrots julienned. Roast chicken. Nuoc Cham/Dressing: Sugar. Warm water. Chilli flakes. Fish sauce. Lime juice.

Method: Cook vermicelli noodles according to packet and leave to cool unless you want a warm salad. Make dressing by dissolving sugar in warm water. Adding chilli flakes, lime juice and fish sauce according to taste. Arrange shredded roast chicken and vegetables on top of the vermcelli. Pour some dressing over it and mix and enjoy. 

I removed the breast of the chicken and cut them into slices (hence why there is a chunk of chicken on the top) Managed to shred the chicken with a knife and one hand. It was pretty fun to do (probably because I kept sneakily eating it =] )

Cooking-Schnitzel, Caesar Salad, Potato and Corn mash

Friday nights means NO RICE night :) For dinner I made Veal Schnitzel with Caesar Salad and Potato Corn Mash.
Took 2 hours....but there was so much to do.
Veal Schnitzel: Needed to crumb and fry. Such a pain in the ass. (only can fry 2 at a time)
Caesar Salad: Wash lettuce, make dressing, grill bacon, make croutons, poach eggs.
Potato Corn Mash: Peel + chop potatoes, boil them, cook off onions and corn, mash potatoes, mix in onion and corn.
Made to serve 6 people, as my two younger cousins come over for dinner every Friday night. (poaching 6 eggs in a row it a absolute pain cos you have to do them one by one =.=") is there a way to poach more than one egg in one pot?

 

Dinner : )

It actually wasn't that good. Need to improve on a lot of things.

My little cousin was shocked to find out that mayo is made of raw egg yolk and oil. Well proper mayo anyways.

Cooking-Salad + New Utensils

Something extremely random but I'm just curious to know whether anyone else is like me. When you buy a roasted chicken from Safeway/Coles or similar sort of place, do you rip bits off to eat the second you get home? It's irresistable, the smell is just mouth watering.

So a couple of days ago we bought a roast chicken and had some left over which I decided to use to make a asian style chicken salad as it was sooooo hot that day.
Ingredients: Carrot, Celery, Beans, Spanish Onion, Lettuce, Chicken.
Utensil Number 1: Bought in HK :) Juilenne Peeler? No clue what it's called but it looks like a vegetable peeler but it also cuts it into strips as well. Very good tool, makes life a lot lot easier. So you pretty much just use it like a vegetable peeler and the carrot (or whatever you are peeling) will became thin strings of carrot. Saved me sooo much time. I don't really see any bad points...cept for it doesn't peel vegetables...but it's not supposed to I guess.

Utensil Number 2: The sharpest knife I've ever used. Also bought in HK. CERAMIC KNIFE. Been around for ages but we never got one until this year. I swear this knife is amazing, it cut the onion so it was see through thin. Cuts through meat as though as it is soft cheese. However there is a downside, as it is extremely sharp, it is OUTRAGEOUSLY dangerous, you can slice your finger open just by cleaning it. Also it cannot cut through bone and is easily broken/shattered.

Doesn't look very nice yeah? Tasted alright. The dressing was too thick though, unfortunately we ran out of hoisin sauce, peanut butter, chilli sauce..everything I was looking for so I had to mix whatever I could find into a dressing. Used, last tiny bit of hoisin sauce, some sesame paste I found, sesame oil, sweet chilli sauce, chilli flakes and quite a bit of bottled lime juice to thin it out and to balance out all the sweetness.

Verdict? Refreshing in the hot weather and felt good to finally eat a tonne of vegies after a month of eating out every day in HK. Could be better next time if I can find the right sauces.