Hainan Chicken Rice (Vietnamese style)

The traditional way to serve Hainan chicken rice is to have a whole chopped chicken alongside of the garlic rice. It also take hours and hours to get it done right. My grandmother spends a whole day cooking whenever we had Hainan chicken rice for dinner. I remember watching her pick out a chicken from the Los Angeles Chinatown live chicken shop, take it home, and spend the afternoon prepping the chicken. I always looked forward to it - I thought it was the most delicious dish she made for us. In this variation of Hainan chicken rice, Trang's recipe allows you to have a lot of the original flavor of the dish with a lot less work involved.

Garlic Rice

Ingredients:

3 cups long grain jasmine rice

3 tsps garlic

6 cups chicken broth

3 tbsps fish sauce

3 tsps sugar

Method:

1. To make rice, first rinse rice and strain. Heat up the sauté pan and toast uncooked rice with garlic and oil. Once rice is golden color, add to rice cooker. Combine chicken broth, fish sauce, and sugar, and also add to rice cooker. Cook according to instructions of rice cooker.

Hainan Chicken Salad (Vietnamese style)

Ingredients:

4 lbs chicken

1 large onion, thinly sliced

3 tsps salt

2 tsps sugar

4 tbsps lime juice

1 cup fresh Vietnamese coriander, chopped

Black pepper to taste

Method:

1. Bring pot of water to a rolling boil, add chicken and cook until chicken is just done. This is indicated by when juices from the meat run clear.

2. Once chicken is done, remove meat from boiling pot and plunge into an ice bath. This stops the meat from cooking and becoming dry.

3. When meat is cool enough to handle, shred chicken into thin strips. Mix shredded chicken with onion and chopped Vietnamese coriander. Season with lime juice, salt, sugar, and pepper.

4. Separately, puree fresh ginger with some fish sauce vinaigrette.

5. Serve Hainan Chicken Salad with garlic rice and ginger fish sauce vinaigrette.

Vietnamese Shrimp Cakes (banh khot)

This is one of my favorite Vietnamese dishes that a lot of non-Vietnamese eaters have never been exposed to. There's a special cast iron pan that you use for this (see picture below), and luckily my apartment mate Trang has one! She played around with the batter recipe, and here's the best one we got. I loved tasting the coconut milk in the shrimp cake, and the outer crust is slightly crunchy.

Ingredients:

1/2 lb. shrimp

1 lb. rice flour

1 cup corn starch

3 cups cold water

1 cup coconut milk

1 tsp salt

5 tsp turmeric

1 cup green onions, chopped

Method:

1. Peel and devein shrimps. Cut into small pieces (3-4 pieces per shrimp) and sauté with a touch of oil and minced garlic. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Set shrimp aside.

2. Mix remaining ingredients in a mixing bowl to make batter for shrimp cake.

3. Heat up pan on medium to medium-high heat. Vietnamese shrimp cakes are made in a specialty pan very similar in shape to an Ebelskiver pan.

4. In each depression, add a tiny bit of oil, pour in batter to fill the depression about ¾ way, and immediately add a piece of shrimp. Cover and cook until batter is no longer translucent (about 2-3 minutes).

5. Uncover and cook until cakes no longer stick to pan and bottoms are crispy.

6. Plate and serve with fish sauce vinaigrette (recipe can be found in previous Vietnamese dinner meet post), and fresh lettuce and mint.