Red Pepper and Chive Salad.

Chinese with Cambodian Flavors. Red pepper and Chive salad.

I first made this as a Chinese stir fry a couple of weeks ago. Since then, I’ve been playing with it as a Chinese salad and thinking about it as a Cambodian salad.

In reality, it’s neither. Particularly not Cambodian. Cambodian salads tend to be big rambunctious affairs that include meat or fish and a wide range of texture, aroma and flavoring ingredients. They’re often a pretty good light meal in themselves. And they are rarely this simple.

But with the right flavoring ingredients, this dish, which started out as a Chinese red pepper and chive stir fry, can be distinctly reminiscent of something like a minimalist Sino-Khmer salad.

It presents a flavor that is predominantly sweet from the red pepper, salty from the fish sauce, and slightly soured by the lime. The aromatics include garlic, chives, coriander and the lime, but the prahok is inescapable. It adds a musty richness that is distinctively Cambodian.

Another prahok warning on this one. Substitute extra fish sauce if you have to.

Recipe after the jump.

Vietnamese Squid and Pickle Salad.

Vietnam. Goi muc. Squid and Pickled Vegetable Salad.

This is just a fantastic way to use some of your giant jar of pickled mixed vegetables. If you have the standard Vietnamese garnishes ready, it’s very simple and quick. Even if you have to make those garnishes, it doesn’t take long.

Recipe after the jump.

Vietnamese Mixed Vegetable Pickle.

Vietnam. Do chua. Vietnamese Mixed Vegetable Pickle (on left.)

(If you’re following the blog, it certainly is a repeat photo. By the time I got around to writing this, I’d eaten half of the mixed vege pickle and couldn’t take another photo!)

Mixed pickled vegetables are all over Indochina. They’re eaten on their own, in sandwiches and salads, and as accompanying dishes in larger meals. Everyone has their own recipe, but the general idea stays the same. Vegetables in vinegar and sugar.  This one is pretty typical for a southern Vietnamese sweet and sour pickle. It goes really well with grilled meat or seafood.

Recipe after the jump.

Three Cambodian Dipping Sauces.

Cambodia. Tuk prahok mnoah. Pineapple fish sauce.

Quite apart from grilled meat as a street food, there is another grilling tradition in Cambodia. In the country, informal Cambodian meals often don’t include more than one cooked dish (in addition to rice). Where the fortunes of the land allow it, that dish is often a small amount of grilled meat.

First rice is cooked in a pot over a charcoal stove, then some kind of meat is grilled over the embers. This saves on fuel, cuts out expensive cooking implements, and means no purchase of cooking oil is necessary.

But what a rural meal might lack in cooked food, it often makes up with a platter of fresh vegetables and a range of dipping sauces. I’ll leave the vegetable platter for some other time but you’ll find recipes for three very simple dipping sauces below.

All three sauces are aimed at complementing the grilled chicken wings from yesterday, or other grilled meats, but they go well with a range of foods.

Recipes after the jump.

Cambodian Spicy Grilled Chicken Wings.

Cambodia. Slaap moan ang kroeung. Spicy grilled chicken wings.

Once you manage to peer through the dust and grime, the array of grilled meat, fowl, fish and frog on the streets of Phnom Penh is incredible. At first glance, the wares on offer from different vendors might look much the same, but even a small scale tasting will indicate that each vendor has a slightly different recipe for each dish.

That said, there are fairly distinct types of grilled food. For instance, one fairly common approach to chicken wings is to marinate them in a fresh spice paste before grilling. The paste is called kroeung and at it’s most minimal it will have garlic, chili and lemongrass. Elaborate versions might have half a dozen other spices such as galangal, krachai and fresh turmeric.

To cut a long story short, these are spicy chicken wings. But not excessively so. The kroeung paste I use here is not complicated. It is really just garlic, chili, lemongrass and pepper with sugar and salt.

Recipe after the jump.

A Sandwich in Four Parts: Part 4. Vietnamese BBQ Pork Sandwich

Vietnam. Banh mi thit or (if your sandwich vendor has a choice of pork) Banh mi xa xiu.

(I forgot to include the spring onions in the photo).

Okay. I reckon everyone is getting a bit sick of the way I’m dragging this out. So I won’t delay an extra day to make the banh mi, or baguettes. You’ll just have to buy those.

Here’s the recipe. Multiply by number of people.

Recipe after the jump.

A Sandwich in Four Parts: Part 3. Vietnamese Garlic Mayonnaise.

I have no idea what mayonnaise is called in Vietnamese.

In my (admittedly flawed) memory this mayonnaise is a major point of difference between Vietnamese banh mi thit and Cambodian nom pan saich chrouk. I don’t recall seeing (or tasting) this in sandwiches made by Khmer sandwich vendors. On the Vietnamese side of the border, it is always slathered on your roll. And that’s fine by me, because it’s delicious.

This makes enough for 6-8 rolls.

Recipe after the jump.

A Sandwich in Four Parts: Part 2. BBQ Pork.

Vietnam. Xa xiu. (From Cantonese Char siu.)

In my mind Char siu is the best competition that rice soup has for the title of South East Asian pizza.

It’s available everywhere, it’s fast, and the minor local variations rarely change the appearance or flavor of the dish too much.

It’s also a dish that everyone thinks of as Chinese, no matter how long it’s been a part of the local cuisine. So the recipe I’ll post here is Cantonese, but if you took out the hoi sin sauce (and increased the sugar a little), it could pass for something made by a street vendor in Phnom Penh or Bangkok.

If you’re pressed for time, but still want to make this rather than buy it, use a pack of red pork seasoning mix. You can get it at Asian grocers. The brand most commonly available here is from Thailand and is named “Lobo.”

But I highly recommend trying the recipe after the jump. It’s rather fine.

A Sandwich in Four Parts: Part 1. Vietnamese Pickled Carrots.

Vietnam. Ca-rot chua.

(Hey! It’s my first ever food photo. The carrots are on the right.)

Some hours ago I set out to make a sandwich. Just a simple banh mi thit or banh mi xa xiu. Thin slices of red “BBQ” pork, salad and herbs in a crispy baguette.

My sandwich was meant to involve a little prepared ingredient shopping (BBQ pork, pickles, mayonnaise) and a few minutes of assembly. Then it’d be another few minutes to blog about my sandwich, and I’d have a lazy day’s post.

Then I realized that if you’re writing a food blog, you’re supposed to make all those pre-prepped ingredients yourself. So it all took a bit longer than it was meant to.

The best laid plans, huh? But I really am feeling lazy, so I’m going to lay this out over four posts. Sorry if you’re hungry.

First the pickled carrots. (Ca-rot chua. Sour carrots.)

Recipe after the jump.

A Note on Photos.

Yay! Meeun masin tort roop.

Please bear with me over the next day or four as I learn to use my camera and post photos. I may be posting a few creative commons images from Flickr to teach myself the image blogging ropes. Credit will be given.

I’ll also be posting photos for some recipes as I cook them again and have a chance to photograph them. So it’s all going to be a bit inconsistent for a month or two. My apologies if it enrages or confuses you.