Vietnamese pork in a clay pot

This is another fairly simple dish that I'm sure very grandmother, well Vietnamese grandmother as mine didn't know how to make this, has her own special recipe for.  There is only one real issue with making this.  It is about 10 times better if you use carmel sauce instead of brown sugar.  But brown sugar will do in a pinch or when you used up the last of our carmel sauce and were too lazy to make more.

The original recipe I start with is form Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table by Mai Pham.  I changed a few odds and ends with this to fit the tastes in my home, but the base is basically there.

Read on to see how this comes together and the changes I made.

A little snack

I needed a quick snack the other day and I came up with this.  Scallion noodles with chinese sausage and some pickled shallots and pickled shitake mushrooms.  I didn't take any pictures while I was making it but it turned out great and will have to do some more on it.  Basically I made the scallion sauce out of David Chang's Momofuku cook book and threw in some sliced Chinese sausage.  You know those scary packs of sausage at the chinese grocery?  They are very good if you soak them in some warm water before you cook them.  Just stir fried them for a bit and threw them on the noodles.  The pickles are out of Momofuku as well.  The noodles are just plan ones that you toss with the scallion sauce.

Moroccan Cubanos - served two ways

Here is another thing from the Top Chef The Cookbook.  This is my take on the moroccan cubanos made in season one.  They are amazingly good and I think it is the pickled veggies that really make it.  The other week I needed something to share at a party.  So I made all the fixings for the cubanons, but served them on little rounds of peta bread.  What I'm showing here is both how I normally eat and enjoy them and hten as the great little finger version.

Keep reading for how I made these.

Gung hay fat chow - Pot stickers!

Happy year of the rabbit!  And in due tradition, I coked up some dumplings tonight to go with my gi-lan and oyster sauce.  But there were the last ones I had made up, so this weekend time to make another batch! I'm still working on getting them to look like ones I had in Toronto but this is pretty good.  Just heat a pan, a bit of peanut oil, put the dumplings and let them just start to think about browning, add a cup of water, cover and turn up the heat.  Other dumpling secrets will have to wait until I perfect them.

If you missed my post about how to make them it is here.

Steak Ssam

No that isn't a typo, it is supposed to be "ssam" but even more so there are supposed to be two dots above the "a".  I just don't know how to put the umlat (or what ever the Korean version is!) over the a.  What ever you call it, this meal was so simple and so good.  It has a number of components but none of them are hard to make and it all comes together some beautifully.  This is the first thing I've tired to make out of David Chang's Momofuku cook book.  I'm pretty damn happy with the results.

Read on what I did.