Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Vietnamese fried mincemeat

This is a dish I had in a Vietnamese restaurant on an early summer evening. We analyzed its components over dinner and decided it must be quite easy to replicate.
I tried it at home recently and was so pleased with the result, I ate variations of it for the remainder of the week. It is a perfect template recipe in the sense that lots of the ingredients can be substituted for similar things you might have on hand. No rigid list of ingredients so to speak.
If you plan on serving it with rice, make it a bit saucier by adding stock or a splash of rice wine that you let cook off a bit. I liked it with just the protein and the veggies, kind of like a warm, rich salad.

Ingredients:
Minced meat of choice (mine was half pork and beef), ca. 100 gr. per person
Splash of oil (optional)
One garlic clove
Chili to taste
A piece of ginger, the size of your thumb
    all minced
Soy sauce
Fish sauce
    to taste
Chopped veggies (Chinese broccoli, asparagus, pak choi, broccoli are all good options. Maybe add the leafy part after frying off the stem bits.)
Fresh herbs (spring onions, mint, coriander, chive, parsley...?

1. Heat up your frying pan to medium high heat. Add the oil and fry off the meat until evenly dark brown. Stirring every now and then helps.
2. Add the chili, garlic and ginger and fry until nicely fragrant and evenly distributed.
3. Add your veggies and fry off for a couple of minutes. If it is quite a hardy vegetable add a splash of water and cover your pan for 2-3 minutes so they can steam through.
4. Take off the lid, season with soy and fish sauce and add your fresh herbs just before serving. The spring onion is especially nice.