One of my favorite places (other than the Ding Ho, of course) to get lunch in Chinatown is the Xing Xing restaurant, which offers mostly Vietnamese fare. I invariably gravitate towards the barbecued shrimp with vermicelli dish, which is essentially a salad with rice noodles and tasty shrimp on top. They also offer this dish with beef and pork, but I've never branched out that way. Eventually I realized that I could save myself $5.95 if I just made the dish myself, since its not like its complicated. So, here is a version of the Vietnamese salad with which I am so enamoured. Its not really the quickest thing in the world to prepare, since there is a lot of chopping and julianning and stuff, but it was worth it. Plus, you can make lots of extra and have enough for lunch all week (or a couple days). Just dress it before you eat it. In this case, I experimented with some pork, rather than shrimp, since I had pork in the freezer. I also had squid in the freezer, but I guess I thought pork might go better.
Vietnamese noodle salad
Serves 3-4
1/3 pack of rice vermicelli (~4.5oz)
4 leaves of lettuce, any kind
1/2C basil
1/2C cilantro
1/4C mint, optional
1C bean sprouts (NOT alfalfa sprouts...)
1 cucumber
2 carrots
~1/4C ground peanuts
4 scallions
Pork
~9oz of pork of any kind, I used tenderloin
Marinade: ~1tbs sesame oil
~1/4C fish sauce
~1/4C rice vinegar
~1/4C brown sugar
~2 tbs thai garlic chili paste
(all these are approximate because its a marinade, so it doesn't really matter the proportions as long as it tastes right)
Dressing (apparently this is actually called "Nuoc Cham")
1/2C warm water
1/4C fish sauce
1/4C brown sugar
2 tsp Thai garlic chili paste
1 clove garlic
1 jalapeno
Juice of one lime
Assembly
First, prepare the marinade. Mix together all the ingredients, and taste it to be sure that it tastes "right". Slice the pork into thin slices. A sharp knife helps. Put the pork in the marinade and let it sit about 30 minutes, just enough time to chop everything else.
Next, prepare the dressing - mince the jalapeno and garlic, and mix everything else all together in a bowl. Let it sit while you prep the salad.
Boil a pot of water, and put the rice vermicelli in the water for two minutes. Taste to make sure they're cooked, then remove them from the water, and run them under cold water to stop the cooking. Divide the noodles into three (or four) eating dishes. Or, into three or four tupperwares if you're making these for lunches. Make sure the dishes are big, you're adding a lot of veggies. Plates worked, but barely, and a bowl would have been easier, I just didn't have any bowls big enough.
Julianne the cucumber and the carrots. If you're a little shaky on your julianning skills (like me), you can just use a carrot peeler to peel thin slices from the carrot. Chop the scallions, basil, cilantro, and mint. Chop the lettuce finely. Put all of these things in the dishes sort of next to the noodles. Add the bean sprouts on top (evenly divided). Sprinkle some ground peanuts on top.
To cook the pork, heat a frying pan to medium-high, and put the pork pieces in the pan. Cook them on one side until that side is cooked, then flip them over and cook the other side. The sugar in the marinade is going to caramelize a bit on the edges, don't fear this process, because its delicious. Divide the pork pieces evenly on top of the veggies. If you want to clean the pan without a ton of scrubbing/soaking, once you've taken out the pork, add some water to the pan (still on the heat) and scrape at the bottom until all the black bits come off.
Now you have your salad all ready to go. Let people dress their own salad, I found that this amount of dressing was perfect for that amount of stuff. A delicious meal, although its easier, maybe, to let the ladies at the Xing Xing do this for you...
Oh, and the Ed-rating was "I really like this". We call that a success 'round these parts.
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