Vietnamese fresh rolls (a.k.a. scrambled rice)

I tried making another meal of my Vietnamese recipes. This did not go to plan. So I'm not going to write out the original, just the final recipe.

It went wrong for primarily one key reason- I had no rice flour so I tried to make my own.

1. Put some rice is a pestle and mortar. Try to grind then give up.
   
2. Move rice into container so that you can use the hand blender on it.
   
3. With luck after quite a lot of blending about half the rice will get through a sieve meaning you have something a bit like rice flour.
   
4. I now tried adding some water too this and spreading it out as thinly as I could on a baking tray to make rice paper.
   
5. I tried drying this out in a warm oven. This resulted in warmish kind of dry rice paste with no papery properties :( So I needed a new plan.... Vietnamese style rice pancakes! Start by adding milk, turmeric and pepper to the failed rice paper. Then start working on the sauce- fry some garlic, shallots, ginger and finely chopped lemon grass in a pan.
   
6. Remove the fried stuff from the pan, keeping the oil, and poured in the batter along with some prawns and a chopped spring onion. I only took the photo after attempted the flip the thing. This did not work. I added some more spring onion and some more prawns now.
   
7. I mashed the fried stuff (removing the ginger) from before along with a chili in the pestle and mortar then mixed this with some light soy sauce, sugar and lime juice.
   
8. I put some shredded Chinese leaf lettuce mixed with some coriander into the 'middle' of the 'pancake'.
   
9. Finally I 'folded' this in half and added the sauce. They say the first bite is with the eyes. Oh well.
   
   
   
   Review
   
   
   Need to buy actual rice flour- the stuff I made was far too coarse so never bound together properly, so the texture of the pancake was quite like short bread dough, which isn't ideal. Also  was meant to use coconut milk if I had meant to be making the pancake from the start. Maybe an egg would have helped the batter. Tasted OK bit I added too much chili to the sauce here. 

British Enchiladas

Fusion food. I like the idea. I like enchiladas and I'm British. Putting all this together, inevitably, lead to this.

1. Take some fancy sausages. I used 2 leek and Stilton and 2 pork, black pudding and apple.
   
2. I chopped up a Bramley apple.
   
   
3. Apple and sausages and cider vinegar and a little sugar. In a pan. With heat.
   
4. Extra flavour from mustard, parsley, rosemary and thyme. At this point dice and boil some swede and parsnip.
   
   
5. After a while on a medium heat the apple softens. I kept adding water to keep the consistency a little runny.
   
   
6. Take out about half the apple sauce and put in a bowl. As the remainder in the plan looked a little like sick I felt obliged to add carrots, as well as some of the chunks of swede and parsnip.
   
   
7. Put quarter of the mix long ways in a tortilla wrap, and wrap it.
   
   
8. End up with a dish with four wraps in it. Mash the remaining swede and parsnip.
   
   
9. Coat the wraps with the remaining apple sauce and then a layer of the swede and parsnip mash.
   
   
10. Serve. Here I've used a plate, you may use whatever you like.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    Review
    
    
    This meal was a gamble. So I was pretty happy it was even edible. It was actually quite nice, although the apple sauce was a little too sharp in the end. I guess using a little less vinegar and maybe a standard non-cooking apple would have worked better. Overall I think this idea has some merit- the wrap in the middle of what seemed more like a pie actually didn't taste out of place.

An attempt to follow a Vietnamese recipe

So I went on holiday to Vietnam and did a cooking course in Hoi An. It was good. They gave me a recipe recipe booklet of the stuff I'd cooked. So here is my version of  Bun Bo Nam Bo (Southern style Beef Vermicelli).

1. I pan fried some shallots garlic and a some lumps of ginger, take the stuff out the pan and set aside. Realise at this point you didn't really want the ginger in there and put it away.
   
   
2. My first major deviation. I used salmon instead of beef. Thinly sliced whatever is used.
   
   
3. A bed of salad, it suggest slightly different in the recipe but I'd say this was a fair substitution. There's some basil and dried mint in there as well.
   
   
4. Pan fry the slices of salmon in the oil from the shallots.
   
   
5. OK I didn't take many photos. Two important steps- first cook some rice (my second main deviation from the recipe), pile it in the middle of the salad and rest the salmon on this, second deglaze the pan with  light soy sauce, stock (I stuck with beef), some sugar, pepper and some lime juice. Reduce this by half and then pour this over the rice and salmon. Sprinkle the shallots over this and garnish with some basil.
   
   
   
   
   I like this, pretty simple, quick and could be made to look really fancy. The swaps seemed to work despite the fact I barely kept anything from the original. I'll definitely be frying salmon in this way in the future.

Ross's pulled pork experiment

I decided I should actually do something a bit more experimenty. By that I mean I decided I'd try cooking basically the same meal in two different ways. That meal would be pulled pork. I went for a quick method and a slower method to see if I could tell the difference.

Quick pulled pork

1. Spice rub- mix loads of paprika, smoked paprika, ground corriander, black pepper, ground mustard seeds, ground cumin, sugar and garlic together. 
   
2. I coated two pork chops in this rub and but this in a the fridge for use with pulled pork attempt two on the next day.
   
3. I wanted a wetter rub for the quick pork- so i added olive oil, tomato puree and white wine vinegar to the remaining spice mix (which was about half the total). I rubbed 3 skinny pork chops with this mix.
   
4. Boiling some new potatoes, with mint and half a lemon,
   
5. I chucked the pork in the oven(lowish temp) with some chopped spring onion, some white wine vinegar and a little water. 
   
6. Salad. Contained some basil leaves but pretty standard otherwise. Unlike people salad is better dressed.
   
7. Potato salad. Chop potatoes, mix in some chopped gherkin and whatever spice mix you have left.
   
8. The pork looked like this (but less blurry) when I took it out the oven. I'd basted it a bit whilst cooking.
   
   
   
9. The crucial pulling of the pork, tare the meat to shreds using two forks. Its fun to begin with but gets dull.
   

The assembled meal. On the sink because its the only surface I hadn't made a mess of.

Slower Pulled Pork

The next day...

1. Take the two pork chops out the fridge and put in the oven with some white wine vinegar water and spring onions. I tried for some honey and mustard glaze but used the wrong jar and ended up coating this in honey and horse radish sauce. 
   
   
   
2. Create some more spice rub because you ran out.
   
3. Cook some tomatoes in in this spice with a little olive oil.
   
4. Add in some mixed Mexican beans (they were in Asda and looked interesting) and a little tomato puree and you have something similar to baked beans.
   
5. For some reason this pork comes out the oven a lot drier, maybe i didn't baste enough
   
6. This should have been the pulling stage :( I chopped the pork up small instead and then mixed it in with the beans.
   
7. Same salad. The potatoes I did strangely- I cut them in half and tried to pan fry in a little oil. After about 15 mins they were crispy on the outside and raw in the middle, so I shifted them to the oven. They look like roast potatoes but tasted liked baked.
   
   
   
   
   
   Review
   
   
   Firstly the quick method made pulled pork, the second didn't. Although I think this is more to do with how long I kept the meat in the oven and the temperature. Really I should be using a fatty join of meat not a steak anyway. The taste of both was good although not as strong as I'd hoped. I think if you do successfully manage to pull the pork a sticky spicy sauce of some kind should be added. The pork and beans were probably the best tasting, although I'm not overly convince by leaving the meat in the spice rub for 24 hours. I guess a proper marinade should be wetter. The crazy failed sauteed potatoes I made by accident were good, I'll use this again. 

Spicy ham rolls with squashed potatoes

A proper 'ready steady cook!' dish this one. I had ham, potatoes and some vegetables, along with some very stale bread. This is what happened.

1. Boil some new potatoes. Nothing smart here.
   
2. I had some crusty bread rolls that had gone hard over the past 3 weeks. These were destroyed into read crumbs using a rolling pin.
   
   
3. For the spiciness I used some caraway seeds, cinnamon, star anise, cardamon pods garlic a pinch of cloves and a little oil. I heated this in a pan until the first pod popped. Then I emptied out about half the pods and peeled the garlic before grinding it all in the pestle and mortar.
   
   
4. Next I sweated an onion for about 15 mins before adding a pepper, some balsamic vinegar and some sugar and then kept cooking this on a medium heat for about 10 more minutes.
   
   
5. After they were boiled I was meant to crack the potatoes next. I smashed them. I added a little oil and a lot of mint and then chucked them in the oven.
   
   
6. Next I added some mushrooms to the onions, and after about 30 seconds added the spice mix and the bread crumbs, taking the pan off the heat.
   
   
7. I laid out 3 large slices of ham, added a layer of lettuce (I wanted this to be healthy) and a good blob of the mix from the pan to each. I then rolled up each ham slice with the contents inside.
   
   
8. The 3 ham rolls were chucked in an oven dish thing, covered in the remaining mix and a little layer of cheese. This was then placed in the oven for about 5 mins.
   
   
9. Once the potatoes were slightly crispy and the cheese was going brownish I took it out the oven and served.
   
   
10. As a random special treat my housemate Gez had left me some profiteroles he'd made (white and dark chocolate). They were really good.
    
    
    
    
    Review
    I think this meal worked better than it had any right to so I'm fairly pleased. The filling mixture was a little dry maybe... some tomato might be used to make it more liquidy, or to coat the whole thing in the dish enchilada style. Saying that the food did taste a little Christmassy, as I think with the cinnamon and cloves I was most of the way to making a mince pie. I'm glad I didn't go with chilies- I think they would have distracted from the taste of the ham. I would have like for the potatoes to have had come out crispier as well, but they tasted fine anyway.