Recipe for Today: Ginger, garlic, fish and greens in parchment takes us to our happy place

By Leslie Brenner

How does this sound: a dish that’s light, easy and quick to prepare, that features whatever fish looks best in the market, that’s super healthy and creates no mess to clean up? And what if it’s not only perfect for a weeknight, but so delicious and lovely to behold that you’d happily present it to someone you truly wanted to impress?

Well, that’s how we felt too, the first time we made the gingery halibut parcels from Andrea Nguyen’s Vietnamese Food Any Day. To achieve it, toss sliced baby bok choy in sesame oil, set a portion’s worth on a sheet of parchment, top with fish (the award-winning author suggests halibut or salmon), spoon onto it a quick sauce of ginger, garlic, oyster sauce, soy and a touch of oil and seasoning, scatter on slices of scallion, wrap it up, and slide it into the oven. Fourteen minutes later you have something wonderful.

How wonderful? I’ve made it four times in the last six weeks. It’s crazy that this simple combo of ingredients turns into something this delightful; the whole is much more than the sum of its parts on this one. Every fish I’ve used so far — halibut, petrale sole and striped bass — cooked perfectly in that package. In that 14 minutes the bok choy achieves ideal texture, the flavors all come together and the sauce envelops all in gingery, umamiful happiness. Salmon will be next. Or scallops. Or snapper.

I like to serve it with brown rice, spooned right onto the parchment to mingle with the sauce; jasmine rice is wonderful with it as well, and gets to the table much quicker.

Enjoy your Recipe for Today!

If you like Recipe for Today, please share it on your social channels or email it to a friend who will enjoy it. Thank you!

Cookbook author Andrea Nguyen and photographer An-My Lê share perspectives on Vietnamese cooking and the exile experience

Bánh xèo inspired by An-My Lê

By Leslie Brenner

Award-winning cookbook author Andrea Nguyen was the featured guest at a Cooks Without Borders Culture-Dive panel discussion yesterday — joined by special guest An-My Lê. Both natives of Saigon, they shared food memories of Vietnam with CWB design director Juliet Jacobson and myself, and talked about what cooking the dishes of their heritage has meant to each of them as immigrants.

The live event was attended virtually by Cooks Without Borders Premium Members.

A little orange notebook filled with handwritten recipes was one of the few things her mother brought with her when her family was evacuated from Saigon in 1975, recalls Nguyen. Three decades later, Nguyen published her first cookbook — Into the Vietnamese Kitchen.

Nguyen’s mother gave the book — a beautiful, 344-page volume subtitled “Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors,” to all her friends. “You give this to your children,” Nguyen recalled her mother telling them. “Because they’re not writing the recipes down. And you’ll need something to give them for their wedding.”

Nguyen, now one of the most respected authorities on Vietnamese cooking in America, went on to publish five other books. She talked, at our panel, about the new book she’s working on now. We profiled her last month.

Lê, a renowned photographer and MacArthur Fellow whose works are in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago and other top museums, is an accomplished home cook, and a fan of Nguyen's cookbooks.

Food was the one aspect of being an exile that was not problematic when she first came to the United States as a 15 year-old, Lê told the panel. “Growing up during the eighties. you associated Vietnam with the war and the vets, and it was so controversial. My default was always to grab onto food because it brought so much pleasure, so much comfort.”

The video replay of the event is available on Cooks Without Borders YouTube channel. You’ll find previous events — with The Woks of Life’s Sarah Leung; cookbook author Tara Wigley; and Masienda founder Jorge Gaviria and chef Olivia Lopez there as well.

To attend future Cooks Without Borders Culture-Dive events live, join CWB Premium Membership.

Author Andrea Nguyen brings unforgettable Vietnamese flavor into every home cook's wheelhouse

‘Vietnamese Food Any Day’ by Andrea Nguyen

By Leslie Brenner

Editor’s note: Women have a history of writing the best cookbooks. That’s why throughout March — Women’s History Month (and maybe even into April!) — we’ll be featuring cookbooks by our favorite female authors.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on developing a few Vietnamese-inspired recipes with the invaluable help and guidance of my dear friend An-My Lê — Cooks Without Borders’ Vietnamese cooking advisor. I want to get them just right, so I’ve been moving slower than I meant to on them; they will be coming sooner than later, I hope!

A brilliant photographer by profession, An-My happens to be one of the best cooks I know — in many idioms, including French (as well as Vietnamese). When I asked her some months ago to recommend the best Vietnamese cookbooks for home cooks, she didn’t hesitate. Andrea Nguyen’s books, she said, along with Charles Phan’s Vietnamese Home Cooking.

Author Andrea Nguyen / Photograph by Aubrey Pick

An-My is not alone in her opinion, obviously; Nguyen’s work has been honored with many prestigious awards, including a James Beard Cookbook Award for The Pho Cookbook and an IACP Cookbook Award for Unforgettable: The Bold Flavors of Paula Wolfert’s Renegade Life, which she edited.

Nguyen, who lives in Northern California and describes herself as “a bank examiner gone astray,” has published five other books as well, including Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, Asian Dumplings, Asian Tofu and The Banh Mi Handbook, as well as her most recent, Vietnamese Food Any Day, with which I’m currently obsessed. One of the dishes in that last title — a rice-noodle salad number — was a dream-bowl for us last summer.

Happily for her fans (me included), she also has a fabulous blog — Viet World Kitchen — where you can find a wealth of delicious stories, videos and recipes.

[Watch our Video Q & A with Andrea Nguyen and An-My Lê.]

I’d recommend Vietnamese Food Any Day for anyone wanting to dive into Vietnamese cooking, whether you’re a newbie or have lots of experience. The book is wonderful for teaching us how to bring the Vietnamese spirit and style of cooking and eating into our American home kitchens, starting with what to keep on hand — including brands: Red Boat or Three Crabs fish sauce! Three Ladies rice paper and jasmine rice!. But Nguyen has a great palate and delightful creative flair, with plenty to offer even someone like An-My (who can make spectacular bánh xèo with her eyes closed).

Nguyen’s parchment parcels of fish baked with ginger, garlic, baby bok choy and scallions is a great example — a quick and easy dish that’s as appropriate for a weeknight dinner as it is for a special evening (post-vaccine reunion?!) with friends when you want to really celebrate.

Halibut and baby bok choy with ginger, garlic and scallions roasted in parchment, from Andrea Nguyen’s ‘Vietnamese Food Any Day’

It’s just the thing to keep in mind to as we come into halibut season. It’s so damn easy to overcook or otherwise ruin halibut (which is expensive!), and this foolproof method gives you an impressive, fabulous slam-dunk. Let your guests or family tear open the parcels at the table, and they’ll find fish that’s gorgeously silky throughout, absolutely elegant, bathed in umami-rich and gingery-bright sauce that melds marvelously with the bok choy. I can’t recommend the recipe highly enough. It’s a great example of why you need this book.

Want something fancy to start that’s also easier than it might seem?

Mushroom pâté puffs from Andrea Nguyen’s ‘Vietnamese Food Any Day’

I’m a sucker for puff pastry, especially the all-butter frozen, buy-it-at-the-supermarket variety, and Nguyen’s Mushroom Pâté Puffs take full advantage. Their filling is a simple yet perfect mix of rehydrated dried shiitakes, white button mushrooms, shallots, butter and thyme. Nguyen’s recipe, which yields about 30, is meant to serve 8 to 10, but unless you are far more restrained, reasonable and mature than the four of us still-sequestered together (though not for long!), you will devour them like some insane, puff-pastry-starved maniacs. I shouldn’t be admitting this, but just want you to know how good they are.

On tap, for the very near future, I have bookmarked recipes for Baked Shrimp and Celery Toasts; Grilled Trout Rice Paper Rolls; Shaking Tofu; and Grilled Lemongrass Pork Chops.

All of which is to say many thanks, Andrea Nguyen, for improving the quality of our lives.

Looking for a new cookbook to make your spring and summer light, elegant and delicious? Look no further.

RECIPE: Andrea Nguyen’s Ginger Halibut Parcels

RECIPE: Andrea Nguyen’s Mushroom Pâté Puffs

Cookbooks We Love: Leela Punyaratabandhu's life-changing 'Simple Thai Food' is one of our favorite primers ever

Simple Thai Food: Classic Recipes from the Thai Home Kitchen, by Leela Punyaratabandu; photographs by Erin Kunkel; 2014, Ten Speed Press, $24.99.

Backgrounder: Bangkok-born Leela Punyaratabandhu, who now divides her time between Bangkok and Chicago, has written for Serious Eats, Dill Magazine, Food52 and the Wall Street Journal, among others. She launched her Thai cooking blog, She Simmers, in 2008; four years later, it was honored as “Best Regional Cuisine” blog by Saveur. It has been inactive for a few years, though still very much worth reading — especially if you wind up buying Simple Thai Food, her 2014 cookbook, and loving it as much as we do. She has since written two other books, Bangkok and Flavors of the Southeast Asian Grill. We look forward to exploring those. But first things first: Simple Thai Food is life-changingly excellent.

Why we love it: Having spent much of my adult life in places with easy access to outstanding Thai restaurants, I’d never been moved to learn to cook Thai food. Then came the pandemic, and being shut in made me crave its bright, optimistic herbal tang, its lovely perfume of makrut lime leaves and lemongrass. Punyaratabandhu’s slim, 228-page volume makes Thai cooking approachable and accessible. Further, her recipes, though simple to execute (once you get your hands on the right ingredients), look and taste anything but simple; they’re extraordinarily sophisticated, downright impressive, with beautiful layered, balanced flavors.

Punyaratabandhu writes instructions that are not only clear and easy to follow, she also thoughtfully describes exactly the way a dish should look and taste as you cook, helping us appreciate the cuisine as it’s meant to be enjoyed.

Phat Phrik Khing — a dry curry, lightly sweet, of pork and long beans (or in this case, green beans). It is garnished with a chiffonnade of makrut lime leaves.

That is particularly valuable when many of us may be using mediocre Thai restaurant renditions of dishes as yardsticks. “This dish is not supposed to be saucy,” she writes in the instructions for Phat Phrik Khing — a dry curry, lightly sweet, of pork and long beans. “When it looks like a dry curry that glistens with deep orange oil, you know it is done.” In those Americanized Thai places that offer “choice of protein” with this dish, that deep orange oil rarely shows up on the plate.

If you’re like me, you’ll be astounded at how simple it is (again, once you have the key ingredients) to make Tom Yam Kung (hot-and-sour prawn soup) or Tom Kha Kai — Coconut-Galangal Chicken Soup.

Tom Kha Kai — Coconut-Galangal Chicken Soup

Som Tam — the green papaya salad that launched my pandemic Thai cravings — is easy to manage as well. Shredding the green papaya so that it does not bruise is best achieved using a mandoline (great excuse to buy one if you don’t already own one). The author also suggests a hand grater, calling out an inexpensive one called Kiwi Pro Slice.

Som Tam Malako — Green Papaya Salad

Read this first: Buried at the end of the book is Punyaratabandhu’s extremely essential Ingredients Glossary. It’s where I would suggest you start if you want to dive into Thai cooking. In it, the author explains everything you need to know about palm sugar (it’s complicated; if you’re not already familiar with it you might want to stick with her suggested sub of brown sugar. We also used coconut sugar as a sub, with excellent results). She also explains that Thai eggplants may be eaten raw; the differences between Thai basil, holy basi and lemon basil; what to look for when you buy galangal (plus how to freeze it) and how to use makrut lime leaves and rind (and how to freeze them). While we are on the subject, Angkor Cambodian Food is a great source for many of these ingredients. If you think about gathering all your ingredients first, and prep and freeze those that can be frozen, you will be much better off when you finally dive in.

In the glossary, Punyaratabandhu insists on the use of some of these hard-to-source ingredients for particular dishes, and no doubt she’s right in doing so. Happily, she does condone shortcuts when the resulting flavor is acceptable, allowing that commercial Thai curry pastes are far better than homemade ones made with inappropriately subbed ingredients.

You’ve gotta try this: Among the many amazing Thai dishes I made from this book, the one my family was most bowled over by was a sort of dip called Lon Kung Mu Sap, which Punyaratabandhu translates as Shrimp-Coconut Relish with Vegetable Crudités. Basically, it’s chopped shrimp and pork simmered together in coconut milk, brightened with tamarind paste and seasoned with shallot and chiles and garnished with makrut lime leaves.

Leela Punyaratabandu’s Shrimp-Coconut Relish with Crudités (Lon Kung Mu Sap)

“Most people who did not grow up in a Thai household or live with Thai people are unfamiliar with the various coconut milk-based relishes called lon,” she explains in the headnote. She also explains that it is served not before dinner (as a westerner might guess), but along with the rest of the meal. Punyaratabandhu went to to share how she likes to eat it: “I take a piece of the vegetable crudités, put it on a bite’s worth of rice on my plate, top it with a dollop of the lon, transport the whole assembly on a spoon, and eat it in one big bite.”

Thank you for that delicious morsel, dear author.

Dear reader, if you’ve ever been tempted to try your hand at Thai cooking — or if you’ve done quite a bit of it and want a great reference with great recipes — you need this book.

RECIPE: Phat Phrik Khing (Sweet Dry Curry of Pork and Long Beans)

RECIPE: Tom Kha Kai (Coconut-Galangal Chicken Soup)

RECIPE: Leela Punyaratabandhu’s Green Papaya Salad

RECIPE: Leela Punyaratabandhu’s Shrimp-Coconut Relish

BUY ‘Simple Thai Food’ at Bookshop

BUY ‘Simple Thai Food’ at Amazon

Favorite dish of summer 2020 so far: Andrea Nguyen’s tangy, fresh, umami-ful Vietnamese rice noodle salad bowl

Cutting to the chase here: This Vietnamese rice noodle salad — from Andrea Nguyen’s new(ish) book Vietnamese Every Day — is probably the most craveable single new (to me) recipe I’ve discovered in four months of daily cooking through the pandemic. That would be my favorite dish in something like 120 days of cooking. Or at least the one dish I know I’ll come back to again and again. It’s the kind of dish you’re excited to add to your life, the kind of dish you think about and crave. The kind of dish you wake up certain days and you simply have to have.

At its base, it’s pretty basic. Put salad greens in a bowl with cilantro and mint, and maybe a handful of bean sprouts and/or some shaved cucumber. Add a layer of cold rice noodles. Then the star of the dish — grilled skewers of meat, chicken or shrimp. Tuck in some pickled daikon and carrot, scatter on toasted peanuts or cashews plus more cilantro and mint, and serve with nuoc cham, the Vietnamese dipping sauce, to toss with as dressing.

It’s cool and salad-y, with a tangy, spicy umami zap of the nuoc cham. It’s fragrant with herbs, and fresh, and cool — perfect for summer. The hot skewer lands atop cold salad and rice noodles, all those herbs and pickle, and it all gets tossed with that delicious, tangy nuoc cham sauce, plus a pickly, nutty crunch — what could be better?

We came upon the rice noodle salad recipe because Wylie was in process of preparing a Crispy Lemongrass Salmon, from the same book. Nguyen writes that while salmon is not native to Vietnam, once her family tasted it in America, they adopted it as if it were. She makes a paste with lemongrass, brown sugar, shallot, Madras-style curry powder, and fish sauce, coats salmon fillets in it, then broils them. In the headnote, she suggests serving the salmon either with rice or on top of the rice noodle salad. Wylie jumped into action, pulled together the rice noodle salad — and we were all gobsmacked.

A week later, I was craving it again, so I tried it with the pork skewers offered in Nguyen’s recipe (and which are shown on the cover of the book!).

I enjoyed putting together the marinade (garlic, shallot, five-spice powder, sugar, molasses, fish sauce, soy sauce and canola oil), and making grillable skewers out of pork shoulder — a cut I’d always thought had to be cooked long, low and slow. I couldn’t get boneless pork shoulder, but it was easy to cut bones out of a small picnic roast (a.k.a. pork butt), and slice the meat across the grain into quarter-inch-thick strips. Marinated and grilled on a cast-iron stove-top grill, the pork skewers were superb: tender, charry, flavorful, just delicious. No doubt they’d be even better grilled over charcoal.

It also seemed obvious that, as Nguyen suggests, the bowl would be fabulous topped with all kinds of alternative things. Shrimp — either marinated and grilled or poached and chilled. Chicken, with this same marinade. Beef (though I’m not usually craving beef with my salad). That’s why we’re calling our adapted version Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with XYZ Skewers.

To go vegan, you can marinate and then grill tofu and vegetables, and use that in place of the skewers.

If you’re starting from scratch, getting all the ingredients together takes some work, for sure. But you can make the key elements in advance and keep them on hand, so it comes together either in a jiff or with just a little effort, depending on the protein.

Nuoc cham base is worth keeping in the fridge (for up to two weeks); add lime and fresh chiles just before serving. Pickled daikon and carrot can be kept on hand in the fridge as well (we used a Japanese salady-pickle called Namasu, from Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, since it’s so similar to the one offered in Nguyen’s book), and rice noodles boil up quick and easy. That means if you keep greens, cilantro, mint and either cucumber or bean sprouts on hand (along with roasted peanuts or cashews), and a sudden craving strikes — which it will, if you’re anything like me — you just have to think about the protein.

A super-easy alternative to Nguyen’s lemongrass salmon is fillets of Koji-Marinated Salmon. (It’s easy as long as you have shio koji (the recipe for that is included in the salmon recipe). That piece of fish — which is five minutes broiler-to-table once it has marinated a day or three in the shio koji — is awesome on that bowl. So what if it’s Japanese and the noodles are Vietnamese? It works, and it’s delicious. But honestly, any simple grilled fish or seafood would do.

OK, maybe you’re ready to get to it. Just think of the dish as a way to riff. Try it once as suggested with pork, if you’re so inclined. And then embrace it as a fabulous vehicle for whatever you feel like.

[RECIPE: Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with XYZ Skewers]