Cooking my fav ethnic food

This week I prepared Vietnamese Style Rice with With Vegetables and Shrimp. The key ingredient is nuoc cham sauce, a staple of Vietnamese culture (sorta like ketchup in the US). The vietnamese table always has a bowl of the nuoc cham dipping sauce. The recipe for the nuoc cham comes from a fab London cookbook (love the London cookbooks!)-Lemongrass and Lime, New Vietnamese Cooking from Bam-Bou. Lets consider the nuoc cham the apex of this recipe:

Nuoc Cham

5 garlic cloves
2 large red chilies
2 fl oz fish sauce
3 1/2 fl oz water
2 fl oz rice vinegar
2 oz sugar
2 fl oz freshly squeezed lemon juice

1-Peel and finely chop the garlic. Slice the chilies in half, deseed (impt) and finely chop
2-In a heavy based saucepan, warm (do not boil) the fish sauce, water, vinegar, sugar, garlic and chilies. When the sauce becomes moderately hot, remove the saucepan from the heat and allow to cool
3-When the sauce is cooled (about 45 minutes), stir in lemon juice

Most of the rest of the recipe is a matter of lots of prepping and assembling:

1-Cook rice (I recommend a rice cooker-dependable rice every time and you can keep it gently warming)
2-Prepare your selected ingredients. In our case we chopped slivers of cucumbers, torn lettuce and chopped garlic onions.
3-"Semi-crush" 1/4 cup of peanuts
4-Steam 1/3 lb of shrimp

Time the cooking of the shrimp for when everything else is prepped and ready to be assembled. Layer a bowl with lettuce and top with 1 cup of rice. Top the rice with shrimp, peanuts, cucumbers and garlic onions. Then top with fried onion and top with 3-6 tbsp of nuoc cham sauce. Use Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce (the other Vietnamese ketchup) to spice up if you like.

The beauty of this recipe is that it doesn't need to be followed exactly. You don't have to have garlic onions. You may choose to use scallions. For veggies, you could add carrots or bean sprouts. You could use another meat, such as thinly sliced beef, pork or chicken. You can add cilantro, regular basil or Thai basil. You may also substitute rice vermicelli for plain rice.

Tip: Buy your ingredients at the asian store, you can expect to spend about 50% less on ingredients as compared to your local supermarket. Fried red onion and thai basil are available at your Asian grocery.