In the course of the holidays, I can get misplaced in cooking manner an excessive amount of roasted meats and wealthy truffles and cookies (’tis the season in spite of everything, no?). So I at all times wish to be reminded that lighter, spicier meals exist and attempt to get these in my eating regimen as properly to interrupt up the monotony of hearty vacation fare.
Cue Susan Vu’s intensely flavorful, recent and fragrant weeknight recipes for our newest “Week of Meals” sequence. Susan is a good friend of mine, and I’m at all times overjoyed when she texts telling me she’s made dinner and to stroll down the road if I’d like some. Susan is a savant at creating a lot of taste in a brief period of time, digging into her Vietnamese heritage to make flavorful sauces and spicy pastes which are wielded expertly, whether or not for a special-occasion meal or a easy bowl of rice with veggies for lunch.
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Working example, her dish of baked tofu bathed in a spicy peanut butter and chili crisp sauce that the tofu soaks to the core. She serves them on rice with chilly, crunchy veggies. However as an alternative of stopping there, she wraps all these components up in roasted seaweed sheets for a hands-on affair that provides texture and extra seasoning.
In one other dish, she roasts Japanese eggplant whereas making a fast Sichuan-style pork sauce seasoned deeply with mushroom-flavored darkish soy sauce, scallions and ginger. For a sheet pan model of a Viet-Cajun shrimp boil, she makes use of dried kimchi seasoning as an alternative of Cajun seasoning so as to add warmth and brightness to the buttery peel-and-eat shrimp.
She places an electrical stress cooker to good use for spare rib ends braised in a aromatic broth flavored with fish sauce and Vietnamese caramel sauce, which provides an unbelievable bitter-sweet taste to the meat. Then, leftover rib meat is sautéed with cabbage and mushrooms for a bowl version of Vietnamese fried spring rolls the place, as an alternative of wrapping every little thing in rice paper, Vu fries items of rice paper till crisp and crunchy to eat alongside the hearty bowls.
Roasted Eggplant With Cheater Sichuan-Type Pork
Chili crisp and mushroom-flavored soy sauce rapidly add umami and depth to floor pork for the sauce, which helps curb cravings for excellent Sichuan meals while you don’t really feel like leaving your home.
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Cook dinner time: 45 minutes.
Sheet Pan Shrimp Broil
This dish is a Viet-Cajun model of a shrimp boil however utilizing dried kimchi seasoning as an alternative of Cajun seasoning. For those who can’t discover dried kimchi seasoning, you should use the flavour packets from immediate kimchi ramen, which might be discovered practically in all places these days.
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Cook dinner time: 45 minutes.
Strain Cooker Suon Ram Man (Vietnamese Caramelized Pork Spare Ribs)
The key to not making the sauce too cloying is within the nước màu (Vietnamese caramel sauce), which is cooked to the purpose that it’s darkish and smoky with a contact of bitterness.
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Cook dinner time: 1 hour.
Nori Wraps With Baked Spicy Peanut Tofu
Chili crisp combines with a little bit of peanut butter to make a fast sauce that thickly coats tofu and flavors it all through because it bakes. Use the sauce on any protein you want, however at all times serve it with rice, veggies and roasted seaweed snacks to make your individual wraps.
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Cook dinner time: 1 hour.
Bun Bowls With Sautéed Cabbage, Mushrooms And Spare Ribs
To get the identical satisfying crunch you get from chả giò (Vietnamese fried spring rolls), however with a few quarter of the hassle, shallow-fry uncooked rice paper till it’s puffed and über crispy, then serve it with a vegetable-heavy filling of cabbage and mini king oyster mushrooms. For those who don’t have leftover spare ribs, you should use two cups of any leftover cooked pork of their place.
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Cook dinner time: 40 minutes.