Two globe-cooking recipes in one day - can't get more exotic than that ! After the Greek Fig & Walnut Bake earlier on today, I've just made the Lemongrass, Beef & Vermicelli Herb Salad from the Vietnam Kitchen Nomad box. I was surprised to see a two star rating and a prep time of 45 minutes for a salad, but having made it, I can confirm that it does take that long - nearer to an hour actually, for me. It's quite simple but fiddly to prepare, with lots of different stages. You can see the full recipe, created by Vietnamese chef Uyen Luu, on the Kitchen Nomad website.
This recipe requires several ingredients from the Kitchen Nomad box : Rice Vermicelli, peanuts, lemon grass, birds eye chilli and fish sauce.
Plus lots of fresh ingredients : carrots, lime, mint, spring onions, garlic, marinated beef.
I'd never used rice vermicelli before so I wasn't sure what to expect. They're very similar to white, translucent, thin spaghetti but seem a bit more unruly - it was hard to separate what I needed from the pack and they seemed to ping all over the place ! They're very simple to prepare though - you just need to pour boiling water over the top and they cook by themselves.
Five different bowls of ingredients, plus the salad leaves and the vermicelli ! Anyone who has ever said that salads are boring should look at the ingredients list for this one - it's packed with contrasting flavours of sweet, sour and salty so each mouthful is an explosion of flavours.
The finished salad is lovely, but it is quite a time-consuming dish to put together. I tasted the separate elements as I was going and thought that some of the individual flavours were lost when they were all combined. I'll therefore be experimenting with the pickled carrots and marinated beef with less vibrant accompanying flavours so that they can shine as main ingredients in their own right because they're lovely.
Disclosure : I received a Kitchen Nomad box in order to write an honest review.
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