Summer's can be hot in the Northwest (no, really) and Friday night was no exception. I had a fridge full of fresh vegetables and figured making a salad would be the best option for dinner. I decided making Nigella's Vietnamese Chicken and Mint Salad since I had all the ingredients needed and more.
I had 3 free range chicken thighs in the fridge that needed tending to, so I put the chicken in water along with a few dried chili peppers, kafir lime leaves and a few dashes of fish sauce and set the whole lot to simmer. Once the chicken was cooked, i left them to cool in the fridge and I put the cooking liquid away in the freezer for another day.
I started by chopping up ½ a small green cabbage and ½ of a small purple cabbage into fine shreds and threw it into a large bowl. Next, I grated 2 large carrots and threw that on top of the cabbage. The green onions, ½ of a red and ½ of a green pepper were next and I chopped those up too. I rolled up a large handful of mint leaves into a cigar shape and cut that into a lovely chiffonade (!!) and tore off some Italian parsley off of their stems and threw them in too. The final step was shredding up my chicken thighs and then with my clean hands, I mixed everything all up and started on the dressing.
I followed the dressing pretty faithfully to Nigella's recipe, but I subsitituted the rice vinegar for some red wine vinegar since it was all that I had.
1 fat garlic clove, peeled and minced
1 tbsp sugar
1 ½ tsp rice vinegar
1 ½ tbsp lime juice
1 ½ tbsp Vietnamese or Thai fish sauce (nuoc nam or nam pla)
1 ½ tbsp vegetable oil
Once it was shaken up, I added it to the salad and me and Cornelius dug in. The next day I ate the some leftovers with some crushed peanuts on top for added crunch. Tasty!
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