White on Rice Couple

August has been a seriously busy food month for us and it’s barely half over! With friends coming into town, a series of cooking classes that we’ve taught and Friday’s catering event , we’re trying to make the best use of our left overs. We’ve been very conscientious of food waste and are always making sure we don’t waste food like we used to. So with Friday’s party all cooked, delivered, served and done, we’ve got a few left overs in the fridge we assembled one of our favorite Vietnamese salads made with jackfruit. Jackfruit is a tropical fruit that is HUGE and sweet tasting like a banana, mango, papaya combination. We made a Jackfruit Video a while back and you can to see it’s full dissection!

black sesame seed rice crackers (banh đa)

Vietnamese jackfruit salad, Gỏi Mít, is wonderful mix of pork, shrimp, jackfruit and Vietnamese black sesame seed rice crackers (banh đa) or prawn crackers. The rice crackers are packaged in plastic bags and normally come in large, round, flat pieces but often are broken into sections. A specialty salad of the Central Viet-Nam, Goi Mit is gaining popularity in the states amongst many Non-Vietnamese diners and is now popping up in many Vietnamese restaurant menu’s. Eaten like the way you would nacho’s, this jackfruit salad is scooped up with the crispy, light rice crackers. The mix of meat, shrimp and fruit is tossed with a flavorful fish sauce dressing that is spiked with chilies and limes. Vietnamese Coriander, rau răm, is the fragrant, musky, slightly spicy herbal finale to this delicious salad.

canned , young & fresh jackfruit

Normally, the jackfruit used in most version are the canned young, unripe jackfruit, therefore having the term “non” in the title of the dish. “Non” means tender or young. But when we have some fresh, sweet jackfruit , we love tossing it in the salad too for an extra sweet, fragrant contrast to the salad. Depending what’s in our pantry, we’ll even toss in some canned ripe jackfruit as well. It’s something different, but delicious. Normally most Asian grocers will have both green, unripe and sweet, ripe version of canned jackfruit. Choose your delicious poison! Also, for a vegetarian version, you can replace the shrimp and pork for strips of fried tofu.

There are so many different variations to this awesome salad. We always toss crushed, roasted peanuts on top, but Christine from Holy Basil made her version with some toasted sesame seeds . That sounds delicious as well! We found this great Vietnamese cooking show from ViệtDồngTâm.com that highlights dishes from the three different regions of Vietnam: North, Central and South. If you speak Vietnamese, watch this great video here that shows a jackfruit salad being prepared. If you don’t understand Vietnamese, watch the video anyways because it is so informative.

Vietnamese coriander, rau răm

Although the chef is speaking Vietnamese, you can see all her steps of preparation, including a cool shot of a whole slice of young, boiled jackfruit. Being so far from Vietnam, we have to buy the young jackfruit canned (already cut in triangle shapes), but being in Viet-Nam, the chef actually sliced small, whole, young jackfruit and boiled it herself. The chef suggests steaming the shrimp, to preserve the sweet flavors of the shrimp. She also suggests using rehydrated, dried shrimp if you don’t have fresh shrimp available. The dried shrimp adds a nice rich, fermented shrimp flavor to the salad, which she personally prefers. She boils the pork belly in a water drizzled with salt and fish sauce, adding further flavor to the meat. If you watch it, but don’t understand Vietnamese and want to understand more of what the chef is saying, just e-mail us and Diane will interpret the video for you!

• Our Jackfruit Video
• Our Jackfruit Salad Recipe
• Christines Jackfruit Salad
• ViệtDồngTâm.com Jackfruit salad video

This post is dedicated to Miss Kaweah, the sweet and lucky black lab that gets to hike, romp and swim in Colorado’s outrageously amazing wilderness. She’s at a summer puppy camp now, enjoying a little break away from her parents.

We’re envious of not just Kaweah, but of her mommy and daddy too, known to everyone as Jen Yu and Jeremy of Use Real Butter. Everyone knows that Jen’s super duper fine photography skills keep us drooling over her delicious Asian dishes and picture perfect sweet desserts. We’ve always been jealous fans of this trio of nature lovers because they are always teasing us with their skiing pics, something we really wish we could do more often and learn better. We comment on their site (with slightly bitter undertones) about how we wish their snow would finally melt, how they get to ski way too much and why they fall too little while tele-ing down the mountain (falling is something we do very well). Then the darn snow gods continue to drop more snow on their beautiful high elevation mountains to get back at us sea level, ski falling folks. Their lucky butts get to do everything we wish we could be doing and much more. Ugh!

So when they decided to take some time out during their California trip to stop by our place, it was time to finally meet them face to face, to let them know EXACTLY what we thought of them after some good eats and intoxicating cocktails. Maybe on a full belly of food and booze (and without their damn ski poles and snow) they wouldn’t be able to fight back. They were going to be on our dry, smoggy, concrete So Cal territory. Time for some serious ski blogger battle.

But when they walked through the door with a bottle of wine and a beautiful photograph of Colorado columbine flowers, we forgot to release all our bottled up ski, snow, mountain, lake, river and wildflower resentment. We all just squealed out our greetings, hugged and held back a little tears (well, Diane did). We hugged and squealed again and at receiving such wonderful gifts, the dogs jumped for Jen & Jeremy joy and we soon forgot that these are the Colorado people that make us look bad on the snow. We’re suckers for presents and hugs. And admittedly, we suck on ski’s.

Jen & Jeremy are the real deal: they’re smart, fun, funny, totally down to earth, sincere , loving and one of the best couples we’ve met. We see lots of us in them too, they’re WORC’s! But they can ski, we can’t! Jeremy is the quiet intellectual type, warm and a total sweet heart. But most importantly, the guy knows his drink, loves coffee and our cocktails, two things that made us instant friends! And then there’s Jen, who is like a disease, in a very good sense. She’s the kind of good bacteria that the whole worlds needs to be infected by. Her laugh, her smile and her hilarious, honest humor is just infectious. Jen brings joy to the room when she enters and when she laughs. We all immediately succumb to her infectious, powerful and radiating rays of strength, joy and love. Breast cancer has battled against Jen, but this damn disease has no fighting chance against her strength and all the love that she has to give to all living things. She has so much crazy love to give, all the beauty of the world is on her side.

The five hours we spent together went by in a flash. But in that time, we were able jet down to Little Saigon’s tropical fruit stores, sip on some fresh sugar cane juice, munch on some fresh baguettes and head back to our place for an outdoor meal. After some serious grub, booze, viet iced coffee and more espresso’s, it was time to say good by. So much food, laughter, doggie ear rubs, Dante’s crotch sniffing and fun passed in the short time that we spent together, it was sad to say goodbye. All we needed was to have Kaweah complete the circle. But till we meet up again with them and Kaweah in Colorado, we hope that all you Jen Yu and Jeremy fans get the chance to meet up with these two kind and awesome folks! Hey Jen and Jeremy, make some room for some permanent house guests from California! XOXO!

We ate so much food! For the beverages we made lots of Vietnamese iced coffee and an awesome cocktail which is basically a Blackberry version of a Tom Collins. We were first inspired to make this after Jen (a different Jen) at Modern Beet left a comment on how she was hooked on a Blackberry Bramble, which is a very similar cocktail. The blackberries have been fantastic lately in one of our favorite markets, so this has been a regular beverage right now. Thanks Modern Beet Jen for getting us started on these blackberry cocktails.Start with blackberries

Lime juice

Sugar

muddle, muddle, muddle

add ice, gin, and soda water

stir & garnish

toast to Jen & Jeremy

Blackberry Tom Collins RECIPE HERE

Here is a sampling of what we ate:

BBQ stuffed squid: recipe and video here

Vietnamese Banh Xeo (crispy crepe): Recipe & video coming soon

Grilled shrimp, beef, eggplant, tofu and sweet peppers. All wrapped up in springrolls with lot of garden veggies and herbs.

Tropical Fruits: (L to R) Mangosteens, rhambutans, lychees, longans

Lots of fresh figs: (L ro R) Brown turkey, coadria black mission, strawberry

We’re bad, really bad. We were supposed to post this recipe a few weeks back, but there have been quite a few distractions lately. Someone had a birthday, so we went on a trip and with cooking classes, taking on our first catering job and planning another big party left little time to write this post. Oops, did the computer keys slip and say….another big party? Uhh, yup, it sure did and yes, we are planning another HUGE party in the backyard. Wait till you see who’s gonna be coming to the paaaaarty! We’ll be writing about this next week, sorry for the tease.

But with out much further ado, here it is ….voila! Grilled peaches with the homemade crème fraîche that so many of you have been waiting for! Our white peach tree produced tons of sweet fruit this year and eating them off the tree is by far, the BEST way to eat them. We made many dishes with these sweet gems (white peach gelato & bellini’s to name a few), but only wrote about the white peach and sorrel salad (who has the time to write about everything you cook anyways?)

With summer grilling at an all time high in the WORC household, grilling these peaches to perfect softness and topping them with some crème fraîche is, quite frankly, the SECOND best way to eat them. (Bellinis are not eaten, they get drank!) Grilled peaches just melt…in…your…mouth. We’re saying this slowly because there is just no other way to describe the amazing sensation of biting into the warm, dripping, slippery, sweet flesh of the peaches. The smoky undertones of the fruit from the grill and the very light honey/balsamic glaze actually heightens the sweet sensations. And add a dollop of some cool crème fraîche with a kiss of lime zest…it’s magical. If your product selection isn’t great for peaches, then nectarines are delicious too.

Crème fraîche, crème fraîche! They can be difficult to find, but when you do, they’re taste. Creme fraiche gives you new dimensions beyond sour cream with it’s silky texture and beautiful tang. We can find it in our select markets around here, of course the Frenchies have easy access to it, but what about the rest of the culinary hounds? You might be able to find it, and you might not. Never fear, our insatiable curiosity has lead us to the method for creating your own. It’s even easier than making your own ricotta (which is also easy, and worlds better than any that we’ve bought. Another post, another time. Stay tuned in for future episodes.) Back to the crème fraîche… All you have to do is culture some heavy cream with either sour cream or buttermilk. Leave it out in a warm place for a day or so (it’s ok, it is perfectly safe.) Then throw it in a fridge. That’s it. Don’t worry, we’ve put the specifics on the recipe page. Take the whole few minutes it take to make crème fraîche and enjoy. The buttermilk and the sour cream both give a slight difference in taste and texture to the final product. We found the sour cream to promote a smoother texture and a slightly sweeter taste. The buttermilk gave a nicer tang, and the texture was still exquisite. Make that which matches your fancy, or do like us and make both. It’s easy.

We’re submitting this dessert to Andrea for your Grow Your Own Event, where we celebrate all the dishes that we grow from our gardens bounty. This month’s event is hosted by Jessica at Finny Knits . Summer weather has definitely been good to us this and there are some benefits of living in So Cal aside from all the smog, concrete and congestion. But if you don’t have a garden, you can still check out all the wonderful dishes that bloggers from all around the world have created from their garden bounty at Andrea’s previous round-ups!

Grilled peaches w/Crème Fraîche RECIPE HERE