Chicken Salad - Round 2

I love things that are rolled up or stuffed. Or both!

I'd been planning on making a chicken salad (cold dinner, too hot to cook) with Asian flavours all week... and then I started getting cravings for Sriracha. (which I, and others apparently, like to call "cock sauce" thanks to the lovely rooster on the bottle)

I knew what I had to do.

I know most people unfailingly put mayo in chicken salad no matter what other flavours are going in, but not me. And not just because my mayo had been in the fridge so long it had expired.

I've been making various versions of a peanut butter and sesame based salad dressing for a while now, and that's how this salad stays together. It's basically a vinaigrette, but with peanut butter as an emulsifier. Watch, you'll see.

Chicken Salad Rolls

The Dressing:

• 1/4 c peanut butter
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 2 tbsp lime or lemon juice
• 2 tbsp rice vinegar
• 1 tsp fish sauce
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1 clove garlic
• sriracha to taste
• peanut oil

The "vinegar" part of this dressing can be replaced partially or entirely by citrus juice. My ideal is a combination of lime and vinegar, but all I had when I made the salad was lemon, so that's what I used.

In a bowl, combine the peanut butter, juice and / or vinegar, fish sauce, ginger, and garlic.

A microplane grater (or citrus zester) is the ideal thing for ginger.

If you can't find fish sauce, or if you're kinda scared of it (lots of people are, it's okay to admit it, and admitting your fear is the first step to overcoming it) you are free to leave it out, but it really is what's missing in all the home made Asian food that never quite tastes the way it does in the restaurant...

Whisk together the stuff in the bowl, and keep whisking as you drizzle in the peanut oil.

Drizzle until you have a slightly thicker than usual salad dressing.

Use a bit of carrot or rice wrapper to taste it. Mine needed a bit more sour, so I squeezed in another tbsp or so of lemon juice.

If you want to put this onto a green salad, I'd suggest doubling the oil and vinegar amounts. What you have here should be pretty thick.

The Salad:

• 2 c cooked chicken
• 2 carrots
• a few radishes (daikon, if you can find it)
• 1/2 c cashews
• 1/2 c cilantro
• 1/2 c basil
• 2 green onions

Yes, there is a pretty high veggie and herb content in this salad. Damn tasty, and makes for a full meal. I couldn't find decent bean sprouts, but some of those would be nice in this if you have them.

Start with the nuts.

Toast the cashews in a dry pan over medium heat. Shake them around in the pan until parts of them start to turn golden. You should also be able to smell them.

Next, the sesame seeds... yes, I know they're listed in the next batch of ingredients, but they're in the pic in this section so toast them now while you have an already hot pan.

Dice all your veggies to about the same size, chop the chicken, and chiffonade your basil.

Thow it all into a bowl, mix it, pour the dressing over top, and mix again. Or just mix once. Up to you.

Now, at this point, you have a perfectly viable chicken salad. You could eat it as is for lunch or dinner. You could serve it with some fried rice (I haven't made fried rice yet, have I? I need to do that soon) or some noodles. You could roll it up in lettuce like I did with the last chicken salad.

Or you could roll it up in rice wrappers.

Have I mentioned that I love food that is rolled up and stuffed?

The Rolls:

• rice wrappers
• sesame seeds
• sriracha

Now, you've already toasted your sesame seeds, so we've got that covered.

Next is the rice wrappers. If you've ever had Vientamese "salad rolls" you know what I'm talking about. Rice wrappers are these lovely stretchy things that you can wrap around all kinds of fresh food to make a hand held salad.

They're a really fun ingredient to play with, and though they look delicate, they are fairly resilient and can stretch quite a bit.

The set up: you need rice wrappers, a dish of water (pie plate works), a plate to work on, and a plate for your finished product. Hmm... I didn't seem to take a pic of the set up, but this is almost everything...

What you see on the plate there is a dry rice wrapper. They start out crispy, but with a little moisture will soften quite nicely.

Dip the wrapper into the water in the pie plate. All you need to do is get it wet, but you need to get all of it wet.

Lay the moistened wrapper on the working plate, and wait about 15 seconds. It will suddenly be flexible and extremely pliable.

Put a small-ish amount of chicken salad in the middle of the wrapper. Too little and you won't get a nice proportional roll, too much and, though it will roll up, the filling will fall out when you try to eat it.

You're going to roll this up just like you would a burrito. Start by folding the edge closest to you over the filling.

Then, fold each of the sides in.

Then, lift the filling and roll it away from you until you have a perfectly stuffed, beautifully rolled, chicken salad.

Sprinkle the rolls with the toasted sesame seeds. If you don't want to dip your rolls directly into hot chili sauce (Taneasha now understands why she keeps seeing me chop jalapenos with bare hands; relatively high tolerance for capsaicin), you can make another batch of salad dressing, or a bit of hoisin instead.

One thing to note about rice wrappers: they will dry out in the fridge if you have leftovers. They won't revert back to their original dry state or anything, but they will lose their stretch and pliability, and are much more likely to fall apart. 

To prevent them from drying out too much, roll each roll in a dampened paper towel before you put it in a container. Even if they do start to lose their structural integrity, you can just tear the wrapper into pieces, dump it all into a bowl and eat it with a fork.

What kind of rolled up or stuffed food do you like?

look ma, no crust!

I've been feeling lately that working full time affords me less time to get shit done than full time school and part time work combined do.

I think this is mostly because I'm out of the house for at least 10 hours every day. During the school year, I have to spend a good chunk of time studying and doing homework, most of which I do at home. Homework. At home. Who knew.

Granted school and work together are a lot of work, and I think in total I put in more hours each week, but at least some of them are at home. In my pajamas. And I can take half an hour here and there to do things like... cook...

But, I managed to get a bit of time in this week to make something and though this recipe really is quite fast to put together, I ended up spending more time washing the dishes afterward than I did cooking. (Don't worry, this isn't a dishes-intensive recipe or anything, I'm just dumb sometimes)

Mini Quiches

What you need:

• 1 zucchini
• 5 mushrooms
• 2 cloves garlic
• 3 tbsp chopped fresh dill
• 1 tsp lemon zest
• 1 to 2 cups grated swiss cheese
• 3 eggs
• 1 c whipping cream
• salt and pepper
• small tomatoes

What you gotta do:

Grate your zucchini. Mine was extremely juicy (srsly, like a cucumber) so I rolled it up in paper towel and gave it a squeeze to get some of the water out.

Chop the mushrooms and garlic nice and small.

Warm a bit of butter in a pan over medium high heat. It should be just starting to brown.

You want the high heat here to get rid of the water in the veggies so you don't end up with soggy quiches. Once you've had them in the pan for about 5 minutes, they'll be as waterless as they're likely to get, so remove them from the heat and set them aside for a minute.

While that's cooling, combine the eggs and cream.

Add some salt and pepper and the lemon zest to the eggy stuff.

Now, we're doing quiches, yes, but we haven't made a crust yet, no.

That's because there isn't one.

The idea here is that the eggs and cheese will brown and crisp nicely in the hot oven so that they form a bit of a crust on their own.

Now, I kinda (on purpose) missed a step when I made mine. I didn't grease the muffin cups. It's a non-stick pan, and I've had disastrous results in the past when I greased non-stick pans. Disastrous. Like, nothing was coming out of that fucker, disastrous; entire thing went into the bin, disastrous.

I had a bitch of a time getting mine out. I'm not sure if greasing would have made the removal process better or worse though. All I know is, I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to clean a non-stick pan with a Mr.Clean Magic Eraser.

Dude, I let the freaking thing soak for days in both hot and cold water, with and without soap and nothing was getting that shit off.

I highly recommend you either grease your pan, or try foil muffin cup liners.

Anyway.

Once you've greased your muffin cups, start filling them. 

Cheese on the bottom to form part of the crust.

Dill and veggies for the filling.

Covered with savoury custard.

Topped with more cheese.

I still had some of those awesome tiny tomatoes, so I sliced them and decorated the tops with them.

Bake... um, preheat your oven to 400... then bake at 400 for about 15 to 20 minutes. They should be lovely and golden on top. They'll be kinda puffy when you take them out, but like most eggy things, they'll deflate as they cool. 

That's okay, they still look pretty.

With the help of a paring knife and a large spoon, I was able to detach them from the sides and bottom of the muffing cups, but a few edges did end up a little ragged.

Pretty sure the only way I'm going to be able to bake in that pan again is if I line it with paper cups. Fine for cupcakes, but I like my muffins naked.

What have you stuck to a pan??