05/17/2013 · 2:59 pm

What’s cooking: Khao Soy Islam

Our pork and chicken satay

Our pork and chicken satay

(Photo by Christopher Schultz)

Real friends always, somehow, prove themselves to you. My friend Dwight is able to go an entire lunch watching me try to shove morning glory into my mouth and talk at the same time. My friend Karen is able to listen to me blather for hours on end about my aching foot, or the last conversation I had with my mother. And my friend Chris is able to stomach all manner of Thai “dishes” I manage to throw at him, no matter how repugnant.

(NOTE: Real friends also tell you when your entire post is wrong. Karen has gently reminded me that Khao Soi Islam is run by a Muslim family, so they don’t serve pork! Me no remember. I will either 1. Have to rejig this recipe to do beef and chicken satays, like they REALLY do it at Khao Soi Islam, or 2. try to emulate the satay at Samerjai or Lamduan Faham. Accuracy is so tiresome.  This is what happens when I write a post in half an hour before picking up my daughter from school. The sauce recipe for the pork satay below is still pretty good though).  

It is hard to make pork satay repugnant. While pork satay is a fine street food dish all on its own, served by vendors up and down and across the land, it is also, inexplicably, the go-to accompaniment for the Northern Thai curried noodles known as khao soy – indeed, no northern Thai vendor worth his or her salt would sell without it.

While the satays at Lamduan Faham and Samerjai in Chiang Mai are rightly praised, it’s the one at Khao Soy Islam in Lampang (Prasanuk Rd., 054-227-826, open 9-14.30 daily) that sticks with me most. Run by a husband and wife team who have served up this dish for the past several decades, Khao Soy Islam also serves a particularly “curry-like” bowl of noodles where they gradually add the coconut milk to the chili paste base bit by bit, over a period of time, instead of all at once at the end like Lamduan. The result is more intense and silkier, and possibly my favorite of all the exemplary bowls available up North.

Like most vendors, Khao Soy Islam is a family affair. The son grills up both chicken and pork satays, with freshly-made peanut dipping sauce and a slightly sweet-sour ajad of cucumber, shallot and chilies. It was this satay that Chris and I tasked ourselves with trying to replicate.

A brief note: We used kebab-style cubes of pork tenderloin here, because I am really lazy and just bought stuff from the grocer’s pre-cut. It’s fine, but doesn’t absorb the marinade as well as a thinly-sliced piece of meat would. We also made this in the oven, but if you have a grill, please use it by all means. Grill 5-7 minutes, or until meat bears a slight, delicious char.

Pork and chicken Satay (makes 4 servings)

- 300 g pork shoulder, sliced thinly

- 300 g chicken thigh, sliced

- 1 Tablespoon curry powder

- 1/2 cup coconut milk

- 1 Tablespoon honey

- 2 Tablespoons fish sauce

- 2 Tablespoons soy sauce

- 3 garlic cloves, smashed

- 2 shallots, smashed

- 1-3 red chilies, crushed

- Satay sticks

To make:

1. Soak satay sticks in water.

2. Setting meat aside, combine all other ingredients to make marinade. Pour half of marinade over pork and other half over chicken and set in refrigerator for at least an hour.

3. When ready to cook, turn oven on to full whack and thread meat onto sticks. Place sticks onto oiled baking sheet (or, ideally, a cooling rack set on top of a baking sheet) and set in position closest to heat. “Grill” for 5-7 minutes, or until meat is browned and even slightly charred at edges.

For Chris’s peanut sauce:

- 1 1/2 cup dry roasted peanuts (unsalted), or 3/4 cup smooth peanut butter

- 1/2 cup coconut milk

- 3 garlic cloves, minced

- 1 tsp soy sauce

- 1 1/2 tsp sesame oil

- 1 Tablespoon brown sugar (omit if using peanut butter)

- 1 Tablespoon fish sauce (or to taste)

- 2 tsp tamarind paste (or lime juice)

- 1 tsp Sriracha sauce or Thai chili sauce

- 1/4 cup water (if needed to thin mixture)

Process until smooth. Taste and adjust seasonings until balance between tangy, spicy, sweet and salty is achieved.

For cucumber-shallot relish:

- 1 small cucumber, washed and sliced

- 3 red chilies, sliced

- 3 shallots, sliced

- 1/2 cup rice vinegar

- 1 Tablespoon white sugar

Combine all ingredients, making sure sugar dissolves in vinegar. Serve with satay, peanut sauce, and toasted white bread if you are so inclined.

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05/13/2013 · 4:24 pm

Isaan paradise

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Duck larb, at the Bangkok restaurant that is named for it

There are times when I think street food is a young person’s game. Constantly shifting and evolving, it seems happy to lie still for a while, lulling you into selecting “favorites” and casting yourself as a “regular”, a person who is in his or her own element.

But, like everything else, Time always tells, and things change, and before you know it, your favorite pad grapao (holy basil stir-fry) place is being replaced by a chi-chi Japanese restaurant and you are left, bewildered and alone, in desperate need of a new aharn tham sung (made-to-order) stall to frequent. Breaking up with your favorite places is hard to do. Time 1, you 0. 

I didn’t know that a sort of Times Square for the Isaan transplants to Bangkok even existed, but it does — at the intersection of Rama 9 and Petchburi Roads, called “Petch Praram Road”. Here sits everything a homesick Isaan person could possibly want: grilled fish coated in sea salt, fiery shreds of beef tossed in chilies and lime juice, steaming vats of pork in a murky broth of volcanic intensity. 

And at “Larb Ped Paw 4″ (“Year 4 duck larb”) (25/15-17 Petch Praram Road, 02-719-7286, open 16.00-05.00), there is a minced salad of duck, chilies, lime juice and fish sauce that is both meaty and delicate, slightly gamy but fresh. It treads a fine line between light and dark, and heavy and light, but it does this in a way that seems completely natural and effortless. This highwire act is what duck larb is supposed to be. And that’s just one dish.

The roughest, most neglected cuts of beef become part of a nuea nam tok (spicy Isaan-style beef salad) of delicacy and restraint, spicy and salty and slightly tart. A thom saeb (spicy Isaan-style soup) with pork bones makes its point (spice) without being unbearable. The hoy klang (blanched cockles) come with a green chili dipping sauce that is dangerously addictive, threats of hepatitis be damned. And the chicken (gai yang mai madan), grilled in a halved stick made from a sour fruit tree so that the sap perfumes the chicken skin as it cooks, is almost similarly delicious (though one must ask for the jaew, or spicy/salty Isaan-style dip along with the sweet chili dip).

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Gai yang mai madan

Go early, because cars are frequently double- (and even triple-)parked later in the evening. Arrive hungry. Eat compulsively. It won’t be hard to do.

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05/03/2013 · 4:42 pm

Glutton Abroad: The Rain in Spain …

… falls mainly when it’s cold outside. Like, freezing cold. Hailing, in fact. We find this out on a particularly ornery stretch of road, searching for our van, stranded in what appears to be a residential neighborhood not far from what we will discover to be the main sprawl of Santiago de Compostela: our ultimate destination.

We have been walking the Camino de Santiago for the past two weeks, starting at Rochesvalles, when our feet felt brand-new and the weather was a relatively balmy 15 degrees. Our days were either dictated by our guides — a rotating roster of Bruno, Jorge and/or Guillermo — the mercurial weather, or our laziness. Some walks, much like life itself, were breezy: 8 km over gently rolling terrain in sunshine. Others, like the 16 km that ended up being 22 in biting hail that blew sideways, were not as easy.

The only constant is the food. Obviously, there are tapas, served in bars that look like the best places on earth. Toothpicks at attention like little soldiers on bar-tops; more complicated bites set up like jewelry in glass cases below; the wine and beer flowing freely; everyone — tourist and Spaniard alike — stuffing their faces. What’s not to like?

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A typical tapas bar on Rua Franca in Santiago

We see countless iterations of these ubiquitous tapas: tuna-stuffed empanadas, grilled slices of chorizo, creamy crispy croquettes, potato-rich tortillas speared with mini-forks and plopped onto a slice of white bread. Out of this dazzling litany of finger foods, my favorite? Freshly marinated sardines, meaty, slick and tart, on top of the Catalan tomato-scrubbed bread that, to me, represents the best characteristics of Spanish food: fresh, tasty, simple.

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Sardine on scrubbed toast at Celler de la Ribera in Barcelona

But that simplicity and devotion to purity doesn’t just describe tapas. It’s in every aspect of the food, as hulking and magnanimous as it can be. It’s not just big, like burrito-at-the- Cheesecake-Factory big; it’s sincere and made with attention and care. There’s just so, well, much of it. And it’s all simply prepared — slow-cooked in salt and water and maybe some frou-frou olive oil if you insist, fancypants tourists. Chicken, beef, baby goat, all are fodder for this treatment. Rubbed in more salt, treated by the Spaniards as Thais like to treat chilies. 

Sounds great, you say. And it is. But there is this strange Spanish mistrust of herbs, much like the way old ladies view red shoes. I find out as we snake our way through the rolling hills around Pamplona, before heading into the strangely ugly flat wine country of Rioja. Along the way, thyme, chervil, fennel and mint grow in profusion. Jorge tells me “only the gypsies” use the stuff.

“It took my father a long time to accept oregano,” he says, as though “oregano” is a euphemism for, say, electronic dance music. “He would try something and say, ‘What is this?’”

Then there are the rules. I find out when I am professing my love of chorizo, and it is a true and abiding love, for a sausage that is sold all over the world, but is nowhere near as good as it is on its home turf. You can stuff an empanada with it, I say. Or put it in a tortilla, or a pasta dish. These suggestions are met with derisive snorts, from the people who routinely cook a handful of pasta for 30 minutes.

“That’s so weird!” says Jorge. “Next you will suggest something like pairing chorizo with fish!”

“Haha,” chortles Guillermo, aka Spanish Chris Evans. “Or putting yogurt on meat!” (Note: I have done both of those things in the past year).

What we can both agree on: Spain’s most famous dishes are deservedly so. Paella, that wondrous mix of starch, meat and broth, kissed by fire to make a grand crust and touched with the slight tang of lemon at the very end, might be the best thing to come out of Spain since, oh, pata negra ham and cava and some of the Rioja wines and … well, you get the picture. Luckily Spain has many variations, from the popular seafood one …

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Seafood paella at Don Quijote in Santiago

.. to squid ink to noodles, or fideua, apparently a specialty of Valencia. One can go very wrong with this dish, but when it is good, it is extremely so.

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Noodle paella at Botafumeiro in Barcelona

At the very beginning of the trip, Bruno asks me what pulls me through the final few kilometers, when my body is weary and I am in desperate need of a bath. He tells me he remembers the incredible stories of perseverance and strength he has read, of people stranded in the mountainous Andes, or stuck in the middle of an ocean, and how they pulled through, and how our puny troubles are nothing compared to theirs.

I tell him, and he is disappointed. But I’m no liar. The answer: it’s lunch, and then dinner, that pull me through. Every step bringing me closer to sardines and creamed mushrooms and chargrilled steak, rubbed in salt, and maybe a salad, without the tuna and white asparagus this time. A step closer to eggs scrambled with shrimp and green garlic, or fried simply with a coil of chorizo and a platter of fries. And, of course, closer to the pitcher of wine. We can never forget the wine.

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Scrambled eggs with shrimp and green garlic, somewhere after Rioja

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04/10/2013 · 5:16 pm

What’s Cooking: Jay Gai

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Two kinds of Isaan-style grated salads at Jay Gai

It is almost impossible to live anywhere in Bangkok that is not within walking distance of a som tum (grated fruit or vegetable salad) vendor. While street food lovers frequently rhapsodize over the best bowl of noodles or grilled hunk of meat, it’s som tum that most often finds itself at Thai tables.

And what som tum it is. Although the grated green papaya is the variety that is most popular in (and out of) Thailand, vendors display a wide range of fruits and vegetables with which to make this salad, from cucumbers and long green beans to tart gooseberries and green bananas. The truth is, anything with any sort of crunch is a good base for a grated spicy salad. It’s the dressing that usually stays constant.

 

Som tum Thai – the type most commonly eaten in Bangkok and abroad — is the kind we are exploring here, with a dressing made of lime juice, fish sauce, and a healthy dose of sugar (be it palm or granulated). A light dusting of roasted peanuts and dried shrimp and you’re done. But if you are the adventurous sort who does not shy away from fishiness (really, the essence of Thai food), there is som tum Lao, tinged with that extra oomph afforded by pla rah, or fermented Thai anchovies, or even som tum nuea (the northern Thai variety), flavored with a bit of nam poo doo (the juice of pulverized and fermented field crabs). I am not a fan of som tum Thai, which I find to be too sweet throughout much of the capital nowadays, but I do have plenty of time for the Isaan version, made with either crunchy fruits or vegetables, or mua (confused), which includes kanom jeen (fermented rice noodles).

The som tum Lao and som tum mua shown above hail from Jay Gai, also known as “som tum yib bat” (som tum where you must pick a number), such is the popularity of this stand on Naresuan Road in Udon Thani. Their som tum Lao is rich in anchovy flavor, with a nearly rancid tinge; the som tum mua includes green papaya, bamboo shoot, cherry tomatoes, long beans and snails alongside the kanom jeen. Both are what you expect Isaan-style som tums to be: thick, heady, uncompromising.

That’s not what we’re doing here. Chris and I are starting with the basics, by trying to emulate Jay Gai’s “Thai-style” som tum. With Western cooks in mind, we are using shredded carrot and daikon radish in place of green papaya. The only thing we may be copying from Jay Gai is its propensity (and everyone else’s propensity) for MSG (pong chu rot).

Som tum Thai, inspired by Jay Gai (makes 4 servings)

In the bowl of a mortar with a pestle, pound 3 cloves of garlic with 1-3 Thai chilies (vendors call each chili a “met” and ask customers how many “met” they want in their som tum. Answers usually range from none (“mai sai prik“) to five (“ha“). Mash into a paste.

Add 3 Tablespoons fish sauce, the juice of 2-3 limes, and a Tablespoon of palm sugar or granulated sugar.  Taste to correct seasoning. This is your last chance to fix the dressing before all the other ingredients are added to the mortar. 

Add a cup of granted carrot, half a cup of grated daikon radish, 3 inches of long beans cut into 5 cm pieces, and 3-5 cherry tomatoes. Mash gently with your pestle to ensure the strands get bruised (nothing is worse than too-crunchy pieces) while scraping the bowl with a large spoon with your other hand. 

It’s your decision to add Ajinomoto (to taste) or not, but every Thai I have spoken to insists that it is an essential ingredient, so there it is. We used a light sprinkling on our finished salad before garnishing with crushed roasted peanuts and dried shrimp (both to taste). A platter of fresh veggies — sliced green beans, a wedge of cabbage and some cucumber spears — accompanies the salad. If you want to be really traditional, serve alongside sticky rice and grilled chicken or pork shoulder or, if you want to be like Jay Gai, a bowl of boiled snails.

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04/04/2013 · 4:21 pm

Glutton Abroad: Goan holiday

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Appam with vegetable-and-coconut milk stew

 

I’ll admit it. When it comes to food, I am frequently a judgmental jerk. I am one of those people who looks into your grocery store cart while waiting in the check-out line. Yes, dude. I saw your value pack of tom yum-flavored Mama noodles, packet of Skittles and six-pack of Asahi — not even Yebisu, but the Foster’s of Japan. I saw that. And gurl, a plastic container of cut-up watermelon? Is it really that difficult to get a wedge of watermelon and cut it yourself?

But I have no leg to stand on. Because I just spent three days in Goa, doing something I don’t normally want anybody to do — wrote a street food guidebook to help people avoid it as much as possible, really — and that is, eat every meal at the hotel restaurant. Every. Single. Meal. Except for the weird interlude spent wandering in the backwoods of Goa, where we ended up in what looked like someone’s backyard dancing to Indian wedding music and shoveling what was optimistically referred to as “Russian salad” into our gaping maws.

It wasn’t just that the cost of every meal was factored into the cost of our stay (not only am I a lazy hypocrite, I am a cheapskate too). Every morning, I thought to myself, I’ll just check what they have today. Just a peek, and then we’ll walk down the beach to somewhere else. (See also: every afternoon, and every early evening. Goans eat dinner late. Like, Brazilian late). But like a terrible siren call luring us to the shallows of delicious, blissful apathy, a veritable army of cast-iron casseroles, each containing an ever-changing cast of curries, stews and grains, would beckon. Mysterious stuffed parathas and deep-fried papads, light as feathers; murky dals, porky vindaloos and buttery naan, delicious enough to drive the crows hovering close to our table to distraction. 

The best things, though, were those I’d never seen before, like the South Indian appam, rice and lentil flour touched with coconut milk and cooked in specially-made pans. They resemble Thai kanom krok but are big and savory, edible bowls for the stews with which they are inevitably paired.

Another day brings wada, deep-fried savory “doughnuts” laced with aromatic spices, thick or thin dosas, comforting discs of steamed rice idli and kachori, deep-fried lentil fritters (this is no food for those who are watching their weight). Alongside vats of local mutton xacutti stew and the popular potato-in-gravy specialty aloo bhaji sit offerings of pongal (mushy coconut-laced rice) and sabudana khichri (savory tapioca), all meant to mop up any stray goodness. That’s not to mention the clever pizza-like uttapam, a mutant form of savory pancake that can be paired with a multitude of chutneys (coconut, onion, coriander), both garlic and lime pickles, and a dried south Indian spice blend aptly named “gunpowder”.

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Wada, tapioca and uttapam with a multitude of chutneys

Everything is milder and sweeter than at the Indian restaurants back home in Bangkok, and I feel a pang of remorse for once referring to the Indian restaurant near my house (the generally-good Indus, if you’re curious) as “India lite”. It’s more refined and unassuming than what Thais — gourmet adrenaline junkies, every last one of them — have come to associate with what defines “authentic” or even “good”. And there’s so much more of it, a dizzying variety of pulses, pastes and combinations that will never make it out of the country, because it’s not what non-Indians associate with “Indian food”. Every Thai restaurant in the world is saddled with expectations that tom yum soup, pad thai and green curry will be on the menu; the vast culinary lexicon of India, too, is typecast: butter chicken, chicken tandoori, maybe a vindaloo or biryani.

Back at the airport on our way home, I still can’t let go of this desire to try as much as I can. At a place called “Curry Express”, where cooks and servers wear the same disaffected looks one would expect of any Burger King or McDonald’s, I get pani puri: razor-thin dough shaped like eggshells with the tops cut off, filled with legumes and paired with two dipping sauces that taste the same. The dough is stale and my husband thinks I am going to contract some sort of stomach bug. But it, too, is something new, and I likely won’t see another plate until my next trip to India.

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Airport pani puri

 

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03/28/2013 · 6:20 pm

Rediscovering the familiar

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Suki and seafood gravy noodles, courtesy of Krua Porn Lamai

I find it amusing when I hear someone say they don’t want to end up like the old married couple in the restaurant, eating their dinner in silence. I find this amusing because, in my opinion, THAT IS THE BESTEST THING EVER. Why do I have to talk all the time? The well-worn song-and-dance, the incessant thrum of pleaselikemepleaselikeme – all of this singing for our suppers … it’s just not my normal state. My normal state is that of a big old grump who thinks occasionally eating a restaurant dinner in silence IS THE BESTEST THING EVER. That’s because sometimes, I don’t want to talk. And sometimes I don’t want to listen. Sometimes these two desires meet up over the dinner table in front of my spouse. Whenever this happens, I call it RELAXING.

Of course, this doesn’t take into account the feelings of my long-suffering spouse. Maybe he wants to bare his soul over his salad caprese and dish over the little details of his day as we work our way through our oxtail stew. Something tells me I probably wouldn’t be married to this person, but once in a while my husband does want to talk, and it’s not the old refrain “When are you going to take care of the kids/clean the house/take a shower” that I usually hear coming out of his mouth.

So, in the interests of compromise, and against all my better instincts (I AM SO MUCH FUN), we talk, we discuss, we communicate. And in doing this, we find out more about each other, even as we soldier on through our 157th year of marriage. As many eons and eons (and eons) that we have been together, we discover that much more every day.

As many times as I’ve been down the main drag of Yaowaraj Road and explored its many offshoots (YES I AM EQUATING MY MARRIAGE TO A PART OF TOWN), I still find new vendors to get excited about — not every day, but often enough to make an hour-long Skytrain-then-subway-then-tuk tuk trek to Chinatown from my house worthwhile (I CANNOT WAIT for the subway extension into Chinatown to be finished. My life will BE CHANGED FOR THE BETTER. THEN I CAN STOP WRITING IN ALL CAPS).  

Enter Krua Porn Lamai (081-823-0397). Despite the suspicious likeness of its name to a made-up massage parlor in a future installment of “The Hangover Part 34″, this outdoor vendor specializes in kata ron, or “hot pan” — fried noodle dishes given the special oomph afforded by the sizzle and smoke of a heated plate. Part of a “cooperative” of vendors that share tables and help service each other’s customers (something I’m seeing more and more of nowadays), Porn Lamai is set right at the entrance to Soi Plang Nam, just as you turn right from Yaowaraj Road. All those tables with hot plates on them? That queue of excited-looking customers staring at other people’s food? That’s them.

The reason for all the excitement — despite the wait elicited by having to wash all those hot plates for new customers — is obvious. Take, for example, the guaythiew lard na talay (seafood gravy noodles), charred to a crisp on the bottom, just like the bottom layer of rice in a good paella. It arrives at the table still seething, emitting a slight hiss, but when the server upends a pitcher of gravy over the liquid, a giant plume of smoke and sound erupts:

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Krua Porn Lamai’s lard na noodles

This is food that fights back (seriously, watch you don’t burn the roof of your mouth off). This is food that you will remember (as you’re doing your laundry). This is food that will not go gently into that good night. Enjoy.

 

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03/26/2013 · 3:04 pm

What’s cooking: Aim Och

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“Egg in a pan” at Aim Och in Khon Kaen

There is nothing easier to make in all of Thai street food than kai kata, or “egg in a pan”. Still stinging from our inability to decode Jay Fai’s Byzantine fusion of herbs and spices masquerading as tom yum goong, Chris and I decided to give ourselves a break and do something that is, quite literally, fool-proof.

Kai kata is the Thai version of the Vietnamese version of the American breakfast, said to have been inspired by homesick American GIs during the Vietnam War. In an attempt to replicate the American breakfast standby “ham and eggs”, Vietnamese cooks cracked eggs into “personal-sized” pans, garnished them with Chinese sausages and Vietnamese steamed pork pate (moo yaw) in place of sausages and ham, and cooked them quickly on a stovetop until the whites set. Garnished with a splash of red chili sauce like Sriracha and fish sauce and accompanied by a toasted, buttered bun stuffed with more “sausage and ham”, this no-fuss breakfast combo is quick, easy — and unbelievably satisfying. Best of all, you can let your imagination run riot: anything, anything at all, will work with these eggs. Have a sweet tooth and want to drizzle some maple syrup on it, maybe with a garnish of crispy

bacon? A handful of peas? Maybe some pancetta and sliced fresh chilies? Or maybe a

splash of minced chicken and diced carrots, just like at King Ocha in Udon Thani:

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Kai kata and buttered bun at King Ocha in Udon Thani

There are no rules for this fusion-y adaptation of a Western favorite. Ironically, if you are in the West, you may need to make some substitutions for some hard-to-find ingredients, so you may have to re-substitute those substitutions. Hence our choice to use buttered ceramic ramekins instead of tiny pans, because we aren’t sure how many of those are available back West. If you don’t have an oven, you can make a bain-marie by putting your ramekins in a pan, filling with water up to the middle of the ramekin, and cooking your eggs on the stovetop. However you decide to make it, we have tried to cleave as closely to the “authentic” (circa 2013) basic Isaan-style kai kata as possible.

Kai kata a la Aim Och (makes 2 servings)

What you’ll need:

- 2 ramekins, well-buttered

- 2-4 eggs, depending on size of ramekins

- 1 link Chinese sausage (gunchieng), sliced

- 6 slices moo yaw (Vietnamese steamed pork pate) — baloney works in a pinch

- Two mini-baguettes or soft rolls (for real Thai street food flavor, they should be as sweet as possible)

- Butter (for toasting buns)

- Fish sauce with sliced chilies, Maggi, or Golden Mountain sauce (to taste)

- Sriracha sauce (to taste)

- Salt and pepper (to taste)

To make:

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit/180 degrees Celsius.

2. Place buns, slightly open and their insides buttered, into a casserole and toast in the oven until warm, edges are light brown and butter is melted. 

3. In a pan, warm slices of Chinese sausage and/or moo yaw until hot to the touch.

4. Crack 1-2 eggs into each buttered ramekin, depending on size. Cook in oven for 5-10 minutes (depending on how well your oven works), until whites are set when you jiggle them and start to pull away slightly from the sides of the ramekin. If you like your eggs more well done (I love runny yolks), wait at least 10 minutes.

5. Take eggs out of oven and garnish with sausages and “ham”. If you have cooked minced meat and/or vegetables, scatter those onto your eggs as well. Season with salt and pepper.

6. Fill toasted buns with slices of “ham” and “sausages”. Serve alongside eggs, and make sure to pass the fish sauce/Maggi and sweet chili sauce. Easy AND delicious.

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Our versions

 

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