Cooking: Vietnamese Lemongrass Chicken

I was in the situation as Rasa Malaysia having leftovers and not knowing what to do with them. OK, I didn't know what to do with leftover lemongrass and shallots. She knew exactly what to do, which was to make Vietnamese Lemongrass Chicken. When I saw her post yesterday morning, I knew exactly what I was going to do for dinner.

The only things I needed to get at the store were chicken (I used skinless bonless chicken thighs) and garlic. For a veggie side dish, I wanted to do Chinese broccoli, but Justyn said I used that too much (who complains when their loving wife is making them dinner?) so I ended up getting regular broccoli and shiitake mushrooms.

The one thing you might notice here is that there aren't a lot of pictures of each step I took. That's because I was nervous making this dish. It instructed me to make caramel! What?! I've never made caramel before. So I got all my ingrediants in place before actually cooking. Instead of mincing the lemongrass (white part only), I used my microplane and grated it into a fine dust. Chop here, mince there and I was done. The chicken was marinating in a soy sauce (I substituted fish sauce with premium dark soy here), minced garlic, curry powder and sugar. I also added a tablespoon of cornstarch to help thicken the sauce when it came down to cooking.

I heated up some water to blanch my chopped broccoli and then started making the caramel. Everything came together nicely except I misread the instructions. Instead of adding a couple tablespoons of water to the pot, I added the caramel to cold water. The caramel seized up into a pretty amber brown blob. As Wandering Chopsticks already knows, I'm horrible at following directions so she'll probably laugh here hehe. I told Justyn to help me redo it and this time it came out right.

Time to saute the chilies, lemongrass dust (sounds like a drug huh?) and shallot. Then I added the chicken and caramel mixture. The aroma that wafted from the wok was heaven. Sweet, savory and spicy. I was drooling, but I kept my mind concentrated on cooking.



It paid off.. Here's what came out.



While Justyn helped me snap pictures, I quickly washed out the wok and stirfried the garlic and shallot with some oyster sauce. Then I added the mushrooms and mixed until they wilted down a bit. Next the blanched and drained broccoli and a dash of soy sauce goes in with a tab of honey. Just combine until everything is heated through and serve!

Do you like my little pumpkin?



Rasa Malaysia is a genius. Justyn plopped down to dig in and the first thing out of his mouth was "Mmm! GOOD!". I agreed in silence because I was starving. Delicious!

Recipe: http://www.rasamalaysia.com/2007/10/recipe-vietnamese-lemongrass-chicken.html