I was paired with Angry Asian Creations for this round of Taste & Create. Her blog is casual and funny, and we definitely share a love of baked goods, but given my love of Vietnamese food, it was the chance to pick her Vietnamese grandmother's brain via her blog that really caught my attention. I was torn between the Homemade Shumai sans wrapper, Grandma Style and her mother's nem nướng, another pork meatball dish. However, it was the "sans wrapper" that decided it--in my experience, working with rice paper wrappers can be a pain in the butt, and I preferred the simplicity of the Shumai for a weeknight.
It seems like no matter how organized I am, I always end up sliding in at the last possible minute with my Taste & Create post. I actually tried to get ground pork from the farmers' market twice in the last 2 weeks, once via John and once myself. Somehow it did not get purchased either time. Then I gave up on that recipe and decided I would try her granola bars, only Finnegan ate them before I finished (stay tuned for an upcoming post on THAT problem). Anyway, it was a blessing in disguise, because I decided to just settle for supermarket pork and made the meatballs tonight.
They are SO GOOD and SO EASY. I originally intended to serve them with rice vermicelli, but I had a doctor's appointment, and John is definitely trustworthy with rice, so I served them with jasmine rice, carrot and cucumber matchsticks, grape tomatoes, and nuoc cham. It was an incredibly easy meal--I have never steamed meat before, it was simple and easy to ignore (i.e., it did not need to be babysat, I did not need to worry about it burning or anything). The house smelled great!
Lan said she purposefully made her meatballs a little bland, which I knew we would not want, so I made the following changes: I increased the fish sauce, I grated some lemongrass in (maybe 1 teaspoon) and I added 2 teaspoons of sugar and 4 cloves of minced garlic. I left out the salt given the extra fish sauce.
3 comments:
Great job! These look so tasty. I had never thought about shumai without the wrapper since that's my favorite part but I think I'd still love these!
These look great! I think I would love your additions myself!
i am SO SO SO SO glad you liked these! i made them again a couple weeks ago, using ground turkey and they still tasted wonderful. your addition of lemongrass sounds wonderful!
based on your steaming picture, i'm assuming you didn't have any juices? i love drizzling the juices over the rice, it adds a bit of flavor to the rice.
i hope you make the nem nuong, it's such a great party food!
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