Good Mis En Place Vietnam!

I've always been a huge fan of TV. Except for a couple periods of my life when my time was spent out in bars more than at home, I've devoted time nearly every day to watching TV. When I was a kid, I even did my homework in front of it - a talent I surely got from my Mom, who reads and crochets while the TV is on. A lot of people demonize television, but I'm pretty sure they just don't watch the right stuff. I grew up watching a lot of science and nature programs, and am fairly certain I picked up more from those shows than I did from many of my classes. These days, I watch a lot of food TV (as well as a lot of other stuff), and I think I'm still picking up vocabulary and skills from the TV that my brain doesn't process as easily as knowledge from books.

I mention this because words that have been coming out of my mouth recently have been taking people off guard. I think I've heard terms like mis en place, mirepoix, and chiffonade so much from the mouths of Martha and Ina and Alton, that I've forgotten they're not commonplace... or even English. So when my parents bought me a set of small stainless steel ramekins for Christmas, I was so excited to use them for my mis en place, and said so. My whole family looked at me like I was speaking in tongues.

Roughly translated to 'everything in it's place', mis en place is about getting everything you need for a recipe ready before you begin. It can mean just pulling everything out of the cupboards and grabbing your measuring tools, or it can involve prepping ingredients by cutting, grating, blanching, etc.

In baking, I find you're often working with raw ingredients (flour, sugar, salt), so mis en place isn't as essential - though it would surely save me from mistakes like adding 1 tablespoon of salt to a recipe that calls for one teaspoon. In cooking - and in Asian cooking, in particular - I find getting everything prepped is much more vital. Any time I do any type of Thai, Vietnamese, or Chinese dish, it seems like the actual cooking time is a blur of adding ingredients in quick succession - and if you didn't have the garlic prepped, you might end up burning the onions you already threw in the hot oil.

Tonight my mis en place was major - making two Vietnamese recipes, including one that called for a lot of ingredients to be finely chopped, and for tomatoes to be blanched, skinned, peeled and roughly chopped. The actual cooking was done in about 10 minutes, so having everything ready to throw in the wok was vital to the success of the dishes. Thanks to being prepared, everything went smoothly and both the Lemongrass Pork Patties and the Garlic Green Beans turned out great... though whatever chili we used for the green bean recipe was a lot hotter than I anticipated!

Another exciting new addition to my kitchen courtesy of my folks is a metal cookbook holder, which props up the book and holds the page open. No more laying heavy spoons on books to hold the pages open! Yay!



Vietnamese Pork & Lemongrass Patties
2 cups lean, ground pork
1 shallot, chopped
2 stalks lemongrass, trimmed and very finely chopped
1/2 tspn salt

Put everything into a food processor, season well with salt & pepper, and pulse for a few seconds. Heat a skillet and cook a tiny piece to check the seasoning, adjusting if necessary.




Make the meat mixture into patties up to 3in in diameter, and pan-broil for 5 minutes on each side.

(From Quick & Easy Healthy Eating.)

Green Beans with Crushed Garlic
1 Tbspn vegetable oil
1 onion, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
3 large green chilies, seeded and sliced thin diagonally
1 tspn ground coriander
1/2 tspn ground cumin
2 ripe tomatoes, blanched, seeded, and chopped roughly
1 lb green beans, washed, trimmed and halved
1/2 tspn sugar
pinch of salt

Heat oil in a wok and stir fry onion, garlic, and green chilies, stirring constantly for 2 minutes.

Add the coriander and cumin, stir vigorously, then add chopped tomatoes and beans. Stir and cover the wok for 5 minutes.

Remove cover, add sugar and a little salt, and stir again for 1 minute.

(From Vietnamese Cooking: Exotic Delights From Indo-China.)