Vietnamese dinner

I forgot another friend's birthday. Again.

I have to do another special dinner to compensate for my lack of good-friendism.

If this continues, I may have to kill myself.

It will be a Thai-Vietnamese Hybrid Dinner for Five.
This is what I am making:

Thai green chicken curry: no bones though, with lots of basil, coriander and green chili
Jasmine rice with kaffir lime leaves
Vietnamese rice paper rolls: some prawn, some vegetarian and some BBQ pork
Thai Great Salad: with hard-boiled eggs and peanut dressing
Nuoc cham
Pandanus and coconut cake
Fresh fruit: melons, strawberries and kiwis

I already made the curry base and froze it. I will finish it off with the fish sauce, sugar and herbs on the day. I will go to Burlington's for the pork in the morning and then just make the rolls and salad close to the serving time. Oh yeah, and the cake. I got some Singha beer from Thailand as well. Hot damn, that's a tasty beer!

With the cake, I have an ancient old recipe that my father was given by a Filipino woman years and years ago, back in Papua New Guinea when he was hanging out at the bakery by day and running the Yacht Club disco by night. Apparently this woman made the best chiffon pandanus cake you can imagine. Anyway she ended up writing him out the recipe by hand on a scrap of old yellow office paper. He made the cake a few times and then the recipe was lost. A few years ago my mother found it, and scrunched it into the bin....from where, LUCKILY, I rescued it.
Phew.
Anyway, the scrap is now in my recipe folder, but it has become even more spattered and faded with age. I am going to transcribe it and put it up here for safekeeping, just in case there's a fire and I can't get to my recipe folder in time.
It's just a normal kind of chiffon cake, eggs, sugar and so on, but the special ingredients are cornflour, coconut milk (out of a can) and pandan paste. I have had limited success in the past making it, because of my TERRIBLE TERRIBLE OVEN and also because chiffons are quite temperamental. You have to get the inside light and fluffy and the outside golden and firm.

So, I have decided, for this dinner, to improvise and take the old recipe just as inspiration. I will prepare a Margaret Fulton sponge cake, substituting the coconut milk for the milk and the pandan for the vanilla. Interesting. It will either be a triumph of invention or a complete mess. I will go back to the chiffon mix when I have a better oven and I feel more confident about chiffons.

What is pandan paste / pandan pasta?

The flavour duplicates that which is derived from the leaves of the Pandanus latifolius or screwpine which is as popular in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore as vanilla is in the West. Cakes, jellies, desserts and drinks may be flavoured with the light, pleasant perfume. Even some brands of coconut juice in cans hold a hint of pandan flavour. (From Asia Food Glossary)

It's just essence, in the form of a thick, syrupy, deep green paste that you buy from Asian food stores. I get mine at Burlington's, Yuen's, or Sunnybank. Apparently it is a combination of pandanus and coconut essences. Smells really strong, but good, not sharp at all. Its a gentle, soft, clean calming flavour, like your old Strawberry Shortcake dolls from childhood, except if they were Pandanus Chiffon Cake dolls instead.

The thing about this stuff though is that it turns your cake green. And I mean.....green. Really green.

By the way, there is a good and different version of the same cake here at Lily's site. I like this different version, but mine is a simpler mix.

I'll post the original version up soon.



***update***

No crises to speak of. All went well: the cake in particular was fab.


Here's the ingredients for my rice paper rolls: carrot, cucumber, coriander, basil and mint. I also added alfalfa sprouts along with the BBQ pork / prawns.






Note how the oven is only capable of HOT or NOT HOT. I went for HOT to do the cake, so he ended up with a cracked top. But I like how his green green innards peep through the brown crunchy cake-skin.

I eventually drizzled the cake with a thin icing made with coconut cream, and had extra coconut cream in a jug on the side.



Huge coriander bunch: only $1.50! Thanks, Annerley Fruit Barn! I'm still trying to make a dent in it.








I used only fresh pineapple, mint and strawberries in the fruit platter. It was beautiful: really clean, sharp and fresh and in nice contrast to the gentle soft flavour of the cake.







The Great Salad. All the usual suspects plus hard-boiled eggs arranged on top. The dressing went on later: it's roasted plain peanuts, palm sugar, garlic, fish sauce, coriander, lime juice, salt, water and vinegar all crushed together.