bánh xèo/bánh khot.

Tonight we got us a wild hair and embarked upon a new adventure, bánh xèo. Thoroughly damn delicious and unique-tasting; thoroughly difficult to eat b/c of the form factor and contents. Here's the recipe we started from (but we didn't use their sauce, we used mara's nuoc cham instead, which remains superlative on anything).

Also a very delicious but poorly color-corrected salad condiment happened using red onion, tomato, jackfruit, cucumbers, grated ginger, fish sauce, lime, and rice vinegar. And cilantro.

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banh xeo. 

1 and 1/2 cups rice flour
2 cups coconut milk
1 egg
2 tbsp water
1 tsp dried turmeric
pinch salt
1 scallion

1 white onion, chopped
2 large carrots, julienned
a handful of snow peas, julienned
two handfuls of shrimp, peeled and deveined

scallions
basil
mint
cilantro

romaine or bibb lettuce for wrapping

nuoc cham!!! for dipping

The technique that seemed to work well was: cook onion in hot non-stick skillet for a couple minutes; add shrimp for 1 minute; make sure skillet is well-oiled and ladle 1/3 cup batter in and immediately swirl to coat pan. Add one portion carrots and snow peas now (or saute separately). Cover and cook for three minutes.

Remove lid, drizzle oil around edges of crepe and attempt to crisp up. You can throw some herbs in there as well, then try to fold. Serve....yeah. How? We hacked our into pieces, then wrapped those pieces in a lettuce leaf and dunked it in the nuoc cham. It was completely delicious, but really awkward to eat, so we're going to try another form factor soon.

ACTUALLY: We are apparently not the first people to struggle with this edibility problem. Bánh khot is the hand-sized version, and is what we will make next time instead.

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