How can I be sad when I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
Earlier this year, I went on a family vacation to California and we all ate at a restaurant called Phoholic. And I don't know why this surprised me, but the restaurant served nothing but phở. I'm used to going to a pho restaurant and seeing lots of different Vietnamese dishes, so I was so thrown off by this. And my go-to Vietnamese dish to order is not pho--it's pork chops.
Ideally, I would go halfsies with another person and one of us would order pho and the other person would order pork chops. But I wasn't able to do that this time. The pho was pretty good, but I admit I felt a little disappointed. So when I saw a recipe for Vietnamese pork chops I decided that I would try making it myself.
I was really excited to try this after I saw that sweetened condensed milk is used in the marinade! The only thing I ever really use condensed milk for is Vietnamese coffee and it is always so exciting to have another use for an ingredient.
Unfortunately, she cooks her pork chops in an air fryer and I don't have an air fryer. In fact, I have an irrational dislike of air fryers, and I felt like I was going to start a fire the last couple of times I've used one. But I don't want to get into that today. She mentions that you can cook it on the stove instead, so that's what I did.
And yes, it was indeed a very splatter-y mess! But it was tasty! I made a second batch and cooked those in the oven instead. It was much easier cleanup, and it still tasted good, but it was so pale.
I don't really think you need to add more flavor to this meat, but restaurants will always give you a side of dipping fish sauce. Since I already had all the ingredients I needed for it, I figured I'd make some. It's not nước chấm, maybe it's more Cambodian style, I don't exactly know, but it's the way my mom makes heu jui魚水 - fish sauce:
And you just boil the water and mix everything in. Easy peasy. Makes your house smell like fish sauce which might be undesirable to some, but I kinda like the smell.
One of the things I liked the most about this meal was actually the oily scallions. I don't know why I never thought to just microwave chopped scallions in oil. I sprinkled just a touch of salt on top and it was SO good. I should have tripled the amount of scallions.
But in order to get the full experience, I needed to have some pickled veggies. When I was younger, I actually never ate the vegetables that came with my pork chops. I just completely ignored them. What was wrong with me?! Why didn't my parents make me try them?!
So I looked up a pickled carrot and daikon recipe and even though it was a lot of cutting, it was pretty easy to make. They also lasted me a while. I was happy to have them when my dad visited because he loves pickles.
For my third and final batch of this, I mixed it up a bit and cooked chicken! I went back to cooking the meat on the stove, which was a little bit messy during cooking and such a pain to clean up afterwards. But it was worth it!
My friend came over and we tried to make Bánh Xèo. We used this recipe from Hungry Huy. Here is a progression of how things went as we tried to make yellow pancakes.
We poured too much batter in this.
I don't know, we probably still used too much batter again. And the heat may have been too high.
Heeey, look the third one didn't totally fall apart. And I think we finally figured out that the meat and onions needed to be on only one side of the pan, so it was easier to fold the pancake in half.
Yeah! We finally made it look nice! I'll have to make this again in the future, but I'll probably see if I can find a different recipe. Or at least cook the meat separately from the pancake.
Oh yeah, we had extra batter so we cooked the rest of the pancakes the next day.
