Tour of Asia

For my whole life I have always loved Asian cuisine, whether it is Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, or Japanese. I’ve always tried to find traditional restaurants with real food, I hate eating at those Americanized Chinese buffets. I’ve also always loved cooking different things but, for some mysterious reason, I’ve never tried to make traditional Asian food. I’ve made my own variations of stir fry an fried rice but never the real thing, so for my last cooking experience I decided to challenge myself with a “tour of Asia,” or full Asian meal. We started with an Asian slaw with ponzu dressing and Vietnamese spring rolls (which I forgot to take pictures of). The spring rolls were probably the most difficult thing. It took me awhile to figure out the rice papers used to wrap them then it took even longer to get the hang of wrapping it. Luckily for me, however, I had Laura with me who was used to rolling tamales. We filled the springs rolls with shrimp, lettuce, rice noodles, julienned red bell pepper, shredded carrot, and slivers of mango. The sauce was the traditional peanut sauce. For the main course I made Korean beef rice bowls. I marinated the thin slices of flank steak for about 30 minutes with fish sauce, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, brown sugar, and sesame oil. I then cut carrots into matchsticks and diced zucchini and onion. I caramelized the onions for a little bit before adding the beef then the rest of the veggies along with spinach at the very end. The meal was then served on top of a bed of rice. For dessert I made Thai iced coffee, which turned out a little better than I thought since I didn’t have the cardamom pods. Despite the first spring rolls not being rolled tight enough and the lack of cardamom, it all turned out to be delicious.