Chicken salad Vietnamese style

There are so many ways to enjoy chicken. Salad is often good to our health. So when I find a new salad recipe, I get enthusiastic and decide to try making it right away.

However, this is not a new dish. This salad has typical flavour of Vietnamese cuisine. I like the crunchiness of the dish when I put one bite into my mouth and chewed it. The sound made me feel refreshed by the freshness of the vegetables.

The traditional Vietnamese salad dish often comes a little bit more sour than sweet. It uses lime juice to make it sour because lime juice also add special flavour to the dish. Quite often, rice vinegar is also used, however, it doesn’t add typical flavour but it reduces some undesirable smell from the raw vegetable, if there is any.

Ingredients: (4 servings)

- 400g chicken breast fillets

- 1 stem lemon grass, white part only, finely chopped

- 1 tablespoon (tbs) fish sauce

- 2 teaspoons (tsp) sugar

- 2 tbs lime juice

- 1 1/2 tbs sweet chili sauce

- 200g Chinese cabbage, thinly sliced

- 1 carrot, cut into ribbons (using vegetable peeler)

- 1/2 small red onion, sliced

- 15g fresh cilantro

- 25g roughly chopped fresh mint

- 2 tbs chopped roasted peanuts

- 1 tbs crisp fried shallots

Cooking:

- Place the chicken and lemon grass in saucepan of lightly salted water. Bring to the boil then reduce the heat and simmer for 8-10 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through.

- Place the fish sauce, sugar, lime juice and sweet chili sauce in a small saucepan and stir over medium heat until the suger has dissolved. Remove from the heat.

- Slice the chicken thinly.

- Place the chicken, cabbage, carrot, onion, cilantro and mint in a large bowl, toss well.

- Drizzle over the warmed dressing, toss to combine and transfer to a serving plate.

- Garnish with chopped peanuts and fried shallots.