Thai beef salad

This is the first time I tried making this beef salad in Thai-style. However, I have eaten other kinds of Thai salads several times before, so I get the typical flavor out of Thai salads. Still, I was amazed at the great flavor out of this dish. It gave me a refreshing feeling and I craved for more.

This salad is the combination of beef and other kinds of vegetables, plus some Asian herbs, which are typical especially for South East Asia. These herbs and fish sauce are the main ingredients that create a distinctive taste to the salad. For me, I am quite familiar with this kind of combination of the salad dressing with the herbs since many salad dishes in Vietnamese style also call for this combination. This similarity between Thai food and Vietnamese food (maybe mainly because both nations use fish sauce very often in cooking) reminds me of the homely flavor.

Try, I bet you will like this. I follow the ingredients in one of the cookbook "Bowl Food" that I do reference quite often.

Ingredients:

- 500g rump steak

- 3¹/₂ tbs lime juice

- 2 tbs fish sauce

- 1 tsp grated palm sugar

- 2 cloves garlic, crushed

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

- 2 small fresh red chillies, finely sliced

- 4 red Asian shallots, finely sliced

- 15-20 fresh mint leaves

- 15g fresh cilantro

- 125g cherry tomatoes, halved

- 1 Japanese cucumber, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced

- 180g shredded Chinese cabbage

- 20g prepared Asian fried onions

- 1tbs prepared Asian fried garlic (I made my fried garlic from coarsely chopped garlic, then pan-fried them with a little oil)

- 40g crushed roasted peanuts, to garnish

Direction:

- Heat a non-stick frying pan over medium-high heat until very hot. Cook the steak for 4 minutes each side, them remove and cool.

- Combine the lime juice, fish sauce, palm sugar, garlic, lemongrass and chili and stir to dissolve the sugar. Add the shallots, mint and cilantro.

- Thinly slice the beef  across the grain, and toss through the mixture. Chill for 15 minutes.

- Add the tomatoes and cucumber, toss well.

- Arrange the cabbage on a serving plate and top with the beef mixture.

- Spinkle with the fried onion, garlic and peanuts.