Who’s ready to make some healthy after workout food or maybe just a light meal for the day? What do you normally eat when you go to an Asian restaurant? I am Cambodian so whenever I get the chance to go to a Cambodian restaurant (there aren’t many around here) I often forget about the salads because there are other yummier dishes that I miss 😀 but whenever I go to a Thai restaurant I always order a salad especially grilled beef salad, which is my favourite! I truly love the asian salad dressing. I think because I grew up eating a lot of sour foods, it’s hard to abandon those flavours.
Most Asian salad dressing ingredients aren’t that different, the key ingredients are lime juice, sugar and fish sauce. In spicy dressings we add chillies or chilli sauce, in a sweet salad dressing we only need to add a small amount of red chillies and then there are the dressings that we don’t use chillies or fish sauce at all. They all taste great in their own way, but I’m a chilli eater so I love my chillies.
Note: In this salad I used about 5 thai chillies in the dressing so for those who doesn’t eat much chillies it might be mild or even hot, but if you are a chillies eater and want it hot I reckon add a few to suites your preferred hotness.
There are different ways of cutting your vegetables, if you like your vegetables in a certain way feel free to use those cuts instead. I thinly sliced all of my vegetables in this dish, thinking maybe it might help with the presentation, but it doesn’t really matter how you cut them. What’s important is the flavour of the salad dressing.
To cook my chicken, I slow pan grilled them, but if you prefer less work you can always oven grill them or even bbq them.
CAMBODIAN/THAI CHICKEN SALAD
Prep-Time: 30 mins Serve: 1
Cooking Time: 15 mins
Ingredients
2 chicken drumstick/thigh fillets
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp fish sauce
4 tbsp oil
1 large carrot, thinly sliced
1 cucumber, thinly sliced
2 asparagus, thinly sliced
1/4 red capsicum, thinly cut
3 pieces green cabbage, thinly cut
dressing
3/4 lime juice
1 tbsp brown sugar
5 thai chillies
2 tbsp fish sauce
Method
Marinate the chicken with salt, sugar and fish sauce and then leave it to set for 30 minutes.
Grind the chillies in a mortar and then add in the rest of the dressing ingredients into the mortar. Stir the dressing until the sugar dissolve and set a side.
Heat the oil in a medium sized frying pan over medium heat. Add in the chicken and leave it to cook for 7 minutes on each side. Check and turn occasionally to prevent it from burning. If the pan is too hot reduce the heat to medium low. Remove the cooked chicken and leave to rest for a few minutes.
Place all of the vegetables in a salad bowl and then pour the dressing over the salad. Toss the salad with some tongs for a few minutes until the vegetables are well coated with the dressing. Transfer onto a serving plate.
Cut the cooked chicken into smaller pieces and place the chicken on top of the salad. Serve as they are or with steamed rice.