Seafood salad

Another Asian-inspired seafood dish which is really simple but has taken me a long time to perfect mainly because my husband doesn’t like fish sauce. It’s really hard to find a good Asian salad dressing that doesn’t contain fish sauce! However, after much experimentation, I have perfected the salad dressing.

This recipe is all about the wombok, salad dressing, and seafood. It is a versatile base to work from, so feel free to try different combinations of ingredients to suit your personal taste.

Ingredients

Seafood (see below)
1/2 Wombok
1 Capsicum
1/3 cup rice wine vinegar
2 tablespoons palm sugar
1 dessertspoon soy sauce
Handful of cashews
1 packet of crispy noodles
Coriander and fried shallots for serving

The seafood

For this version I have used prawns and seafood sticks, but it would be great with any other shellfish, and even calamari would be excellent.

I like to buy raw prawns and cook them in boiling water for 3 minutes or until they turn red, and then chilling down straight away in cold water, or iced water is even better. You can easily use prawns that have already been cooked. I prefer cooking them myself because they are fresher and softer.

Anyway, whichever you choose, slice the prawns up for little kids, or keep them whole for bigger people. Slice up any other seafood that you have chosen to use into bite size pieces.

The salad

Slice up some red capsicum into thin strips, and slice some wombok. I’ve only recently discovered wombok, or Chinese cabbage as it’s also known, and I’m hooked! I use it regularly now, both raw in salads and cooked in stir fry meals and pasta dishes. It’s used raw in this salad, so slice it quite finely like you would cabbage for coleslaw. You could use a food processor to do this if you have one. Put the sliced wombok and capsicum in a bowl. Add the seafood. Put to one side.

Chop up some cashews, and dry fry in a frypan with some sesame seeds for 2 to 3 minutes, until you can smell the sesame seeds and they start turning golden in colour and start popping. Set aside to cool.

The Dressing

Put 1/3 of a cup of rice wine vinegar into a jar or jug, and add 2 to 3 drops of sesame oil. Add 2 tablespoons of peanut oil. Grate in some palm sugar if you have it, about 2 tablespoons. If you don’t, you can substitute brown sugar but it won’t taste quite as good! Use about 1 tablespoon of brown sugar. Squeeze in a small amount of lemon – about 2 teaspoons. Add 1 dessertspoon of soy sauce and add chili to suit.

Mix up the dressing really well, and taste. Think about the taste – is it sweet enough? Is it sour enough? Adjust as necessary. It should be zingy, because once it’s added to the salad it won’t be as strong.

Add the dressing to the bowl with the wombok in it. It will probably look like quite a lot of dressing, but the salad really soaks it up so don’t worry. I start putting the ingredients on the plate, because I don’t like the crispy noodles getting too much dressing on them and turning soggy.

To Serve

Place a pile of the wombok salad on the plate, and then add some crispy noodles on top. You can buy the crispy noodles from the supermarket, or make them by deep-frying normal noodles, but it is very messy. I definitely recommend buying them! Add the sesame seeds and cashews, and then some fried shallots. Then add some coriander.

To make this just a little more exciting for my boys, I often serve this with a couple of mini spring rolls, with maybe one or two more for the adults…

Enjoy.