Hearty Salads with Rice or Noodles

Richly flavored, filling salads are perfect for serving over warm rice to make a delicious rice bowl. There are also many salads that compliment the Asian noodles that we have come to know and love, such as glass or cellophane noodles (rice vermicelli) or pho noodles. Can you guess what my favorite single-dish meal is?

This book includes a variety of salads, from simple vegetable salads to make-in-advance pickled and marinated salads that are so handy to have on hand. All work well as side dishes, but I especially recommend putting hearty main dish salads that contain meat or seafood on top of rice to make a rice bowl. Richly flavored salads such as Pork, Kimchi and Leek Salad (see page 83), Chicken & Green Onion with Spicy Sesame Dressing (page 57), Fried Fish Nuggets with Carrots and Onion Chili Sauce (page 73), Sweet & Salty Pork and Water Spinach Stir-fry (page 84) and Stir-fried Chicken with Bamboo Shoots and Ginger (page 91) work really well as rice bowl toppings.

In addition, as I mention on the following page, putting the rice into tableware that I have bought on my trips, such as a bowl with a lid or the cheap but cute plastic bowls, really gives the meal an Asian vibe. There are a variety of rices too: glutinous rice, used commonly for red bean and rice dishes in China, Thai or Indica rice, which go well with Southeast Asian and Indian cuisines, and mixed grain rice, used commonly in Korea. You may enjoy exploring the variety of rices to find your favorites and discover which rice pairs with which cuisines.

Along with rice, noodles are also an essential part of Asian cuisine. While there is a variety of noodles, Chinese or Korean glass noodles (vermicelli) and Vietnamese pho are popular and can be bought worldwide. There are so many salads that pair superbly with noodles. For example, you can try stir-frying glass noodles with Fried Tofu and Bean Sprout Stir-fry (page 94), add pho to Thai Crispy Pork Salad (page 60) or serve Jellyfish and Cucumber Salad (page 50) over somen noodles, thin wheat noodles from Japan. I encourage you to try all kinds of combinations!