This story is part of On Repeat, a series in which we ask top chefs, cookbook authors, and other famous foodies about the dishes they just can’t quit.
When we asked James Beard Award-winning food writer Andrea Nguyen
what dish she can’t seem to quit for this week’s edition of On Repeat, she pointed to a vibrant salad from her latest cookbook, Ever-Green Vietnamese. The point of the book—her seventh—is to introduce Vietnamese ideas into plant-focused diets, and her cucumber, kale, and spicy cashew salad (gỏi du’a leo chay) does just that.
The dressing’s a mix of lime juice, fish sauce, spicy chile, and a little sugar to sweeten things up—with just 1 tablespoon of oil to bind and enrich everything. And there’s a cup of fresh, tender, aromatic herbs (mint, shiso, and basil) along with the crunch of toasted nuts. “This salad is a wondrous little thing,” says Nguyen, who pens the Substack Pass the Fish Sauce. “People think of kale salads as being very Western, and I thought: Why not put a Vietnamese spin on it?”
Why I love it
“One thing I love is that you can make the dressing in advance and it can sit there in the fridge for three or four days. You can prep the vegetables and the nuts and put it all together later. Or you can make it a homemade grab-and-go: Put it in a large Mason jar with the dressing on the bottom, then the veg, and then nuts on top, and you can shake it up when you’re ready to eat it, to bring on a picnic or for work. And it plays well with a lot of different kinds of food.
“I make a double batch of the spicy cashews—they’ve got maple syrup, cayenne, and a little salt—because they’re wonderful to snack on. A lot of Vietnamese salads have nuts in them, because the salads themselves don’t have much oil or meat in them, so you need the nuts for richness.”
What I’ve changed
“Oftentimes kale salads feel like I’m eating a Brillo pad, so you don’t want to get kale that’s tightly curled up like a tutu. I prefer when it’s very soft, sort of like a swirly skirt. It has a velvety quality. That’s what I look for when I’m making this salad. When I don’t have that beautiful swirly-skirt kale, I’ll pick up a head of escarole. (Some people might think kale and escarole are not Vietnamese greens, but that’s not true. They’re both grown and eaten in Vietnam.)
“When I don’t have cashews, I’ll use walnuts or pecans. The beautiful thing about the maple syrup is that it’s thin and it’s sweet, and if you use honey instead the nuts can get kind of sticky. Having said that, you can use honey. If you don’t have fish sauce (regular or vegan) on hand for the dressing, you can use the same amount of soy sauce plus a quarter teaspoon of fine sea salt.”
What else I’m into right now
Japanese vegetable scrubber. We often discard the parts of the veg that aren’t pretty, but I’ve stopped peeling potatoes and carrots. I keep the skin on because it has a different kind of flavor. I have a Japanese vegetable scrubber, and I love that little thing. There are fewer scraps to discard, and it also cuts down on the time spent peeling, and you don’t have to wash a peeler. Plus, you’re adding extra beautiful flavor to your food, and extra nutrients.
Sprightly herbs. Sometimes people buy a bunch of herbs and throw them in the crisper, and then the herbs poop out. I treat them as if I run a little florist shop. I’ll trim the ends, spin them dry, and put them in an empty yogurt container, loosely covered with a little produce bag, and put that in the fridge. The herbs will last a week, maybe two. (You can’t do that with basil—you don’t want to wash it until right at the end.)
Asian “scrap stock.” I throw vegetable trimmings into an airtight container that I keep in the freezer, and when it gets full I make stock. I make a lot of Asian-y stocks, so I embellish that base of water and vegetable trimmings with ginger, onion, some kombu for umami, salt, and maybe some scallion. You know those yucky pieces on the outside of a cabbage that are tough and wilty? That’s good flavor—mature, intense flavor. The leaves have kind of dehydrated, and there’s this earthy funk.