A Quick Lunch Break

Ingredients

Salad

8 shrimps, cooked and peeled

1 avocado, washed, peeled and cut into slices

2 Thai green onion, washed and chopped

2 large leaves iceberg salad, chopped

1 tablespoon peanuts, grilled and chopped

1 pinch powdered chili

Dressing

1 clove of garlic, finely chopped

2 tablespoons peanut oil

2 to 3 tablespoons lime juice

1 teaspoon palm sugar

1 tablespoon fish sauce

Preparation

In a bowl, prepare the dressing: mix palm sugar with lime juice and fish sauce until sugar dissolves, then add peanut oil and mix. Taste and eventually adjust the seasoning according to your own taste.

Add avocado, green onion, shrimps and iceberg salad.

Mix everything well.

Sprinkle peanuts and chili over the salad.

You may sprinkle some fried onion as well.

Eat immediately.

In Paris, in the 13th “arrondisement”, there exists an important Asian quarter. There are tons of restaurants serving Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, Cambodian and other Far Eastern food. On the other hand, Indian food and stores can be found in a completely different part of the city, in the north of Paris.

The resources for Asian food are plentiful there. Aside from restaurants, which we visit occasionally only, as we prefer to cook at home, there are several stores offering nearly everything you need for your experiments with Asian cooking.

I visit the neighborhood quite often, and I actually would not mind moving somewhere closer to the Chinese quarter. Twice per month we do our shopping there, and then cook Asian food at home for a couple of days.

Probably the biggest food store is “Tang Frères”, located at 48, avenue d'Ivry. You can find not only the necessary spices, pastes, sauces, vinegars, cooking wines and so on, noodles, rice, dried and fresh mushrooms, but also - and most notably - fresh Asiatic herbs, vegetables, leaves, fruits, sweets, fresh and frozen meat and seafood. Thanks to such a great source of supplies, it is possible to cook genuine dishes, without any substitutes.  The shop has become more and more popular and crowded over the last few years. For that reason, it is best to go there in the morning, never on Saturday afternoons, when shopping - instead of being a pleasure - becomes a nightmare.

Last weekend, we were cooking a Thai dinner for our friends from Poland. The dinner was served quite late in the evening. I don’t like to bother my guest with taking pictures while they wait for their meal, as I don’t like taking pictures with artificial light.

After the weekend, I still had some ingredients leftover from this meal, which I had to eat before they would get rotten. I hate to throw food away.

All in all, I made a quick salad, but it was so tasty, that my husband advised to put in on the blog, in between oscypek and pierogi.

We had it for lunch (we did not plan on going outside that day, so we could enjoy its fresh garlic taste) and its preparation did not even take 10 minutes!