Thai-Style Lettuce Cups from ‘Lucky Peach Presents: 101 Easy Asian Recipes’
Every week, Yahoo Food spotlights a cookbook that stands out from the rest. This week’s cookbook is Lucky Peach Presents: 101 Easy Asian Recipes by Peter Meehan and the editors of Lucky Peach (Clarkson Potter), the bestselling and award-winning quarterly food journal. Read more about Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week here.
Photograph: Gabriele Stabile
By Peter Meehan and the editors of Lucky Peach
Thai-Style Lettuce Cups
Makes 4 servings
I wanted to put a larb in this book — larb being the spicy, acidic, flavor-bomb of an Isan salad that is all the rage these days in the ever-expanding American awareness of Thai cookery. But there were a few things that we couldn’t ask you to do in the true spirit of ease; we couldn’t call the results larb and still look at ourselves in the mirror in the morning. (It’s weird to think about a whole group of people getting up and looking at themselves in the mirror, but that’s how it is at Lucky Peach — we all live together and work in a loft that’s kind of like the one in the first season of The Real World.)
So this dish, which is not larb, is larb-like, and pleasingly so. We tried making it with turkey to see if even the most pointless of ground meats could be elevated by this treatment, and we found it to work. But given the choice, pork is the champ.
1 pound ground pork, chicken, or turkey
2 tablespoons minced lemongrass
1 garlic clove, grated
½ teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon grated lime zest
3 tablespoons fish sauce
1 teaspoon sambal oelek
6 tablespoons lime juice (about 3 limes)
2 tablespoons turbinado sugar
1 tablespoon neutral oil
½ cup thinly sliced red onion
½ cup roughly chopped cilantro (leaves and stems)
½ cup roughly chopped mint leaves
1 head butter or romaine lettuce or ½ head white cabbage, leaves separated and washed
Combine the meat, lemongrass, garlic, salt, lime zest, 1 tablespoon of the fish sauce, and ½ teaspoon of the sambal in a medium bowl. Mix with your hands or a spatula until thoroughly combined. Cover and chill until ready to use.
Whisk together the lime juice, sugar, and remaining 2 tablespoons fish sauce and ½ teaspoon sambal until the sugar dissolves. Set the sauce aside.
Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the meat mixture and cook, stirring and chopping it into fine pieces with a metal spatula or wooden spoon, until the meat is just cooked through, 5 to 6 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and fold in the onion, cilantro, and mint. Scoop onto a plate or bowl and drizzle with the sauce. Serve with lettuce or cabbage leaves.
Reprinted with permission from Lucky Peach Presents: 101 Easy Asian Recipes by Peter Meehan and the editors of Lucky Peach (Clarkson Potter).
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