Vietnamese Grilled Chicken with Salad

Fresh, tasty, light and very easy to cook- served with a Vietnamese inspired salad and rice, this dish is so tasty with wonderful cooking aromas as the chicken is being cooked. Big favourite both in our family and also when cooking for guests. You can cook this for large gatherings as well, so a very versatile dish

The salad is simple and tasty with lots of coriander, mint and Nuoc Cham dressing which is very simple to make in 3 minutes!

It is a perfect all year round dish and the chicken can be cooked on the BBQ or stove-top

Ingredients

1 kg chicken thighs

Vietnamese marinade – refer below

Bag of your favourite salad mix

1 bunch coriander

Good handful/ half a cup of shredded mint leaves/ Vietnamese mint leaves – ideally a combination of both

1/2 cucumber cut into rounds

1 long red capsicum, preferably one of the long King Sweetie varieties – cut into rounds (optional)

Nuoc Cham dressing – refer below  

Vietnamese marinade

50mls fish sauce

50mls lime juice

1 teaspoon garlic paste/ 2 cloves garlic, crushed (optional)

1.5 tablespoons sambal oelek (get from an Asian food store - Yeo is the best brand). If you can’t find, you can use chilli flakes or some other hot chilli sauce

3 tablespoons crushed ginger

2 tablespoons brown sugar

Nuoc Cham dressing

1/3 cup of lime juice – try to use fresh if not too pricey

1/4 cup of fish sauce

1 red chilli (optional) – remove seeds and thinly slice

2 tbs soft brown sugar

1/4 cup of water

Combine the ingredients, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Taste and adjust flavours as you like

Cooking instructions

1. Mix all marinade ingredients together and pour over the chicken thighs, toss around and leave for a couple of hours before cooking -important that you taste the marinade before using and adjust/ add ingredients as required. Note: you are unlikely to need more fish sauce
2. Heat the barbeque plate to medium/high and grill the thighs until well browned and cooked, constantly basting with the marinade - no oil required because of the marinade
3. Cook rice as per the way you normally do
4. Mix salad ingredients together and add half the Nuoc Cham dressing – leave the rest of the dressing for those that want more and enjoy 

Because this dish really caramelises when cooking, I would strongly recommend using one of those "plastic" sheets you can get from Bunnings/ Mitre 10 etc or cook on foil.....otherwise major clean up and lots of scrapping off burnt cooking from the chicken!!!!!

 Serves 4 generously