Emergency recipes: Omelette Bánh Mì
What to make if you've got 10 minutes and a speed peeler
I really like to cook, but anyone who cooks a lot knows: you are going to need a back up plan. Not every day is a risotto day. Not every day is a long-cooked curry day. Many days, and virtually all lunches, are emergency days—sustenance patched together from the carby contents of your freezer and the back end of your pantry, the place where your personal fusion cuisine truly comes alive.
I’ve been writing about my favourite emergency recipes for years, which are usually streamlined takes on actual cookbook recipes. There’s supermarket antipasti (tortellini + the contents of the antipasti fridge at Sainsburys), peanut-butter noodles with greens, a simplified sheet pan bibimbap, fish finger bao buns, and endless variations on “dumpling salad” (this creation from Hetty McKinnon is exactly what it sounds like.) Many of my favourites are listed here. An approximate 80-90% of my emergency recipes include shop-bought crispy onions. The appearance of mayo is also likely to be high.
This is the point of an emergency recipe. In a food-based emergency, there is only the pressure of time, and the possibility of delight. I save my long-cooked sauces and roast-chickens for friends. An emergency is just for me.
They are also very personal to your culture and tastes, which is why, as a non-Vietnamese person, there’s perhaps no meal more comforting than the bastardised but beloved Calgarian bánh mì. (We just called them “Vietnamese Subs”, and in 2007 you could get one for five Canadian dollars.) They usually included some kind of saucy protein, excessive amounts of pickled carrots, and anything else you might want to put in there.
For sheer efficiency and taste, here is my cheat’s variation. It’s a simplified version of Kris Yenbamroong’s Thai omelette (if you’ve never had fish sauce in an omelette before, it will blow your mind), plus peanut butter (inspired by this Advanced Player version), and quick-pickled veg. This is very much for one—scale up as needed, but cook the omelette to order.
Bánh Mì with fish sauce omelette
Ingredients, all deeply approximate:
- Half a soft French baguette, or a mini baguette. A cheap one from your local supermarket.
- A carrot
- About a quarter of a cucumber
- small handful coriander/cilantro, if you like that (mint is also nice)
- One lime, OR any kind of white wine or rice vinegar, 1-2 tbsp
- A fresh red chilli, finely sliced, or a pinch of chilli flakes
- Two small pinches of sugar (optional)
- 2 eggs
- 1 tsp fish sauce (good quality stuff, it makes a difference)*
- 1-2 tbsp peanut butter
- About 1tbsp sriracha mayo, or a mix of sriracha AND mayo, or just one.
- salt and pepper
Ok, so there is nothing, I repeat nothing, prescriptive about this—you must adapt to your own tastes and your own fridge. Use any crunchy veg and stuff in anything you like on top.
First, take your carrot and speed peel it into long strips (if you are a total freak like me, use your tiny julienne peeler.) Put in a bowl, and squeeze over half the lime (or a couple tbsp of vinegar), along with the sliced red chilli, to taste. Add a pinch of salt, and the optional sugar. Mix it and leave while you do everything else. Slice your cucumber into long, crunchy strips. You can add them to the pickling liquid or not, as you like.
Slice your baguette and lightly toast, if you so prefer. Squeeze some lime juice into your peanut butter to loosen it, then spread on one side of the baguette. Get a frying pan on scorching hot, with a generous amount of neutral or olive oil.
Then crack your two eggs into a cup and lightly beat with a fork. Add a pinch of salt, the optional pinch of sugar, a crack of pepper, and 1 tsp of fish sauce. When the pan is very hot, pour the egg in and tilt to cover the base; it should immediately start bubbling and forming a very thin, marbled omelette.
Wait until the bottom is cooked and the top is mostly cooked (this will take a matter of seconds really), and then coax the omelette into one long, ruffled strip. You could of course roll the omelette, but that’s beyond my abilities—thus, the ruffle. It will finish cooking in the middle as it rests.
Tip the omelette onto one side of the baguette, drizzle with the sriracha mayo, and pile the cucumber, carrot and coriander on top. Close the sandwich. Consume over the counter, alone but content!
* You have to buy good fish sauce or it will be gross. Three crabs is apparently a good bet (this comes from the British-Vietnamese food writer Uyen Luu). If you’re a vegetarian, you can either leave out the fish sauce, or do a cheat’s version, and spike a little soy sauce with a squeeze of lime and a pinch of brown sugar.
If you really can’t be assed even with this level of effort (it happens), then there is another version of this recipe that is simply a fried egg on toast, with a big squeeze of lime, and lots of sriracha mayo. It would cost a lot of money in a south London cafe, and that’s nothing to sniff about.
However if you can be assed, get yourself Lara Lee’s intensely fun, technicolour book A Splash of Soy, which includes a choose-your-own-adventure bánh mì, with banging options for either savoury mushrooms, gingery prawns (both are great), and many more. This book also includes two of my regular rotation recipes: a charred leek (!) lemongrass curry that is a bright, tangy smack in the face, and a buttery gochujang linguine.
If you particularly love Vietnamese food, I constantly bang the drum for Uyen Luu, who is brilliant, and has put out at least three really gorgeous books of Vietnamese food, including one that’s entirely veggie. I swear by her chicken pho recipe and her salads (she also has loads of bánh mì recipes). I’ve been going to her supper clubs for about eight years now, and they are one of my favourite meals in London: the food is so fresh and her Mum grows loads of the herbs. If you want a special meal, I urge you to go. It’s BYOB, set menu, and you must bring cash!
Cookbook recommendation: Rambutan
I’ve been trying to not buy every cookbook I see (we’re running out of space), but all this means is I consider my purchases very carefully . . . and buy them anyways. The main book that has rocked my world this year is Cynthia Shanmugalingam’s Rambutan, which shares a name with her restaurant in Borough Market. I really feel this cookbook is a new classic. I bought it after going to the restaurant in November with my friend Maria, and since then, I have thought about the crab roti curry at least weekly.
First I will say: this is a cuisine that requires upfront investment. You are going to need to buy curry leaves, people—there’s no way around it. My South London neighbourhood is basically as multicultural as it gets, and they were still hard to find. I bought them online and stashed them in my freezer (big Waitrose’s sell them, and so will all big South Asian supermarkets.) I also managed to find fresh, frozen grated coconut from Kiki & Miumiu in Elephant and Castle. (Buying a whole coconut and grating it myself is a step too far, even for me; I also drew the line at purchasing a hopper pan.) I also made her Sri Lankan curry powder from scratch, which was a pain in the ass. Just buy it online. After you’ve done all of that, you will need to make sure you’re well stocked with about ten different spices, in generous quantities, and lots of coconut milk.
Congratulations! You’re ready to make Sri Lankan food. It’s actually going to be completely worth it.
If you’re from a South Asian family or even just West London, you won’t need me to convince you that Sri Lankan food is spectacular. But outside of big diaspora cities, it’s not that common, and you are just going to have to seek it out or make it yourself. It’s incredibly fresh, often light, loaded with coconut and toasty, buttery flavours from the curry leaves and spices. I can’t do it justice, but Cynthia Shanmugalingam is not only a brilliant cook but a deeply talented writer, and her essays on the Sri Lankan civil war and its impact on her family and the wider diaspora are evocative, sharp, and beautiful. She has something in common with the London-based Ukrainian writer Olia Hercules, who interweaves history, memoir, and food writing completely seamlessly, and who never over-writes. She’s also really funny. (There’s a very sizeable and very talented group of first or second-generation immigrant cook/food writers in London, and basically all of them are women. They’re all my favourites.)
The benefit, too, of doing the upfront purchasing is that assembling all the spices is really the hardest part. A lot of the recipes, especially the veggie curries, take max 20 minutes to make, are very easy, and will use up all kinds of veg. I started with a cucumber (!) curry for one, that was so delicious I repeatedly ‘mm-mmm!!!’ ‘d the whole time I was eating it.
Then I made a big, sprawling meal for five, with tamarind chickpeas, delectable coconut greens, a cashew curry, and crispy potatoes with tempered spices. It was absolutely demolished, accidentally vegan, and loaded with such a vast array of veg and spices that it probably added about five years to our lives. If you’re looking for something that will please fussy eaters and complicated diets, while still feeling very indulgent and special, Sri Lankan is for you. Rambutan is where to start.
One last thing I wanted to add. For my condiment mania at the start of this year, I started bulk-buying mason jars. And look, it might sound a bit out-of-touch to say we’re sleeping on mason jars (remember when every cocktail came in a mason jar?). But maybe we’re sleeping on mason jars. Many people are trying to cut plastic out of their kitchens, and it’s not alarmist to say this is a good idea. (Please pre-order my friend Saabira’s excellent forthcoming book, Consumed!). Mason jars are glass, and they’re also perfectly sized: I tote granola, use them for salad dressings, I keep extra coconut milk in them. Plus, a mason jar containing homemade pasta sauce genuinely makes a great gift for any sleep-deprived parents in your life. Hear me out! Mason jars!