Warm Handpull Chicken Salad with Sesame Dressing (Thanks to gourmettraveller88)

Not only is food blogging fun, but also does help me acquaint with many wonderful people with the same mind, same taste and same passion with foods. I met Janet on twitter and started to read her food blog, gourmettraveller88, regularly a few months ago. You can’t imagine how wonderful I feel, when I get to know a food blogger who came from the same home country, Hong Kong. We love the same old-fashioned and modern fusion Hong Kong cuisine. Janet is now living in Basel, Switzerland with her husband and a new-born baby.

Before she gave birth to her lovely son, Marc, her husband gave her a lovely present, helping her to publish her own cookbook, “Gourmet Traveller 88”. I’m so glad that Janet sent me a complimentary copy. In Janet’s cookbook, there are 7 sections, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and Western, all recipes in each section were carefully chosen by Janet and her husband through months. I love Janet’s cooking passions, and feel she has her own style in creating dishes with simplicity, with creative ideas of whipping up her favourite dishes of different countries. Take this warm handful chicken salad as an example, Janet really knows how to tweak the dressing to go with the chicken and fresh veggies, that tastes very similar to the one that Japanese cold noodle salad often used.

Warm Handpull Chicken Salad with Sesame Dressing (Adapted from Janet's cookbook gourmettraveller88) (Printable recipe)

Ingredients:

• 2 handfuls of chicken meat kept from the chicken soup (I used chicken breast.)
• 1 small cauliflower, wash and cut into pieces
• handful of green peas, wash and drain (I omitted this.)
• 1/2 cucumber, peel briefly, seeds removed & cut into strips
• extra virgin olive oil

Sesame Salad dressing:

• 1/2 cup water (I used hot water to dissolve the sesame paste easily.)
• 2 tbsp brown sugar
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 tbsp fish sauce
• 2 tbsp rice wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp ground sesame seeds (you can use black or white or both)
• 3 tbsp sesame paste chinese sesame paste or tahini
• 1 tsp sesame oil

Method:

1. With the chicken you saved from your chicken stock, hand pull the chicken meat into pieces, the texture by hand pull method is better than cutting with a knife !!!
2. Prepare the sesame sauce by mixing the above in a bowl and set aside.
3. Boil the cauliflower for a few minutes, not too long so they are still crunchy. (I added a bit of salt in the boiling water.)
4. Stir fry the green peas with a little olive oil for a minute or so and repeat the same for the cucumbers.
5. Let all cooked vegetables cool to room temperature.
6. Arrange the vegetables on a big round serving plate and the hand pulled chicken in the middle.
7. Garnish with some ground sesames and serve with the sesame dressing.