Hai Au, it’s one of my favourite Vietnamese restaurants for more authentic Vietnamese food. You won’t find pho or crispy skin chicken here, you’ll find crabs stir fried in tamarind sauce, caramalised fish in claypots and charcoal grilled meat and seafood. It’s worth the treck to the South West if you can’t see yourself in Vietnam anytime soon.

Seeing Pho pop up as this month’s Daring Cooks challenge gave me a little thrill, I always thought that Pho would be an exhausting, time consuming exercise that would result in a sub-par results, luckily only one of these things were true! We were given the choice of Pho Ga (Chicken based stock) or Pho Tai (traditional beef stock with rare meat), I of course chose the beef option.

Lately, I have frequented Cafe Ish and La Gerbe d’Or for my weekend Brunch fix. I figured that it was perhaps time I paid a visit back to Cabramatta as it has now been a month or two since I had my regular dosage of authentic Vietnamese food. Most of us know the typical Vietnamese dishes of Pho, Spring rolls and Crispy Skin Chicken (which I have doubts over whether it’s even Vietnamese or not)

In Sydney we perhaps had the coldest winter I could remember. Never has winter dragged on so long into the year. Lately though, the weather has started to warm up which inspired me into re-introducing two of my favourite summer foods : Salads and grilled meat. For this post, I’ll go through how easy it is to create a healthy and tasty summer salad which can act as a side dish or even a main.