Salad Days: Ginger-Miso Dressing

Roasted red pepper and yoghurt dip, hummus and toasted whole-wheat pitas brushed with olive oil and za'atar.

Saturday was nuts. A gazillion errands to run, and then an emergency trip to the supermarket when my organic poultry delivery unexpectedly took a detour (ETA, next Wednesday). I was having friends over for dinner that night and had an ambitious menu planned, so I'll cop to a moment (or two hundred) of panic. Tight schedule notwithstanding, however, it was gratifying to realize how much easier it was getting to execute my usual overly ambitious dinner party menus. 

Cut to 7:30 p.m. A gaggle of middle-aged women in their prime knock on my door, looking and sounding more like a bunch of schoolgirls at a One Direction concert than the cool and composed wives, mothers, entrepreneurs and career women that we claimed to be actually were. 

Ginger-Scallion Sauce

I'm not a fan of Hainanese chicken. Chicken skin that's any paler than a Jersey Shores cast member's gives me the heebie-jeebies.  My mom even browns the chicken in tinola (a Filipino boiled chicken soup) when she makes it for me. But what saves Hainanese chicken is that delicious ginger-scallion sauce, because I think I would eat my cats if you smeared some of that stuff on them.

What??? I kid, I kid!

This sauce is so good, I'll use my chopsticks to painstakingly scrape off every single pallid little goosebump off my chicken, just so I can drown each slice in ginger-scallion goodness.

So anyway, this sauce has now become immensely popular in the US, thanks to David Chang of Momofoku fame, whose Ginger-Scallion Noodles have become a signature dish at Noodle Bar, his more affordable restaurant.

Recently, I came across Francis Lam's adaptation of Chang's ginger-scallion sauce.  Lam's version heats the oil to sizzling and then pours it on the ginger and scallions, cooking the mixture and mellowing its bite. Liking the sound of sizzle, I decided to get going.