Mien Kam

Ingredients.

While the name bears strong similarity to Adolf Hitler's book (just a character flip and 2 letters short), this here is not a German dish. It's a Thai appetizer.



The ingredients, clockwise from the top, spiraling into the center, are: dried shrimp, mint leaves, diced lime, cili padi (a very very spicy chili), chopped lemongrass, diced onion, toasted dried coconut and finally, roasted peanuts. The 2 missing ingredients from the photo is the sauce and the leaves that you use to wrap all this with, both of which I do not know the name.

Before the fold.

What you do is grab one of the heart-shaped leaves, fold it into a cone (if you cannot imagine how then you suck at origami) and drop a bit of each of these ingredients in, along with a dollop of the unknown sauce. For the purpose of this shot I did not roll the leaf into a cone (this is now sounding like a drug blog), but what happens after that is you just roll the cone up and eat it whole.

Apparently the original dish does not include mint leaves. That's something my mom added in, and it works well too, considering that this is a very raw and uhm... "sharp" tasting appetizer. It's difficult to explain the taste, it's a combination of... zesty, sour, sweet, nutty and very green. You try finding one word to sum all that up.