Thai Chicken and Vegetable Salad

This is a just a basic, quick Thai dish which features some really great vegetables. The recipe as I have listed here in it's original form is actually a salad. I decided to prepare it as a stir-fry using the same ingredient list. If I had it to do over again, I would have kicked the heat up a bit with a few Thai chillies. That said, my favorite parts about it were the quick prep time and the crunchy-tenderness of the great vegetables. I tell ya, I love those little corncobs!

400 g chicken breast fillets
1 cup water
3 slices ginger
2 stalks lemongrass, white part only, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons fish sauce
250 g broccoli, cut into florets
150 g fresh baby corn
100 g snow peas (mange-tout), trimmed
1 red pepper, cut into strips
3 scallion, cut into strips
½ cup sweet chilli sauce
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons lime juice
2 teaspoons lime zest, grated
¼ cup fresh coriander

Slice the chicken into short, thin strips.

Place the water, ginger, lemon grass and fish sauce in a frying pan. Bring the mixture to the boil, reduce the heat slightly and simmer for 5 minutes.

Add the chicken to the pan and cook in the hot liquid for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Drain and allow to cool. Discard liquid.

Bring a large pan of water to the boil and cook the broccoli, corn, snow peas, red pepper and spring onion for 2 minutes. Drain and plunge into iced water; drain again.

Combine the sweet chilli sauce, honey, lime juice and rind in a small bowl and mix well. Arrange the vegetables and chicken on a serving platter. Pour the sauce over the top and toss gently.

(NOTE: If you want to stir -fry this up, skip the previous two steps, put some peanut oil in a hot wok and stir-fry the vegetables for 5 minutes or so, adding oil as needed to keep things moving in the pan. When the veg has started to go a bit tender, add the sauce and the chicken, stir through, cover, lower the heat to medium low, and allow to steam together for a minute or two. The sauce should bubble away and thicken some.)

Sprinkle over the coriander leaves.

NOTE: To trim snow peas, cut or break both ends off and then pull away any strings from along the sides.