[chumley]

I get spam email once a week from Saveur magazine, which gives dinner suggestions for the week.  They had a recipe for Vietnamese pork meatballs the other day that looked intriguing:

http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Bun-Cha-Vietnamese-Pork-Meatball-Noodle-Salad

As you can see, the recipe calls for caramelizing sugar.  Being lazy, I just skipped that step and used a couple of tablespoons of D45 amber candi syrup.

I grilled them up last night for dinner, along with the rice noodle, herbs and lettuce.  Amazing!  The caramelly syrup with the salty fish sauce and shallots made those grilled morsels fantastically delicious.

My only other tweak was to the sauce.  I didn't have any green papaya, so I made this version of Nuoc Cham instead:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/29/dining/294krex.html

[denny]

YUM!

[reverseapachemaster]

I could see that working really well. I had some of those Vietnamese pork meatballs at a restaurant a couple weekends ago and the caramel is very obvious.