Shrimps and Lemon Grass Salad

One evening, Nawel, an Algerian mate from school who is very interested in international cuisine, called and we talked about bla bla bla (mostly our effort to find a good decent job, hehehe)...and she closed the conversation by asking me a recipe of Thailand shrimp salad, that our Thailand class mate once made her. She said that she was trying to make it but the taste was just not the same. So i ran through my Thai cook books, and voilà i found it... and scanned it directly to her email.

Very funny, the day that she called, i went to Paris in the afternoon, and treat Mr. Gorilla in our favorite Laotian Restaurant which serves the salad, and i order exactly the same ensalada :)

Here is my own version of recipe, it was lack of many spare parts. as i had not yet gone to do groceries ...

Sauce

In a small bowl, mix the following:

• 1 or 2 tbs of (green) citron juice
• 1 shallots, minced
• 1 tsp of fish sauce
• 2 tsp white sugar
• 1 tbs of spring onion (thinly sliced)

In a big salad bowl, combine the sauce with the following ingredients, and then set it aside for 5 minutes before serving:

• 2 carrots julienne sliced
• 400 gr of big shrimps, 2 minutes boiled in boiling water, discard heads, tails
• 2 tsp of Thai sweet sour sauce (or any industrial sweet spicy-chilly sauces will do, hehe)
• 1 lemon grass, discard the hard part (outer leaf) trim the lower part of the stalk, and slice thinly the bottom white part only

Serve by sprinkling:

• coriander leaves
• sliced chillies

Other ingredients that i don't have but you may use to optimise your salad:

• Salad and mint leaves
• Thai industrial dry squid which has sweet salty taste, very flat form (I don't know the name for this product and unfortunately I don't have the picture either).
• Sliced onion
• cashew nuts
  

Note:

• you can replace the shrimps with squid or jelly fish