Flavor Boulevard

Almost every Sunday we make a trip to Bellaire to get the usual supply of patechaud, cha lua, banh gio, and the like. Almost every Sunday the question’s asked: where will we eat today? Well, there are two choices: the all-too-familiar Kim Son, and the more adventurous find which can be anything Little Mother saw in the local Vietnamese newspaper ads. We’ve had our handfuls of adventurous finds, all are good, but as usual smaller places don’t have a big selection, the menus are either common banh mi and pho, or grandiose names we don’t particularly care for. Mother is also easily shy away by the appearance of a restaurant: if the setting doesn’t look good, the food won’t taste good. So back we headed to Kim Son today…

We opted for the popular choice of a lunch buffet. We got there early enough, meaning at 11, when it’s just opened and there was banh canh. 15 minutes later and it was all gone. Out of banh canh noodle they said. The soup is not left unattended like the rest of the food trays known and visited by many. No, that would have reduced the availability to 5 minutes. It’s hidden in the right corner of the diner, in something can appropriately be called a kitchen box, with fellow roasted ducks and another noodle soup of the day. You go over there, order, stand around watching the cook slap a bunch of noodle, shrimp and pork, and pour a couple ladles of steaming broth into your bowl, you go back to your seat and start slurping. It’s really slurping, even chopsticks have a hard time holding the noodles in place long enough, don’t even try spoon and fork. They’re quick, short, round, and annoyingly feeble. It’s too easy to break them, but it’s hard to put them in your mouth before you flick a drop of broth to somewhere it shouldn’t be. The taste is worth the sloppy embarrassment, though. Banh canh and hu tiu are somewhat similar, the final touch in each bowl is a dollop of mo hanh (chives stir fried in lard and fried shallots). It adds savoriness, enhances the mix of meaty and sweet. A very hearty soup. I even drank the broth. The small bowl is a perfect belly hit.

Not to be healthy I packed a few frog legs and fried shrimp-pasted toasts down my throat afterwards. Great baguette. Frog legs would have been great too if not for the irritatingly overloaded hot pepper. When something’s hot, it’s just hot. Hot overpowers everything. Can’t taste another daggum flavor, if there were any. Dunno about you but I find that boring. The meat is kinda dry (I would be too if I were covered in hot pepper) and sinewy. But they do look sporty, don’t they? 🙂

The other soup of the day was bun bo Hue, which we’ve had, and I’ve blogged, here. Looks good, eh? Spicy, too. It’d be good to have intermittent sips of water, given you have a full glass. Kim Son is usually crowded after 11:30, at which time there are too few waiters for too many tables, and it’s expected that you fend for yourself. Yes, that means no refill. Vietnamese scoffers are used to drinking only after the meal anyway. They believe that drinking during eating would result to feeling full immaturely, or making your belly bigger. Maybe that’s why my jeans feel tight…

We heard dapples of fireworks last night, other than that, everything was normal. TV had the usual shows, roads had the usual cars, the usual air, the feeling of a usual day. Isn’t that strange? New Year came quietly in this town, but with all the bombing and protesting around the world, I suppose a quiet peaceful New Year’s Eve is a nice New Year’s Eve. No champagne, no confetti, no wishes, no counting down. We slept.

But how about some black eyed pea? 🙂 Not only is it a traditional American New Year’s food, it always appears in a baby’s first (and most important) birthday in Vietnam (quite a connection, I know… but a good bean, isn’t it?). The word “đậu” for bean, or pea, has the same spelling with the word for passing (an examination), chè is a dessert, so chè đậu trắng is a sweet food of good luck for the beginning of something. Cooked until soft, washed with cold water, the hard “black eye” part of the testa taken off, then cooked again with sticky rice and preferably brown sugar, the beans melt in your mouth. In an average pot of che dau trang, you see the sticky rice makes a gluey protection of the beans, the seed coat is still just a tad chewy, your jaws and tongue will enjoy a mix of texture. This might be exclusively enjoyable for those with an eye on texture food, myself included. In a good pot of che dau trang, you can see each grain of sticky rice and each shapely pea, but each spoon will only give you a sweet, nutty, almost homogeneous mixture. Oh, can’t forget the slightly salty, thick and fat coconut milk, of course. Coconut milk makes everything aptly better.

Coconut milk sneaked in here too… A small cup of chè bột báng (tapioca chè) from Lee’s Sandwiches. The big pink and green balls have mung bean paste inside, the little ones are your usual tapioca marbles in bubble tea (only slightly bigger and not dark brown). There is no sticky rice, but there is a teaspoon of pan-dried sesame seeds atop. Chewy and sweet is the main theme che bot bang shoots for. It’s pretty light.

Che is a vegan snack. Sticky rice, bean and coconut are about the main ingredients in any kind, some have fruits or roots, but eggs and milk stay out of this business. So how many variations of che do you think there are? Quite a few, actually. Chè bắp (corn), chè bột báng (tapioca), chè bột khoai, chè củ năng (water chesnut), chè củ mài (a kind of yam), chè chuối (banana), chè đậu xanh (mung bean), chè đậu đen (black bean), chè đậu đỏ (azuki bean), chè đậu trắng (black eyed pea), chè hạt sen (lotus seed), hạt mít (jack fruit seed), chè hạnh nhân (chesnut), chè nhãn (longan), chè khoai lang (sweet potato), khoai môn (taro), khoai mì (cassava root)…, and many others I haven’t tried. Are there similar desserts in other countries? I don’t know, but certainly not in the US, where people say ew to soy milk (and not to raw clams). Kim Son, quite to my disappointment, has stopped serving che dau trang for some while, but still has chè trôi nước, another familiar dessert of the Vietnamese, especially in the North, where some call it bánh trôi, as it’s a ball floating in sugar liquid. Such simple name is made simpler, pronunciatively, by the Southerner, when they turn it into chè xôi nước: xôi – sweet sticky rice (the coat of the ball is indeed made of sticky rice flour), in nước – (sugar) water. The stuffing is, surprise surprise, Mung Bean Paste. Sweet outside, mild and nutty inside. A beast to work your jaw. Doesn’t it remind you of banh it? Sprinkle some sesame seeds and spoon in coconut milk for a homey taste of the countryside.

Off to a well-seasoned new year, everyone! 🙂

It was a warm, cloudy day. Few cars were on the road and every store was closed. So were restaurants, but not Vietnamese restaurants. We drove all the way down FM 1960 to Veteran Memorial, and pulled in the parking lot of Phở Danh (with the helpful hand signal of a Vietnamese gentleman, who just happened to stand there for no reason and apparently noticed my clumsy parking skill). But we went next door for Bún Bò Huế Cố Đô, since my mom spotted it out and we were in adventurous mood. There were as few people inside as cars on the road today. Everyone in the neighborhood seems to go to Phở Danh, cuz it’s bigger and more noticeable. We weren’t deterred. So how is Cố Đô?

My dad got the house specialty: bún bò Huế (Hue beef noodle). Rice noodle, beef, beef broth, (sounds like phở so far, isn’t it?), congealed blood, cha lua, a thick side cut of pig leg (not foot), and some good spicy hot pepper. I suppose it wasn’t spicy enough for my dad, so he put in some satay, which makes the broth colorfully pretty. And the whole side of greens (that has more than green):

Bean sprouts, a slice of lemon, plants whose English names I have no idea, and a purplish bundle of thinly sliced young banana flower. The meat was tender and generous, but I’m not so sure if this bowl has everything an authentic Hue beef noodle soup would have. For some reason I had never gotten the crave for it, I must have had it at some point and just can’t remember. It certainly looks good, perhaps a little busy. The noodle is thicker and rounder than the noodle in pho, so bún bò is more filling. The pig leg meat is just all too common pork with a bit of thick skin, pig foot is better and more interesting for the teeth. According to my dad, the soup didn’t quite live up to his expectation, except for being tenderly meaty. But the rest of the crew was actually quite pleased with the other dishes we got:

Hủ tíu mì

Hủ tíu Nam Vang.

Address: Bún Bò Huế Cố Đô
13480 Veterans Memorial Suite P3
Houston, TX
(281) 537-6760

Today it snows…
… in Texas. Yep, College Station… It was 70°F yesterday, and this morning I went outside at 10:30, seeing shrubs, lawns, cars, and the roof of the All Faiths Chapel covered in white. But I didn’t have my camera with me then. And it is snowing outside my window right now, for hours, but little Kodak can’t capture this momentous event through 2mm thick and dirty glass, so that I have no hope of disproving people who laugh at Texas for not having snow. Not that it will be long. AccuWeather says Sunday may reach record high of 82°F set in 1921. Aw… you mean I can wear my gloves only one day a year?

That’s what you get for living in the South your whole life (so far). Have some snow white food instead. (Presented to you by Eistube with limited commercials, production of Gio Cha Duc Huong, Houston, TX.) I have faith in sausages. I’ll try haggis when I find a place in America that has it. Meaty, seasoned, high in calorie, compact, preservable, easy for cooking, efficient, what more can you expect from a food? It is tofu for meat-eaters. I’ve never come across a type of sausage that makes me cringe and run away. But if you think about it, it comes from the black sheep of the meat production line, it’s bits and scraps stuffed in an intestine. Is there any kind of sausage with a cleaner background? Yes. There is. At least one that I know of. This is the purest form of sausage in my list, and possibly in the world.

Just lean pork (no fatty allowed, sorry) and a little fish extract (nuoc mam).

“…The pork has to be pounded until it becomes pasty; it cannot be chopped or ground as the meat would still be fibrous, dry, and crumbly…” (Wikipedia – Cha lua)

No intestine. No skin. No liver or kidney. No congealed blood. Usually people eat it right after they got it out of the banana leaf wrap. But my mom, having her own way of doing things, boils it. That lessens the flavor of nuoc mam and keeps the cha lua 1-2 weeks longer.

Did you know sausage is lighter than water? It floats.
And it’s still snowing outside…

My mother keeps a strict Buddhist habit of eating vegan twice a month, once on new moon day and once on full moon day. It’s a good way of practicing self control, especially when those vegan days fall on party days. Such as Thanksgiving dinner. While everyone was feasting away at the fat 20lb turkey, my mom watched the Dallas Cowboys and the Seahawks with a bowl of vegan instant pho.

I thought of a PhD comic in which Tajel and Cecilia prepared “tofurkey” for Thanksgiving and wondered if she would have preferred that to the pho. Then over the phone Mudpie brought up the likelihood of being a complete vegan in the future, possibly due to californianization. So I was reminded of a place we ate in Mountain View. A vegan place, surprised, no?

How about some (tofu) crab soup for starter?

I’m never a soup fan, first it’s too hot then it gets cold quickly, it’s like hot pocket without the pocket. But this one was baby bear’s soup. It was just the right amount, too. Tofu cubes, sweet corn, diced carrots, cilantro, and perhaps a little flour to thicken the broth? Very heart warming.

Scallion pancake: just simple fried batter with scallion, I suppose. But scallion is the hit. It smells good. Its flavor dominates and instead of blanddom you get all time favorite snack. Pickled carrots and green beans soften the greasy effect.

Do they look like drumsticks to you? Maybe. But not chicken legs. They didn’t taste like dark meat either. But they definitely were worth the bite. Crunchy and fun to eat. I like these. The only thing I would miss from a real chicken drumstick is the cartilage and the bone marrow (ok, that were two things), but if they’re deep fried there’s little chance any bone marrow would survive the fire anyway. Now onto the main course.

What is the classic dish every American would get at a Chinese restaurant (that is not sweet-n-sour chicken)? Orange Chicken! Our friendly hostess recommended it to us tonight. Presumably you can never go wrong with a chinese chicken, even if it’s not a real chicken. Tofu clumps of various shapes pretended to be oddly cut chicken pieces, browned (not oranged) in sugar and soy sauce and many other ingredients I can’t dissect. They might have been too flavorful by themselves, but were great with fried rice, just like a good chicken always is.

What is the one Chinese dish every American, including my Greek professor who has lived in America for a long time, knows the name of? Peking Duck, you got it! This is no Peking duck, just duck. In fact, it’s no duck, just a bundle of different kinds of tofu, but close enough. It looked just like the real duck, with skin, bone, fat and everything. I felt there were strands of “meat” when I ate this. The only difference is we could eat the bone, which makes it better than real duck. It’s been too long to remember if it was sweet or salty or what, but the stew sauce was arguably the best part of the dish. It shows seasoning is the key to make something taste good, not the stuff being seasoned.

We probably would have gone for dessert to complete a three-course supper, had the restaurant any dessert. But thank God they didn’t, we were so full by the time we said goodbye to the friendly hostess. For only $36.15, we had enough leftovers for another lunch. Excellent service. Take a look at the menu. (It grew since last time we were there.)

Address: Garden Fresh Vegetarian Restaurant
1245 West El Camino Real
Mountain View, CA 94040
(650) 254-1688

Instead of choosing among a few dozen types and brands of cereal, the traditional Vietnamese children choose among a few dozen kinds of stuff made of rice flour and often containing meat for the morning energizer. Meat and rice in the morning, what? You must be be kidding… Well… we have breakfast croissant, breakfast burrito, breakfast sausage and cheese biscuit, sausage and cheese kolache, pancake with sausage and/or bacon and definitely butter, and probably more things out there with meat and dairy. The only difference is rice and wheat, but unless you count your calorie intakes and all, grain is grain.

Banh cuon certainly doesn’t have any cheese or butter in it. I’m still waiting for the day McDonald comes up with MacBanhCuon (MaCuon, maybe?), then banh cuon will have cheese, egg, sausage, and bacon, probably pickles too, but I think the flour sheet is too delicate to be mass produced like the buns. Anyway, I digress. My schooldays back then often started with pho, hu tiu (a noodle soup with pork instead of beef and slightly sweet broth), banh cuon, and occasionally when I was young we had banh gio. There’s not much I could remember about it because it was rare to find a street vendor with trustworthy cleanliness, and it was rare, if ever, to find a store selling banh gio. Yes, it is almost exclusively street food, until it gets to America.

We got our banh gio from a small food shop in Bellaire, downtown Houston, named Gio Cha Duc Huong. A triangular cylinder is its basic shape, a thick coat of rice flour with ground pork and minced woodear mushroom inside, with a little bit wandering too close out to be visible. In all splendor the banh gio is a coarser, thicker, chubbier, more stern and fulfilling version of a roll of banh cuon. I know what it is made of, and I know it is boiled, but I have no idea how they put the liquid mixture of rice flour and water outside a few spoonfuls of meat stuffing to form a pudding wrapped and cooked in banana leaves. The flour coat is bland, but the stuffing makes up for it just right. No condiment is needed, and I don’t know if it has ever been eaten with any kind of condiment. The whole package is somewhat like a student who just pulled an allnighter, rather easily shattered and just collapses in your mouth. A spoon would be much more useful than a fork, and I can’t imagine using chopsticks with this. But its endurance is remarkable: it was made and cooked the same day we bought, it stayed good in the fridge three days later, and its twin brother stayed good one day later at room temperature.

Banh gio is a kind, guileless meal. Unless you eat 3 in one sitting or something oversize like that, it won’t make you feel like carrying a stone around the rest of the day. Its lightness will never betray you.

Sold at most banh mi stores in the States.