Brunch: WestSoy vanilla soymilk
Dinner: Pearl green tea soymilk
When my green tea soymilk got scanned at the cashier, there were two reactions from the cashier girls: “Wow, this sounds awesome! I’ve never heard of it before!” and “I don’t know… it sounds a little weird to me”. Call me a Berkeley-induced hippie if you want (although I’d like to say I’m as far from being a hippie as Japan is from Berkeley), but I side with the first reaction, cuz I like green tea ice cream and I like soymilk. Now I’m addicted to this thing.
Sweet and smooth with a light-hearted, herbal accent. I finally understand why the Brits add milk to tea. In this case, it’s adding tea to milk. The mix rivals my most favorite drink number: mung bean milk.
It’s great alone. It’s an elegant partner to a mini chocolate rugelach or a kuri manju, a sweet chesnut-shaped bun with white bean paste).
The budget:
1 Quart Pearl Organic Green Tea Soymilk carton – $2.85
Package of 4 Kuri Manju – $4.95
Package of 14 Green’s Chocolate Rugelach – $7.99
… all from the Berkeley Bowl…
Found in a furniture store. Refrigerated. In a tube, a tad bigger than a Colgate container. Cuz I haven’t seen any edible paste in a tube at Safeway or Walmart, I say The Swedes rule in design, again. But does the paste sing, too?
The band ABBA had four member, but the paté has at least four times as many ingredients, as the label says, and I quote: “canola oil, crab meat, cod roe, saithe roe, salt, sugar, tomato purée, dill, aromas (this isn’t exactly an ingredient, but whatev), vinegar, potato flakes, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate, spices, yeast extract”. I’ll cut the chase and tell you now that the only thing I could taste…
… was the salt.
In hindsight saltine crackers probably contributed in blinding my tongue, but I don’t regret. It’s pleasantly salty, like French fries and chips. It’s the other background stuff that make the scene. The smoothness melts the instant the tongue reaches it, a fishy moment whips through the air, and you sink to the bottom of the ocean watching two crabs clapping claws. If you eat this for the first time, don’t expect anything, the more blank you let yourself be, the less chance you get hit in the face by the taste. But once that first cracker goes down, your hand will pull out another and untwist the cap of the tube faster than you can say paté.
Can anyone not love IKEA? 🙂
And I still can’t get over the tube shape. It inspires arts. Though judging from the two crooked letters I make on the crackers, the route to pâtisserie suddenly seems bleak.
DISCLAIMER: I received no free product or monetary gift in exchange for this review.
Let’s make it clear: ô mai |oh mai| is not xí muội |xi mui| (huamei), even if Wikipedia says so. The former is a cooked mixture of cut-up fruits, ginger, licorice and spices, the latter is a whole plum dried and salted.
Now that’s settled, I got a bunch of ô mai from Vua Khô Bò & Ô Mai a while ago, all homemade or so the lady told. Guava, rose buds, sấu (no English name, it seems), mango, kumquat, cóc (golden apple), tamarind, and 5-fruit combo, 2 balls each at $6.99 per half pound. Sweet, spicy, chunky, velvety, gingery, tart, salty, it’s all there.
The downside: they all have the same wrapper, so except for the guava one which is extra chunky, I can’t tell which is which if my life depended on it.
And here’s some xí muội. Look more like rocks then edibles, doesn’t it? Americans like ’em not, but I find them lip-smacking good, one tiny nibble at a time.
Address: Vua Khô Bò & Ô Mai
2549 S King Rd #A-B
San Jose, CA 95121
(408) 531-8845
Two oatmeal cookies sandwiching a scoop of vanilla ice cream, everything encapsulated by a dark chocolate shell.
Chocolate shell with ice cream isn’t really my thing, because stuff breaks and spills, like you’re eating a hamburger and look down and see a salad on the burger’s wrapper, except now the melting ice cream replaces the lettuce and mayo. Oatmeal cookie is another not-my-thing, as it’s just too crumbly. But somehow this combination works.
The chocolate keeps the oatmeal cookies from turning into oatmeal, and the oatmeal cookies are soft and chewy enough that they don’t push ice cream out in the back (as much) when you take a bite. No wonder It‘s survived since 1928. It predates the Golden Gate Bridge by 9 years.
San Fran’s tradition sold in box of three (why 3?) for $3.69 at Safeway.
Oh, regarding health concerns (because that’s a trendy topic these days), It’s It contains no trans fat or high fructose corn syrup. Yippie!
I have a soft spot. If I like someone’s movies, I have to try their food too. Take Korean for example, I saw the actors eating bibimbap and ddeokbokki with so much joy I had to find and like them myself. Many months ago my friend Rashmi posted a link of this adorable short movie The Danish Poet, and now I’ve finally found Copenhagen. A Danish restaurant that I will frequent.
Most of the menu is above twenty, which doesn’t seem to bother the elderly ladies and gentlemen dining here. They sip their white wine, take small bites, talk with their backs straight and eyes observant. I always have to watch my pitch in this kind of casual expensive place. Thankfully, the food is plentiful.
A choice of soups or salads precedes every entree. I like how they top my spinach salad with boiled eggs and bacon bits and very little vinaigrette. Split pea soup seems more popular than potato and leek soup and cream of mushroom soup, but as the staff said, they’re all good. I’m not crazy about mushy soups, but a small nutty cup paired with crusty baguette makes a warm entrance for din-din.
Two thin, Moselle style batter-fried red snapper fillets come out crisp hot, unfortunately topped with a rather cold batch of sauteed shrimps and mushroom. The shrimps felt a little watered-down and sea-ish, if that makes any sense. That aside, kudos for the grape halves, whose sweet juice complements the fried fish quite well. I also love the nutty buttery boiled potato and the overcooked mustard greens (cai be xanh) on the side.
The Danish style roasted pork loin also comes with overcooked mustard greens and carrots, both overwhelmed by the red cabbage sauerkraut. The lonely prune is good for nothing. Deep drowned in gravy, those soft slices of paper white lean pork go exceedingly well with apple sauce – once again, the sweet-savory duet triumphs.
For completeness, we get dessert, which turns out a tad boring. The Danish rice pudding is a sad cup of white rice in some thick milky sauce, a few sparse raisins, topped with strawberry jelly and whipped cream. It’s like chè, but is too monotonic. That’s ok, it is cheap, only $3.75. Next time we’ll be happy with chocolate cake.
Address: Little Copenhagen Bar & Restaurant
356 Woodside Plaza
Redwood City, CA 94061
The silver shilling: Red snapper ($16.95) + Roasted porkloin ($16.95) + Rice pudding ($3.75) + tax = $41.13
Note: This post is a secret ad for the 2007 Oscar winner for Best short animation, The Danish Poet. Just kidding. Enjoy the movie.
Given how often my family comes here, I feel obliged to give this store a proper post. About every other week or so, my parents make the hour-long drive to get a loaf or two of cha lua (silk sausage) and maybe a few Vietnamese between-a-snack-and-a-meal goodies. The affable owner lady knows our usual grabs, and we know her trustworthy provision. Whether it’s wrapped in banana leaves, aluminum foil, or cling wrap, Giò Chả Đức Hương has the best of its kind in Bellaire.
The shelves of nem (fermented pounded pork sausage), bánh tét (sticky rice log), and bánh ít (sticky rice pyramid). These small bánh tét are sold all year round, they are only about 4 inches long, usually with vegan filling (mung bean paste or banana). They make an appropriate snack for a teenager, but usually a little too much for me. Unwrapped below, left-right-down: bánh giò – bánh ít – bánh tét:
Bánh giò always reside on the front counter, next to loads of chả (sausages). There are chả chiên (fried), chả lụa (lean pork), chả Huế (spicy), chả bò (beef), chả gà nấm hương (chicken and shiitake), and boxes of chà bông (also known as ruốc in the North, pork floss in English, and similar to rousong in Chinese).
A few more pictures of bánh tét just to do partial justice of how many kinds they have there:
Black bean mixed with sticky rice, disrupting the usual smooth glutinous texture by nutty bites.
Sticky rice mixed with pandan leaf extract for flavor and color. A sweet touch.
Plain white sticky rice, usual fatty pork and mung bean paste filling. The classic.
Address: Đức Hương Giò Chả in Bellaire, Houston
11369 Bellaire Blvd, Ste 950
Houston, TX 77072
(near the Vietnam War Memorial)
(281) 988-6155
This sausage store sets their price a knuckle higher than the Asian markets, but the care, the freshness, and the family touch are unbeatable.
One of my retirement plans is to translate these books into English. This one is about Southern Vietnamese food. Most of these dishes are still there, some hidden behind coconut trees and around small branches of the river net, some popularized in Saigon’s expensive menus, national tour, and exported oversea. Some have vanished as the species of the land died out or became unfavorable, as time is too short to make good treats, as the abundance of resource and imagination is replaced by the greedy fight over benefits, and as people simply forget.
I remember bắp nấu. It’s corn kernels without the peel, cooked like rice, white, soft, and gently sweet, eaten hot with a sprinkle of salt and sesame mix. Mmmmm… I remember thịt kho nước dừa. “Kho” is to simmer meat or fish with water and nước mắm, preferably in a clay pot, believe it or not, earthenware gives a flavor to the dish. My mom used to kho pork and eggs with fresh coconut water (according to Tran Van Chi, and many Southern ladies, kho with coconut milk – the juice from the dried shredded coconut meat, is untraditional, the flavor would be too thick). The result is extremely tender (rệu) pork soaked in a clear, coconut sweetened, savory, golden brown liquid, the egg whites hardened, somewhere between chewy and crunchy, the egg yolk turns into a deep orange ball like the low moon, tightly packed with flavors. It’s a must-have, a tradition, an indicator of Tet…
The tastes of these revive in my mind, as I read Tran Van Chi’s book. Tasting memories, that is. My mom said she misses the atmosphere of Tet in Vietnam, even if we had the food, the mai tree, the firecrackers now, which we don’t, we would only be on the sidewalk looking at the party, we can never be in the party again. Christmas and New Year don’t have the same atmosphere. Like Thế Lữ wrote for Nhất Linh’s Đoạn Tuyệt:
Rũ áo phong sương trên gác trọ
Lặng nhìn thiên hạ đón xuân sang
(Shaking off wind and dew, from a motel room,
Silently watch people celebrating the new spring)
DISCLAIMER: I received no free product or monetary gift in exchange for this review.
