 Every now and then I feel blessed to grow up in the tropics. It doesn’t let you wear scarves and gloves, but it has bananas. Many types of bananas. There are at least 10 common cultivars in Vietnam, most are for eating fresh as a fruit, some for eating raw as a veggie with wraps, and one is particularly favorable to be cooked in desserts. And desserts with bananas are just about the most addictive thing out there. Take this banana bread pudding for instance. I intended to cut one little slice each day to savor it for over a week, but next thing I knew I was gorging half the slab after dinner. The bread is part chewy, part spongy, mostly firm, juiced up by a semisweet layer of sliced banana on top. It needs no sauce, no ice cream, no chocolate. It is good both at room temperature and right out of the fridge. The description simply can’t capture how delicious this thing is. And it’s not even a well made banana bread pudding, you know, the type of treat that grandmother would make at home or the recipe that a vendor […]
Continue reading Sandwich shop goodies 10 – Bánh chuối nướng (Vietnamese banana bread pudding)
 The revamped Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ #8 dishes out some seriously tender thịt kho (fatty pork slow cooked in nuoc mam and sugar). You know how they say this beef and that melt in your mouth? Well, I haven’t had any beef like that to testify if it’s just figurative talks, but last week I had this pork that really did melt in my mouth. There is no need for either knife or teeth. The porcelain soup spoon cuts through three layers of skin, fat and meat as it would with a flan. The skin, which is half an inch thick and might have been chewy once, is not even as tough as jello. There is perhaps too much fat in this pork: a runny white bunch flimsily holding onto the meat (which should have been trimmed off) and bubbles floating in the sauce. Continue reading There can’t be more tender pork
 In the middle of bright yellow paste lies a crimson orange ball. The egg yolk. Salted and dried up to the size of a cherry. Or should we say it is the moon, at its fullest on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month each year. Roughly 650 years ago, it was a bright moon for the Ming Dynasty, but not so bright for the Yuan Dynasty. The Mongolian rulers’ defeats started from a full moon day of August 1368, when the capital Dadu (present day Beijing) was captured by Zhu Yuanzhang and his Han Chinese insurrection armies. Zhu Yuanzhang then rose to the throne as the first king of the Ming dynasty, and he made sure that the Mid-Autumn Festival, which coincides with the end of the harvesting season, was celebrated throughout the country. As the story goes, such revolutionary victory could not have happened without them little mooncakes. They were secret means of distributing messages among the resisting forces. Words were printed on each mooncake as a simple puzzle. Each mooncake in a package of four was then cut into four pieces, and the sixteen parts were arranged in […]
Continue reading Sandwich Shop Goodies 2 – Bánh bía (Suzhou mooncake)
 Bánh chưng and bánh tét to the Vietnamese Tết are like turkey and ham to the American Thanksgiving. The holiday feast just wouldn’t feel right without them. Although I have blogged about these sticky rice squares and logs before, the lunar new year has come back, and so are they. Sticky rice can be uberfilling in large quantity, and like all festive food, it’s not recommended that you feast on these dense beasts day after day, as satisfaction would turn into tiresomeness. But once a year, or maybe twice, a couple slices of banh tet sound so much more interesting than cereal, rice, even noodle soup. Banh chung and banh tet have rather similar ingredients, especially when they’re made by Vietnamese Southerners. Both are wrapped in leaves (although slightly different kinds of leaves), and boiled for hours in water that is sometimes spiced with lemongrass. After cooking, a heavy weight is put on banh chung to drain the water, while banh tet are rolled around to perfect the cylindrical shape. I remember we used to hang pairs of banh tet in my grandfather’s kitchen, taking one down everyday during the week of Tet to whip out a nice […]
Continue reading Banh tet, sweet and savory
 It must have been at least 4 months since we last went to Thao Tien, and I’ve been telling myself to blog about this place ever since, but for some reason every record of our visit had mysteriously disappeared. Did I not take picture? What happened to the receipt? I have no idea. But the amazing taste of roasted quails haunts me in my sleep. We just had to go back to take pictures again, and it’s only appropriate to complete this last hour of the Ox year with the best of birdies. Thao Tien actually specializes in hủ tíu, a noodle soup with slightly sweet broth, chewy noodle, fried shallot, usually accompanied by pork and shrimp (I blogged about it before at Bún Bò Huế Cố Đô). With the southern Vietnamese theme, the house not only has their waiters dress in áo bà ba but also extends its menu to include the less commonly seen savories like chim cút rô-ti (roasted quail) and cá kèo kho tiêu (a kind of freshwater fish – the “elongate mudskipper“, if you absolutely must know – simmered in fish sauce and caramel sauce much like cá […]
Continue reading Roasted quail at Thảo Tiên
 You know how some dishes just instantly come up when you think of certain places? Those are the dishes that always get served when you go on tours to the region they’re associated with, like barbecue in Texas, crawfish in Louisiana, crab in Maryland, clam in the little island Nantucket of Massachusetts. Well, in the deep south Mekong delta of Vietnam, where there are more rivers and canals than Venice, freshwater fish multiply like crazy and the countryside inhabitants make fish dishes like crazy. But for some reason, the name “Mekong Delta” is always linked with “cá kho tộ” (fish simmered in claypot). Why? The fish (usually catfish) is cut up into thick sections across the body, skin and bone intact (scales off, though), simmered in fish sauce and caramel sauce until it turns beautifully brown inside and out. The mixed sauce is thick and savory, it’s sweet, it’s salty, it can spike up your senses if you add a fillip of chili pepper. Some might argue that fish can taste good by themselves, but this sauce alone would make every mouth water. I’d take the sauce and the sauce-soaked skin anytime over the flesh. Then again, I had […]
Continue reading Claypot fish is now upscale
 Vietnamese places usually don’t appear on the web, why? Because they already paid for ads on Vietnamese newspapers and radio station. Of course the ads are in Vietnamese. There are a little over 30,000 Vietnamese in Houston. It’s amazing how such a small community can sustain its numerous restaurants, with customers primarily themselves. I think I’ve said the word “Vietnamese” enough times for the month. But let me say it one more. Vietnamese must really like to eat out. So we found a new address in one of the newspapers. We arrived past lunch time, so it felt as if we rented out the whole place. The hostesses seem to be enjoying their leisurely afternoon snack as well, they sat at a nearby table watching TV with us. A flat screen on the wall with documentary films about Vietnam. Anyway, let’s start with an appetizer. Continue reading Rice noodle day in Banh Hoi Chau Doc, Bellaire
 They never blink. They never wag their tails. They never mutter a sound. I can never tell what they are thinking or feeling when I look at them. I like them deep-fried, or pan-charred with salt, lemongrass, and pepper, but that’s mostly because of the seasoning mix they’re fried with. By themselves, they are cold-blooded creatures with a distinctive smell, tiny bones resembling oversized needles, very little fat, and worst of all, flaky meat. They’re quite abundant in Vietnam, both alive and cooked. I even like the dipping sauce made out of them. I just don’t like them. Something about their meat freaks me out, or perhaps it’s the childhood memory of having a bone of them stuck in my throat that damages my feeling for those footless fellas. I would have never done it, but my mom, craving for some motherland’s taste, ordered canh chua cá (fish sour-soup) when we went to Kim Son the other day. How could she… fish and soup? Well, it turned out to be the best dish on the table. Canh is soup. Usually the vegetables in canh are leafy greens, and because canh came about before the French and […]
Continue reading Multitaste soup – canh chua ca at Kim Son
 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, […]
Continue reading Sleeky banh soup
 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 […]
Continue reading Hot soups for the cold winter at Bún bò Huế Cố Đô
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