Flavor Boulevard

Mother said “you shall not eat meat on the first day of Tet“. And I said “yes, Mom.”

It has been our family tradition that the first day of the lunar year is a vegan day. It’s not unique to our family of course, most Vietnamese Buddhists eat vegan on certain days of the lunar calendar, the number of days depend on the amount of devotion to practice the precept of not killing. To refrain from all of the festive food is also a step to train the mind against the worldly temptations. Normally, that would be difficult if I were at home, given the excess of pork sausage loaves, braised pork and eggs, banh chung banh tet, roast chicken, fried spring rolls, dumplings, et cetera. But I’m here by myself, it’s like expatriation on top of expatriation. To refrain from meat has never been so easy. 😉

My quick and simple vegan lunch: steamed rice with muối mè (a mix of sesame, salt and sugar, similar to furikake but Vietnamese 😉 ), steamed bok choy, shisozuke umeboshi (salted plum with pickled shiso leaf) and pickled cucumber (a kind of tsukemono), an orange, a cup of mung bean milk from Banh Mi Ba Le and a cup of rose water. (In my recent San Jose trip, I found out that Chinese people take a particular liking to the bok choy outside the food realm. They make huge glass (or plastic?) bok choy that resembles chubby gold fish, except green and white, to put on pedestals for house decorations. Pretty cute, actually!)

Rose water is the simplest way to healthily flavor your water that I learned from a friend: pour dried rosebuds (easily found as an herbal tea at any tea shop) into cold water, let the water be for a while, drink, refill the water. I use a small sieve to filter the rose petals when I pour my glasses and to keep the rose in the water pitcher, but eating a few petals wouldn’t hurt. I thought about making little temaki (rice cone wrapped in toasted seaweed) but that might taste too salty with all the pickles and muối mè.

Snacks: vegan Biscoff cookie given to us by Abbot Thich Huyen Viet at the Lien Hoa Buddhist temple in Houston (these are surprisingly tasty!), a Pink Lady apple, Miyaki Komedawara okoshi (basically, peanut and rice sweets) and a pot of Vietnamese lotus green tea.

For dinner, I’ll probably have a few bánh u tro (sticky rice ash dumpling with red bean filling) and a packet of Vifon Vietnamese vegan instant noodle, then wait until 00:01 am to have a bowl of Dreyer’s double fudge brownie ice cream. 😉 (That’s right, refraining from ice cream is still difficult…) Happy Lunar New Year!

The latest addition to my dream house: a wooden platform to put in the garden where we can sit cross-legged, eat, drink tea, lie down while listening to the birds and wind chime. That platform, we call it phảng |fang|, but I don’t know the Japanese or English word for it :-/

It came about when Kristen and I sat on that wooden thing outside Ippuku tonight. It was outside outside, not a patio sitting, no chairs, no tables, just a platform like a wide bench. We came for their goma ice cream, and the wait for a table was super long so ordering at the bar was the best idea. You’d think it’d be cold, but there was the heater lamp hanging off the roof to warm us. My face was so warm I thought I was gonna get sunburn at 9 pm.

It was so relaxing. Sit cross-legged, savor sesame ice cream, sesame cracker and a mochi, watch the street and the boys goofing off on it, and be watched by people waiting for a table. Come to think of it, we weren’t any less goofy than those boys. 😀

Address: Ippuku
2130 Center Street #101
Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 665-1969

I wrote about twenty different Ippuku dishes before. Every time I came here it feels nicer and nicer. The guy at the bar was also so kind, he gave us water and wet towels (one of which is visible in the picture to the right) although we only ordered one bowl of ice cream…

*Photo courtesy of Kristen Sun*

UPDATE: As of November 2013, this dessert is no more. The machine broke down and would cost too much to be fixed, mostly Asians like this dessert while non-Asians don’t, and management doesn’t consider Asians the target audience. I weep (with rage).

Technically, ごま蒸し饅頭 (goma mushi manjuu) means Steamed Sesame Bun (as a friend told me), but I’m a firm believer that proper nouns, i.e., names, cannot be translated without losing some of their meaning. Since there is no sufficient translation already, I might as well make the English name suitable to describe the object instead of sticking to the literal translation. Hence, to distinguish these little buns from the gazillion of buns in the Far East, I shall call them “buttons”.

Flaky, multi-super-thin-layered dough. Semi-sweet black sesame paste. Adorable, in every sense of the word.

Here’s the label, for those who can read Japanese:

From Super H Mart, Houston, 12 buttons for $3.