That stuff is everywhere in the South. I’m talking about something that only Texas has. Something a little sweet, a little pillowy, a little chewy, a little cheesy, a little meaty. Something that after you eat one, you just have to get another. Something that 99.91% of the time is chosen over donuts (I made up the stats, but I’ve never met anyone who picks a donut when they’re given this). My Texas friends, I miss the kolaches.
If you haven’t had it, you’re gonna say “That’s a pig-in-the-blanket, Whole Foods has loads.” No, it is far from a pig-in-the-blanket. I repeat, kolaches is NOT pig-in-the-blanket (PitB).
Last weekend we went to the annual Eat Real Festival in Oakland. They had it for three days, we went two. And we still couldn’t stuff everything down. The idea is to show that real, good food can be affordable like fast food. The reality is no matter how small each portion was, we ended up walking slow.
Some things were delicious. Like the Korean BBQ tacos from Seoul On Wheels. Ebony loved the chicken, Mudpie swooned about the spicy pork, I adored the bulgogi, all served on a corn tortilla with some lipsmacking sauce for $3. Follow their tweets to know their locations.
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.
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.
Those burgers are not merely a matter of recharging one’s battery, though one of these joints might have been quite crucial to my friend’s survival on his way from coast to coast, as it was the only oasis between miles of burnt brown hills and deserts after he crossed the state line into The Golden Bear. His uncle always compares other burgers to In-N-Out’s, so when his dad visited the area, the man shrugged “well, I guess I should try it”. His friend, who later came here for conference, felt the same obligation as the other non-Californian conference attenders checked out lunch at In-N-Out. By hook or by crook, this chain gets the reputation of conjuring up a regional specialty that everyone should have while staying in California.
This Saturday August 21 (11am-7pm) there’s some massive fun street food fest going on in the Mission District, next to Garfield Square, San Francisco. I counted 52 “vendors” for the chow, which spans all five continents (well, not including Australia, and Europe and Asia are two) and covers the menu from appetizers to desserts.
The majority power seems to split between los cocineros of Hispanic descent from the Southern hemisphere and the culinarians of the Far East. Colorful dapples here and there are West African (Purple Hibiscus of Nigerian American chef Chukuduwebe), classic Southern comfort (Zella’s Soulful Kitchen of chef Dionne Knox), hot dogs (Let’s Be Frank) and waffle sandwiches (Brass Knuckle), just to name a few.
This name may sound foreign to you, unless you happened to see it in the UK, New York, DC, or Hong Kong. It’s a British chain, with a French name, that’s slowly coming to America (and elsewhere). The private company has decided not to franchise, so it’s not spreading as fast as other fast food places, but they’ll slowly populate the States; Chicago is next this Fall.
Pret, as it is called by many, is like the ready-to-eat sections, as the name suggests, of cafes and food shops. They have a myriad of salads and sandwiches on the shelf that you can grab and take to the cashier. It’s about as fast as fast food can be. They have soups, fruit, baguettes, sushi, wraps, smoothies, yogurt, etc. They make everything in the kitchen each day and give the unsold items to charity at the end of the day.
After seeing Stonehenge with a large group of friends, we went in search of a place for lunch. We were looking in a nearby village and happened upon a nice-looking place called The Ship Inn in Upavon. I don’t know how it got its name, being far from water and not resembling a ship. It did have a castle right behind it, which provided a nice setting for a midday lunch in the back patio of the place.
Let’s get down to business, the food. Many people got hamburgers. Someone ordered a ploughman’s lunch, which was a big chunk of bread with large wedges of cheddar and brie and a few slices of ham. Apparently cheddar is uncommon in some parts of Europe as some hadn’t heard of it. I was in England, so I had to get something distinctly British — steak and kidney pie. It looked like a quarter of a full pie, with a side of vegetables and mashed potatoes. It was good, nothing unexpected, nothing disappointing. There wasn’t much kidney, but that wasn’t a problem. I much prefer the steak to the muddy texture of kidneys. It set me back about 8 or 9 pounds. If I went again, I’d get the same thing, unless I were not that hungry. Then, I’d get the ploughman’s lunch, which comes with or without ham.
In foodie talk, Berkeley is synonymous with Chez Panisse: there’s hardly a writing of Bay Area cuisine without the mentioning of Alice Waters and her propriety. But as attractive as the local and sustainable idea sounds, places like Chez Panisse are clearly not in the accessible range for everyone’s weekly, or even monthly, savour. If it’s not what the locals regularly eat, how can it represent the local cuisine? The common Berkelers don’t make one month reservation to eat at a cafe, they instead would rather make a line on the sidewalk, waiting to be seated in 25 minutes or so-told by waiters with tattoos and spiky hair. Such casualness, though paired with obvious reduce in taste innovation and price, defines the Berkeley dining spectrum, with the holes in the wall like Razan’s Organic Kitchen and Gregoire at the cheaper end, to more comfortable sit-downs like Herbivore and Venus at the other.
I call it a sit-down because Venus is barely bigger than a classroom, and diners are spaced more snugly than students on exam day. Its rectangular base holds a kitchen-cashier combination and roughly 40 seats – an ok amount for lunch and dinner but not enough for the mornings. I’ve seen lines, and been in one myself, standing outside the door even on weekdays. The mornings here are cold, but Venus’s breakfasts are good.
Does this happen to you often? You give a friend something to taste, he says “It’s good. What’s it called?”. You’re stumped. The English translation is easy, but it would make no sense because the name matches neither the food, the ingredients, nor the method of cooking.
It happens to me quite often, and usually I shut off the questions with “Just eat it!”. But I wonder, too. Southern Vietnamese folks have a niche for obscure naming scheme. The names could have sprouted from some jokes, some overly simplified impromptu description they thought of at the moment, some mispronounced foreign names, who knows. The result is intelligible and untranslatable, like bánh khọt, bánh tét, chả đùm. The translatable-but-not-always-understandable cases happen when they attach random verbs after the categorical nouns to make a new name, like bánh xèo – “sizzling banh”, bánh lọt – “falling-through banh”, bò né – “dodging beef”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Bánh bò belongs to this flock. Cow bánh? Unlikely, the thing is vegan to an n. I even thought about the possibility that the name is derived from its resemblance of the cow’s tripe, but they would have called it tripe bánh then. Crawling bánh? Less unlikely, more bizarre. Turns out some grandma saw the rising dough attempt to crawl over and out of the mixing bowl and thought “Gotcha! I shall name you the Crawling Banh”. Vietnamese food is so alive.
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