 A couple of millimeters thin, chewy, savory, bánh bèo, the waterfern-shaped appetizer, is as familiar to the Vietnamese dining tables as crab cakes to Americans. But not everyone makes it at home because it takes more time than its worth: make the rice flour batter, steam the banh, make the toppings, mix the fish sauce. In fact, I’ve had homemade bánh bèo only once, and it was at my friend’s family restaurant. That said, there are [...] Continue reading Bánh bèo tips from Mrs. Tự  It’s the 29th of the 12th month in the lunar calendar. The last day of the Year of the Cat. The last day before Tet officially starts. But the preparation for Tet is also Tet. Having a good time is also Tet. Being home is also Tet. One of the best parts of being home is not just getting to eat a lot. It’s getting to eat a lot of food that I would never have [...] Continue reading Central Vietnamese rice cracker roll (bánh đa cuốn thịt)  Vietnamese Something occurred to me within the last month: I probably should learn to pair drinks with food, but I hardly drink anything beside water and soymilk. Now I would *love* to learn about the different kinds of water, but living in the city makes it a bit difficult, and soymilk can’t be paired with everything like wine (yet). Coffee, alcoholic beverage, juice? Didn’t quite catch on. So what does that leave me? Tea. [...] Continue reading Black tea rice  I lost my memory card. If you’re a food blogger too you’d know how devastated I felt: the first advice to a food blogger these days is “good pictures”. Well, the pictures I took at Hương Giang are amazing, they just no longer exist. But, pictures or not, as my professor Lawrence Hall would say in his British tongue, “you can’t stop me,” or in this case, I can’t stop myself from blogging about [...] Continue reading Hương Giang – Savour Huế in Houston  I have discovered another great soup. My fingers trembled with anticipation over the sweet aroma, the shining aurulent broth, those fragile fatty bubbles that form a thin film on the surface, the promising dapple of fried shallot,… and the pictures got all blurry. So just squint your eyes and pretend for the moment that you’re hunching over a bowl of piping hot succulence and the steam makes your eyes hazy. Can you smell that sweet aroma? No? Grab a [...] Continue reading Banh cuon, bun, and beyond – Tay Ho #9  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 [...] 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 [...] Continue reading Hot soups for the cold winter at Bún bò Huế Cố Đô |
My tea diary:
My photoblog: Blogroll
Blog under the
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
|
|
|
Copyright © 2013 Flavor Boulevard - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
||
