Candied fruits for a candy Year of the Cat

Its popularity might have declined over the years in Vietnam, but to the Vietnamese expats, mứt Tết remains one of the few links home to resurrect our new spring festival atmosphere on foreign lands. As far as I know these candied fruits are unique to the Vietnamese New Year (Tết), just like the tteokguk and the yakwa to the Korean Seolnal. They are holiday gifts to friends and family, offerings at the altars to ancestors and deities, little snacks for children, tea confections for adults, and vegan treats for those who refrain from eating meat at the year’s beginning. Mứt can be divided into two types: wet and dry. Visit any beef jerky (khô bò) and salted plums (xí muội) stores in Vietnamese shopping malls in the Tet season, you’d see a swarm of mứt in glass jars, the wet kinds wrapped in crunchy paper and the dry kind laying bare. The two most common wet mứt are tamarind (me) and soursop (mãng cầu). The former is kept in its scrawny form, with a few rope-like fibrous strings along the fruit’s length, […]

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Toothsome nana tootsie

Last night I dreamed of these brown sticks in cellophane wrappers. The sound of crunchy plastic unraveled. The smooth yet sticky, dried-syrup-like surface that easily gives way to the pinch of two nails. An ever so lightly sweet, fruity, malty breath whizzing up as your nose closes in… I woke up feeling as though there were some of those pieces melting on my tongue. But the best part of eating a banana tootsie roll, if I may call it so despite it having no relationship to the Tootsie Roll, is, like with the real Tootsie rolls, the chew. You chew it and notice it get smaller, but not any less sweet or less gummy. And it’s only as sweet as a just ripe banana, yet with an alluring touch of coconut. The chewy banana candy is a Mekong delta specialty, where siem bananas grow more easily than rice. The stout, dense, supple bananas either make their way into che, bread pudding, wrapped and grilled in sticky rice, flattened and sun-dried, or cooked in some recipes that are only passed down from mothers to daughters. I just know that whenever we traveled to […]

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Finger split banana

So I just learned this cool thing you can do with a banana finger and your finger. It works better with not-so-ripe bananas of course. Three way split all the times. Credit to Mudpie. Then I told my mom about it. She said “Duh. You just now know?” 😀 For comeback, I told her (again, credit to Mudpie for telling me) that banana is used as a unit in measuring radioactivity. Like all foods (and living things, including you), banana radiates. It just happens that banana contains the radioactive isotope Potassium-40 (19 protons and 21 neutrons, 1 neutron more than stable Potassium) which makes it radiate a little bit more than other things. Fortunately for us the half life of Potassium-40 is over a billion years, so the amount of radiation a banana produces is less than 1/365 times the increase in cancer risk caused by 40 tablespoons of peanut butter. Continue reading Finger split banana

Down the Aisles 7: Lady apples and pudding cups

These plum-sized apples belong to one of the oldest cultivars first known to the Romans, but I only saw them for the first time at Lucky last weekend. Some have a rosy cheek on one side, some are burgundy all around the upper half, like a little rotund Red Riding Hood with greenish yellow gown. The cheerfully color-contrasted skin feels waxy smooth as I run them under the faucet. Memories of Thai apples (poodza) rush through my fingers, but Thai apples are whole green and oblong with a pointy bottom, the Ladies here are shaped like mochi dumplings slightly squished by two fingers at both ends. I pick one up close to my mouth, before the lips can get to its skin, the nose already catches a fresh swift of the dimple where its stem sprouts. It’s crisp, like a pile of crunchy leaf. Its sweetness and tartness are lady-like. Continue reading Down the Aisles 7: Lady apples and pudding cups

Sandwich shop goodies 10 – Bánh chuối nướng (Vietnamese banana bread pudding)

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 […]

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