 Bánh bía from Tường Ký Fast Food. Filling: taro paste with salted egg yolk, would have been perfect without bits of candied winter melon. $13 per box of 4. I’m having writer’s block. Don’t know if that’s true (I once met an Ivy League law school professor who said, as diplomatically as she could, that scientists can’t write), but that’s how my friend put it when I told him that I’ve been sitting around [...] Continue reading Tuesday mind-wandering: food blogging is weight watching?  So Flavor Boulevard went out of existence for about 10 days. It just disappeared. First of all (it wasn’t my fault but I will apologize because that’s how my culture works), my apologies to anyone who tried to visit Flavor Boulevard (and thank you for checking back to read this now ). Secondly, I’ll explain. Thirdly, I’ll complain. And finally (I haven’t decided between devil Mai and angelic Mai yet, so maybe there’s no “finally”), [...] Continue reading Back from the dead  One of my onions grew a plump white sprout. So plump that I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. I left it alone for a week. Then two weeks. [...] Continue reading Alone in the Kitchen with an Onion  Movies are food for the eye (and ears, and brain, or whatever else you like). I watched Bread of Happiness on the plane ride from Houston back to SFO, and it made me happy that whole day. It also strengthened my resolve to study Japanese. The breads shown in this movie don’t seem particularly complicated, their presentation doesn’t sparkle, but they perfectly suit the gentle atmosphere that flows through the plot: looking at [...] Continue reading Food and film: Bread of Happiness and Kimchi Family  Tofu misozuke. Image courtesy of Rau Om Every Saturday in Sunnyvale and every Sunday in Palo Alto, Oanh sets up the tables. She hangs a white banner with a simplified lavender elephant and the word “Rau Om” in calligraphic green, and a poster featuring a little mouse prancing with a block of tofu on his back, with the word “Mice eat Rau Om’s Tofu Misozuke” below. Then she arranges dozens of little bamboo and [...] Continue reading Tofu misozuke – the vegan cheese  My most vivid memory nem happened one summer afternoon at a fishing park in the suburbs of Saigon. Nem is one of those more favored snacks to accompany conversations among friends, and while the adults were toasting away the sunlit hours grilling their freshly caught fish, the ten-year-old Mai made friends with this tiny black-haired guy with her share of nem. He enjoyed the nem so very much that he kept reaching out to her and [...] Continue reading All-natural nem by Rau Om – Rediscovering the Vietnamese meat curing art  “It’s sweet, and it shines like honey,” my mom recalls. She was in fifth grade, her teacher, whose family also owns a fish sauce plant, gave each student in the class a sample of the condiment in a mini plastic pouch. When my mom took it home, it took her mom no time to see that this was the Ninth Symphony of fish sauce. It didn’t take the Vietnamese grandmothers in the Bay Area [...] Continue reading Red Boat fish sauce – Good enough to sprout crazy ideas  Brunch: WestSoy vanilla soymilk Dinner: Pearl green tea soymilk When my green tea soymilk got scanned at the cashier, there were two reactions from the cashier girls: “Wow, this sounds awesome! I’ve never heard of it before!” and “I don’t know… it sounds a little weird to me”. Call me a Berkeley-induced hippie if you want (although I’d like to say I’m as far from being a hippie as Japan is from [...] Continue reading Down the Aisles 9: Green Tea Soymilk  Found in a furniture store. Refrigerated. In a tube, a tad bigger than a Colgate container. Cuz I haven’t seen any edible paste in a tube at Safeway or Walmart, I say The Swedes rule in design, again. But does the paste sing, too? The band ABBA had four member, but the paté has at least four times as many ingredients, [...] Continue reading Down the Aisle 8: Abba crab paté  Let’s make it clear: ô mai |oh mai| is not xí muội |xi mui| (huamei), even if Wikipedia says so. The former is a cooked mixture of cut-up fruits, ginger, licorice and spices, the latter is a whole plum dried and salted. Now that’s settled, I got a bunch of ô mai from Vua Khô Bò & Ô Mai a while ago, all homemade or so the lady told. Guava, rose [...] Continue reading Spicy balls of fruit and salt |
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