More starchy sweets

Do you have those times when you keep craving something sweet, even after you wiped clean a cereal bowl worth of Double Fudge Brownie, exterminated many prunes, and skillfully chewed up four pirouette cookies like a mafia boss smoking cigars? I’ve started to see such danger of staying up late, but sweet stuff is always easier to eat than savory stuff in those wee hours. To avoid having my belly exceed my face, I started going through pictures of food (it helps more than studying and thinking about food), and found some munchtastic sweet treats I meant to but never got around to blog about. 1. Chè khoai môn (taro che) One of the few country treats without mung bean paste. Depending on each root and how long it’s cooked, the purplish pale taro cubes can be grainy, nutty, a little chewy, or al dente, like scallop potato minus the butter. However they are, they serve as a textural contrast to the gooey pudding-like sticky rice base. I’m particularly charmed by the vibrant green color in this Lee’s Sandwiches‘ rendition, hopefully from pandan leaf extract. You know it’s a skilled cook when the […]

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Sweet New Year began with chè

We heard dapples of fireworks last night, other than that, everything was normal. TV had the usual shows, roads had the usual cars, the usual air, the feeling of a usual day. Isn’t that strange? New Year came quietly in this town, but with all the bombing and protesting around the world, I suppose a quiet peaceful New Year’s Eve is a nice New Year’s Eve. No champagne, no confetti, no wishes, no counting down. We slept. But how about some black eyed pea? 🙂 Not only is it a traditional American New Year’s food, it always appears in a baby’s first (and most important) birthday in Vietnam (quite a connection, I know… but a good bean, isn’t it?). The word “đậu” for bean, or pea, has the same spelling with the word for passing (an examination), chè is a dessert, so chè đậu trắng is a sweet food of good luck for the beginning of something. Cooked until soft, washed with cold water, the hard “black eye” part of the testa taken off, then cooked again with sticky rice and preferably brown sugar, the beans melt in your mouth. In an average pot of che […]

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Banh mi ba chi pate

Lee’s sandwiches has different kinds of banh mi on their menu, and although I’m a stingy about chances to try out varieties (after finding out my favorite, of course), my mom often surprises me by how open-minded she is on a few things. For example, despite my usual fondness of banh mi thit nuong, this time she got me an extra: banh mi ba chi pate, the new and only item on Lee’s menu that has pate in it. I’m not sure if I would even have seen that on the menu myself. “Ba chỉ” literally means “three threads,” which I loosely understand as three layers, because there’s one really thin layer of skin, then there’s fat and meat. That’s right, sometimes words reflect great imagination of whoever made up the word originally. Just to confuse you, this type of meat is also called “ba rọi” in the south, and I have no clue what a “rọi” is, maybe a mispronunciation of “loại” – “type”? I digress. The meat is so thinly sliced that skin and fat can almost go unnoticed in your mouth. My gut instinct (well… not quite, just […]

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