Viet World Kitchen

How Have Your Tet Foods and Feasts Changed?

Everyone is busy these days yet we still try to squeeze as much of our cultural traditions into the nanoseconds that we have to spare. Last Thursday and Friday, I was scheduled to be in Seattle for an Asian Dumplings luncheon at Monsoon East restaurant (the room was packed to the brim with nearly 70 guests). I didn’t return home till Saturday afternoon. How did I rearrange my Tet celebration to welcome in the Year of the Tiger? My strategy unfolded as so:

• Last Tuesday: Soaked rice, cooked mung beans, and cut banana leaves for banh chung sticky rice cakes.
• Last Wednesday: Wrapped banh chung cakes, made pickled shallots (dua hanh) and tangy pickled cauliflower, carrot, and red bell pepper (dua gop). Refrigerated it all.
• Saturday, after landing in San Jose: Went directly to an Asian market to pick up vegetables, lots of pork. Rory pulled out the Tet decorations and we hung all the red and gold around the house. Attended a Chinese dumpling-making party.
• Sunday: Ate a banh chung sticky rice cake and pickled vegetables, called my parents to wish them chuc mung nam moi, and texted a bunch of friends to wish them the same. Marinated the meats for pork riblet kho and Vietnamese charcuterie (gio lua, cha mo, gio bo). Candied orange peels (mut vo cam).
• Monday: Made Vietnamese sausages, head cheese, simmered pork riblets in caramel sauce, cleaned the house.
• Today:  Putting last minute touches on more food and preparing for a blowout Tet dinner with friends, including Pim, David Kinch, and winemaker Randall Grahm and his family.

I’m sliding into home plate but it’s been lots of fun. My Tet celebrations are not as coordinated as they used to be in the past. Despite the pressures of a hectic schedule, I try my best to be as old school as possible. It’s not easy but I turn off the computer and head to the kitchen.  Apparently, the reverse is happening in Vietnam. This morning I found a story from Vietnam about how Tet foods and menus there are now less complicated than in the past. The causes were related to how more women now work outside of the house and people purchase things or go out, instead of preparing traditional foods at home. Take a read  for the changes going on in Vietnam.

Top Chef Sees Changes in Lunar New Year Feast

What did you do or are doing for Tet 2010? What has changed for you? How do you manage to keep the spirit of the Lunar New Year alive?

P.S. For recipes of the items mentioned, above, I crack open (really!) my cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, and follow my instructions.

Worthy Causes: Charities Cook up Change in Vietnam

Spending Christmas or New Year’s in Vietnam is rather surreal. If you’re in Saigon, it’s hot but there are holiday decorations and Christmas music. I particularly love the fanfare on December 31 because Saigon locals come out for fun; Tet (Lunar New Year) is typically a quiet time for family. Vietnamese people love public celebrations like the one on New Year’s Eve, and the park in front of the Reunification Palace is a giant party and public performance area. Young families ride up on their motorbikes, 3 to 4 people on each, and they hang out, snacking and visiting with friends. It’s loud, colorful, and fun. Multiple stages are set up and you can choose from classical music performance, torch singers, and dance performances by cute young girls dressed up in frilly outfits with stage moms in tow. That night, the scene in the park reminds me of the crazy Asian variety shows that my parents watch on Vietnamese-American television channels.

Indeed, much has changed for the better in Vietnam in the past decade and people, especially young people, are full of optimism. But there is still much to be done to provide greater opportunity to more people. Lots of people visit Vietnam during this season and part of the experience is to understand the needs and potential of the country. We can help out with tourist dollars but you don't have to visit to contribute to change.

Here are three non-profits that are doing interesting work to help improve the lives of Vietnamese people, particularly in the kitchen:

1,000 Newly Discovered Species Found in Mekong River

My parents and other older Vietnamese folks have told me about strange creatures from Vietnam's waters. The lovely dwarf deer is an animal that my dad fawned (pun intended) over. For the most part, I went "Ya, ya, ya. Stories from the old country. Must be myths or they're long extinct."  My assumption was that people either hunted and ate them or they died out due to environmental changes.

This morning Simon Bao pointed me to a 12/16/08 CNN story about a wealth of unusual creatures found in the Mekong Delta. The Mekong River, which starts out in the Himalayas and fans out into a delta region that includes Vietnam and five other neighboring countries, is one of the longest rivers in the world. I knew that thousands of species live in the Mekong but now, they've discovered 1,000 more in the delta alone!

After reading about the spider with a foot-long legspan and the Laotian rock rat that resembles a squirrel, I'll never doubt the stories again. I also won't be such a chicken about the skunks that are partying in our neighborhood these days. 

Heard of or seen any strange Vietnamese animals that you thought were so outlandish that they couldn't possibly exist? Share your story with the rest of us!

The New Yorker's 2008 Food Issue - Non-Asians on Asian Food

Want some good info on Asian food? Check out  The New Yorker's annual food issue released today. There's a fabulous profile of Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, the folks behind Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet (food traditions along the Mekong River) and the latest Beyond the Great Wall (foodways of western China).  Naomi and Jeffrey are terrific people and it's a pleasure to get to know them even better.

Journalist and author Fuschia Dunlop strikes another blow for Asian cooking. Her story about a Hangzhou, China, chef who strictly adheres to high standards demonstrates how Asia is not all about quick-money-making schemes and tainted food. Dunlop wrote a great memoir called Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper and cookbooks Land of Plenty (Sichuan) and Revolutionary Chinese Cooking (Hunan).

What does any of this have to do with Vietnamese food and cooking? These are the kinds of writers who demystify and de-exoticize Asian cuisines, connecting and knitting them into the global culinary landscape instead of letting them sit on the margins. That's what the aim of this blog is. If you read and cook from these people's works, you'll be able to connect the dots between Vietnamese cooking and the cooking of the region!

Finally, I often am asked: Do you have to be Asian to authoritatively write about Asian food? Do you have to be Asian to cook Asian food well? What do you think?

Shrimp Farming in Vietnam: The price of progress

Food safety is a huge concern these days, but for struggling shrimp farmers who have suddenly found themselves open to a world market, their dream has come true. They can finally make a decent living doing work they know and are proud of.

But Asian are fiercely competitive and if you read enough news in Vietnam, there are food safety scares all the time. I remember growing up hearing the stories of people using jet fuel to fry food in.

However, if you're a shrimp farmer in the Mekong Delta and you're trying to get ahead (i.e., buy your first refrigerator) and stay competitive in the world market, what's your best strategy?

We love our seafood but we're rarely willing to pay much for it. If we are willing to pay more, then farmers such as the one in this U.K. article from the Daily Mail, wouldn't need to use funky chemicals to raise tasty products.

• Is your prawn cocktail toxic? -- by Alex Renton, Daily Mail, 10/3/08

Agronomy in Asian is ancient and as farmers speed up to 'modernize' -- what is the price to their health, consumer's health, and traditional methods of producing food? How much do we really need to eat to feel satisfied? I see shrimp cocktail at lots of parties and people can't get enough of the stuff.

Lost in Asian Food Translations

The New York Times published a funny but spot-on article on how the Chinese are rethinking the ways they translate and present their dishes in English. For example, "ants climbing trees" -- for those in the know-- is a great noodle dish. But for those who are unfamiliar with Chinese classics, it sounds like a bizarre dish. Jennifer 8. Lee wrote "Chinese Food Translations: Sweet, Sour, and Downright Odd" to highlight how the Beijing Olympics is getting the Chinese to ponder such PR/communication/marketing issues.

I often spend time wondering what to call Vietnamese dishes in English. We have no standards in English, and sometimes a dish goes by several names in Vietnamese. Even something as simple as banh mi -- I struggled to figure out the appropriate name for in English that doesn't rob it of its essence but is intriguing/approachable enough to the uninitiated. So for Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, I called it "baguette sandwich" after seeing it as "hoagie sandwich," "submarine sandwich." I looked into what exactly are hoagies and submarine sandwiches in the American culinary repertoire and decided that banh mi didn't fit.

More obscure dishes like ya ba ba got the name of "mock turtle stew of pork and plaintains." In Vietnamese, it's literally "fake turtle."

Translating Asian food terms and dishes is hard because for those of us who've eaten these foods for years, we know them in their original names. Here are ones that got me really laughing recenlty:

• spongy buns = Chinese yeasted bao (stuffed bun)
• cakey balls in syrup = Indian gulab jamun, a classic desserts

Those are sooooo wrong. Have any to add?

What is Modern Asian Cuisine?

I ponder this on a regular basis. Doesn't something become modern the moment you prepare it because you can't exactly replicate the experience of the past? Also, modern approaches for me mean using cooking implements like food processors and maybe reducing the amount of fat, salt, or sugar in dishes. However, it doesn't mean letting go of or forgetting the past.

Simon Bao sent me his observations from watching recent episodes of Top Chef. As usual, Simon's acerbic wit makes for a terrific read. Take a look and let us all know your thoughts:

Blurring Borders 33 Years Later

April 30 marked the 33rd anniversary of the fall of Saigon, which sent hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees abroad to create the kind of diaspora situation that this blog tries to capture.

I marked the anniversary by cooking a Viet meal and then watching the gut-wrenching Bolinao 52 documentary that aired on our local KTEH public TV station. My husband and I went through lots of tissues, wiping away tears and sniffles,  as we learned about the horrific journey that one woman endured to get to the U.S.  and her drive to find closure decades later. Let's just say the  "52" in the title refers to the number of people who survived.

The documentary underscored how fortunate my family was to be among the very fortunate to been airlifted from Vietnam in April 1975. We were and continue to be grateful.

These days, whenever I return to Vietnam, I think about what my life may have been like had we not been able to leave. For sure, it would have been difficult for many years but much better these days. Life is relatively stable and good in Vietnam, particularly in the cities, and there's so much communication between here and there. It's a transnational situation in which borders are blurred.

For example, last week, I was contacted by a reporter from Thanh Nien (which means "Youth"), a major national newspaper outlet in Vietnam. Van Anh wanted an story about my work, what I thought of the state of Vietnamese food in the United States and Vietnam, and about my cookbook,  Into the Vietnamese Kitchen.

The interview process was nice but what I was impressed about was her worldly professionalism, English writing skills, and resourceful pluck. Van Anh could have been a Vietnamese American for all I knew. She uses a gmail account. Maybe she's an American Vietnamese? There's a new one for ya!

The article was published yesterday in Thanh Nien's Kieu Bao (overseas) news section. You can read it online IF you read Vietnamese. Sorry.

In today's San Jose Mercury News, which despite being decimated by recent layoffs, still has terrific, timely  coverage of Vietnamese topics, there was a piece about how Silicon Valley Vietnamese Americans (called Viet Kieu) are making Saigon into a "Little San Jose" with their hi-tech start ups.  (The Merc has a way of blocking access after a few days so access this soon or do a search for John Boudreau's 5/18/08 piece.)

So much has changed in the past 33 years and given Vietnamese people's hyper entrepreneurial spirit, there's lots more to come.