Viet World Kitchen

Guide to Lucky Sweets for Lunar New Year

Feeling rushed to get something together for Lunar New Year? You’re not alone. It’s part of the fun and excitement of celebrating major holidays. On the other hand, come Sunday, you can slither into the Year of the Snake with a simple sweet and warm cup of tea. Sit down and contemplate the year to come.

Pick your lucky fruit(s). This holiday typically means lots of fruit displays. I keep it to a minimum with tangerines. This year, a friend shared a bag of mandarin oranges grown by her father in Fresno. Sweet as candy, they’re better than store bought! I’m thankful for my friend Diane’s generosity.

Many Viet people go all out for special Tet lucky fruit trays. You’re suppose to make a sculpture with 5 (lucky number!) types of fruit and set them on your ancestral altar.  We never had that when we were growing up because we focused on preparing traditional Viet foods. My parents, ardent Catholics, say their daily rosary in front of portraits of my grandparents. I figure that we’re covered year-round.

Fried Ginger Chicken Recipe per Japanese Farm Food

This year has been fabulous for Asian cookbooks. I am not just talking about Asian Tofu! It’s in fine company with an outstanding group of 2013 publications. While I’ve checked out Tracey Lister and Andreas Pohl’s Vietnamese Street Food and Charles Phan’s Vietnamese Home Cooking, I hadn’t had the chance to dive into the non-Vietnamese ones, until now. This fall, I was out of town for five weeks total. Phew, I’m back home working on the banh mi cookbook. In between, I’m trying out recipes from autumn Asian cookbook releases that caught my eye.

The first one is Nancy Singleton Hachisu’s Japanese Farm Food, a work that takes a non-fussy, matter-of-fact approach to Japanese cooking. Nancy lives in Japan, where she teaches home cooking and is married to an organic farmer. Their life is filled with straightforward food, much of which is detailed in the cookbook. It’s a highly personal work, not meant to be strict and authoritative, but casual and inviting. You can tell that Nancy put a lot of love into her book. Some recipes require a trip to a Japanese market but others, like this fried ginger chicken recipe (tori no kara age) are a doable with supermarket ingredients. Plug in where you want and can. Sometimes the instruction are opaque and a little finesse is required. For example, when the oil temperature for frying the chicken wasn't specified, I clipped on a thermometer. The recipe had charming cues but I wanted a little more accuracy.

I chose this recipe because frankly, I never get enough kara age when I order it at Japanese restaurants. My husband and I politely divide up however much there is on the plate. Making it at home was a fine workaround. We both got our fill.

Soy Chicharron Recipe

I didn’t come up with this idea. It belongs to Seattle-based radio show host Dick Stein. When we met up in September to tape an interview for KPLU, Dick said that after reading and cooking from Asian Tofu, he was inspired to buy dried tofu skin and deep fry it. The result was soy chicharron, Dick said.  

You can do all kinds of amazing things with tofu skin, which despite its name is really the film that forms on hot soymilk. The Japanese call it yuba and the Chinese know it as doufu pi or fu pi (tofu skin); in Vietnamese, tofu skin is called dau hu ky. You have likely had it at dim sum or on a Viet ride plate as a dumpling wrapper to encase a paste of shrimp; the recipe for those fried shrimp tofu skin rolls (xia fu pi juan) is on page 182 in Asian Tofu.

There are many kinds of tofu skin and basically, they differ in how dried they are. If you’re interested in extra details, I posted a tofu skin primer earlier this year and tofu guru William Shurtleff just published an online history of yuba. 

Dick’s tofu skin chicharrones used sheets of dried tofu skin – sold at Chinese and Vietnamese markets near the dried mushrooms. Get a flat package that contains the yellow pieces of tofu skin. Then get ready to fry up the skin into sparkly pieces.

Tasty Tofu Recipes in March Sunset Mag

From Sunset magazine. Tofu, bacon and avocado sandwich.

Over the weekend, a local newspaper reporter interviewed me about the Asian Tofu cookbook. One of her questions was: Do you see a rise in the popularity of tofu in America?

I paused for a few seconds to figure out an appropriate response, and the March issue of Sunset magazine was it. I’ve been a long-time subscriber to the magazine, which focuses on lifestyles in the American West – the region’s food, travel, gardening, and decor. Sunset has been around since 1898 and has a monthly circulation of  1.2 million plus readers. It has always been a great gauge for what’s trending in the mainstream American West. Last fall, food editor Margo True asked me to curate and develop a collection of innovative tofu recipes by chefs in the West.

Deep-Fried Apple Spring Rolls Recipe

Last year when I was in Beijing to do research for the tofu book, my friend Lillian Chou, food editor at Time Out Beijing, dragged me and stylist Karen Shinto to a McDonald’s. We were there to eat tofu but she insisted that we first try the fried fruit pies. “You can hardly get them anymore in the States so eat up girls!” Lillian said. I hadn’t been in a McDonald’s in years (primarily to use the rest room) yet there we were eating fried pineapple pies at McDonald’s in China.

It was surreal but truth be told, it was good. In fact, the fried pie took me back to my childhood, when my family would buy deep-fried fruit pies at the supermarket. We didn’t know they were bad for us. We got them on super duper sale along with the occasional Twinkies nearby. My favorite was the fried apple pie.

That experience in Beijing, my longing for fried apple pies, and a frozen package of spring roll skins leftover from the Chef’s special crunchy shrimp balls led me to create this spring roll. I should also mention that I have an abundance of apples right now – thanks to generous neighbors and my overbuying at the farmer’s market. I live in an apple farming area. You’ll be seeing another apple recipe or two later.