Viet World Kitchen

Tropical Fruitcake Recipe

Our neighbor down the street stopped us yesterday on our walk and yelled at his son to go into the house to “get us a little something.” His gift turned out to be a small sweet potato custard, a family holiday favorite that he and his son had just finished making. We often pause to say hello and chat with the fellow, an African-American gentleman who uses a wheelchair and cane for his mobility. He also fixes and restores cars and our conversations over the years have ranged from the weather and classic cars to cooking and race relations. Carrying the warm sweet potato custard home, I was glad to have a little something to gift back: fruitcake.

I know . . . you may be rolling your eyes but my family likes fruitcake. It is like a giant version of Vietnamese mooncake (banh Trung Thu) with all the sweetmeats, nuts, and liquor. American friends would gift them to my parents when we first arrived in America and my husband’s aunt would make them for Christmas. Alas, those sources are gone so I make my own, with tropical Asian elements such as candied ginger and citron (e.g., Buddha’s hand), as well as cashews, black pepper and lime leaf.

There are many recipes for fruitcake, as I discovered while paging through the “Cakes” volume of Time Life’s Good Cook Series from the early 1980s. Some are for weddings, some are “white,” most are for the holidays. In the fall, dried nuts and fruit are a great way to savor past harvests. Their jewel tone colors are gorgeous too.

There are 13 pages of "Dried-Fruit and Nut Cakes" recipes.

Then there’s the booze – my favorite part of fruitcake. Lots of it to flavor and moisten the dense cake. After decades of eating and making fruitcake I had this realization this year: If you like trail mix and liquor, you gotta like fruitcake. It’s essentially those ingredients held together in cake batter.

Here’s how I made this year’s batch – which I baked in large and small pans for family and friends.

Cherry Almond Clafoutis Cake Recipe

It may seem like banh mi fills my kitchen but it doesn’t. I do cook other food! In fact, this was my near dessert disaster on July 4. I had a bunch of cherries in the fridge and wanted to make a quick sweet treat to conclude our dinner. Something not too sweet but that employed a decent amount of cherries since they were sort of on the brink of going bad.

Looking through my bookshelves, I pulled out the Fruits volume of Time Life’s Good Cook series published in the early 1980s. It was one of my favorites to check out of the library when I was young, and last year, I bought an entire set on eBay.

The Good Cook series was sold via mail and supermarkets. Each volume was dedicated to a particular kind of ingredient. There were lots of handy how-to technique chapters that preceded tested recipes spanning the globe. Richard Olney edited the series and he was known to be persnickety with details. That’s to say, the recipes reliably worked.

Gluten-Free Miso Tofu Brownies Recipe

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting story last Saturday on using white (shiro) miso as a secret ingredient in desserts. The piece was akin to the story I wrote for them on fish sauce as a stealth component in food. This time, Elizabeth Gunnison Dunn referenced Kyotofu, a New York based maker of Japanese-inflected sweets that informed and inspired her to employ miso in unconventional ways. The results were desserts with a wonderful savory-sweet edge, she said.

There was a fudgy miso brownie recipe that looked terrific, and I wondered what it would be like if I substituted tofu for the bit of flour in the recipe. My logic in doing so is that in Japan, there are bakeries as well as restaurants that use tofu and soy in nearly every dish. Sometimes you’d know it, other times not. That kind of seemless but very smart swapping of ingredients was based on knowing the possibilities of the little soybean. 

Since the miso brownie idea was Japanese in origin, I thought what the heck, I’d give it a try. If it succeeded then it would be like using soybeans two ways, family members reunited in a brownie.

Belinda’s Amazing Almond Cookies Recipe

One of the best – if not THE best pastry shop in San Francisco these days is B. Patisserie run by Belinda Leong and Michel Suas. I met Belinda several years ago in the kitchen at Manresa restaurant in Los Gatos. She was cheery yet focused. She handed me a chocolate treat filled with extra virgin olive oil. She’d just made it and the little candy was divine, sensuous and exploded with a riot of flavor.

I was with my friend Pim who had a question for Belinda about French canele, a tricky little pastry to bake. Belinda whipped out a small notebook and read off notes from her past work at places like Pierre Herme in Paris. I immediately liked her calm resolution and willingness to share.

We didn’t meet again until about a month ago at a restaurant opening and soon after, I visited Belinda’s stylish bakery. It was packed on a Saturday afternoon, with customers ranging from local chef Mourad Lahlou and his crew of Aziza to well-heeled San Franciscans to humbly dressed Chinese ladies. They were at B. Patisserie for Belinda’s pastries. I went with pastry chef Pichet Ong, who was in town from New York and despite being at the bakery the day before, wanted to revisit. That’s always a good sign. 

My Mom's Dried Persimmon Recipe

We've had a very warm autumn and by the time I handed over the persimmons to my parents last Thursday, they were so soft that you'd dent them with a gentle poke. I apologized and also sheepishly handed over some firm persimmons I'd bought from a local farm.

My mom took one look in the boxes of soft persimmons and confidently said, "I'll take care of these." I knew what she'd do with them: make fruit rolls.

Over the weekend, my dad checked in with VWK (he and my mom are avid readers of this blog!). Dad read Amy's comment. She asked how my parents dry persimmons.

Ironically over the weekend, our friend John gifted us a box of hoshigaki Japanese dried persimmons. He purchased them from a farm in California. The farm goes through a special, lengthy process to dry the whole fruit, which explains the $35 a pound price tag. John also reads this blog and asked me how my parents dried persimmons.

Because your minds inquired, my dad sent information and instructions for drying persimmons. What my father wrote: