Home, again. And again.

The word home is so imprecise. Rather like the word love, I guess.

Questions I was frequently asked when in BrisVegas:

1. Is it good to be home again?
2. How long are you home for?
3. When do you head home?
4. When are you coming home for good?

1, 2 and 4 all refer to Brisbane as home. 3 refers to England.

I caught up with some people who did not know I was no longer living in Brisbane, and my typical convolutions (in response to "What are you doing at the moment?"):

"I'm in the UK - well, obviously not right now. Right now, I'm sweating like nothing else, but in general, I've been living in the UK for the last few years and lawyering."

And that's what I did for two solid weeks. Sweated like nothing else and spun stories about my life in the UK, my life as a lawyer and my life as a merry holiday maker. After a while, I bored myself (and possibly my listeners). I also ate. My goodness, did I ever EAT.

At home (with my family), I had goi cuon, pho, bun nuouc leo and banh xeo. Goi cuon was my hello meal and banh xeo was my goodby meal.

Some of the places I visited were a disappointment. Kabuki, at Stamford Plaza in the city, loses my vote. As does Espressohead in West End. Keeping my vote are Batavia in South Bank and Happy Days in West End. And my brother, mother and sister-in-law all still have my votes, too.

Since coming back home from back home I have been busy with work, Christmas client lunches, work, Christmas itself, laundry and then, um, work. So this is a bit of a pathetic nothing of a post to round off 2008. I thought about writing about my Christmas day (fire! We had a FIRE! And we roasted chestnuts over our open FIRE!) but I don't have time. And I think all my Christmas day photos (rather surprisingly) have people who look recognisably like themselves in, and you can't have a Christmas day post without photographs. But mostly, time is my problem.

I'm hoping 2009 will bring more writing - either on this blog or elsewhere. (Ominous, no?)

Happy New Year to all (four!) of you.

The Joys of Blogging

Subtitle: What's with twinkies?

A few months ago, Wandering Chopsticks suggested a food swap. What a brilliant idea, thought I with full enthusiasm. So I started collecting her goodies for her, and she for me. When she asked what I wanted from the US of A, I was a little bemused. Nothing, really. I have discovered that I am a hideously incurious person. This surprises me, because I think I have a lot of intellectual curiousity. I just don't have any need to see or taste or experience particular things. If they come my way, I will investigate them with all the curiousity and abounding enthusiasm (quite a lot) I have, but if you want to know what I have been dying to try, or see, or experience? I don't know. I'm just not really like that. In addition, I have never been to the US, so I do not know what it has, that I cannot get in the UK or Australia. Oh, except for groovy t-shirts without exorbitant postage costs. But I tangentalise.

This is what the wonderful Wandering Chopsticks sent me, and which arrived shortly before my holiday:-

I have been working my way through the box of goodies. Clockwise from the lychee jellies, we have Fudge Shop Grasshoppers, Brussels Cookies, butterfingers, lemongrass, Nestle Crunch, Twinkies, gunpowder green tea and curry powder so I can make some ca ri ga. Somewhere in there too are some loofah seeds. And what's the blue thing drapped over the Brussels Cookies? Read on, read on...

The first thing I chose to eat was the only thing I asked for: twinkies.

My curiousity about twinkies has two origins. The first (not in time) is from an episode of (I think) The Family Guy, in which an apocalyptic event wipes out the world and the family of The Family Guy live on in a twinkie factory; twinkies obviously being impervious to apocalypse.

The second is my awareness of "twinkie" as a perjorative for people of colour. I was so much more aware of racial issues in US and UK culture that I knew the insult "twinkie" and "coconut", before I knew the insult "banana". And if you're not in the know, the common thing about all the above is that they are white on the inside.

The first time I heard the term, "banana" was when a friend in university, laughingly said to me, "Bet you're such a banana you don't even know what one is." Because I did not know what one was, I could have no feeling except perplexity about her comment. My bemused look was enough for her, still laughing, she explained, "Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. I'm one of your few Asian friends, you know."

I think about these terms every now and then. And you know what? I can't get worked up about it anymore. The terms just make me roll my eyes, either actually or figuratively (depends where I am).

Still, I'd never eaten a twinkie, and I have eaten plenty of bananas and coconuts. And I want to taste the thing impervious to apocalypse. Maybe it will make me impervious, too?

There was another good reason for trying the twinkie first: it was pretty squished on arrival. Clearly, cross-Atlantic travel does not suit a twinkie.

I have this to say about twinkies: ugh. No thank you! Awful airy sponge thing on the outside, terrible tasteless but too sweet "cream" on the inside. I could not finish one. (Sorry, Wandering, for the waste.)

I have also scoffed all the lychee jelly things. I miss them from Australia. My mother used to have loads in her cupboard for the kids (and me) and we'd just randomly pull one out, tear off the foil top and squeeze into our mouths. It's not the sort of thing I have in my own household, but I devour it when I find it in someone else's.

The other things are still waiting to be eaten. I have to eat my sweet things in short bursts.

The curry powder has found its home on my overflowing, disorganised spice shelf, and has already successfully fed my friends, who loved ca ri ga. Thank you, WC for the curry powder and the recipe! I did ask for the curry powder, but it doesn't count as American food (per me).

And the blue things? I had told Wandering Chopsticks that I was off to Sweden. So she knitted another beanie and scarf for "her Iron Boy". My partner and I took her directions and went looking for him in Stockholm's Gamla Stan (old town). We did have some trouble, not because WC's directions were poor, but because, well, all the buildings were the same colour, they all looked like grand churches (except the one that looked like a grand palace) and they all seemed to have courtyards.

But we found him:

Wandering Chopsticks writes about what I sent her ...

Weekend Wokking II: Tuber Coconut Curry

Ha! And I thought I could do a blogging event monthly. It is surprisingly difficult.

This month's feature ingredient is the humble potato. My favourite piece of 2008 trivia is that 2008 is the UN International Year of the Potato. What a wonderful accolade for this most simple, and rather ugly, of vegetables. Can you just imagine the procession celebrating the 'tater?

Although we currently have an abundance of potatoes from our veg box, I have not made anything very exciting with them in the last month. We've mostly been eating boiled potatoes with various veges for week-day dinners. I did make a rabbit stew, but I was not so happy with how it turned out. I did not take a final photo, and binned all the preparation photos.

I got inspiration for my recipe from this source. My recipe is pretty darn similar, except that there are variations based on what I had in my kitchen and how I wanted this flavoured.

For the curry

• 4 or 5 medium potatoes, quartered
• 1 sweet potato, diced into pieces roughly the same size as the quartered potato
• 1 zucchini / courgette , diced into pieces roughly the same size as the quartered potato
• 1 yellow capsicum / pepper, diced (you get the drift)
• 1 onion, diced finely
• 3 or 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 teaspoon shrimp paste (mam ruoc)
• 1 can (375g) of coconut milk
• 1 1/2 teaspoons of mustard seeds
  
• 1 1/2 teaspoons of garam masala
• 1/2 teaspoon of tumeric
• 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspon ginger powder (or use fresh if you've got it; sadly, I did not)
• a pinch (or more) of cayenne pepper
• water
• a nice big stockpot
  

For the rice

• 2 cups (or one cup per person) wild and brown rice
• half a dozen cloves
• water
• a saucepan
• a clean tea towel

What to do

• Saute onions and garlic in a little peanut oil until the onions are translucent.
• Add the shrimp paste and fry for a few minutes.
• Add all the spices and fry until fragrant and formed into a nice paste. If the spices are starting to stick to the bottom of the pan, add in tiny amounts of water.
• Add can of coconut milk. Usually, a the coconut milk in a can separates into two parts, one more liquid, the other more solid. The solid part gathers at the top of the can. Instead of mixing it in, spoon as much of this out as you can, saving it for later in the recipe, and use the more liquid milk. Cook this with the paste until a consistent dark orangey, browny paste is formed.
• Add the potato and mix in with the paste.
• Pour in enough water to cover the potatoes. I usually pour water into my now empty can of coconut milk, which serves the purpose of using all the coconut goodness and cleaning the can so I can happily put it into the recycle bin.
• Let this simmer for about 10 minutes, then add the sweet potato. If needed, top up with water to cover all the potatoes.
• Cover and let simmer until the potatoes are soft, but not mushy. The way I test mine is by pushing a fork gently in. There should be no resistance and nor should the potato crumble. If the potato does crumble, all is not lost. Just finish off the last few steps quickly and on lower heat, rather than leisurely.
• Add the zucchini, capsicum and the reserved slightly more solid coconut milk. Mix in into the rest of the curry. Turn the heat to low and let the whole thing simmer for a while.
  

To cook the rice This is my current fail-safe way to cook rice without a rice cooker. Although these instructions are separate, I usually cook the rice right after I have thrown the potatoes in, during simmering time. Another way of ensuring your rice is ready when your curry is, is to do the rice first. After all, it can sit there, waiting, whereas sometimes you do not want the accompanying dish to wait on the rice, e.g. stir fries!

I have mentioned before that I am not accurate with my measurements. I am happy and comfortable in the kitchen, so I do not need exact measurements for successful cooking (except for baking. I have learnt my lessons - no estimates for baking!) My rule of thumb for rice is almost literal - about a thumb's breadth of water on top of the rice. When I was a girl and my chore was to put the rice on for the family, I was always perplexed by my mother's instruction to check the water level by plunging a finger in and measuring to the first knuckle. I mean, surely everyone's hand size is different? But somehow, this has always worked for our family. And I still use it now, with all different types of rice - jasmine, basmati, brown, wild, red, camargue, arborio - and I've only had the occasional rice mishap, usually because of temperature of the cooker, rather than water. The only caveat to the above is that brown rice does require just a little bit more water, and basmati, just a little bit less.

• Boil the rice, covered, on medium heat for about 15 minutes.
• If you want to flavour your rice, just add the flavourings with the water. For this dish, I added some cloves. I also like to add cardamon pods, when having basmati rice and curry.
  
• Check the rice occassionally to ensure that not all the water has evaporated. I am always perplexed by instructions not to look in on cooking rice. I always look in and have only had occassional mishaps which I don't think were caused by my checking the progress of the rice. In my rice-cooking world, checking is vital.
  
• Taste test occassionally, as the 15 minutes approaches.
  
• When testing a grain of rice, you want it a bit harder than al dente at the point where there is very little water.
  
• If, when you check the rice, you find that there is still a lot of water but the rice grains are soft, drain the water, place over high heat with the lid off for a few minutes and do the above step.
• When there is barely any water left, turn the heat off and place a clean tea towel on top of the saucepan, replace lid and then leave the rice to sit for at least 5 minutes.
• Check that the rice is done - slightly softer than al dente is what you're after.
• If you have to do other things at the tea towel part, it's fine. I have left rice sitting like this for 15 - 20 minutes, and it's still turned out well. I have also been impatient and left it barely any time at all, and it's been fine.
  

Tuber Coconut Curry and Wild Rice!

As a bonus, because this post is late, I cooked roast potatoes for dinner tonight. One of the advantages of an electric cooker is that an electric oven walks all over a gas one.

Roasted is the best way to eat potatoes. No, wait. Chips are. Roasted comes second.

Do you need a recipe for roasting?

• Chop potatoes up. However many you want.
• Chop other veges suitable for roasting up. Other suitable veges are carrots, pumpkin, brussels sprouts, zucchini / courgette, parsnip, mushroom, cauliflower. Heck, you can roast just about any vegetable. The size that you chop veges will depend on what it is and when you intend to throw it in with the potatoes. I chop carrots to about 150% the size of pototoes. I add mushrooms, brussel sprouts and courgettes near the end of roasting time.
  
• Quarter an onion - keep the 'tail' of the onion intact so the whole thing doesn't fall apart.
• Throw in a whole head of garlic, too, if you've got one sitting about. Tonight, I sadly did not. For the garlic just separate the individual cloves and rub them together in your hands to remove most, but not all, of the papery skin.
• Liberally pour olive oil over the mixture of potato, onion, garlic and whatever other veges you're using.
• Crack on some pepper.
  
• Toss together.
• Bung it in the oven (temperature medium high, unless you're in a hurry, then crazy high) and go find something else to do for about 40 minutes to an hour.
• Ta da! Roasted veges.
• To get a nice crisp edge, I cheat by grilling my potatoes for about five minutes prior to serving. This is a bit better for my heart than using heaps of oil and butter, which is how most of the roasting recipes I've seen tell me to get that crisp edge.
• Serve with other yummy things, but, most importantly, lots of condiments. In the photo below, we have tomato sauce, chilli sauce, wholegrain mustard, Colman's mustard and spiced carrot chutney.
  

*****

I'm submitting this recipe to Weekend Wokking, a world-wide food blogging event created by Wandering Chopsticks celebrating the multiple ways we can cook one ingredient.

The host this month is White on Rice Couple.

If you would like to participate or to see the secret ingredient, check who's hosting next month.

Comfort food: chao ga (rice congee with chicken)

After my last post, I am struggling to write new posts. Below is something I drafted a while ago, and had not quite got around to pressing the 'publish post' button. It is appropriate because it is a recipe for the ultimate comfort food - chao ga (rice congee with chicken).

I have mentioned before that when I am feeling sick, I want to eat chao - rice congee. If I am at home, my mother would cook this for me; although after I moved out of home, I did not tell my mother when I was sick because she would berate me. Because somehow, I am to blame if I catch a cold.

More than a month ago now, I had the flu. It was awful. For one day, I was in bed tossing and turning, moaning deliriously. I could have been a heroine in a Jane Austen novel, and soon the man of my dreams would leap onto his horse to ride hastily with news for my family of the dire state I was in. In reality, the man of my life telephoned work to tell them I was ill and to ask someone to re-arrange a few appointments for me.

When I recovered, I had a lingering cough, so I did not telephone my mother to speak with her for a while. After a few weeks passed, and with the cough still present, I had to call my mum. So I did. The phone rang and rang. It's terrible of me, but I was glad she was not at home. So I rang my brother to have a chat with him, but he was not at home either. Next, I tried my sister. Thankfully, she was at home, otherwise I would have got all morose.

I hoarsely chatted to my sister, coughing and spluttering occassionally. She asked me about the cough and I told her that I had been so sick that I had taken a week - an entire week! - off work, and that I spent most of the time in bed, unable even to read. She commiserated. Suddenly, I blurted out, "But don't tell Um! Don't tell her I was that sick. She'll worry."

On one of the days I was home from work, I made a huge pot of chicken congee. I think it cured me (minus that lingering cough).

For the congee:-

• 200gms chicken (whatever part suits you. I used breast, but thighs would also have been great).
• Garlic
• Ginger, about a cm of, sliced
  
• Carrot, one, diced
  
• Fish sauce, splash
  
• Jasmine rice, a cup of, or thereabouts
  
• Water, a lot
  

• Coriander for garnish
• Ngo gai (perennial coriander, also known as sawtooth or Thai coriander. I don't know why it's called Thai coriander because coriander coriander is also used in Thai cooking, and ngo gai is used in Thai and Viet cooking (and possibly other cuisines, I just don't know). Probably has other names too.)

How to cook it:-

• In a decent sized saucepan and on medium heat, saute the garlic in as small amount of oil as you can manage.
• Toss in the rice and stir it quickly around the saucepan.
• Pour in enough water to thoroughly cover the rice.
• Add your chicken, ginger and carrot.
• Pour in enough water to cover everything.
• Let the whole mixture boil briskly for about ten minutes.
• Extract the chicken. Let it cool, then tear into strips and put back into the saucepan.
  
• Turn the heat down and let the chao simmer until the rice grains have taken in so much water that they cannot take anymore. You cannot leave the saucepan - you can wander away but you must not forget it. You will need to keep topping up with water, so have some pre-boiled water handy.
• When the chao is the consistency you like - my Ba and I are at the extremities of the chao consistency spectrum: he prefers his rice grains a bit al dente and his water a clearish broth; I prefer my rice grains thoroughly soft and the chao water thick with the broken up, water sodden rice grains - add a splash of fish sauce. For the way my Ba likes chao, the simmering part only takes about 15 minutes. For the way I like chao, the simmering takes an hour.
• Turn the heat off, let cool for about 5 minutes and then serve into nice bowls, with garnish, cracked pepper and soy sauce.
  

Easy as!

Although, given that I crave this when I am sick, it is sometimes just too much effort and I will pout instead. Does not work to make my tummy full, but makes me feel a bit better.

Weekend Wokking 1: Asparagus

So, Wandering Chopsticks has a blog event: Weekend Wokking.

Now, I love blog events, but I'm crap at entering them because, well, they occur too frequently. And frequency is not one of my blogging strong points (had you noticed?). But this event is MONTHLY. I can do monthly. Perhaps...

What I can't do, is use a wok in the UK. This is because we left our wok back home. It's a proper steel wok, that my partner got given as a present when he moved out of home. When I moved out of home, my brother and his-then-girlfriend-now-wife gave me a rice cooker and a 25kg bag of rice. One of my sisters gave me a block of knives (without telling my mother because giving knives as presents is a Viet no-no).

Also, we do not have gas - we have a weird electric stove top thing. The first night that I cooked on it, I was very upset: my rice noodles overboiled and spilt all over the stove top and I freaked out about whether or not the stain would come off. All throughout dinner, I was very, very quiet. This is not a good sign with me. I am a chirper. I chirp away on most occassions. Being quiet is indication that Something Is Wrong. I tried to be chirpy and happy because it was our first home-cooked dinner, in our new house, but I was already worrying about not getting our bond back for having ruined the stove top.

There's a happy ending: the over-boiled rice noodles water just wiped away real easy like.

Since moving into our new house, we have got what I always wanted but never bothered with in Australia and did not get in the little flat - organic veg box home delivery. In Australia, we enjoyed our regular traipse down to the Green Markets so much that getting a veg box home delivered would have spoiled the fun. In the little flat, there was no way the veg-box would actually get delivered to us, and no guarantee that someone else would not take our veg-box goodies.

One of the (many) wonderful things about veg-box home delivery is the seasonal produce. And currently in season, in the northern hemisphere, is asparagus.

Did you know asparagus makes your wee smell funny? And, though it makes everyone's wee smell funny, only about 40% of the population can smell the asparagus-wee-smell. Don't believe me? Surely you believe wikipedia? So, for all those participating in Wandering Chopsticks' Weekend Wokking for May/June, there will be a confluence of asparagus-smelling-wee. Great, huh?

Wandering Chopsticks informs me that a wok is not necessary for Weekend Wokking and, therefore, my entry follows below. It is a pretty pathetic entry, because I only had this weekend. Had I a whole month, I might have come up with something more interesting. I did not do anything special with the asparagus - just cooked it ever so slightly, to enjoy its full, fresh flavour. So, this probably doesn't count as an asparagus recipe, but I'm submitting it anyway. Just to get started.

Weekend Fry-up with vege sausages, asparagus, grilled tomato, eggs over-easy and a kohl-rabi & snow pea salad

Weekends are for long breakfasts. I love hot cooked breakfasts. Weekday mornings are for eating something nutritious and then rushing to work. Weekend mornings (if we're not rushing to some fun activity) are for lingering over breakfast, newspaper spread out, chilled music playing.

What you will need for two breakfasters:-

The Fry-up

• Sausages
• One medium onion, sliced
• Eggs (one per person, or more if your persons are greedy)
• Tomato (half per person)
• Fresh asparagus spears
• Non-stick saucepan or griddle, if you're brave. I covet griddles, but have not yet purchased one.

The Salad

• Dressing: wholegrain mustard, extra virgin olive oil, cider vinegar, cracked pepper
• Cherry tomatoes, a handful, halved
• Kohl-rabi, about the same amount as your cherry tomatoes, diced
• Snow peas (mange-tout for the British, and maybe elsewhere too, I don't know!), roughly same amount as cherry tomatoes, cut into little bits
• Red capsicum (or red pepper for you English and Americans), same amount as cherry tomatoes, diced
• Lettuce leaves (I used baby gem, but any will do)
• A bowl
  

What to do:-

The key to a good fry up is timing. I used vege sausages, which take longer to cook on lower heat than meat sausages, so bear that in mind if you're going to replicate this with meat.

Make the salad first. In the bowl in which you will mix your salad, take a teaspoon of wholegrain mustard and mix with a teaspoon of oil. When well blended, add a dash of vinegar and whizz like a maniac. Now add in your halved cherry tomatoes, diced kohl-rabi, snow peas and capsicum. Grind some black pepper in.

Wash the lettuce leaves and leave to dry.

Salad.

Slice onion, and fry with a small amount of oil. Before the onion gets translucent, add the sausages and let fry on a low heat, checking and turning every now and then.

Halve a tomato and place cut side down onto the saucepan. Push it about it bit to make sure it doesn't stick to the pan, but otherwise ignore.

Wash asparagus. Holding firmly in the middle, break off the woody end. Wherever it snaps, thus is your asparagus. If the whole spear bends, you do not have good asparagus.

When the sausages are brown all around, add the asparagus spears. Cover saucepan with a lid so that the asparagus cooks through in a steamed fashion. Remove and place onto pre-warmed serving plates.

Flip tomato onto its round outside. Push sausages, onion and tomato to one side, so that there's enough room to fry some eggs. Break eggs carefully into saucepan and don't let them mix with the sausages, onion or tomato. When the albumen has turned from translucent to white, turn the heat off and flip over to get that over-easy feeling.

Arrange your plates: lettuce leaves on one edge, forming a bowl for the salad. Asparagus on the other edge, sausages etc in the middle. Serve with crusty bread, chutney, chilli sauce and soy sauce for the egg, if you're me.

Have understanding partner on hand, who will wait while you take some photos of breakfast before digging in. Understanding partner will laugh at the soy sauce. This is permissible, provided it is done with a measure of affection. No mockery allowed.

Breakfast!

****

I'm submitting this recipe to Weekend Wokking, a world-wide food blogging event created by Wandering Chopsticks celebrating the multiple ways we can cook one ingredient.

The host this month is Wandering Chopsticks.

If you would like to participate or to see the secret ingredient, check who's hosting next month.

Bun Bo Hue - The Recipe

After extracting ingredients and instructions from my brother in law, I went to acquire the items that I did not have at home at the Asian grocery nearest to me. I wandered around and around the aisles - it's only a small store, but I find its logic incomprehensible. I picked up my ingredients and went looking for the stock cubes. I just had to see them, and ponder why and whether to use them. I found the cubes. One for pho, one for Bun Bo Hue, one for Bun Rieu, one for canh chua (sour soup). And they were hilarious. Their ingredient list? Salt, MSG, spices. All of them listed those three ingredients and nothing else. Definitely not going to buy stock cubes (but thank you for the offer, Hedgehog).

What you will need if you want to make Bun Bo Hue

For the eating:

Noodles - I used pho noodles because that's what I had in the cupboard and I wanted to use it up, but thick round rice vermicelli is best.

Thin slices of beef and meatloaf that you can buy from most Asian grocery stores. It's called cha lua in case you want to buy it. I didn't because there was plenty of meat on my soup bones and we don't eat that much meat. You can also add liver (ugh) and blood cubes (also ugh), but not having them is okay too. I'm a laissez faire kinda diner.

Herbs - you will need holy basil, spring onions, coriander

Bean sprouts - it ain't no Viet noodle soup without bean sprouts! I have a Viet-Australian friend who shares my family name - but, no, she is not related to me, really and no, we're definitely not sisters, or twins and nor do we look like each other although we do both have long hair and wear glasses - and who cannot abide bean sprouts. I find this thoroughly shocking.

Fish sauce.

Shrimp paste mixed with chilli and lemon.

Nice large soup bowls! Chopsticks, spoons, etc. Oh, you will need serviettes or tissues handy, as this is a runny nose kinda soup.


For the soup:

Beef (or pork, if you prefer) stock bones. Oxtail is best (I channel my bro-in-law) but I again just used what I had in the freezer.*

Lemongrass - mince some finely (about half a cup full) and some chopped into approximately two-inch long sticks. I tend to mince mostly the thick white base, and use the long leafy bit of the lemongrass for the sticks, with a few of the thick white base bits.


Chilli - depending on taste and fieriness of chillis, three or five finely minced.

Shrimp paste - this will stink out your fridge once you open it, so I store mine in its glass jar, inside another plastic container, thereby jailing its pungency.

Oil. I use olive, but any would be fine. Except perhaps sesame or peanut.

Chilli oil - for cheating with (all will be made clear).

The three essentials: onion (one), ginger (thumb-sized knob), garlic (um, half a clove?) - charred

About two litres of water.

A big stockpot

A frying pan

Another saucepan for pre-parboiling of stock bones

How to make it:

Parboil the stock bones first; boil on medium-high heat until a brownish froth appears. Then wash the bones in warm water and discard the boiling water. Set aside until its grand moment.

Char onion, ginger and garlic.

Using the flat of a large knife, squash the lemongrass sticks. This releases their lovely flavour.

In a little bit of oil, fry up about a teaspoon-full of the shrimp paste with about a quarter of the minced lemongrass. Don't let this burn (add little bits of water if you're worried that it will). Add stock bones and fry them in the shrimp paste for a bit. Add the lemongrass sticks, onion, ginger, garlic and water and bring to the boil. Turn heat down and let simmer for an hour or so.

Fry minced lemongrass and chilli in about a tablespoon full of oil and add to the stock. The soup should have a lovely red tinge. If it doesn't, add some more chilli oil. Red tinge, ta dah!

Simmer again on even lower heat for as long as your patience or hunger will permit, and taste the stock. If too bland, add some fish sauce but remember that fish sauce also gets added at the eating part so don't over flavour the stock. You want it to taste of your lovely ingredients.

The soup is ready when the meat on the bone is soft and tender, and falls nicely away with only minimal persuasion on your part.


Assemble your bowls and eat with relish.

As I was eating, I couldn't quite remember what Bun Bo Hue was supposed to taste of. I could not call up any memories of eating Bun Bo Hue with my family. I don't think I've ever ordered it in a Viet restaurant (I find pho on the menu difficult to resist if I want to eat a noodle soup). But my version was yummy. The household food-critic (my partner) declared it delicious but that pho was better. As always, he is right.

*So, why all this 'using up'? Because I'm moving!** Woo hoo! To a house! With a yard! Hurrah!

** Post-lude:

After such a promising end to my last post, I neglected. I am sorry. I'm rubbish. The reason I'm rubbish is still the same, but in addition: I was moving and then I did move. From my little flat, into a house. I'm off internet connection for a bit, and I have photos to go with this post, which I will update later. I'll also respond to comments from the last post, later. Later.

Bun Bo Hue

Bun Bo Hue is a noodle soup from the region of Hue, the old imperial capital of Viet Nam. When in Hue with my sisters, we completely forgot to order any Bun Bo Hue from anywhere to eat. We were much too excited by the vegetarian banquet put out before us, and at another restaurant, distracted by the flags that they gave to each table of Viet Kieu. They gave us the Stars and Stripes of the US, before we had even said anything. I looked at it for awhile wonderingly, and then, while the waitress was out of the room, got up and went over to the display of flags and exchanged the Stars and Stripes for the Australian Union Jack and Southern Cross combo. I plonked that flag down on our table , and my sisters affectionately shook their heads at me. Another table watched my progress and then did the same: exchanging their Stars and Strips for the red and white maple leaf affair of the Canadian flag. We all giggled conspiratorially together when the waitress came back and looked from our table, to their table, and then over to the flag table. But she neither frowned nor smiled, so what we had done must have been a neutral act.

It also rained the entire couple of days that we were in Hue, so we did not wander the streets very much; we were chaperoned by our grumpy tour guide from monument, to temple, to imperial palace grounds, to hotel, to market, to restaurant. I found our tour guide extremely difficult to understand: the Hue accent is mellifluous, gentle and musical; the words flow together. I need sharp distinctions in my Viet words to know what is being said. After all, my family speak Viet in sharp ringing tones, like the fishwives they all once were, or were descended from. Initially, I frowned at our tour guide, listening as hard as I could, and then I would look over at my eldest sister, who also looked like she was struggling to understand. If she was struggling, I had no chance. Eventually, I gave up. I wandered away from our guide a number of times to read signs in English, and I don't think she liked that very much. I also had my lovely red raincoat, so the rain was but minor hindrance to my explorations. She did not like the rain, and she would rush us from one shelter under turned up eaves to another, or from the van door to the inside of temple grounds. I wanted to wander and explore the grounds themselves, not merely the inside of buildings. So I did. My sisters tried to tell her to leave me be, but she would try to call me in to listen to her guiding. I told her that I was happy exploring on my own and that I had trouble understanding her because my Vietnamese was very poor. It was easiest for me to surreptitiously tell my sisters that I would see them shortly and wander away, into the rain, where she would not follow.

As we drove away from Hue, shortly after lunch, I cried out, "Oh no! We did not eat Bun Bo Hue in Hue!" My eldest sister said, "We can stop." I replied that I was much too full. Her response? "Eat it in Sai Gon, it will probably be better anyway." And we all chuckled, suspecting this to be true. I was not overly impressed by Hue, but I think that was the fault of our guide, and not of the town, which has much crumbling imperial and colonial granduer to recommend it. Another time, I will visit and I will not be shackled by no grumpy tour guide!

I decided to try to cook Bun Bo Hue recently. So, it being roughly three weeks since the last time I had spoken to my parents, I telephoned my mother. I informed her of my intention to cook Bun Bo Hue and asked her what the ingredients were. I had done a brief internet search to try to locate a recipe, but failed.

I did find some interesting information, however. A number of sites (don't ask, when I google, I open loads of links and then close them again. I only remember the ones that were useful, and sometimes, not even them) referred to Bun Bo Hue as 'spicy pho'. I thought this was odd, and much pleased when I read Wandering Chopsticks' comment that Bun Bo Hue is not pho. I like her comment a lot:-

Mini-rant here. No it is NOT pho. Calling bun bo Hue a variation of pho is like saying fettucine alfredo is a version of spaghetti. Sure it's easy to reference a more popular dish when trying to describe it, but in both cases: different noodles + different flavors = different dishes entirely. OK?

Tangentially, I also found this and this. The first is a recipe from Khmer Krom Recipes for a soup remarkably like Bun Bo Hue, but of Cambodian origin, and the second is an interview with the author of the website, Mylinh Nakry, by another blogger on Cambodian food, Phonmenon. I am probably going to get myself into trouble here. Oh well.

Mylinh Nakry, of Khmer Krom Recipes, says:

Vietnamese people loves this Khmer Krom soup so much that they changed Khmer Krom recipe name to Vietnamese name *Bun bo Hue*, and never gives us any credit which is no surprise to me since they also took our land. On 6-4-1949, French government illegally gave *Kampuchea Krom*( now know as South Vietnam) to Viet Nam. Hue (now know as Central Vietnam)was part of Champa that Khmer Empire was once ruled Champa and most of South East Asia.

She also makes this claim of Bun Rieu and pho, and probably some other dishes as well, except that I don't know; I was looking, and then started to feel a bit silly. I cannot speak to her claim about the origin of Bun Bo Hue, or Bun Rieu, or pho. I do not know enough about the history of food and politics in Viet Nam and Cambodia / Kampuchea. I am prepared to accept that the borders of the region of what is now known as Viet Nam that borders what is now known as Cambodia were porous, and that cultural exchange, including inter-marriage, linguistic exchange and food exchange would have occurred. Perhaps one cuisine influenced another; more likely, the exchange was both ways. I am not prepared to accept that when Kampuchea Krom and Champa existed, one culture and one people and one food type existed and then continued, unchanged, to now, or to 1949. Nor am I prepared to accept that the Vietnamese people who first made Bun Bo Hue appropriated a Khmer Krom dish, and renamed it, in the same way they appropriated the land. It's just not that simple.

Maybe they made something like it. Maybe the Cambodians used a spice, or herb, that the Vietnamese had not before and they thought, "Gosh, that's tasty. Why don't I chuck me some of that into this here soup I be making?" (Although perhaps not in a fake Aussie/Irish brogue.) Probably, the people who lived in the Champa kingdom are the ancestors of the people who live there now and their diaspora. As now, there were some indigenous and some not. But eventually, if you just keep living there, you belong there. Who were they? Cambodian? Viet? It would be fiendishly difficult to disentangle what 'belongs' to one culture / ethnic group or another. And for what? A claim to authenticity? Nationalism? Parochialism? To what end?

I'm very pleased that Mylinh Nakry feels strongly about her cultural / ethnic identity (however she would describe it) and applaud her attempt, via her website, to bring some attention to how Cambodian cuisine has languished in the shadows of its neighbours. But not in this simplistic way, that is so potentially damaging. I also don't condone the hateful, and hate-mongering, and indeed contemptuously ridiculing, comments posted to Phnomenon's site about Mylinh Nakry either. I got myself kind of lost in it. First I was mildly amused, and then outraged, and then, just saddened.

Whatever its origin, it's a delicious dish. And I, because of my ethnic background, know it as Bun Bo Hue.

Back to my story.

When I spoke to my mother, to ask her the ingredients of Bun Bo Hue, she asked me if the local Asian grocery store stocked stock cubes. Perplexed, I said that I thought they did. She told me to find the one for Bun Bo Hue, and to use pork feet instead of beef bones in my stock. I said, "But don't you make it from, you know, lemongrass and chilli and other things?" She replied, "No. I never cooked you Bun Bo Hue. Or if I did, I probably made it from the stock cube. Ask your brother-in-law. He knows how to cook it." I was flummoxed. Had I never had Um-cooked Bun Bo Hue? I wracked my memory, and decided it was probably true. I had eaten Bun Bo Hue with my family, but rarely. More likely, we would have had Bun Rieu (which is on my list of things to work out how to cook). If we wanted to eat Bun Bo Hue, we would ask my sister in law to cook it. After further miscellaneous chit-chat with my mother, I rung off.

I then telephoned my brother in law, to ask him. I did not telephone my sister in law because she is more difficult to track down. After a chat with my sister, and telling her the true reason for why I had called, I spoke to my brother in law. He is the pho cook in the family. He also used to work in restaurants and can roll spring rolls at an alarming speed. We competed once (I'm a mean spring-roll-er myself, from way back) and he won easily; he rolled four for every one of mine. "So you want to cook Bun Bo Hue?" he started. "Yep", said I. "With pork or with beef?" "With beef!" It is, Bun Bo Hue after all (bo means beef). "Okay. Well make sure you have oxtail then. That's the best meat. Nothing from the shoulder, okay?" I made agreeing sounds although I was already going to disobey him. "Next, if you go to the Asian supermarket, you can buy stock cubes. You can get Bun Bo Hue stock cubes." "What?" I burst out. "That's what Um told me to do! I don't want stock cubes. I want the ingredients!" "Oh, okay," he conceded, "I just wanted to make it easier for you."

Stock cubes! I can't believe my family use stock cubes.

And on that note, this post is long enough already. Next post will be the recipe. Promise.

Hot Lemon Fritters

I may have, in the past, mentioned my poor dessert making abilities. I blame this mostly on my imprecision as a cook. It is therefore a joy to find a dessert recipe I can muddle, and have something edible at the end. I find myself curiously craving sweet things and desserts in England. A meal seems incomplete without 'pudding' (whenever anyone says pudding, my brain starts playing a part of Pink Floyd's The Wall: You can't have your pudding if you don't eat your meat. I get a faraway look in my eyes, and people just assume I'm mesmerised by the idea of pudding. Nope, just listening to imaginary music.)

My partner got this recipe book as a birthday gift many years ago, and it was one of the few recipe books that made the trip to England with us. Many of the recipes have stood us in good stead. We had a joyous dinner party at our home in Brisbane with the pumpkin and eggplant tagine, and it makes a regular appearance at our dinner table, with variations aplenty: parsnip or sweet potato instead of pumpkin, and (a personal favourite) okra instead of eggplant.

We had some friends over for dinner, and I decided to cook pho again, as they had expressed an enthusiasm for it. I wanted a light dessert to accompany my pho. If you are not familiar with them, Vietnamese desserts are rather odd; beans, agar agar and coconut milk don't leap out at one as dessert foods, if one grows up with steamed puddings and ice-cream. Or so I am told. Matter of fact, Vietnamese desserts are strange for me, too. My father did not have a sweet tooth, and my mother was much too busy to make sweet things if my father was not going to bother eating them. The first time I remember my mother making something sweet was when I was about 7 years old; her children were finally out of her hair enough for her to labour over something sweet.

The dessert she chose to make was red bean and some-kinda-nut 'che': a kind of soupy dessert, which you can have hot or cold. I must have inherited my tastebuds from my father because I hated it then, but am prepared to tolerate it now, if only to make my mother happy. There are some Viet desserts I like, in particular the tri-colour bean dessert drink (layers of yellow bean, red bean, green jelly, coconut milk - which is really four colours but no need to be pedantic, now), but not many. I have yet to find a che that I like.

So, not only do I not know how to make a Viet dessert, I don't especially enjoy eating them. Hence, I delved into the Moorish cookbook, looking for something complementary, and relatively easy (because I am a dessert wimp).

I found hot lemon fritters with cinnamon sugar, and though they weren't perfect, they did work remarkably well. Naturally, I fudged the quantities, but here is the recipe, cribbed from Greg and Lucy Malouf's.

For the fritters:-

250ml milk (I used soy milk, because that's what we had in the fridge)
70g butter (the recipe called for unsalted butter but I can't stand unsalted butter, so salted it was!)
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil (I just used normal olive oil)
125g plain flour (couldn't work out how to vary this one, so plain flour it was)
finely grated zest of two lemons (my lemons were quite large, and I'd already used half of one, so I zested one and a half lemons)
3 eggs (nope, no fudging there)
1 tablespoon of honey (or thereabouts)
1 teaspoon or orange-blossom water (or thereabouts)

Zest of one and a half lemons, waiting patiently for its moment.

You will also need to make cinnamon sugar. This is very easy: supposedly you need 150g of caster sugar and a teaspoon of ground cinnamon. I guestimated the amount of caster sugar. Measuring cups etc are for the weak. You basically just mix this all together.

Cinnamon sugar: the photo is a tad dark because I don't like using the flash on my camera.

To make the fritter batter, start by melting the butter with the milk and olive oil over a nice low heat.


When this is done - the recipe says when the liquid froths up but mine never did, possibly because of the soy, possibly due to the alignment of the moon and the stars, who knows - add the flour and lemon zest, and beat with a wooden spoon. This done over a low heat, but I found I needed to remove the pan occassionally as my heat seemed too high (the flour was cooking before it was blending into the liquid.)

My milk, butter and olive oil mixture can't be bothered frothing up.

Mixing in the flour and lemon zest: much vigourous stirring is needed.

Once the mixture has become smooth (ish) and ceases to be liquid, beat in the eggs, one at a time. Lastly, add the honey and orange blossom water.

Egg in the mixture.

That's it. You should now have a pancake-batter-like batter, that smells encouragingly of egg and lemon. The batter should be left for at least an hour - I left mine overnight. The next day, the batter had thickened up nicely.

To cook the fritters, heat a lot of vegetable oil in a deep saucepan. I test whether my oil is hot by holding one wooden chopstick in the oil, against the bottom of the pan, and checking to see whether bubbles form. If bubbles form quickly and vigrourously, it's hot enough. If they don't, wait and test again whenever your patience has run out. This is my method for testing the heat of boiling oil for all my deep frying needs.

The recipe says to carefully place teaspoon-sized blobs of the batter into the oil. I tried this initially but found the batter would balloon out, as below.

Hot oil and cooking batter.

Ballooned fritters.

Eventually, I got annoyed at carefully placing blobs, and just started pouring the batter in. This had the desired effect of the right sized blobs creating themselves, and the collateral effect of not ballooning. So I recommend just slowly pouring your batter in. It won't form one enormous fritter, because the batter just won't hold together. Instead, it will of its own accord form the right sized balls. Good, well behaved batter.

It's cooked when it's golden brown.

The final result: some balloons and some balls, all tasty.

The recipe recommends rolling the fritters in cinnamon sugar and eating with custard. I just brought the batter and the plate of cinnamon sugar to my guests, and we all had fun rolling the batter in the cinnamon sugar - each to his/her own discretion as to the amount of sugar - without custard, because custard is a strange creature that would only make a very rare appearance in my household.

Easy, and quite yummy. A good accompanient to pho.

I cooked pho!

I knew that leaving Brisbane for England would mean that my cravings for Vietnamese food was unlikely to be sated without a visit home. When I emailed my sister to remind her of the date that I was arriving in Australia, and asking her to arrange a family get-together for the following day, her response was to ask me what I wanted to eat. We decided that we would have goi cuon (transparent rice wraps) for lunch and then pho for dinner.

The entire time I was in Brisbane, I ate. I had breakfasts, brunches, lunches and dinners organised, visiting some old haunts, hanging out in newly married friend's houses and stuffing myself silly with my family's cooking. Um cooked everything she knew I liked, often all at the same time. Ba, too, joined in the cooking and made some of my favourite dishes. I ate the noodle soup of my region (bun nuoc leo) for dinner and breakfast, together with caramelised prawns, steamed crab and rice. On another day, I had banh xeo (crispy pork and prawn pancakes), spring rolls, more caramelised prawns and my mother's special deep fried chicken that she makes for the kids, but that I always end up eating. Um had bought a box of mangoes, and kept lamenting that the dragonfruit in my father's garden (which fruited in riotous abandon last year, right after I arrived in England) would not even flower while I was home. After finishing the main dishes, and while I still sat at the dining table nattering away to my siblings, Um would pull out a mango and start peeling it. I could not say no.

I am back in England again, in the cold, and contemplating what to do to celebrate tet this year. Last year, we were not settled and mostly friendless. This year, we are settled, and we have friends, and I would like to have a more noisy Tet. I love cooking for people, and because it's winter, I decided I would cook pho.

I have never in my almost 30 odd years cooked pho for myself. And I have lived away from home pretty much since I was 18. As a matter of fact, I do not cook all that much Vietnamese food. I tend to rely on my siblings and my mother for that. To ensure I do an okay job, I had to cook a trial batch, which is what I did last weekend.

First, I had to collect the ingredients. Most of the spices I have on hand. Our spice cupboard was magnificent in Brisbane, and it took about 6 months for the spice cupboard here to mimic the glory of the past, but it does. So I knew that I would have cinnamon, star anise, cloves and coriander seeds at home. I also had rice noodles from a previous stock up trip to the Chinese grocers. All I needed was the fresh stuff: bean sprouts, basil, coriander, spring onions, and limes. I knew I could not get the one herb that makes an average bowl of pho, better and a good bowl of pho, perfect: ngo rai. I don't know what ngo rai is in English. I've seen it referred to as Thai coriander (in Cairns, Queensland, which made me bristle with silly affront), thorny cilantro or perennial coriander. Oh, and the beef bones and beef to make up the rest of the soup.

Getting the beef bones was remarkably difficult. My partner had intended to do our grocery shopping at Sainsburys (an English supermarket) while I was at work, so I emailed him my list of ingredients that I would need. He was informed that Sainsburys are not permitted to sell meat on the bones, and that everything comes to them pre-packaged. I had forgotten to tell him that oxtail could be substituted for beef bones.

The next day, I went to Waitrose (another, slightly more upmarket, English supermarket - even the supermarkets in the UK are class structured. Shamefully, Waitrose is my favourite supermarket). I went to the butcher counter and asked if they had beef bones. I was told the same thing as my partner: that everything came to them pre-prepared and packaged. I asked for oxtail. The butcher counter guy looked at me apologetically and gestured towards the customer whom he had just served: I just sold my last one to him! I looked over at the other customer, and brief thoughts of violence occurred. I smiled at the butcher counter guy, and assured him it was okay.

I then went to an 'International Food Market and Halal Butcher'. Their meat counter was much more prosaic, and less surgical, than Waitrose's. When I asked for beef bones, the butcher said: Fish bones? No, I am a butcher! (My Aussie twang clearly lingers). I spoke more clearly and the butcher walked over to where large hunks of meat lay: Which one do you want? Surprised, I asked him if he had anything smaller. He looked at me strangely and picked up one of the smallest pieces and weighed it. Only one kilogram. Four pounds fifty. I looked uncertainly at him: the piece of meat was twice the diameter of the thickest part of my thigh. I said: Um, do you have anything smaller? You can have it for four pounds, he said. I was not concerned about the price; just what on earth I would do with a kilogram of beef bone. Okay, said I, but can you cut into maybe four smaller pieces? He quickly hacked at the meat, and it fell expertly into four large chunks: Like this? I thanked him and took away the meat.

At home, I used two of the chunks, and froze the other two, safe in the knowledge that if my first pho venture did not succeed, I had another two chunks with which to try again.

My pho recipe comes cribbed from the internet - matter of fact, it was how I found Wandering Chopsticks, when I googled 'pho recipe' more than a year ago. Mostly, I needed a recipe to double check what was in the broth. I knew that onion, ginger and star anise went in, but cinnamon, cloves and coriander seeds surprised me. Last time I ate at my brother in law's, I checked his broth: there were the cinnamon and the cloves. I tried to telephone my brother in law to ask him for tips, but he was not at home. I rang another sister instead, not for cooking tips as she is such a terrible cook she once burned chao, just to chat because I get despondent if I ring my family and come away having spoken to no one. The joy of a large family is that you just ring the next number and then the next, until someone answers.

Here is my recipe, although it is mostly Wandering Chopsticks', and I suspect she is a better cook than me. I think I have said on this blog before that I am a bad recipe follower. My recipes are imprecise, because I am. I substitute and I don't measure ingredients. And I don't know how much a pound or a quart is.

For the broth, you will need:-

Beef bones: I used about 500 gms for two people. Although my soup would have fed four. I suspect that if you cook this for more people, you just increase the water and the beef bones, but don't increase the other flavourings. I'll report back on that one, as I intend to cook pho for at least 15 people.

One surprisingly large onion. (Your onion does not have to surprise you with its largeness, but mine did me.)

Also, you can add garlic: half a clove is a good amount. Somewhat unusually, we were out of garlic at home, so none went into my stock.

A decent knob of ginger: about the length of your thumb and at least twice as thick.

One carrot: chopped into finger sized chunks.

One or two sticks of cinnamon (my stick was very long, so I just used one), a handful of star anise, some cloves and some coriander seeds: dry fry these before throwing into the stock.

A fry pan for dry-frying, a stock pot for cooking stock in, and another pot for parboiling.

All the flavourings (except the beef bones, which is too hideous to be photographed).

To cook it:

Chop the carrot up first. Leave it wherever you chop it.

If you, like me, are not fortunate enough to have a gas cooker, prepare the onion and ginger by sticking it under the griller, almost touching the element. Leave it there while you do everything else, but remember to keep an eye on it, and perhaps ask your partner to turn off the smoke alarm. If you're using garlic, do the same with it as you do the onion and ginger.

Start boiling a lot of water. I initially used two litres (but ended up using much more). Throw the carrot into the water, and leave it well enough alone.

Wandering Chopsticks and Viet World Kitchen gave me a tip I had not heard of before: parboiling the beef bones, rinsing and then using in the stock. This is to get rid of impurities, so that one gets a nice clear soup. My mother used to make me stand at the pho stock pot, scooping out the muck as it rose to the surface. It was peaceful work, and I enjoyed it.

I followed this tip. And you know what? It works brilliantly. No muck to scoop off, so it meant I could wander away from the stock pot to read my book! I highly recommend parboiling the bones, for oh, maybe five minutes (until the meat goes white, and the water gets frothy) and then rinsing the bones quickly in warm water before throwing back into the stock pot.

I parboiled my bones in a separate pot, because I knew I would have plenty of time to do the dishes while the stock bubbled away. This meant I could have some water on the boil (with carrot!) and that I could just rinse and throw the bones straight into the water.

Then, dry fry all the spices and throw them into the stock pot too.

Check that the onion and ginger are nicely burned. If there are any too-burnt bits, peel them away, and then throw onion and ginger into the stock pot.

My gently simmering stock.

Let the whole mixture boil for a couple of minutes, turn the heat down and then do the dirty dishes (chopping board, parboil saucepan, breakfast/lunch and too many mugs of tea leftovers). Stir the stock, turn the heat down again, and wander away, preferably to read a good book (but not so good that you forget the stock).

I had a jug of boiled water ready at all times to top up the stock if it got too low, and also to refill my cups of tea while I read my book, but that's a less integral part of the recipe. Check the stock every now and then, and stir.

I perhaps boiled my stock on too high a temperature, as the water got dangerously low (it no longer covered the bones!) after about one and a half hours. After topping up, I turned the heat from mark 3, down to mark 2, and left it again for another hour. Even mark 2 was a little too high, so I turned it down to mark 1. Basically, it needs to simmer ever so gently. You don't want it just keeping warm, and you don't want it boiling. You want the water to burst occassionally with a bubble. Mark 1 worked for me.

All up, I let the stock simmer for about four hours. In the last hour, I prepared the fresh stuff to go into our bowls (rinse bean sprouts, basil and coriander, chop limes, thinly slice red onion and spring onions, arrange nicely on plate). My partner sliced a 250gm sirloin steak super thinly, because he's good at that sort of thing. I cooked the rice noodles last, using the same element that I had cooked the stock on. While I was rinsing the rice noodles, I moved the stock pot back to the element and let it boil over.

All the fresh stuff.

The finished soup.

I have not bothered to tell you how to cook the rice noodles. Just follow the packet instructions.

Fill bowls with noodles - but don't overfill, because the noodles expand while you're eating.

The sliced beef is then cooked in a ladle held in the stock pot, and the soup is spooned into the noodle bowls.

Table setting for pho, with fruit bowl and stack of magazines, miscellaneous correspondence and one Christmas card.

Each person adds the herbs and sprouts as they wish. My family uses hoi sin sauce as the dipping and flavouring sauce. I am yet to find a brand of hoi sin sauce here that I like.

The verdict? My pho was a success. It was such a success, I forgot to take a photo of the finished product, with herbs and sprouts. My partner and I just dug right in. We ate it the following day for dinner, and it was still delicious.

Close up of my bowl, sans herbs and sprouts.

Sugar Bananas

[Warning: This post is all about bananas.]

Wandering through Brick Lane on Sunday with my partner and a friend, we cross the sprawling pavement sellers of myriad goods, commenting on how chaotically like South East Asia it was to be wandering along a crowded street, dodging bikes and touts. Ahead of us, boxes of bananas were stacked up, and a woman calls out: "Normal bananas! Baby bananas!"

I walk past glancing curiously but with no intention of buying anything. "Baby banaNAS!" I take a few steps past her and then say to my partner: "Sugar 'nanas? I have to look." I walk back and look down at the boxes of bananas: they were indeed little, about the size of my thumb. I stop. I pick up a little bag of bananas. I peer closely at their skin: yes! It is thin, strongly indicative of the super sweet sugar bananas of home. I put the bananas down. I have had a huge lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant on Kingsland Road and I am much too full for bananas. What's more, I don't want to have to carry them all over London, before heading back to where we live in Southern England.

I look over at my partner and friend, who stand amidst the chaos, waiting patiently for me. To the woman standing near the boxes, I say: "How much for the little bananas?" "One pound," she replies. "For each hand?" I ask, confused. Each hand is bagged separately, but some have only three fingers, and some have more than ten. "For the box," she says dismissively.

I am heady with glee. One pound for a box of precious sugar bananas! For the many months that we have been in England, I have been eating cavendish (mostly fair-traded), not even my preferred lady fingers, which we used to buy at the Green Market from a man and his bewildered son, who grew them on their farm out near Gin Gin. In the supermarkets, you can only get cavendish - or dark green lady fingers. No thank you! We eat bananas almost everyday, on our morning cereal and muesli.

I rush over to my partner. "They're only one pound for the box! AND they're sugar 'nanas. Can I have a pound?"

He hands me a pound, wordlessly, and I run back to the stall.

Beside me, a man caresses one of the little bananas and leans in to me: "These ones are good," he says conspiratorally. I look down at the box he indicates, his hand resting proprietorally upon the lovely yellow bananas, still green tipped and the skin so fragile I can almost see it bruising under his fingers. I reply assuredly, my own hand on the box I want, "These are better."

Transferring my box of sugar bananas into two bags, I return to my partner and friend. "Look!" I say, with joy. "Aren't they cute? And they're sugar bananas."

Sugar bananas are tiny bananas. They are, perhaps, the smallest variety: no more than 3 or 4 inches. They are a brighter yellow than cavendish or lady finger, but because they ripen quickly and their skin is no more than a millimetre thick, they are often brown. The flesh, too, is more yellow, a creamy transluceny with clearly visible, but tiny, seeds. My mother likes hers mushily soft - I prefer mine slightly green tinged and harder. It is a battle, at home, of whether the sugar bananas will last long enough to be as ripe as my mother likes, before they have succumbed to my greed.

I am reminded of my mother when we were first able to get sugar bananas in Australia. She came home from the markets triumphantly nursing a large bag of bananas that looked much too ripe for my palette. My mother would often come home from markets with treats for us: bags of sugar plums and rambutans for me, if they were available; durian, mangosteens and custard apple for my sisters. The first time Um brought sugar bananas home from the markets, I was disappointed not to have sugar plums or rambutans. "Don't you remember these?" Um said to us. "I do!" One of my elder sisters took some bananas from my mother and started peeling. I wrinkled my nose at the over ripe smell, and wandered away.

At dinner that night, my mother uses a spoon to slice bits of banana, eating them with her rice. She breaks off a banana to give to me and I say no. "You used to love these," she admonishes. I shrug, a little sulky that I had not got rambutans instead.

The next day, I am looking for fruit to eat. My mother suggests I eat a banana and I say no. She sighs and says, "There are greener ones in the rice bin, but don't eat them all." In our rice bin are many more hands of the little bananas, and none of the lady fingers I think I prefer. I take out one, mostly green tinged, but with bits of yellow. It is kinda cute. I can eat it. I poke its skin and it browns straight away, which does not please me. Nevertheless, I peel and eat it. It is wonderfully sweet and much more pungent than other bananas. I take out another. And another.

My father saves some of the smaller bananas (he hides them from all of us, deep in the dark recesses of the pantry), he dries them out and tries to collect the miniscule seeds. A few years later, we have our own sugar bananas growing in our backyard orchard. I don't know if they come from the seed, or if (as he is wont to do) he has asked for a cutting from the sellers. They don't fruit as often as the larger banana, but they give my mother greater joy. Our house ceases to have lady fingers and I eat only the tiny bananas. Cavendish begin to look obscene, and much too large to be eaten.

Slowly, since living away from home, cavendish drift into the norm. They are the easiest to obtain, the most widely available, and the only ones with fair trade stickers. Even lady fingers have faded from my memory in this green and pleasant land. But, for this week only, fair trade, locally produced succumb to the pleasures of sweet tiny 'nanas. I can eat four in a sitting. Oh, joy.

Sweet Potato and Okra Curry

It was only a matter of time before I started posting recipes.


****

One largeish onion - diced
A couple of cloves garlic - diced
One tin of tomatoes
A teaspoonful of garam masala
A teaspoonful of ground tumeric

One large sweet potato / kumara - diced
A handful of okra - topped and tailed

Plain yoghurt to accompany the meal (or you can chop some chives into it, like I did)

I used elephant garlic from the Isle of Wight's Garlic Farm. Elephant Garlic is enormous! It is much milder in flavour than usual garlic and is fabulous roasted (but it takes an awfully long time). It is a lot more liquid than usual garlic and seems to have a somewhat bitter aftertaste. This is not a problem when roasting, but it does seem to be a problem when saute-ing. I don't usually mind bitter flavours, but because I used about half a head of garlic, the bitterness was overpowering the other flavours. I dealt with it by adding some palm sugar to take the bitter taste away.

Saute the onions, and when softened and translucent, add the garlic. Throw in the garam masala and tumeric and fry into a nice paste. To prevent burning of the spices, you can add a little bit of water to the mix.

Add the tin of tomatoes and stir into the spice/onion/garlic paste so that the colour becomes consistent. I love this part: I find thoroughly enjoyable watching the colours merge, and the consistency of both sets of ingredient change to something altogether different.



Once the tomatoes and paste have unified, throw in the diced sweet potato. Cook without a lid so that the sauce reduces, but if it's getting too dry, add a little water and perhaps put a lid on, so that the sweet potato cooks through. I like mine still a little bit crunchy.

Towards the end of cooking, add the okra. Put the lid on to cook the okra - it's cooked when it changes from dull green to bright green.

Serve with rice, accompanying yoghurt and, if you're me, soy sauce. I eat soy sauce with almost everything.