A Taste of Viet Nam

One of the things I go on and on about over here is Viet Nam. And how much I miss it. And while the best way of getting over someone, something or in this case somewhere, is to focus on other people, places or objects, I can't help but look back. A trigger happy finger resulting in a hard disk full of pictures and nothing to do during a blackout doesn't help the case much either. So I've decided to blog about Viet Nam. I may as well since Nepal is taking its time revealing its many secrets and wonders to me.

So I'm clicking through pictures and a photo of quay comes up. The asian salty version of a churro, deliciously crunchy on the outside, if ever so slightly greasy, and hollow on the inside. You leave it to soak in a bowl full pho' – a chicken or beef water based soup, with a delicate aroma of ginger, basil and spring onions – until it soaks up this savoury liquid. If you time it right, with that first bite you can experience the crispiness of the outside and the juicy chewiness of the inside all in one go. You can then counterbalance this with a slurp of the slippery rice noodles waiting patiently in your bowl, letting the rest of the quay soak up some more pho'.

Another wonderful dish is cha ka, fish cooked with lots of dill, spring onions, peanuts and a yellow slightly spicy sauce of some sort. This is sautéed on the spot, then combined with small portions at a time of cold rice noodles, fish sauce, chili, more peanuts and smelly feet sauce to taste. Smelly feet sauce is optional – it is a purple/gray fermented version of fish sauce which customarily has lime-orange juice and freshly chopped chili added to it when served. It is then stirred vigorously with chopsticks until it begins frothing and can then be used as a condiment for fried tofu, cold rice noodles or cha ka. At its most concentrated form it smells like feet to foreigners, hence why many Vietnamese now jokingly refer to it as smelly feet sauce.

One last dish to be described, and there are so many more of them which will have to wait until the next bout of nostalgia for Vietnamese food, is bun cha. Char-grilled flattened meatballs and slices of fatty beef, each street kitchen has it's own particular blend of flavours its customers diligently come back for. During lunch time those bbq smells can be traced back to a man wearing a face mask which does nothing against the clouds of black smoke engulfing him, crouched over a block of coals holding what appear to be two square sections of chicken wire clamped together with a makeshift handle. A closer look shows you the beef expertly threaded between the two wires, 5 dishes at a time being quickly and efficiently prepared over a cylindrical block of coal. When the meat is ready it is added to a bowl of diluted fish sauce, pickled carrots and green papaya and served hot with a basket full of soya sprouts and leaves (and I do mean leaves not herbs or salad – possibly of the hibiscus variety), and sticky cold rice noodles. Extra chili and garlic can be added to taste. Delicious.