nakji

May I ask what work they're doing there? As for driving on the sidewalk - well, heck, that's just another lane around here. It looks a lot like Korea in many ways - modern, with great facilities, and the idea of my husband being able to study Chinese, the ability to have a scooter again, and all that lovely food makes it an attractive destination. Now the deal breaker - what's the availability of Western food like? Limited to fast food, or can you buy staples like bread and cheese in the supermarket?

I don't have to speculate when the Lonely Planet Vietnam can answer this... "For centuries, the Vietnamese language was written in standard Chinese characters... Around the 13th century, the Vietnamese devised their own writing system called chu nom, which was created by combining two Chinese words or by using single Chinese characters for their phonetic value...The Latin-based "quoc ngu" script, widely used since WWI, was developed in the 17th Alexandre de Rhodes (A French Jesuit Scholar). [it] served to undermine Mandarin officials, whose power was based on traditional scholarship in...scripts that were largely inaccessible to the masses." Apparently he was able to preach in Vietnamese after only six months in the country. Those wacky Jesuits! They sure did get around.

When I watched them do it in Korea, I seem to remember they spent some time whacking the noodles onto the board below - maybe that contributes to the flat shape? Fabulous thread! It's really turning my head. What do you think it would be like to live there full-time/ How's the traffic and pollution situation, for example? Hollow-stemmed vegetable is eaten here, too - don't know what it's called, though. And the dates! I've been staring at those on the street here for the past week - wondering what the heck they are! Keep the pictures coming!

For my cold, I took a cup of my Dad's home remedy: It never fails!

I forgot to add this in the post above, but I just want to put it on the record that that Bun bo nam bo was one of the finest things I've had in my mouth this year. Crunchy, tangy, sweet, salty and smooth all in one...I can't believe food that tastes this good isn't full of fat or cream or something. It's the fish sauce that gives it the complexity of taste, I suppose, the kind of taste in the west we're used to getting from fatty ingredients like cheese. Magnificent. I wouldn't be disappointed if you told me I had to eat that every day for the rest of my life. In the jumble of the power being out this morning; and then having to run some errands for my husband's photo exhibition, I wasn't able to hunt down the Bun Bo Hue for Miz Ducky, but it's on my plan tomorrow. I also plan to do some more Korean cooking tomorrow - this time a Friday night favourite of ours, Dalk Galbi. (Spicy pan fried chicken with rice cakes). I've been looking for a recipe forever, and then one popped up in the Korean Home Cooking thread the other day, so I'll be using that. Thanks ChryZ! I was also hit by the mega cold that has been cutting a swathe through our teacher's room the past week, so I haven't been as active as other days. We crawled out of work around 10pm, which limited our dinner options. Hanoi is not a late-night dining sort of place, unless you stay up until 5, when everything opens for breakfast again. The only thing for it was to go to the best pub in town, the R & R. The R & R is run by a Dead-Head from West Virginia. He and his wife make pie. Not meat pie, like most tourist traps in town, but good, honest fruit pie. It is very hard to find good, American-style fruit pie in Asia. They make cherry and pumpkin, and it makes your heart sing to eat it. The sidewalk outside is crowded with Minsks (Old, Belo-Russian motorcycles left-over from Soviet times. Long term ex-pats adore them, as no one would deign steal them, and they're great for touring trips in the mountains.) and the walls inside are decorated with tie-die and the latest speeches from the president of Iran. There is a faintly herbal fog in the air. It is an excellent place to lift a pint. They also make the best burger in town. Actually, it may be the best burger I've ever eaten. The bun is toasted in butter, and the patty is made from proper ground New Zealand chuck. You can get it done with local beef, but I always pay a dollar more and get the imported. It tastes of beef fat and butter. Beetroot is not offered as a topping. It tastes really, really good. I'm not sure the picture does it justice. They also do really good tex-mex - about as good as I imagine you can get it this far from the Rio Grande. They do not perform such perfidies as serving whipped cream in the place of sour cream. It is not run by Australians, like every other Western joint in town. (No offense to Australians, but too many of them in Hanoi have offered me whipped cream in place of sour cream in this town.) Peter had the nachos with refried beans, which I assure you tasted much better than they look in this picture. In short, when I want really good, really accurate American food, and I don't want to cook it myself, I go to the R & R.

Lunch today was a trip to KOTO, which is a training restaurant for street kids. From their brochure: "Nearly half of Vietnam's rural population lives below the world's poverty line, and more than 50 percent of the country's people are under the age of 25...in Hanoi alone, there is an estimated 19,000 young people living on the streets. /snip/ KOTO has 70 trainees from disadvantaged backgrounds on its 18-month program. All are aged between 16 and 22. Studying either Food & Beverage service or Commercial Cookery , the curriculum is accredited by the internationally recognized Box Hill institute. The courses are complimented by hospitality-based English language classes." They're located across from the Temple of Literature, which guarantees a steady clientele. Their menu is simple and delicious, heavy on sandwiches and some Vietnamese dishes. Their desserts are some of the best in town. We started off with juice - banana smoothie for Peter, Passionfruit juice for me. It looked like a jewel. I had Bun bo nam bo, a beef noodle salad with peanuts, rice noodles, fried shallots, herbs, shredded carrots, and bean sprouts. Its dressed with a lime and fish sauce dressing. You pour the sauce over and mix it up! Peter had lasagne, which wasn't interesting enough to take a photo of. More grape tomatoes. Dessert: Carrot cake for me: Caramel "Appling" for him:

Thanks! I'm burning ancestor money every night out the street to maintain it!

The power was out when I woke up this morning, so that meant breakfast on the street. I went across the street to my local pho shop. Not the best pho, but at 7,000 VND a bowl (roughly 50 cents), a good value. The pho pots on the stove. (Which is essentially a concrete block with coal burners underneath) The big one is the Broth of Tomorrow; the little one, The Broth of Today. The other pot holds boiling water to dip the noodles. I ordered tai (raw beef) again, so the shop son chops it up for me. Dad is in the back somewhere, wrangling vegetables. Pho! No leaf plate at this place, the herbs are pre-added. Limes, chili sauce and pickled garlic are all available for your convenience. I use lots of pickled garlic.

That's true - a lot of my TOEFL students are competing for those scholarships. It breaks my heart when they tell me the score they need, and I know they just don't have the English to get it. They always give themselves ridiculous targets, like giving themselves three months to "learn English". I always say to them - "Did you learn to speak Vietnamese in three months?". Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of avenues to practice English here, and class fees remain out of reach for many Vietnamese people. The Kimchi is the best part! This is the sort of thing I try not to think about. But truthfully, most places are as clean as they can be, under the circumstances - people are always out on the street, scrubbing dishes, pots, glasses, and chopsticks down. But floors aren't ever mopped, and rubbish is often thrown right on the floor. Like I've said, I never get sick, but I occasionally suffer from an overdose of MSG! Oi Xoi! Sorry, I sometimes forget that not everybody spent those three years in Korea with me. Gochujang is chili pepper paste, as Pan described above, and baekseju, the bottle in the picture, is a kind of Korean wine. Its name means "One Hundred Year Wine", which is supposed to mean how long you will live if you drink it; not how long its aged. Not all kimchi is inferior, just the kind I bought here. Even that's not bad, but if you're going to make kimchi bokkum, you need a lot of the dregs from the bottom of the bag - the extra chili, ginger and assorted other seasonings from the cabbage. It helps flavour the rice. As for the Vietnamese coffee cheesecake, I'm afraid I can't help very much. I don't have the language to communicate a request for a recipe to the lovely people at Highlands coffee, and even if I could, they would think it pretty strange, as nobody bakes at home here. If it helps to describe it, I will: it's a fairly standard cheesecake, although I would say that it has been set with gelatine of some time, as there's not a lot of cream cheese available here. Many places use Laughing Cow cheese as a substitute. The top layer is intensely flavoured with Vietnamese coffee; and the bottom, white layer is mildly sweet. It has a standard cookie crust.

As an amuse-chef – you know – the snack you eat as the cook, as you’re contemplating the mess that your kitchen is in, and how much you’ll have to do before you get the kitchen into decent enough shape to actually start cooking in…I had a slice of that great break from Stop with slices of cold President butter. Kimchi is delicious, but kimchi cooked in pork fat is one of God’s gifts to humanity, as far as I’m concerned. Dinner tonight was solo, as my husband was working later than me, so I took the opportunity to make one of my favourite Korean dishes, kimchi bokkumbap. My husband doesn’t care for kimchi, so it was a good opportunity to stuff my gullet with the stuff while he wasn’t around. . Whenever I did food lessons with my students in Korea, where we discussed favourite foods, kimchi bokkumbap always came up. It was a favourite of many of my younger students, the kind of dish they’d ask their mum to make for a special treat. It’s widely available in food courts everywhere there, and in small bunshik restaurants – the kinds of places we’d call cafes, specializing in one-plate meals. Open all night, cheap, and invariably orange in colour, bunshik restaurants are a haven for students on a tight budget, and beacons in the late night to people stumbling home; in need of a grease hit before sleeping off the soju. (Or maybe that was just me..) They always have names like “Gimbap Heaven” or “Gimbap Country”, and serve gimbap, jigae, bibimbap, bokkumbap; doncasse/tonkatsu; shin ramyeon (500 won more to add American cheese!); and ddeok bokki. I like to make it because it marries pork fat; kimchi, sesame oil, and crispy rice – all the flavours I love from Korea. I took steamed rice (cold) Some onions and bacon – normally Spam is used, but a) I don’t like Spam, and b) you can’t get it here anyway. Chopped kimchi – chopped with red handled scissors, of course, in a dish that keeps in the “juice”. Local kimchi brand – not as good as the stuff that I used to get from my boss in Korea, but any port in a storm. A little extra gochujang, to make up for inferior kimchi “juice”, cut with a little baekseju. Fry it up, and season with some sesame oil and toasted seeds at the end. This is usually served with a fried egg on top, and piercing the runny yolk and letting it flow all over the rice in molten rivers is the best part...but considering the amount of pork fat and eggs I’ve already consumed today, I decided to give my heart a break.

After my afternoon class, I had a snack. One of the other teachers had bananas, so I snagged one of those. You can never just buy one piece of fruit here, you have to buy it by the weight – if you want just one or two of something, the vendor will curse you and call you crazy. Plus, you won’t have enough small change anyway. And your Vietnamese co-workers will demand to know what price you paid and then mock you mercilessly when they find out. Buying fruit is fraught with anxiety. So anyway, she had about a kilo of bananas, so we all sat around and had one, as you do. Eating fruit is a major time-passer in the non developed world. I also went down to the Star-Mart, the supermarket below where I live- I mean work, and bought a “pain chocolate”, which I understand is a French translation of : “Chocolate for your pain”. It’s not the best chocolate croissant in town, but it’s the best chocolate croissant in walking distance, if you know what I mean. Imagine my utter joy upon moving here to find pastry untouched by red beans. Hurrah! (Although – it’s not like red beans are bad, it’s just that when you bite into a pastry for the first time thinking it’ll be chocolate, and instead it’s red bean … for me, a little disappointing. I understand that there are whole countries out there, full of people who prefer red bean to chocolate, to which I say: More for me.) Where was I? Star-Mart: I could only fire off a few shots before the security guard came after me, but here you can see the roast pork and duck stall in the front, where you can by roast meat by the weight. Also a steamed bun stand, and some Chinese preserved fruits. You can get goat’s milk yogurt and crème caramel here, as well. Inside – canned drinks. Our pipeline to Orangina. Coffee! Note the hideous incursion of Nescafe. Instant noodles. Fuel for the younger set. Couldn’t get the dairy aisle, as the staff were eying me suspiciously. There’s no meat aisle, like all supermarkets in Hanoi – just some bacon and pate, and if you’re lucky, frozen shrimp. This limits my ability to cook at home as well, since I’m never awake early enough to buy the meat sold on the street or in the wet markets. When I got back upstairs, I remembered my students had given me a tangerine, so I ate that as well.

We had some time after meeting our French teacher to have lunch in one of our favourite restaurants, Stop Café. It’s hard to say why I like this place so much…it looks utterly unprepossessing on the outside, but inside, it warm and cozy, with terracotta floor tiles and wrought iron chairs; and photos of the hilltribes people in Sapa on the walls. They serve French and Vietnamese dishes. Now, I’d never really had “French” food growing up in Halifax. My parents were keen on Asian home-cooking and restaurants, and to tell you the truth, I’m not even sure that Halifax had a decent French restaurant as I grew up. (And even if we had, my parents would have been unlikely to take me there!) Stop has really great bread, the kind that you don’t take for granted when you’ve lived in Asia for any length of time. It’s billed as pain au levain, and as you walk by the window outside, you can see it cooling on the sill. We often buy one or two loaves to take home, as we did today. They make steak frites, omelettes, simple sandwiches; and Vietnamese dishes like Cha Ca, braised pork and fish, and some salads. I think the owner is Alsatian, because they have flammenkuche on permanent rotation. I find it hard to resist. We were with our classmate, and he ordered a lovely looking Caprese salad. Peter ordered the daily special, listed as tournedos of beef. I resisted the flammenkuche and had “Le Hanoienne” – a platter of nem, green papaya salad, and their amazing honey-braised pork. I need to learn how to make this! Completely full, I went to work.

No doubt. Most of the vegetable vendors hose down the produce with water periodically to make it look more appetizing, to, so it's hit by a lot of dodgy things. I try not to think about it. Thanks! That seems to be a common theme....

Very exciting! My husband and I have Taipei on our (admittedly long) list of places we'd like to go teach. He wants to learn mandarin, and I want to save enough money for my MA TESOL. I'm watching to see what the food looks like (a major factor for me when choosing a place to live!), since we've only heard one report back from a friend who said he though the food was terrible. But he's allergic to wheat, so that may have coloured his experience. I adore both Dragon Fruit, which looks so improbable; and custard apple. My husband loves the custard apple smoothie that Highland Coffee makes here...it does taste like peach, and something softer as well...

Most foreigners don't seem to drink tap water here. I buy bottled water to drink, although I do brush my teeth and wash my veg in tap water. I go by the "innoculation" theory of water consumption. Tiny bits over a long time...I've never been sick, even after eating on the street. The water looks cleaner than the water I got in my apartment in Incheon! There, the problem was deteriorating pipes, though. The Vietnamese sensibly boil all their water up and drink it as hot or cold tea. Water coolers are common in public buildings. They use shared cups - every time I look at them, I think "Typhoid Mary!". But I guess it's environmentally friendly. I see a lot of ex-pats in restaurants questioning wait-staff probingly about the provenance of vegetables and how they were cleaned. A lot of them won't even eat on the street, especially those who work the embassies. They seem to live really isolated lives. Oh, well. More for me.

This morning was a simple omelette, like the kind I saw everywhere on tourist menus in India. Chopped tomato and onion, with some cilantro leaves. I got the eggs and cilantro fresh on the street this morning, but the grape tomatoes have been hanging around in the fridge since my sandwich the other night. Simple and delicious! The menus always described these as masala eggs - maybe because of the mixed filling? I have a meeting with my French prof today, and then I'm working the afternoon into the early evening. This'll give me time to work on another cooking project tonight - Korean! But you probably won't see me around until then.

One of my cooking reference books suggests that you can make coconut milk by dissolving 2 oz of creamed coconut into a scant half cup of hot water. I guess you could reverse engineer that, by reducing the amount of broth accordingly. Hope that helps.

Dinner was pho. Like I said earlier, due to my screwy schedule, pho is more often a late-night snack for me. Pho is one of the few foods you can get at any hour, along with “my xao” (fried ramen noodles). I like it, because it’s not too heavy to eat late at night – unless the broth is really good, and I go too far drinking it, and get a condition I call “pho belly” – the feeling of too much pho broth sloshing around in your stomach. There is an independent pho shop on my street, but a new Pho 24 just opened up in my neighborhood, and Peter wanted to try it. Pho 24 is a chain of pho shops. It’s a reliable, high-end pho shop kind of place, when you want to go somewhere that offers fruit juice, coffee, and sturdy wooden stools. There are seven or eight in Hanoi, some in the middle, and quite a few more in HCMC. There’s one in Manila, and one in Jakarta as well. (Thank-you, informative placemats). They have a real up-scale, unified look, and I hope they do well. If only more people ate pho as fast food, instead of burgers and fries! They have a wide selection of meats, but we got “tai” – raw beef. Always a safe bet until you get the lay of things. We didn’t see any pho fingers (a kind of choux pastry that you use to suck up broth, a lot like you might have bread with a European soup), but it was late in the day, so they might have been sold out. When we walked in, we ordered in Vietnamese, which resulted in some gasps. The manager said, “You speak Vietnamese very well!”, to which my husband replied, “We don’t speak Vietnamese – we speak pho!” Pho mise en place: Pho action: Stupid fact about me: when I speak English, I pronounce it “fo”, but when I speak to any Vietnamese person, I try to use the correct pronunciation, “feu”. The rising tone on this is very hard for me to say correctly, if the laughs from my co-workers are any indication. Pho table: Pho foliage (tm noodlepie): Pho glamour shot:

Lunch today was a banh mi, from the stall outside my office. I forgot to take my camera down when I bought it, so I offer this picture that my husband took a couple of weeks ago. The stall was slammed when I went down, with motorcycles lined off, each waiting for two or three baguettes. The woman making them was a stop-motion study waiting to happen. She was mechanical. One man was there, his only job to carve off the meat. He carved steadily while she took a pre-cut baguette, filled it with pickled red cabbage, tomato, lettuce, onion, shaved pork, a squirt of ranch, and a squirt of ot (chili) sauce. It got popped next to the heating element to stay warm while she prepared the others. Banh mi, and banh mi cross-section. Kem caramen, for dessert. Technically a crème caramel, another remnant of French influence, I guess. Any café or restaurant in Hanoi will offer these. It’s called “caramen” because Vietnamese has only a few consonants that it can end syllables with, “n” being one of them, and “l”…not being one of them. Don’t even get me started on “s”. The teacher’s room, where the magic happens. The whole thing runs on cigarettes, Orangina, and pork fat.

The Paris Bistro closed the first week I was here! I know because my school is across from the Hilton on the side street. My first week in town, I ate lunch there a couple times, went back a few days later, and they were closed! I'm not sure about the SoHo. I'll go look. I haven't been to the Hoa Sua restaurant, but I often go to their bakery, Le Croissant. They make fabulous cookies and French pastry. I've also eaten at their restaurant Baguette et Chocolat, in Sapa, which I really enjoyed. I'm planning to go to a similar restaurant this week, called "Koto". It's around the corner from my house, across from the Temple of Literature. Sure! In fact, one of the producers offers lacquer lessons, which I wish I had the time and money to take. But I've resolved to take French lessons in the new year. I used to be fluent, but I've sadly let it lapse.

All of those things were purchased locally, although some from specialty Western goods stores, with really, really jacked up prices. My husband loves jarred salsa and tortilla chips. I abhor both, but they're his special treat (ie. it's not chocolate or cookies that I'll hunt and destroy while having a sugar craving). The President product is actually butter, although a whole range of President products are available. A lot of the dairy here is imported from France, Australia, or New Zealand. (Aussies will note the Bega cheese in the fridge door. Tasty!) This reflects the overall effect France had on Vietnam. For example; in Korea, the only foreign goods available in major supermarkets were American cheese, Spam, hot dogs, and bottled spaghetti sauce. Here, we have Brie, baguettes, Normandy butter, pate, pain au chocolat, Orangina - even the smallest supermarket carries these goods. The Ortega Salsa and Tostitos were bought from a shop specializing in Western imports, although overall, these shops carry much more things from Europe. I have a suspicion things like the tortilla chips come in in diplomatic bags, as the shop only ever has one or two bags available! At Christmas, I made shortbread for the staff that work in the office with me. They seemed to like them. And I made some macaroons for some of my students - they enjoyed them, but then; they're a common bakery item anyway. Students seem shocked that I would bake at home, though, most Vietnamese homes do not have ovens. I've never made anything savory for them; perhaps I'll do that in the future! In Hanoi, there seems like there is a restaurant for every country in the world! That could be because of the embassies. I think that on the whole, Vietnamese cuisine has been influenced by French and to some degree, Chinese cooking. I'm not sure if there's enough of a middle class here yet to pursue cooking and eating as a hobby. But I see Vietnamese cooking magazines at the checkout in the supermarket, so I think it's on the way. I have a choice of American, Italian and Regional French pizzas here! But really, I feel your pain.

I teach ESL to adults, so that usually means I work in the evenings. This means I’m on a completely different schedule from most Vietnamese people. Even here in the city, farming hours are kept, and everyone rises between 5:30 to 6:30. By 11:30 it’s lunch time. I work until 9:30 at night, so that means I get up around 10 am – long past breakfast time, so my breakfast is usually everyone else’s lunch. I want lunch around 3 pm, when any sensible Vietnamese restaurant is having an afternoon nap, so I usually order into my office. When I get off work, the only places serving food are pho stalls and banh mi stalls. I usually end up having pho as a late-night snack, rather than for breakfast. Today, I was up and ready to get out of the house just at the magic hour for Bun cha. Bun cha are pieces of pork – either strips or little pork burgers here in Hanoi, served in a cool vinegar soup with pickled vegetables, herbs, and round rice noodles (bun). I’m told the little burgers are unique to Hanoi, and in other parts of Vietnam, you can’t get them. Also, the herb mixture is supposed to taste best in Hanoi. It’s usually a mix of cilantro, sweet basil, mint, lettuce, and some other herbs I can’t identify. You can also add chilis and pounded garlic to your broth. You dip the noodles into the soup, and then slurp them up, a bit like soba. The meat goes best with a bit of herb. The burgers are cooked on coals that are fanned by hand or by a little electric fan. It causes a tell-tale blue smoke to rise over the whole street where it’s being made. It smells delicious. Traditionally, the meat was cooked in bamboo tongs, but almost everywhere these days uses these metal grill pans. Progress. It can be served on the sidewalk, but we chose a proper shop on Mai Hac De street, a favourite of our friend, Vancouver Dan, who is a bun cha aficionado. The shop only serves bun cha, so the only question when you sit down is, “How many nem do you want?” We got two, as my husband is not much of a fan. You dip the nem into the soup…or at least I do. that’s probably a real “country” thing to do, but I’m forgiven a lot, being a foreigner. The meal for two cost 26,000 VND, or roughly $1.60 USD. My husband has been battling a cold this week, so we headed to a café next to get him some juice (and me a coffee). Nuoc Chanh, often translated as lemon juice, but is actually lime juice, is always a safe bet at any café. I like places that add a lot of crushed ice and sugar.

Ahem, yes. A note about the pictures. If they look like a blind bat took them while hanging upside-down in an alley, then they were taken by me. If they look beautiful and in focus, they were taken by my husband, who is an amateur photographer. I didn't study the language before I got here, and I still don't speak Vietnamese - most of my daily activities are conducted in English, as all of my co-workers speak English. Some of my foreign co-workers study Vietnamese, but truthfully, I don't have the time. I did learn several key phrases though - 'How much?"; "Hello Auntie/Uncle"; "Hello Grandmother/Grandfather"; "Thank you"; "Excuse me"; "How beautiful!"; "How delicious!" "Twenty copies, double-sided" and "Sorry". I'm a big believer in that you acquire the language you need to survive. I actually had to learn a lot more of the language in Korea, as hardly anyone spoke English there. Even my students would only respond to commands in Korean. When I got here and found out you could order food delivery in English, I almost died. All of the vendors who deal with foreigners (tourists and embassy staff) speak English quite well. Needless to say, you get cheaper prices in Vietnamese! The bureaucracy is hellish. It took me 8 months to get my official work permit (although to be fair, five months of that was waiting for Canadian bureaucracy to grind out my criminal check), a full medical test, countless bribes, and at least 10 colour photos of me. "Dutch Lady" is a dairy brand here. They make milk and yogurt. I'm not sure, but it could be imported, because there aren't a lot of dairy cows here. Most of the milk is UHT.

I like octopus - both to eat and look at. In Korea, saeng nakji is a delicacy - little baby octopus cut up and eaten while still squiggling. I consider it the height of adventurous eating. The baskets of flavourings are beautiful. If you walk out on my street in the hours when women are buying food for their meals, you can see ladies walking by with little baskets - kind of a microcosm of all these things. Here's a photo from a few months ago from on my doorstep.

Ha! Yes, they are the absolute best! Don't even waste my time with Chic Choc. The soft dense fudginess of Chocochip makes it the king of Korean boxed cookies. That box in the picture? Is empty. I managed to make it last three days, if you can believe that.