petardier

It appears I've been eating Vietnamese crepes wrong for decades. A Vietnamese co-worker introduced me to them back in the 80s when I worked in Hartford (in the insurance mines). Unfortunately, he didn't show me all the accessories.

My Vietnamese food guru was shocked to learn I had been picking up pieces of my crepe and eating them with chopsticks. He said I'd been missing half the flavor. John would not be satisfied until we went off to My Sister's Crawfish* and he had a chance to demonstrate the proper technique.

To eat the crepes properly, you first take a leaf of lettuce or mustard greens and add your choice of fresh leafy herbs to it. Break off a piece of crepe and wrap in in the leaf. Dip into fish sauce (spiked with pepper sauce if desired). Eat. We had 3 type of herbs with ours; mint, fish mint**, Tia To (purple perilla). At home, John's mom serves up to 6 different herbs.

Here's a link to a list of Vietnamese herbs. Not all of these would be used with crepes.

http://vietworldkitchen.typepad.com/blog/vietnamese-herb-primer.html

*This is John's current favorite location for crepes.
** not exactly minty or fishy

In Botswana (Vumbura camp maybe), there was something called Vietnamese Shaking Beef on the menu one night. I ordered it, of course. My sessions with my Vietnamese food guru, John, had not yet introduced me to this dish, so I was keen to try it and see how the American version compared with the African.

On my return, I asked John about it. His first response was, "Never heard of it". That didn't seem right to me, so I googled the name and showed John the search results (which included a Vietnamese name). His second response was, "Oh, that. I don't consider that really Vietnamese. It's more French. Only the French and rich people could afford beef".

The two versions were not too different. The American version had smaller slices of beef that was probably marinated then sauteed (thus the "shaking" part of the name); the African version came in slightly larger pieces. The restaurant version came with a few slices of tomato and some lettuce for no apparent reason. There was rice with both. Neither version had much spice.

John likes to make a dipping sauce for the beef by mixing salt and pepper on a plate, squeezing lime juice over it, and stirring. He says this is completely optional. I found it well worth trying.

Back to Ahn Hong last Thursday with John. This time it was the long-threatened congee with pig-parts*. Congee, of course, is rice porridge and can have just about anything added to it. I think John would class this as Vietnamese comfort food. Spare parts added this time included blood pudding, heart, tripe, liver, and some more standard meaty bits. Oh yes, there were the ubiquitous bean sprouts to add as well. John likes to have a small bowl of dipping sauce on the side so one can flavor the various parts as desired without dumping sauce in the soup. John considers that a faux pas; for him, the congee is meant to be enjoyed for its natural flavor I gave John's method a try. It's helpful especially if you're not wild about some of the add-ins (liver, blood pudding). The heart and tripe were fine but were, as expected a bit chewy.

*not the actual name of the dish on the menu.

This time we went to Pho Le (1356 Dorchester Ave) for pho*. It's not John's favorite soup which is why we left it till this late in the series. Also, it's cold now, so soup works well. We both got the pho with beef slices, beef tendon, and tripe. All were thinly sliced and delicious.

John tells me there are two main ways of spicing up your pho. Both start with putting basil leaves in the soup. Basil leaves and bean sprouts come on a plate separate from the soup. The basil, in John's view, is not optional. Some put a mix of Hoisin sauce and chili/Sriracha sauce in a side dish to be used for dipping the meat slices. Others put the mix directly in the soup. John is a dipper. He says the sauce gets in the way of appreciating the properly-made broth that is the key to a good pho. I tried dipping as well. John's point is well taken. The broth could easily be overwhelmed by strong condiments. The other sign of a good pho is noodles that are not overcooked. If they're falling apart when you pick them up, they've been cooked too long.

Next episode, congee with tripe?

*pronounced fa (but there's also a tone to do there) If you say foe/faux, you've just said the Vietnamese word for city.

This morning, Tatonka head-butted my paperback book off the bed. I guess she knows a rival when she sees one.

For part 6, we returned to Saigon Seafood for salt and pepper lobster and salted fish fried rice. The salt and pepper lobster, according to John is more a Chinese than Vietnamese disk. It consists of lobster cut into pieces that are breaded and fried (deep fried?). It's tasty, but as is typical with lobster, you have to do some work to extract the meaty bits. I was initially dubious about the salted fish fried rice (not a huge fan of salted fish), but it was very good. The fish was shredded into very fine pieces which serve to add a nice flavor to the fried rice without being excessively fishy.

For part 7, we went to Lucky Cafe, an Asian barbecue place at 1107 Dorchester Ave. I think they have more typical Chinese offerings, but we got the rice combo that comes with 2 kinds of meat. It was $8 and had enough rice and meat for two meals. I had chicken and duck; John got chicken and pork. John is a big fan of the ginger sauce they put on the chicken. I liked it, but I won't rave about it the way John does. BTW, this restaurant is cash only.

This time we went to Pho 2000 (198 Adams St) for Vietnamese crepes. These are savory crepes made of rice batter with a filling of bean spouts, little shrimp, thin pork strips, and some other stuff I'm forgetting. They're cooked so that the shell is crispy. These are an old favorite of mine; I was introduced to them by a co-worker at Cigna *mumble* years ago. Vi Do's family ran a restaurant and our department would go there for lunch sometimes. I'll be eternally grateful to Vi for introducing me to the Vietnamese crepe, but he neglected to show us the proper way to eat them.

John was happy, as always, to set me straight on how to properly eat Vietnamese food. The crepe should come with a pile of lettuce leaves, carrot and cucumber slices, and a few other leafy things. You take a lettuce leaf, break off a piece of the crepe, add carrot/cucumber/leafy stuff as desired, and then dip the whole package into the fish sauce*. Repeat until crepe is gone or the fragments are too inconvenient to pick up in this way. Can be somewhat messy. John thought the crepes at Pho 2000 were more crunchy than his mom's and that (obviously) his mom's version was better. There's no counter to that criticism, but I will say that the crepes were delicious all the same.

This time we decided to try one of the desserts. John suggested one that turned out to be a goblet with layers of red beans, mung bean paste, green jello. Coconut milk was poured over all this and there was a big pile of crushed ice on top. Step one is to mix the crushed ice into all the other ingredients. I'm generally dubious about desserts containing beans, but this one was actually pretty good. I'm not sure why, but it's much better when the crushed ice is mixed in.

*to which you can optionally add chili sauce.

Got take out food from Ba Le (1052 Dorchester Ave Dorchester) on Friday with John, my Vietnamese coworker. The dish of the day was bahn cuon. This is ground beef wrapped up in wide rice noodles, topped with sprouts, fish sauce and chunks of Vietnamese cold cuts.

The woman preparing this dish for us at the take-out counter used a small Chinese-style cleaver. While she cut up the beef rice noodles and the cold cuts, she was frequently NOT looking at her hands. I wanted to say something, but figured it would be better not to distract the person with the rapidly moving chopper.

John eats this by putting the cold cut chunks in the lid of the take-out tray. He then pours the fish sauce over the what's in the bottom of take-out container. He recommends eating from the bottom of heap of food to make sure each bite gets an adequate amount of sauce.

Went out for Vietnamese food again with my Vietnamese coworker on Friday. This time we went to Ahn Hong. He thinks they have the best "Seven kinds of beef" dish in Boston. Seven kinds of beef is not really one dish; it's a whole meal. There's a progression of plates of thinly slices beef seasoned in different ways that you put into a spring roll wrapper at the table along with vegetables. You also get fish sauce mixed with pineapple for a dipping sauce (adding Sriracha sauce to the mix is normal). There's a soup and a salad as well. Here are the courses:

sliced beef - cooked at the table in boiling vinegar
beef salad ( John called it Vietnamese cole slaw)
sliced beef with lemongrass sauce
Beef congee soup
beef meatballs
rolled grilled beef on skewers
Cooked beef wrapped in grape leaves on skewers

They were all quite wonderful, but the beef cooked in vinegar and the beef wrapped in grape leaves were my favorites. I will certainly do this again some time.

Note: if you search google maps for Ahn Hong, you will get the Dorchester location, but the web link in the sidebar turns out to be for a set of restaurants of the same name in California.

Posted this elsewhere and figured it might be worth sharing here:

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