On our second night here we cooked dinner for ourselves, made a cocktail, and watched a DVD on the television in our apartment’s living room. It really set in, then, that we’d get to have a fairly domestic little experience while we’re here.

Most of our evenings here have looked like that, actually – we make cocktails or pour glasses of wine, we cook dinner, and we watch a show or a movie or we read or we both get work done. Sometimes somewhere in there we put a wooden cutting board on the dining room table and pile it with bread and sausage and cheese and mustard, and we snack on that while we’re waiting for dinner or for whatever comes next. Our mornings generally all look the same, too – waking whenever it feels right, and slowly emerging into the day with breakfast and tea and coffee and a virtual check-in with the rest of the world. It feels a little like dipping our toes back into what normal life will feel like, and we like it.

We’ve been doing quite a bit out in the city, as well, but everything we do feels less like tourist activities and more like the sorts of things we’d do if we lived here. We walk to various markets (and sometimes buy too much and have to lug it all back across town), we go hiking, we sit in cafés and at wine cellars, and we mainly just wander around the city. My German is much better, this time around, and we generally don’t hesitate to go into shops that look interesting or to engage with people when we need or want something.

It’s obvious, from the mood on the streets and from how people are dressed, that spring has recently appeared in Vienna. From what I can tell the seasons transition smoothly from snow to rain before ending up in late spring, and that it’s finally now that people can enjoy being outside and walking and biking around the city without being entirely bundled up or huddled under umbrellas. Most of the restaurants, cafés, and beer halls or wine cellars we go to are empty as crickets inside with packed outdoor patios, and everyone seems to be showing off new spring wardrobes and sunglasses and brightly colored shoes.

We’ve felt the lure of spring as well, although we haven’t quite mastered the art of predicting the short bursts of rain clouds that come through, and that’s why the cocktail I made a few days ago before dinner is named after our experience here: Frühling is the German word for spring, and 19 is our apartment number. I threw this together with what we had in the kitchen (which is extremely limited), but it turned out to be one of my favorite simple cocktails I’ve ever made. Fruity, fizzy, and refreshing – perfect for spring, and for sipping while you cook with all the windows open. (Equally as perfect for sipping while doing nothing else with all the windows open – we’ve tried it.) It’s exactly what spring feels like here in our apartment, and thus a fitting name.

A note about Aperol: this bitter orange liqueur is fairly common in Austria, Germany, and other places (I also wrote about it when we were here two years ago), but it’s not as commonly seen in the United States. We’ve always found it at BevMo and have even found it a couple of times at Trader Joe’s, and it should be available at most liquor stores with a wide selection. It’s a really great alternative to Campari if you find that too bitter, since it’s in the same vein but a little less intense. If you want to use Campari for this cocktail instead of Aperol, try reducing the amount to 1/2 ounce and increasing the simple syrup to compensate – but I haven’t tested that, so play around with what works best for your tastes. Campari is a great option if you don’t have Aperol and don’t want to buy it.

Frühling’s 19

Makes 1, easily scalable

• 1 1/2 ounces gin
• 3/4 ounce lemon syrup (see below, OR 1/2 ounce simple syrup and 1/2 ounce lemon juice)
• 3/4 ounce Aperol (see note above)
• 3 to 4 ounces soda water

Lemon syrup: Combine equal parts lemon juice and sugar. Either shake heartily in a closed container to combine, or heat to a simmer on the stove until the sugar dissolves, then let cool. We keep this on hand all summer for making lemonade-based drinks and radlers (beer and lemonade). It will last at least 1 month in the refrigerator in a closed container.

- Mix together the gin, lemon syrup, and Aperol, either in a shaker with a bit of ice (especially helpful if your gin and Aperol are at room temperature) or in your serving glass (which should be large enough hold a 6-8 ounce cocktail with some ice). Add a few cubes of ice.

- Top with soda water and give a quick stir to mix the ingredients.

Spending the next million(ish) hours working on HTML is really not as bad as it sounds – I have good music, an open window, a new cocktail recipe to test (meaning drink, obviously – and it’s a good one, so get excited for the coming post) and three seasons of Friday Night Lights (which I’ve never seen) on DVD to keep me company. I have plans for a big salad for dinner to counteract all the döner and schnitzel and everything else we’ve been eating, and a slice of sachertorte for dessert. (Yes, I see the contradiction in that sentence, and no, I don’t care.)

That said, I do wish I were still wandering around the Wienerwald, as we did for much of yesterday …

And there’s certainly a lot more to say – about our time in Vienna thus far, about how amazing it feels to have our own kitchen space, and about all the little confusing things about going grocery shopping in another country. Or about how easy it is to burn things in the thin, aluminum pans that sorely stock our kitchen here, or how the stove really only goes down to medium-high, and that effectively using anything lower requires some MacGyver-like manuevering. But for now I have a few more important things to move on to.

First, this dinner. To back up a bit, I just finished reading Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal for the second time (and I might just turn around and start it again to go on an underlining spree). It’s an incredible book, the closest thing I’ve ever read to the way I love to cook and eat and share food with loved ones. The next time someone asks me what I suggest as a starting point for someone who wants to learn how to cook, I will definitely point them to this book. It has certain drawbacks, for sure, but it’s beautifully written and an absolutely lovely, passionate ode to home cooking. Take this, for example – one of my favorite quotes, in the midst of a chapter about vegetables:

“And always [buy] a few bunches of dark, leafy greens. This will seem very pious. Once greens are cooked as they should be, though: hot and lustily, with garlic, in a good amount of good olive oil, they lose their moral urgency and become one of the most likable ingredients in your kitchen.”

When I read this a few days ago, even though it was my second time, this passage struck me as so perfect that I had to stop, close the pages, and just think about it for a while. The choice of the word “lustily” is so utterly apt to this process, and seemingly out of step with the thought of a big bunch of kale, but makes the passage so incredibly true that I couldn’t help but stop for a moment, then immediately read the passage out loud to Brett, who laughed and nodded in response. Pious. Lustily. Moral urgency. Not words I would generally turn to in describing the activity in my kitchen, but maybe that’s a problem.

Another thing I love about Tamar’s words in this book is how most of the recipes within aren’t the specific, list-oriented sort, but instead more like a narrative, a few sentences or short paragraphs describing the process. It’s personable and relatable, and more appropriate to the simple, adaptable, home-style cooking she’s talking about. Some of it assumes some level of comfort in the kitchen, but it’s generally straight-forward, understandable, and from the heart.

And in that vein, here’s what I came here to say: Cook a pot of polenta,* at the end adding salt, butter, and Parmesan or whatever else you like to add to make it luscious and delicious. Add enough of everything that after one taste you immediately reach for another. Ladle hearty portions of it into low bowls and scoop on top some delicious mixture of cooked vegetables, meats, or sauces, then add a poached or fried egg and garnish with chopped fresh herbs, freshly cracked black pepper, a drizzle of olive oil, and a healthy dose of grated Parmesan.

Whatever you put between the polenta and the egg might be something cooked especially for the occasion, like some of those lusty greens and some sautéed mushrooms, or braised lamb shanks (one of my favorites with polenta), or like I did last night with a mixture of spring leeks, fresh young garlic, and green onions, sautéed and then tossed with thin tomato crescents and shredded ribbons of butter lettuce. It is spring, after all, and this is what called out to me as we wandered through the stalls at the Brunnenmarkt. Or maybe you’ll use leftovers, like the braised beef you ate two nights ago, or the stewed lentils, or the roasted butternut squash, or the remaining bits of grilled pork chops browned and mixed in with a rich tomato sauce. Your chopped herbs might be parsley, like I used here, or maybe basil in the late summer, or chives when they first come up in the spring. It might just be whatever tugged at you at the market that week, cooked however your hands wanted to do it that day.

This is something I make fairly often. Polenta + delicious something or other + egg + garnishes. It seems extraordinarily fancy and is extraordinarily comforting, and it always works to fill whatever cracks need filling.

And that equation above looks like a lot of meals I make, some general framework filled by whatever else I want to put together that day, or what I happen to have in the fridge already. It becomes an easy way to eat well every day, knowing I could apply something – let’s say, sautéed greens and onions – to a variety of things. Those greens and onions could become risotto, or filling for an omelete or frittata. They could be spread into a pastry crust to become a galette, or spooned onto garlicky toast and covered with broth, or mixed with pasta and toasted breadcrumbs, or any one of a million other options.

So this brings me to my second point of the post, which is that over the next few weeks I’ll be adding a guide/feature/some thing or other about basic meal frameworks. (I’m hoping I can promise to come up with a more appetizing thing to call it.) Friends and family ask me often about coming up with inspiration for new and interesting meals that they can just as easily make for a dinner party or a weeknight meal, and I’m hoping what I put together can be a good resource to turn to when you’re not sure what to do next. I’m also starting to work on an overall pantry/shopping list (as I turn my eye toward setting up our new little homestead at the end of the summer), and the idea is that one should always be able to make something delicious and extravagant-seeming (the “seeming” part being key) with some pretty general shopping lists. It’s like how my go-to cocktail posts helped build up to the Bowen Appétit Bar Guide.

It’s part of a good amount of work I’m hoping to put into this site while we’re in Vienna. We both see this part of the year as sort of a working vacation, and we each have a list of projects to work on while we’re here. It’s not all Sachertorte and cocktails, people. There are things to be done! (That said, Aperol and prosecco are practically cheaper than water here, and they are not going to drink themselves.)

I’m also working hard to tie up the loose ends of making some pretty big technical changes in how this site is run. It’s not worth going into the details, but just know that it’s been a long process of making everything work right again (leave it up to me to decide to make this switch right before flying to another continent …). Old posts being posted as new (and being sent out to email subscribers and RSS feeds) was just one of the many problems caused by the old system, but that shouldn’t happen anymore now that I’ve made some big changes. The site shouldn’t really look any different on your end, but you’ll probably (hopefully) notice some slight but regular changes over the next while. For now, some things are still a little funky – like you might notice that some of the pictures still link back to the old WordPress site (I’m working on that). And some links here and there might be broken, so make sure to let me know when you run across that. Speaking of which, all my @bowenappetit.com email addresses are back up and running. This might be the perfect time to drop me a note at bowen (at) bowenappetit (dot) com, and tell me if there’s anything you’d like to see here soon. Or just say hi! Or send me a picture of your cat. (Or better yet, your goat – if you have a goat, it’s fairly mean not to send me a picture. Videos work well too.)

* You may have your preferred methods for cooking polenta, but here’s generally what I do: whisk 1 part polenta (I prefer coarser rather than finer) into 5 parts boiling, salted water in a medium pot (I find it’s usually about 1/4 cup dry polenta per large serving). Lower to a simmer for 45-60 minutes, stirring occasionally, or until the polenta tastes cooked through (less time for finely ground polenta). Add 4 tablespoons of butter and a healthy dose of grated Parmesan, and salt for taste.

Another spring one, from the same meal as yesterday’s post. We served this one alongside grilled salmon, roasted brussel sprouts, bread, and salad, and ate our first outdoor family dinner of the year. There was a heater, to be certain, and it was too dark outside by the time dessert was served, but it was still lovely to start the evening outside.

This is pretty obviously inspired by early spring flavors – asparagus, leeks, fresh herbs, and ricotta. The crust is olive oil and half whole wheat flour for a heartier texture and flavor, the leeks fortified with mushrooms for a bit more content, and the ricotta lightened with lemon zest and chopped herbs. It was a perfect hearty side for the grilled salmon, but would also make a lovely vegetarian main dish (or non-vegetarian, if you wanted to add some flaked fish or pancetta/bacon along with the leek-mushroom mixture). It’s also easy to make ahead, since it’s really perfect at room temperature.

Spring vegetable ricotta tart with whole wheat olive oil crust

Serves 8 as a side, 6 as a main dish

Crust – adapted from Chocolate and Zucchini, makes enough for an 10-12″ tart pan

• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/2 cup cold water, plus more as needed 
• Butter, oil, or non-stick cooking spray to grease the pan

Filling

• 8 ounces mushrooms (crimini, white, shitake, etc.)
• 1 medium leek
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 medium bunch asparagus stalks
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 8 oz. ricotta (whole or part-skim is fine)
• 2 Tbsp. chopped fresh herbs (I used chives and rosemary, but really anything will work – thyme, basil, parsley, sage, etc.)
• Salt and pepper, to taste
• 1 egg

- Prepare the crust: Mix together the flours and salt in a medium bowl. Add the olive oil and mix together with a fork. Add the cold water in two batches, mixing with a fork and adding enough that the dough comes together. Add more water if necessary to mix the dough into a shaggy ball, kneading once or twice with your hands if necessary to bring the dough together. If it’s warm in your kitchen and the dough feels very soft, refrigerate for 15 minutes or so. Otherwise, move right on to the next step.

- Put crust in the pan: Grease an 11″ or 12″ tart pan with a removable bottom or a springform pan, set aside. Roll out dough on a lightly floured surface, adding flour as necessary to keep it from sticking to the counter or the rolling pin. Press into the bottom of the pan, going only 1-1 1/2″ up the sides if your pan has taller sides. Put in the refrigerator until ready to fill.

- Prepare asparagus: You have two options here – you can roast the asparagus with olive oil, salt, and lemon zest, or you can quick blanch it. One requires more preparation, but the other requires boiling a big pot of water and preparing an ice bath. I chose to roast, but if you want to blanch and need instructions check here. For roasting: preheat oven to 400F. Trim the woody ends off the asparagus – I do this by grabbing each piece with two hands near the stalk end and bending until it naturally breaks, which will be at the point where the stalk gets woody. On a baking sheet, toss the trimmed asparagus with a bit of olive oil (enough to lightly coat), a few pinches of salt, and the zest of half the lemon. (The zest will clump up a bit, but that’s fine.) Roast until desired tenderness (I like mine still a little crisp, but that’s up to you.) After taking out the asparagus, reduce the oven temperature to 350F.

- Prepare the mushrooms/leeks: You can do this simultaneously with the asparagus process, if you have time. Slice the mushrooms into bite-size pieces. Mince the three garlic cloves. Slice and wash the leek into 1/4″ pieces (here’s what I do: cut off the root end, separate the dark green part from the white and light green fleshy parts, and cut the fleshy parts lengthwise. Slice down each half into 1/4″ half-moon shapes. Put cut leeks in a bowl of cold water, swish around a bit, then let sit. After a few minutes, the dirt will sink to the bottom and you can grab the clean, chopped leeks from the water.) Now you want to sauté these all together. I had a small pan so sautéed the mushrooms and garlic and then the leeks in two batches, but you can easily do all together. If you do, start the leeks first and add the mushrooms once they’re softened. Add more water (or better yet, white wine) if needed to moisten the mixture and tenderize the leeks. Salt to taste, and don’t forget the garlic! Set aside.

- Make the filling: While the vegetables are cooling, prepare the ricotta layer. Mix together the ricotta, the other half of the zest, the chopped herbs, and salt and pepper to taste. Mix in an egg, and set aside.

- Assemble: Once the vegetables are cool enough to handle, spread first the mushrooms and leeks in the bottom of the crust. Spread the ricotta mixture over the vegetables – it may be a fairly thin layer and some veggies may peek through, but that’s fine. Cut the asparagus into 1″ pieces (or smaller – the smaller they are, the easier the tart will be to slice), scatter over the top of the ricotta layer, and lightly press them down into the ricotta.

- Bake: Bake at 350F for 45-55 minutes, until the edges of the crust feel firm and the ricotta layer feels fairly set. It will continue to set as it cools. It will also be much easier to slice when it’s cool, and you may need to slightly adjust pieces of asparagus so your knife can slice between them.

Making ahead: The finished tart can be refrigerated for 3-4 days; let sit out for at least 30 minutes to come up to room temperature. The crust, asparagus, and mushroom-leek mixture can each be made 3-5 days ahead; the ricotta mixture can be made 1 day ahead. 

Oh boy. I have a lot catching up to do. I mean this mainly in terms of things to tell you, but I suppose it also applies to life in general, at the moment. We’ve been away from normal life for a long time, and that means we generally always have a lot of catching up to do.

First, the big news – we decided that we’re moving to Madison, Wisconsin at the end of the summer (!!!), where Brett will start his PhD program (at UW-Madison). We’re both really happy and very much looking forward to getting back to a sort of normal, stable, stationary life again (we’re not ready for it quite yet, but a few months from now sounds perfect). During our short visit to Madison earlier this month we found a cozy, homey flat to rent, and along with plenty of room for guests it has a huge screened-in front porch and a big colorful kitchen. I’m particularly excited about having the space and the stability to work on projects I’ve been wanting to do for a long time – like home-brewing, and canning, and making cheese, and setting up the smoker I got for my birthday this past fall. We always knew we’d be leaving Claremont at some point, so for the last two years or so we were there we avoided setting up some of these more labor- and time-intensive projects that would require new equipment and space. But now we have the perfect space to do it, and things like canning will make a lot more sense when we’re living somewhere with actual seasons, somewhere we won’t be able to access most produce throughout the year.

So – you can look forward to lots of posts about adapting to life in the Midwest and settling into our new home.

Second, some other news – well, not news really, but more of a travel update. We just returned from a crazy three-week trip around the country, starting with school visits and ending with five days each in New York City and New Orleans. I was feeling a little under the weather for both of those visits, but we still had a great time – lots of exploring the cities on food, eating good food and drinking good drinks, and spending time with good friends we don’t get to see very often. It was a perfect way to celebrate having made our decision. Next week we leave for our stint in Central Europe – one week in the Czech Republic, five weeks in Vienna, and one final week in Budapest. That five weeks in Vienna will be by far the longest we’ve spent anywhere since July (our current record is six nights in one place since we left in early July, which is nuts), and we’re looking forward to relaxing and cooking and exploring the city at a more leisurely pace.

Third, one of my projects over the next couple of months will be cleaning up this site a little, including adding some new features. So I’m sorry if things seem a little weird around here for a while (like this funky/aggravating issue of old posts being published on RSS feeds … it seems to happen whenever I’m making changes to the site, so unfortunately that might be happening more in the near future). One of those things will be updating old posts with new photos and recipe tips, which I’m actually really looking forward to. There’s a lot of great recipes back in the archives, but the posts generally have terrible photos and could use a little sprucing up.

But now, onto the more important – way more important – stuff. Cocktails. We’re in Portland at the moment, staying with an aunt and uncle, and those aunt and uncle have a beautiful Meyer lemon tree hanging heavy with fruit at the moment. So to start off last night’s family dinner, Brett and I whipped up a quick, fresh, ridiculously easy version of a whiskey sour, nothing but Meyer lemon juice, orange juice, honey, and bourbon. It was tart and sweet and delicious, a perfect reminder of spring.

Honey-Meyer lemon whiskey sour

Makes 1, easily scalable

• 1 1/2 ounces bourbon
• 1/2 ounce Meyer lemon juice
• 1/2 ounce orange juice (preferably freshly squeezed)
• 1/2 tsp. honey (or more to taste)

- Stir or shake together all ingredients. If shaking, strain into a cocktail glass over ice. If stirring, mix everything together before adding ice, or else it will be more difficult to dissolve the honey.

One difference you’ll note between this post and the South American version is that I don’t have many specific restaurant names. I know this isn’t helpful for anyone reading this hoping to recreate the experience, but to be honest a lot of the places we went didn’t have names, and since neither Brett nor I spoke any of the languages (as opposed to Brett speaking Spanish), it was difficult for us to remember names when they existed. If you really want to know specific locations for a future trip, let me know and I can walk you through specific directions (if I remember, that is).

Bali

• Chicken, lamb, and mystery organs satay with peanut sauce – warung in Seminyak
• Mangosteens – everywhere
• Black rice pudding – random luwak coffee shop (by “coffee shop” I mean “half-built building”) on the road between Pemutaran and Danau Bratan
• Babi Gulung (roasted suckling pig) – Ibu Oka, Ubud
• Fish satay lunch – warung between Ubud and Amed
• Gado-gado and fried fish with onion relish – tiny Amed café

Dhaka

• Mustard seed steamed fish, curried cauliflower and peas, tomato-date chutney, naan, and raita – Oh Calcutta!
• The meal we had at Roll Express, full of dishes whose names I cannot remember for the life of me (Joanna – help?)
• Lime juice soda (sparkling water served with sides of lime juice and sugar syrup) – various places
• The homemade Bengali meal prepared by Mutaleb at Joanna’s apartment, including curried vegetables, egg curry, and lentils

Cambodia

• Khmer curry with pumpkin – Khmer Kitchen, Siem Reap
• Green peppercorn chicken – restaurant whose name I can’t remember, Siem Reap
• Fried spring rolls – White Rose, Battambang
• Fish amok (coconut dry curry) – Smokin’ Pot Café cooking class, Battambang (yes, I’m saying that something I made myself is one of the best things I ate in Asia)
• Chocolate brioche – Blue Pumpkin Café, Phnom Penh
• Khmer noodles and panko fried chicken – various food stalls, Phnom Penh Night Market

Vietnam

• Vietnamese iced coffee (with condensed milk) – various places throughout the country
• Banh mi sandwiches – various street carts throughout the country (see the Vietnam post for a lot more info about banh mi)
• Sesame fry bread (especially when spread with Laughing Cow cheese) – various street cards (with self-supplied cheese) throughout the country
• Pho – Pho51, Nha Trang
• Cao lau – various stalls, Hoi An Central Market
• Banh xeo – various stalls, Hoi An Central Market
• Banh goi – Lonely Planet-recommended banh goi restaurant (can’t remember name), Hanoi
• Bun cha – Dac Kim, Hanoi
• Bun bo nam bo – Nha Hang Bach-Phuong, Hanoi
• Bia hoi – various places, Hanoi

Thailand (no post)

• Pad see ewe – street stall near our hotel, Chiang Mai
• Mango and sticky rice – street stall near our hotel, Chiang Mai
• Green papaya salad – restaurant near our hotel, Chiang Mai
• Spicy waterfall pork – food stall, Ayutthaya Floating Market

We’re in the midst of our whirlwind three-week United States tour – San Diego, Los Angeles, Eugene, Davis, Minneapolis, Madison, New York, New Orleans, Portland, and finally back to Eugene for a week before we head out again. Right now we’re in the portion of the trip where we’re visiting (in rapid succession) and then choosing the city where we’ll be moving at the end of the summer, which might even involve us signing a lease for our new home. All in the next five days. Whoa.

This comes in the midst of a sort of vicious and sneaky exhaustion that crept up during our last week in Southeast Asia, only to be exacerbated by jet lag and all the rapid travel that’s happened since. It’s all taken a toll on our diets, especially as we’ve been getting together with friends and spending more time in airports than I would like to admit.

So during our brief 18-hour stay in Eugene, 18 hours that included going through our mail from the last five months, doing our taxes, going for our first run in five months (ouch), buying new phones and a new laptop for me (yay!), and reorienting ourselves with our belongings enough to pack for this part of the trip (oh, and sleeping, sort of), I took full advantage of my little window of opportunity to use a real kitchen and made myself exactly the sort of meal I’ve been craving for months.

I make this kind of thing a lot, especially when I’m stretched for time or when I need to recover from heavier eating or when I’ve built up a good collection of leftover bits and pieces in the kitchen.  It’s a sort of not-salad salad, packed with whatever delicious cooked and raw things I can pull together with what I have around. This one in particular included dried cranberries, raw pumpkin seeds, chopped dill pickles, roasted carrots, a poached egg, and shaved raw cheddar, all of which I found within a minute of rooting around in my in-laws’ kitchen. I tossed the greens with a simple olive oil/balsamic vinegar combo, though at home I’ll usually use my basic simple vinaigrette, which I almost always have in the fridge. If I’ve planned ahead or if I’m feeling fancy, I’ll make a more complicated dressing, like one with preserved lemon or avocado and cilantro or orange and sesame.

I’ve surprised even myself with the sorts of things I’ve thrown in these salads – pretty much any sort of cooked and/or smoked meat or fish is fair game, along with cooked grains and dried or fresh fruit and croutons and a million other things. There’s almost always some sort of poached, fried, or soft-boiled egg, delicious in any case but particularly here because the yolk can soak down and mix with everything else to make a sort of fortified salad dressing. I generally try to mix up the ingredients so there’s a good variety of textures and flavors – crunchy and chewy, salty and sweet, creamy and piquant – but it really doesn’t require even that much thought to be delicious.

I suppose this sort of thing is often called a “kitchen sink” dish, since you can throw in everything but … and that’s definitely true here. It’s infinitely adaptable and creative and always in season (as long as you can get your hands on some salad greens).

Easy main-dish salads (aka “kitchen sink salads”)

It would take pages to document all the various additions and combinations that work well for this sort of thing, but the basic formula is:

• well-dressed and well-seasoned (salted) salad greens
• add lots of stuff (see ideas below)
• maybe put the egg and the prettier additions on top of the salad once it’s plated instead of tossing those things into the greens
• maybe add some flaky sea salt, freshly cracked black pepper, or a drizzle of vinegar or oil on top

And for inspiration’s sake, here are some categories of additions to think about, along with a few of my favorite examples:

• Cooked vegetables (e.g. roasted carrots or beets, sautéed mushrooms, grilled zucchini or eggplant, curried cauliflower)
• Fresh vegetables (e.g. avocado, cubed cucumbers, in-season cherry tomatoes)
• Dried fruits (e.g. cranberries, currants, chopped dates)
• Fresh fruits (e.g. Asian pears, grapes, firm stone fruits, thin kumquat slices)
• Frozen and thawed vegetables (e.g. peas, corn)
• Cooked grains (e.g. quinoa, Israeli couscous, barley)
• Croutons (preferably homemade, preferably with garlic and salt and plenty of olive oil)
• Cheese (e.g. goat cheese or feta crumbles, shaved or shredded hard cheeses)
• Meat and fish (e.g. smoked fishes, shredded chicken, chopped ham)
• Eggs (e.g. poached, soft-boiled, fried)
• Nuts and seeds (e.g. pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds – either of which can be candied before adding)
• Pickles of some sort or another, chopped into bite-size pieces

And a few of my favorite specific combinations, off the top of my head:

• Bacon lardons, blue cheese crumbles, halved red grapes, poached egg
• Chopped ham, soft-boiled eggs, roasted asparagus, preserved lemon vinaigrette (this one was right after easter)
• Smoked salmon, cubed Asian pear, green onions, cucumber
• Roasted carrots and beets, avocado, pumpkin seeds, thin but creamy cilantro dressing (like this one on top of lettuce)
• Bulgur, roasted fennel, cherry tomatoes, diced celery, za’atar spice mix
• Roasted butternut squash, sautéed mushrooms, Israeli couscous, creamy lemon dressing

And then, there’s the food. We’re both big fans of Vietnamese food back in the states, so we were particularly looking forward to our time eating our way through the country, south to north. We were not disappointed.

I’ve always said that if I were forced to eat one type of food all the time it would definitely be Mexican food, but I’m honestly not so sure of that anymore. Vietnamese food is the absolutely perfect combination of deep, complex flavors and simple, fresh ingredients, combined in millions of different ways to achieve entirely different things. The number of amazing and amazingly different things they can create with even just a few ingredients is incredible. It can be possible that something made of just broth, rice noodles, and mint leaves can taste like the best thing you’ve ever had, and that’s the sort of simple magic I can get behind.

We tried to eat as wide a variety of things as we could, considering our need to have some of our most favorite things more than once, but I know there’s a lot we still missed. I suppose all those times we spent eating $1 banh mis could have been used trying other things, but each and every banh mi I ate was slightly different than those that came before it – like beautiful snowflakes – so it was all worth it. And on our second-to-last night in Hanoi, over steaming bowls of bun cha, we started planning what we’ll do (and what we’ll eat) on our next trip to Vietnam, so there will be more chances to fill in the gaps.

We loved each of the places we went in the country, each very different than the others and each featuring particular culinary specialties. Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon and Hanoi were big, urban, bustling cities, clogged with motorbikes and chaos and street food, served mostly from carts or baskets or miniscule charcoal grills, diners perched precariously on shin-height plastic stools. Nha Trang, Hoi An, and Hue were smaller, slower, and quieter, the first one focused entirely on its beach and the latter two on their historic culture and creative, artsy vibes. We tried to avoid touristy food as much as we could (impossible when we took an overnight boat trip on Halong Bay, for instance), and ate street food with abandon. More often than not we found ourselves in the sort of place with no menu to speak of, the sort of place where two fingers held in the air, two times, brought us two servings of whatever they made and two bottles of beer.  There wasn’t as much seafood in our diet as we expected, but my inability to eat shrimp/prawns was a serious setback in that regard, and we probably would have found more in fancier restaurants. And in its place was plenty of pork and beef and duck and chicken, each of which we thoroughly enjoyed.

This post will be a bit unwieldy, with lots of things to say and even more pictures to share. So I’ve organized it the best way I knew how, starting with the various kinds of starch we knew and loved – noodles, rice, rice paper, steamed dumplings, bread – then talking about a few other categories of things, including beverages (oh, Vietnamese coffee, I miss you so much already, and it’s only been two days).

And this might be my last post for Asia, aside from a general “Best of” post to come after we get back. We’re in Thailand now, but only for a short five days, our last five days before heading back to the United States for the month of April (itinerary: San Diego, Los Angeles, Eugene, Davis, Minneapolis, Madison, NYC, New Orleans, Portland, Eugene – it tires me just writing it, much less thinking about it, though in reality I am far more excited than anything else). Five days in Thailand is not nearly enough to make observations about a massive and intricate culinary tradition. And, to be honest, I’m a bit tuckered out. We’re both suffering from a travel fatigue that we hadn’t really experienced thus far, and in place of our usual excitement and zeal for tracking down specific food items or going out of our way to eat something new, all we’re wanting is our idea of Thai comfort foods – spicy fried noodles with scrambled egg, green Papaya salad, creamy Massaman curry, and big bottles of Chang. So there might be some new photos somewhere down the line, but probably no “Thailand: The Food” post. Which seems crazy, but exhaustion is a dangerous thing to be toyed with, these days.

And one more little thing, actually fairly related: the March Farmer General issue came out a few days ago, appropriately enough titled “The Great Escape,” all about food and travel. My contribution - Blood, Guts, and All the Rest - is probably my favorite that I’ve written for them thus far, and I hope you like it! It’s all about the markets I’ve been to in South America and Southeast Asia, and why they’re so important for one’s understanding of food.

And now, onto the food:

Noodles and broth
Noodles and broth in various ratios and flavor combinations was a mainstay of the diet wherever we went. The more broth it contained the more traditionally it was eaten for breakfast, though most of the things I talk about below were readily available all day.

• Yes, there was pho, and yes, it was incredible. I actually had eaten pho only twice before we went to Vietnam – blasphemy, I know – but we had it quite a bit while we were there and I am fully on the pho train now. Big bowls of savory, heavily spiced beef broth (think spices like star anise, clove, coriander, cardamom, nutmeg, and the like)  with rice noodles and meat (we had chopped beef, beef meatballs, each of which were cased like a sausage and were subsequently crisp and juicy and delicious, and chicken, which was vastly inferior [in our opinion]), served with mountains of bean sprouts and basil and other delicious herbs we generally could not identify. We liked it best with healthy squeezes of lime, a few spoonful of the hot chopped chilies that were always served alongside, and a few spoonfuls of liquid from the jar of vinegar-soaked garlic cloves.
• Bun bo Hue was the noodle soup of choice in – believe it or not – the city of Hue. I had a really bad head cold while were in Hue, so pretty much all I ate was bun bo Hue, loaded down with chilies to try and clear out my head. Like pho it was noodles and broth and meat (always beef, hence the bo in the name), but the broth was an entirely different flavor base, heavily infused with lemongrass and absent the spices of pho broth. Like pho, bun bo Hue was also served with lime, chilis, herbs (in this case cilantro, mint, basil, and others), bean sprouts, but also with thinly sliced banana blossoms.
• Cao lau is a noodle dish entirely tied to Hoi An – to have it, you need cao lau noodles, and to have cao lau noodles you need Hoi An water. Or at least so the legend goes, though the part about needing a certain kind of noodle is true. Cao lau noodles resemble Japanese soba noodles more than they do Vietnamese rice noodles, and their chewy texture and unique flavor make cao lau what it is. It’s those noodles, plus pork, herbs and greens, and a small bit of salty, extra flavorful broth, just enough to puddle at the bottom of the bowl, beneath the noodles and meat and greens. We ate big bowls of it at a stall in the Hoi An central market, where it was topped with bean sprouts and crispy deep-fried rice noodle bits and accompanied by chili-infused vinegar.
• Bun cha. Between this and the next dish on this list, I could write volumes. We’re both incredibly disappointed that we didn’t discover these two until late in our trip, but acknowledge that if we had known about them we probably wouldn’t have tried many of the other things that we did. Bun cha is a pork paradise, a steamy, sweet fish sauce-based broth stuffed with grilled pork in some form – the place we loved had both ground pork patties and strips of pork belly – and shavings of green papaya, alongside a plate of vermicelli noodles, a bowl of chopped garlic and chilis, and a huge pile of herbs and Boston Bibb/butter lettuce. It’s traditionally served with crab spring rolls, which Brett enjoyed but I unfortunately could not. There’s a million different ways you could eat all of this together, but mainly the point is to come up with as many ways as possible to get the broth into your mouth. The noodles soak up the broth, the pork soaks up the broth, even those silky smooth lettuce leaves pick up broth in all their wrinkles. That was an important element in particular – I’ve always loved Boston Bibb/butter lettuce, but I’ve never known how perfectly paired with something it could really be until bun cha.
• Bun bo nam bo is the other of our favorite two dishes we ate in Vietnam. It was more like cao lau in form, a pile of noodles, meat, and greens doused with just enough broth to fill an inch or two up the bottom of the bowl. It’s vermicelli noodles again, but with beef this time, sliced thinly against the grain, marinated, and stir-fried with bean sprouts. Into a bowl goes lettuce and herbs, a thick knot of noodles, the meat and sprouts, and a ladle or so of insanely flavorful beef/fish sauce broth. It’s all topped with roasted peanuts (probably the most genius part of the whole thing), crispy fried shallots, and slightly pickled carrot and green papaya. We ate it for dinner our last two nights in Vietnam. That’s how good it is.
• We had plenty of other generic noodle/broth combination dishes along the way, too. I’m sure some of them had official names, but I either didn’t note them down or never saw them to begin with (the latter is more likely). In Danang, waiting for our train to Hue, I slurped down fat rice noodles in chicken broth, packed with a good dose of roasted peanuts (and bits of chicken bone, but I’m trying to forget about that part). In Hoi An we started our first morning with huge bowls of noodle soup that came packed with fresh mint, chunks of deep-fried pork, strips of bologna, and lots of raw chopped beef (it cooked quickly in the broth). These and others all came with plenty of chili, in one form or another, and lots of garlic, if we were lucky. They were all variations on a theme – a great theme – and they were all delicious.

Rice
Strangely enough, we didn’t eat a ton of rice. Aside from the two dishes below, we only really ate rice whenever we had Generic Asian Stir-fry, which I talk more about below. We had it in other forms (which I also talk about below), but basic cooked rice was not a big part of our diet.

• Our first night in Hoi An, exhausted after an overnight bus ride that ended up causing my hellish head cold, we could only summon enough energy to make it to the little restaurant at the end of our guesthouse’s driveway. By “small restaurant” I mean a half-dozen or so low plastic tables and stools set under a roughly built canopy in the large driveway of a family’s house. It was legit enough to get a sign and a makeshift outdoor kitchen (versus them just cooking everything in their home kitchen and bringing it outside), but was certainly not a place for tourists. We had heard they served duck rice soup from another guest at our hotel, but had no idea what that would be in Vietnamese, and since no one there spoke English we just walked in and held up two fingers, the international sign for “we’ll have two, please.” They showed us where to sit and sat in front of us two steaming bowls of chao vit, duck rice soup. (This restaurant actually offered two dishes, but considering the other one was bowls of duck blood with vegetables, they made a fairly correct assumption that we wanted the chao vit.) The soup consisted of a thick, porridge-like rice soup made with savory duck broth, topped with pieces of cooked duck meat, plenty of duck skin, and chunks of duck blood pudding, plus a healthy dose of freshly cracked black pepper. Tired and beginning to feel the onset of my cold, this was about as comforting as I could have possibly gotten. And we had a good time trying to communicate with the family who owned the restaurant, each of them emerging from the house in turn to get a look at the Americans eating in their driveway. On the way out, a group of raucous (and most certainly intoxicated) young Vietnamese men excitedly made Brett take a shot of the house-brewed rice wine with them, and took many cell phone photos of them with the two of us.
• Our first day in Hanoi, we ate sticky rice with barbeque – one of two dishes we ate in the country that had great promise, but fell a little flat. The streetside restaurant we stopped at specialized in sticky rice with various toppings, and we ordered a big bowl of it topped with corn, barbequed pork, and a fried egg. Together with a healthy dose of chili sauce, how could this possibly be bad? Well, it was. Maybe not bad so much as mediocre and deeply disappointing, especially considering the potential of the ingredients individually and collectively. It was mainly flavorless and strangely textured thanks to a thick layer of yellow paste, which we went in phases of identifying as either weird mashed potatoes or weirdly pasty pork fat. All together, good in concept, bad in implementation. We wished we’d had the chance to try it again at some other place.

Dishes served with rice

• Seafood was plentiful. I’m guessing it has something to do with the country’s plentiful coastline. We didn’t eat much of it, as I mentioned before, mainly because of my shrimp allergy, but we did have around ten or so various dishes with things like scallops, mussels, clams, squid, and various types of fish. It was generally cooked in the ways you would expect – grilled with garlic and butter, stir-fried with vegetables, fried and covered with various sauces/relishes. These were all good, but nothing spectacularly notable.
• I’m not sure if this is true across the country, but at least in the central part there’s a lot of cooking of meats and vegetables in clay pots. Whatever’s inside ends up a soft, silky, steaming stew-like concoction with an Asian twist, full of savory ingredients like fish sauce and palm sugar and herbs. I had one with eggplant and tomatoes, and another of slow-braised tofu and mushrooms, and they were both perfect Asian-style comfort food.
• Unfortunately we were subject to a number of Generic Asian Stir-fries, the mainstay of tourist restaurants and tourist activities (like our snorkeling day trip in Nha Trang and our overnight boat trip in Halong Bay). In situations like these, they’re unavoidable. Lemongrass chicken, sweet and sour vegetables, beef and broccoli, etc. They weren’t actively bad, just incredibly boring – the same thing you could get in mediocre Asian restaurants across the United States.

Rice paper and rice flour
In Vietnam we learned of a whole new world of rice paper. There were the same ol’ dried sheets that I’ve used at home, steamed or soaked to make fresh spring rolls. But there were also freshly made rice paper, steamed from batter right in front of our eyes, and thin sheets eaten dry and wrapped around various things, and Jackson Pollock-esque lattice sheets that fried up into crisp shards to encase a spring roll filling. In a slightly related way, rice flour is often used to make sheets of dough or pancakes to encase sweet or savory fillings.

• I took a cooking course in Hoi An that ended up being far too oriented on giving people a fancy experience and not nearly enough oriented on actually teaching people about the food, but it was all worth it anyway because it taught me how to make fresh rice paper. We used it to make spring rolls, but it’s used in many other dishes around the country (as in banh cuon, which I describe next). Partially because it was tastier than the dried stuff, partially because I love knowing how to make everything from scratch, and partially because I particularly hate preparing those damn dry sheets, I am really excited to bring this skill home with me, and to teach it in future classes.
• Banh cuon was the other dish that felt a bit disappointing for us. It’s sheets of fresh rice paper rolled around a filling of minced pork and mushrooms, usually served with a fish sauce-based dipping sauce, slices of bologna-like pork sausage, and some selection of bean sprouts, cucumber, and/or herbs. Our was topped with crispy fried shallots, but that was probably the best part of the whole dish. Either we did it wrong or we went to the wrong place, since I’ve heard from other sources that this dish is delicious, but when we ate it the whole thing just seemed kind of flavorless. But this is another one with great potential, and I’m looking forward to trying it out at home.
• Throughout Vietnam we enjoyed spring rolls (nem), which were available practically anywhere and everywhere. We ate them fried more than fresh, usually because we were craving something tasty to eat with a cold beer, and they were filled with veggies and/or pork, glass noodles, and herbs. Once we had pork spring rolls that were basically a sausage wrapped in rice paper and deep-fried. (It was about as awesome as it sounds, after a long, hot day and alongside ice-cold cans of beer.) Only once did we have them with the lattice rice paper, which was perfect for soaking up the flavors of the dipping sauce (which was always fish sauce-based). You might notice that I don’t have any pictures below of spring rolls, but that’s probably because we mostly ate them at night (since the light is usually so bad at night I usually only take pictures of our dinners when we’re eating something really important).
• We had a number of different dishes that utilized thin, dry, flexible sheets of rice paper to wrap together a variety of ingredients. One of the ways we ate this was in banh xeo, a crispy fried pancake of rice flour and turmeric with shrimp (or other meat) and bean sprouts, eaten after stuffing it with herbs and rolling it up in that thin rice paper, then dipping it all in peanut sauce. The fried pancake itself is pretty greasy from the frying, but together with all these other elements it’s perfectly crunchy, crispy, and fresh.  Another way we had this was with nem lui, ground pork lemongrass skewers available in Hue. The ground pork is mixed with all kinds of flavorful elements, then shaped around lemongrass stalks and grilled, served with greens and veggies, that thin rice paper, and peanut sauce. Into the rice paper goes pork (stripped off the lemongrass, which isn’t edible), herbs, and veggies, then it’s rolled up and dipped into the peanut sauce. In general the idea with the thin rice paper seems to be: add main thing, add herbs, dip in peanut sauce. I’m very into this concept.
• Another rice flour-based dish we enjoyed was banh goi, an empanada-like pocket of rice flour dough filled with ground pork, mushrooms, glass noodles, and pork sausage, then deep fried and served alongside a thick roasted chili sauce. I’m not sure it’s always served with that kind of chili sauce, but the one we had felt almost Mexican, and all together the entire thing was some amazing combination of techniques and flavors from various cuisines. But I’m certainly not complaining, because it was delicious and one for each of us made a perfect pre-lunch snack as we wandered around Hanoi.

Dumplings
We saw steamed dumplings – steamed dough filled with savory or sweet things – across the country, with a few specialty types in various places.

• Banh bao was the basic steamed dumpling, and was widely available from carts on the street. Our favorite version was full of ground pork and a quail egg, which would cook perfectly in the center of the meat and become the cutest little hard-boiled egg you might ever see.
• Hue has a selection of specialty dumplings available, unfortunately all featuring shrimp. I dutifully took down the names and all the details, hoping I’d be able to find a version without shrimp or that I could at least take a bite or two (my allergy is only mild), but then it didn’t happen and I somehow lost all my notes. This was at the height of my sickness, so who knows what I did with them. In any case, if you go to Hue, you should try the various types of shrimp dumpling. I hear they’re all delicious.

Bread
Vietnam’s close ties with France over the years have brought a number of French influences to their cuisine, most notably in the form of the baguette and other bread-like baked items. This is fantastic, when you’ve been traveling around mainly bread-less for a while.

• And it manifest itself in a ridiculous number of banh mi, at least in our diet. We were particularly excitable consumers of these Vietnamese baguette sandwiches back in LA, and upon arriving in Ho Chi Minh City were ecstatic to see banh mi carts clogging pedestrian traffic on almost every block. In the first week we ate them every day, at least once, especially because they were so cheap ($1 or less) and easy to eat on the go on buses, at the beach, etc. We never did find the perfect, maxed-out combination of our favorite banh mi ingredients, since each cart was slightly different, but each day was sort of a game to find the cart with the best offerings. We’re big fans of pickled vegetables and cilantro on banh mi, for instance, but it seemed these would always be available at the carts with the least enticing meat options. Across all of the banh mi we had, here’s a comprehensive list of the fillings we tried: meat/protein [barbecued marinated pork/pork belly/pork fat, shredded pork skin with fish sauce and sesame seeds (NOT my favorite, ugh), ham, bologna, hot dog, paté, omelet with fish sauce (my personal favorite), Laughing Cow cheese]; vegetables [pickled carrot/daikon radish, cucumber, lettuce, tomato slices]; spiciness [fresh tiny chilies (ridiculously spicy), chili oil, chili sauce]; toppings [cilantro, crispy fried shallots, pork thread, sesame seeds]; flavorings [fish sauce, MSG sauce]. I’d say the best one I had consisted of fish sauce omelet, pickled veggies, cucumber, chili oil, fried shallots, pork thread, sesame seeds, and (gasp) MSG sauce.  I bought it on the street in Ho Chi Minh City, and it was glorious.
• Another way bread appears in Vietnam is in the form of highly French-influenced bakeries, all of which offer an impressive spread of bread, brioche, pastries, cakes, and other lovely baked things. I generally passed these by to make more room for many of the things I’ve mentioned above, but we did have a small selection of really fantastic brioches and pound cakes and other items. It appeared most of the baking staff at the more legitimate bakeries had been trained either in France or at French pastry schools in Vietnam.

Beverages

• Café culture is alive and well in Vietnam, perhaps in part due to their history with France. We made a point of ending up in cafes most every day we were there, partially because they were generally lovely places to sit and watch the world around us, and partially because we fell in love with Vietnamese coffee. We fell in love with the condensed milk version in particular, though it was available without. Either way, it’s brewed (or mixed, in the case of instant coffee) very strong, then combined with condensed milk and/or water and/or ice, depending on how you order it and in what part of the country you are. In the south it would get enough water to fill up an entire glass, where further north it got no water at all, and ended up almost syrupy thick and strong enough to fuel an army. In some areas you could get it mixed with egg white or yogurt – we unfortunately didn’t have a chance to try to the latter, but the former was amazing. As far as we could tell most of the condensed milk was mixed with the beaten egg white, which forms sort of a fluffy sweet/salty meringue on top of the thick, strong coffee, whether iced or hot. In general we drank Vietnamese coffee mainly iced, since it was so warm outside, but the warm version was just as delicious. We drank it perched on tiny plastic stools on sidewalks and from fancy cafes in the park, and from just about everywhere in between.  We miss it already, and are anxious to make it once we get back home.
• The beer in Vietnam was pretty much the same as everywhere else we’ve been – light, fizzy, etc. etc. etc. – with one notable exception. Bia hoi is freshly made beer available across the country but most widely in Hanoi. And by fresh, I mean fresh – it’s made every day and sold only immediately. It’s traditionally a morning and afternoon sort of thing, and locals swear it doesn’t taste right by the end of the day. Many places don’t even have any by the evening, since they have only what they’ve made and can easily run out. But the thing is, it’s good. I don’t know how they do it, but they make it in a day and it’s flavorful and refreshing and way better than the bottled stuff. It’s pretty much only available at places that specialize in just that, though they sometimes sell some snacks and small plates of food, and usually you sit on those same little plastic stools out on the sidewalk and watch the world go by. And the kicker is, it usually costs somewhere around $0.20 per glass. I’ve heard that Vietnam actually has the cheapest beer in the world, and there’s how. Go to Vietnam, drink bia hoi. Thank me later.

So on this site, you’ve mainly seen bulleted lists of things I’ve eaten and food-related observations I’ve made, and otherwise I’ve written pretty much only what was necessary for pitches and deadlines and such. In our four months abroad – four months of constant travel, staying places for three or four days at most – I’ve written about my thoughts and feelings and experiences only twice, in a journal that has otherwise turned into a depository for menu ideas and lists of things we’ve eaten and German language exercises and frustratingly scrawled tables of bus ticket prices and hostel addresses.

But, today I sit in my bed in a hotel room in Vietnam, anchored by a head cold that all the pho in the world does not seem to be able to cure, and I’m going to take the time to write some things down. I probably won’t say much about food, but bear with me – this site will, eventually, return to the recipes and techniques and everything else it’s always been. I promise. The past eight months, and the past four in particular, have brought along with them almost an entire journal’s worth of ideas and inspiration, and there will be plenty to share once I’m reunited with my boxes of kitchen equipment and finally have a place to unpack them. I can’t wait to get back into the kitchen, and planning for new projects and ideas have lately been what’s gotten me through endless hours of bus trips and bus station waiting rooms. (And if you’re relatively new to this blog, you might want to read these three posts – 1, 2, 3 - first. They talk more about our decision to take this year of travel and why we made it.)

I’ve managed to stage a mid-year review for this adventure only once. I’m a mid-year review sort of person, I can fully admit, and I’ve surprised even myself by only once creating a formal conversation about whether we’ve been meeting our objectives. We each had separate-but-similar sets of goals for taking this year of travel, and we agreed over plates of green peppercorn chicken stir-fry in Siem Reap that so far we felt like we were doing a pretty good job at meeting those goals. Some of them are pretty personal, but mostly they’re of a vein you’d be familiar with if you’ve been reading over the last year – we wanted to take some time away from our normal lives to recalibrate a bit, with some space to think about the sort of life we wanted to recreate when we came back and re-settled. That’s a bit vague, but pretty well encompasses what we were looking for in our lives to take this year-long leap of faith. I wanted a complete shake-up of my daily life and routines, with space and time to assess how I actually like to spend my time. I hoped this would not only help me to feel a little more satisfied and confident with how I live my life on both a daily and a long-term basis, but also to help elucidate what kind of work I’ll want to do when we get back and to give me more focus and identity in whatever that is. I wanted to throw myself into unknown territory, to challenge my conceptions about what I could and couldn’t do, and to test my own boundaries. And to really do all of this right I wanted private space, so that we could focus on ourselves and on each other without so many distractions (I say, as I write about it all on my public blog …). And more than anything else, I wanted everything to feel slower, so I could stop feeling like each day was a to-do list to get through just to move onto the next one.

I would say all of that is going fairly well. The fact that I can’t really tell if I’m busy or not is a pretty good sign, for starters. And I’ve certainly been challenged. The past eight months have been made up of a lot of really great things, but there have definitely been difficult minutes and hours and days. We’ve seen some amazing things, and some really difficult and heart-breaking things. There have been lunches spent convincing ourselves that we’re not doing this all wrong, or that this wasn’t a horrible idea for some reason or another (most of them financial), and dinners even on those same exact days that we’ve spent toasting ourselves and our decision to do this. But all of the difficulties and everything else have all been worth it, without a doubt.

I don’t want to jinx it all by saying that things have significantly changed over the past eight months, and I’m not sure I’ll even be able to tell if they’ve changed until after everything is all said and done, in any case. We do still have somewhere around five to six months to go before we have a home again, so I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch. But it does feel like things have been clarifying, even if it’s in a way that’s a little difficult to explain. I don’t know if it’s that I’ve gotten better at listening to myself or if I’m saying things more loudly or if I’m now just more aware of what it was I’ve wanted to say all along, but I definitely have been feeling some important tugs and drops. Oh, that’s sort of a funny way to say it, but I’ll try to explain – as time has gone on over these past months I’ve started feeling certain ideas and sentiments tugging at me, from little things like realizing that I really do love hiking (I just didn’t like it in Southern California), or that thickly-brewed coffee with condensed milk is one of my absolute favorite things, to medium-sized things like a much more distinct idea for the business I’d like to start when we get back, to bigger, more significant things that go in the philosophy and personal ecology boxes. Likewise, there have been things of all of those levels of significance that have finally started comfortably dropping away, some of which I probably should have let go of a long time ago. Sometimes this takes the form of considering some past embarrassment, failure, or shortcoming that likes to tag along behind me and figuring out how to either accept it as a point of learning in my life or try to completely let it go. I guess it’s all a part of being more confident in what I actually want and don’t want out of life, which is exactly what I had hoped would happen. I can feel myself reacting differently to things, usually in ways that I always wished I had – the reactions that usually come to me hours after the fact are starting to become second-nature. I’ve been trying to avoid using the word priorities in all of this, because it seems a little trite, but it’s kind of impossible to talk about all of this without saying that my priorities have been clarifying, shifting in minute little ways and in big ones.

And it’s great to be feeling all of this at this time in particular, because we’re starting to look at the end of this year with more specifics in mind. We’re most of the way through the grad school application process, with just a few more programs to hear back from, and in just a few short weeks we’ll be jetting around the US visiting campuses and vetting cities as potential new hometowns. It’s very strange to think that in exactly one month we’ll know where we’ll be moving in August (or September), and that I’ll soon be able to start seeking out new opportunities and partnerships for all the things I’m interested in doing once we’re moved in and settled. After Decision Day we’ll be visiting friends in a few places around the US, then heading to Vienna for five weeks, with short stays in Prague and Budapest on either side. Then, it’s back to the US for the last month or two, hopefully to be filled with camping and backpacking and time with friends before we drag all of our belongings somewhere else. It’s all very hard to imagine from this sickbed in Vietnam, as I daydream about the next banh mi to make its way into my mouth.

It feels a little strange to end this without really talking about food at all – well, I guess I did mention both pho and banh mi, both of which are important parts of my life these days – but thanks for being patient and letting me put it all out there for a minute or two. Go drink some bourbon for me, and eat a good muffin (a scone would suffice, if necessary), and sleep in your own bed. I could use all of those, right about now.

We really loved Cambodia – amazing culture, friendly people, lots of interesting stuff to see and do. You’ll note I didn’t say anything about the food there, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. It just wasn’t … all that notable. In a sea of incredible Southeast Asian cuisine, Cambodian food seemed a little muted and repetitive. My sense is that if we’d have more money to spend, we would’ve had a whole series of spectacular meals, but I don’t know how much they would have resembled what Cambodian people actually eat. Don’t get me wrong – we did eat some really fantastic things, things that I’ve noted down on my lists of top eating experiences and things to bring back into my own kitchen. And maybe we just made poor choices about where and what to eat. But by the end of our time there, I actually took us out of our way to go get Mexican food. In Cambodia.  (It actually turned out to be a fairly good Tex Mex-style wet burrito, with freshly fried tortilla chips and everything, but it’s still fairly out of character for me.)

Cambodian food in general seemed fairly similar to Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese cuisines, depending on from what angle you look at it. Lots of rice, lots of stir-fries dominated by the fish sauce/soy sauce/sugar triad, some fried noodles, lots of curries, always some version of spring rolls and papaya salad, and a decent selection of BBQ restaurants with sweetly-marinated grilled meats. But there are plenty of other specific things to note, as well:

• Unlike Thai food, Cambodian food is not spicy, and decidedly so. They do have a few traditionally spicy dishes and often serve vinegar-soaked chilis (tiny, Thai chili-like peppers they affectionately call “rat shit peppers”) on the table as an accompaniment, but even their bottled chili sauce is big on flavor, very small on spiciness. This was kind of frustrating, and at least twice led me to soak my food in chili sauce to the point that it became the dominant flavor.
• But speaking of chili sauce, many things did come with a small dish of an amazingly perfect sweet and sour chili garlic sauce, a thin dipping sauce-like consistency made of fish sauce, sugar, red chilis, and garlic. Whenever we got it, we used it all.
• Most of the produce we saw was familiar to us, but some was entirely unheard of. Morning glory (a plant in the same family as the flower, otherwise known as “water spinach”) was a common green for stir-fries, one night we ate tiny green eggplants the size of large chickpeas, and another time we started our meal with a banana flower salad. Wandering through the markets we spied fruits and vegetables of all sorts that we had no idea how to identify, much less eat.
• Amok, a delicious coconut milk-based “dry curry” traditionally made with fish, is a fairly ubiquitous dish on menus. “Dry curry” means a far thicker sauce in far less volume, as opposed to other curries, served soupy and in a bowl. Traditionally it was always made with fish and steamed or roasted in a bowl made from a banana leaf, forming a thick, pasty curry as the liquid cooked off. These days it’s available with chicken, beef, or tofu, or other proteins, and is often made in a wok like other curries, left to bubble on the stove while the coconut milk cooks down into a thick sauce with a slightly curdled texture.  
• Khmer curries in general (the soupier ones) we found to be fantastic. They were creamy like Thai curries but with the warmth and depth of Indian ones, and usually contained pumpkin and yam (and chopped up peanuts, if we were lucky).
• Lok lak is a common type of beef stir fry, though menus differed heavily on what exactly it meant. Some were served with french fries instead of rice and said that that was traditional, some with egg on top and said that that was traditional, some with raw salad vegetables like lettuce, tomato, and cucumber, and said that that was the most traditional. So who really knows? But at its most basic, it’s a stir fry of beef with a sauce including black pepper, garlic, tomato sauce (often ketchup, especially in restaurants), soy sauce, and fish sauce.
• Oh, Kampot pepper. I’ve always been a fan of black pepper, especially once I moved from the tinned ground stuff to using a pepper grinder, but now that I’ve seen the world of Kampot pepper, I might never be able to go back. Kampot is a region in Cambodia famous for its pepper, and while we didn’t go there we were able to eat it in a variety of ways. On our second night in Siem Reap we ordered a chicken stir fry made with long strands of the fresh green peppercorns (not dried), and the flavor was like a revelation. Every bite was infused with a slowly-growing, floral, citrusy pepper flavor, like all the best parts of black pepper without any of the acidity or staleness or kickback that it sometimes has. It was obvious that the pepper – whether green, black, red, or white – was everywhere in the food, sometimes more dominantly than others, and I loved it. One night we ordered barbequed pork ribs and alongside the sweet, palm sugar-lacquered meat was a small dish of a sauce made entirely of ground black pepper and lime juice. Simple, but packed with flavor and right to the point. I loved it. Unfortunately the green pepper flavor is kind of unexportable since it requires the fresh, undried, unripened green pepper berries, but I did buy a 250g sack of black peppercorns at the market for about $2.
• We didn’t eat as much street food as we perhaps should have, but we did have a few really great experiences. They appear to be very fond of skewers of … well, it’s not really clear what kind of food product is actually on the skewers. Some are definitely fish balls, and some seem to look like bits of hot dog, but I’m really not sure what the Angry Bird-shaped ones were, or the bright green ones, or most of the rest of them. But they love them, deep-fried and often served with hunks of baguette and chili sauce. My shrimp intolerance limited me to a few timid bites, but Brett tried 3 or 4 different kinds of them. At the Phnom Penh night market, we also fell in love with Panko-breaded fried chicken drumsticks with chili sauce and plates of thick noodles fried with greens and topped with shredded chicken and roasted peanuts. (We fell enough in love with those two things, in fact, that we had them for dinner two nights in a row on our last two nights in the country.)
• Twice we ate something similar to our noodles at the night market, both times called simply “Khmer noodles.” It consisted of a large bowl of undressed cooked noodles topped with things like dried shrimp or cooked meat, a huge pile of lettuce, herbs and bean sprouts, and a healthy handful of chopped peanuts, served alongside a smaller bowl of sauce. We couldn’t tell exactly what the sauce was, but I’m going to go out on a very secure limb here and say it included fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, and soy sauce, among other things.
• One street food we definitely, definitely didn’t eat was clams. Everywhere we went, vendors with wooden carts sold mounds of tiny clams, seemingly tossed with some sort of herb-chili mixture. Brett came to call them “the shits in a shell” (note: not “shit in a shell” … “the shits in a shell”), and it became my primary goal to get a good picture of them. I didn’t do very well, but I’m including below one of my better mediocre shots.
• Coffee and tea with condensed milk began showing up more and more the farther east we moved toward Vietnam, and I was pleased to see it. Iced coffee with condensed milk became an every-few-days treat while we were in Cambodia – as time has gone on it has turned into an everyday necessity, but that’s not important.
• Beer: Light, fizzy, cold. Cambodia, Angkor, Anchor (which they pronounce “An – chore” to differentiate), and some others I can’t really remember. Pilsner, pilsner, pilsner. And more pilsner.
• (But also – some booze was strangely cheap and we now have a 1 liter bottle of Bombay Sapphire in our possession, for which we spent $11. It is a treasure!)

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