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Posts tagged ‘Vietnamese food’

Oct 31

Vietnamese braised eggplant

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We’re entering that brothy, stewy time of year I love so much, and this recipe has been added to our rotation for the season since it’s delicious, relatively simple to put together, and perfect for making in larger batches to divide over a few meals. We don’t cook a lot of Asian food at home, but this is definitely one of the most delicious and simple ones we make. It’s inspired by one I made last spring in a cooking class in Central Vietnam, where they fill clay pots with vegetables, aromatics like garlic and lemongrass, and a sweetened fish sauce broth, and cook it all over a low fire. These were unlike any of the other dishes we ate in Vietnam – warming and filling like Pho and other noodle soups, but instead packed with vegetables, intensely flavorful, and served over rice – and I knew the concept would be more easily adaptable to making back at home. Read more

Mar 25

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Vietnam: The Food

After Cambodia, we spent almost three weeks – nearly half our time in Asia – in Vietnam, starting from the south in Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon and working our way north along the coast to Hanoi. Neither of us would hesitate to say it has been our favorite place of the last four months of travel (of the last eight, it’s competing neck-and-neck with the Canadian Rockies). Across the country people were friendly, travel was easy, and it was easy to relax and enjoy our time in lovely places.

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.

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