Vietnamese Pancake

Bánh Xèo are Vietnamese crêpe-type pancakes made out of rice flour and coconut milk(optional), and are pan-fried and stuffed with slivers of fatty pork, shrimp, and bean sprouts. Served wrapped with lettuce leaves and stuffed with mint (optional) and other herbs, and dipped in nuoc mam.

Ingredients:
For batter
1 PackageVietnamese pancake ready mix
31/2 cup water
1cup coconut milk
½ cup chopped green onion
For filling:
500gram raw shrimp peel or leave whole
500gram pork thinly sliced
500gram bean sprouts
7oz peeled split mung beans , soaked in warm water ,steamed or microwaved
For cooking:
Cooking oil or pork fat
1 Pancake pan


Accompaniments:
1 head of butter or grean leaf lettuce
vietnamese herbs : basil, Spearmint, fish mint, Vietnamese Perilla …
vietnamese greens: there are over 24 kinds of greens to be served with banh xeo : mustard leaves, Wild Betal Leaf, mango leaf, fig leaf, …
1 cup of mixed fish sauce
pickled daikon and carrot.

Method

The batter:
To make the pancake batter, in a large mixing bowl whisk together the flour, turmeric, coconut milk, water, 2 tablespoons oil, and chopped green onion until well combined. Allow the batter to rest for 30 minutes.
The filling:
Heat 2 teaspoons oil in a wok or skillet over high heat and stir-fry the pork for 3 minutes. Add the shrimp and cook until opaque, 1 to 2 minutes. Add the bean sprouts and cook until just translucent but still firm, about 1 minute. Transfer to a platter and set aside.
Greens and herbs:
Arrange the salad ingredients in separate piles on a platter and set aside.
Frying pancake:
Heat 1 teaspoon oil in an 8-inch nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. While tilting the pan add 1/4 cup of the batter, swirling the pan at the same time to evenly distribute the batter.
Once the crepe starts to bubble gently in the center and loosen itself at the edges, 3 to 5 minutes. Scatter a handful of bean sprouts( mushrooms…), 2-3 pieces of pork and 2 shrimps on the lower half of the pancake. Reduce the heat to low and cover the pan.
Cook for 3 to 4 minutes or until the pancake golden browns and turns crispy. Fold the pancake in half and slide onto a platter. Continue making banh xeo as you serve them. Serve with table salad and herbs, and mixed fish sauce on the sides.
*Bean sprouts: can be alternated with turnip, mushroom….
* Pork and shrimp: can be alternated with duck meat, clams meat,…
* There are may kinds of herbs and greens served with banh xeo ,which only found in the countryside of Vietnam , so if you want to enjoy the real banh xeo come to vietnam .i will treat you then

Hai Phong shrimp noodle soup

Shrimp noodle or shrimp rice pancake are famous dishes of Hai Phong. Today, welcome mothers to test with delicious shrimp noodle dish (Bun tom Hai Phong)!

Ingredients:

• 300g shrimps; 
• 1-2 tomatoes; 
• 200g lean and fat meat mixed; 
• celeries; 
• 2 job’s ears; 
• some field mushrooms; 
• dills; 
• 5 dry onions; 
• 2 bowls of pre-stewing bone soup; 
• 500g noodles

Method: 

- Wash celeries, cut up them into pieces about 4cm long, dip through hot water, and separate them.
- Take the head and shell the shrimps, and put them in separate. Pull out the black thread at the shrimp’s back.
- Slice the meat into thin pieces large in width.
- Soak job’s ears and field mushrooms until rising, wash and slice into pieces about 1cm thick.
- Slice tomatos or cut into segments depend on your favourite
- Dip rice noodle through hot water and separate it.
- Peel and slice the onions
- Leave shelled shrimps alone or split into two parts, mix them with a little spices
- Roast the head and shell of the shrimps
- Then grim them in about 5-8 minutes
- Add them into a bowl of water then filter them slowly.
- The filtered liquid will be very sweet-smelling. Throw the residues
- Fry 1/3 of dry onions, add shrimps and stir them in 3-4 minutes to a turn then take into a bowl
- Continue to add other 1/3 of onions , add meat and fry them in about 2-3 minutes for less fat, add more spice for strong flavour.

- After cook the meat, take them into the recent bowl
- Use the pot that fry meat before, add field mushrooms and fry with a little sauce in about 3 minutes, then take into a bowl, then separate it.
- Add the last 1/3 of onions to a pot and fry them, add tomatos then stir until they’re flaccid, after that add the bowl of bone soup and the bowl of filtered shrimp soup and boil it, then taste for pleasant.
- Pay attention to taste this soup so that it’s more a little bit tasteless than your normal taste because shrimps and meats were salt.
- Now you just need to add noodle to bowls, put celerys, shrimps, meats, job’s ears and dills then souse soup on them.
- A bowl of hot and delicious rice noodle with the strong soup of shrimp flavour and crisp celeries will certainly satify members of your family on the weekend! In addition, you can also use rice pancake instead of noodle.

It’s so great!

Bánh Mì for You and Me

At first bite, the grilled pork Vietnamese sandwich (bánh mì) from L.A.'s Nom Nom Truck – the top scorer in the first two weeks of Food Network's The Great Food Truck Race – tastes simple, ordinary, unexceptional. But don't let the first bite fool you. The exceptional quality of Nom Nom's grilled pork sandwich does not spring from any unexpected "wow factor," or from a sudden rush of unusual flavors; the exceptional quality of Nom Nom's bánh mì emerges from the straightforward, harmonious blend of fresh, high-quality local ingredients.
You'll first be struck by the freshness of the twelve-inch baguette, which tastes as if it had been removed from the oven just minutes prior to placing your order. One bite of this bread, and you begin to realize why the French are so obsessed with it. Next you'll be struck by the freshness of the vegetables and herbs, with the cilantro so crisp and aromatic that you seem to taste it not with your tongue, but with your nose. The thin slices of carrot, cucumber, and daikon add a refreshing crunch to each bite, with the jalapeño flying in low for a bright, spicy burst. The honey grilled pork adds some needed weight to the sandwich, which might otherwise float out of your hands and into the ether. You may want more pork at first, but by the end you'll appreciate the proportions, which leave you feeling nourished and full, but never heavy.
Each element of Nom Nom's grilled pork sandwich achieves a life of its own without alienating the other ingredients – standing out while also complimenting and even augmenting the power of the other elements, like a Hall-of-Fame-caliber player in a well-managed ball club. When a sandwich truck has this kind of commitment to fresh, clean, local ingredients, simple becomes more than just simple; it becomes extraordinary. 

This Vietnam

What I have in my hand is Vietnam.
This Vietnam is visually spectacular, still a landscape of layers and colours but perhaps slightly easier to deconstruct, examine and truly know. Those who have not visited may recognise its features. This Vietnam, too, has green as its primary colour, emanating from the tangled jungle of herbs and vegetables at Hanoi's market tables. Mustard leaves and mint are the rice fields and banana trees of this Vietnam.
This Vietnam has also been constructed with material crafted from nature by human hands; slats of carrot, pineapple, cucumber and young banana sawn in kitchens by knives. Laying in a pile like bamboo, bricks and timber, there is anticipation of large scale development in the air, hasty and perhaps without a clear view to the implications. This Vietnam is using energy sparingly, too, a thin conduit of chili transferring just enough heat to keep the metabolism chugging along.
This Vietnam is populated with flesh; beef giving iron and muscle, a force working to bind all of the other elements together in palatable coexistence, something with legs. Essential in my opinion.
And the success of this Vietnam is at the mercy of the hand that rolls the rice-paper and the degree to which that paper is transparent. Clumsy mismanagement of this Vietnam at such a stage may result in a rather ugly mess, all of the ingredients sinking in a murky quagmire of soy sauce and wasabi.

Two Little Jasmine Flowers

Not all flowers get cut and arranged in vases in Hanoi.
They occasionally crop up in the most unlikely places; in the middle of a choking moment of gridlock at an intersection, a flower vendor will be pushing for her piece of tarmac just like the rest of us but her flowers, pristine and bright in the dusty haze, will grab my attention. Or on the road to the airport, between the rectangular box landscape of the many industrial estates and Vietnam's famous green ricefields, a small plot of land with colour unimaginable will zip by.
Outside food markets, flowers are more clearly in evidence. Here, shopping for flowers is much like shopping for food. While in recent times there has been more attention to flowers as adornments for the home, their ritual function makes them more like a necessity. Small bunches of flowers are bought in odd numbers for placement in vases on ceremonial family or business altars on death anniversaries and auspicious days in the lunar calendar, both of which seem to occur on a more regular basis than one might expect. In fact, believe it or not, flowers go up and down in price according to the movement of the moon.
Food-lovers would know that flowers can be featured on a plate. The little yellow flowers of choy sum go into woks and the short-season hoa thiên lý (sky flowers) are sauteed with beef or offal. In Hanoi too, flowers are sometimes eaten.
But the most subtle floral experience I've had in Hanoi occurred at the chè stand.
I was taken by two little jasmine flowers.

A Touch of Japan

I like the entrepreneurial spirit of the Vietnamese.
They are a 'get-up-and-go' kind of people; blindly optimistic, vague and blundering at times, yes, but the energy is generally positive. Get rich quick schemes are rife, business ideas go from mere utterance to reality in a matter of weeks. "What can we do to make more money?" is pondered by affluent and impoverished alike. Things happen here. And when they stop happening, they get hit with a hammer until they start happening again.
This rush forward is no more in evidence than in the retail and restaurant sector. With so much cheap labour available it's not impossible to get a shop or eatery fitted out and operational in no time. Carpenters and handymen can be picked up on the side of the road in the manner of a hitch-hiker, their saws and rudimentary tool kits the thumb to indicate they're looking for a ride to a day's work. Building laws are somewhat lax so the quality of the workmanship is hardly if ever inspected and even if it is, compliance can be obtained by the contents of a white envelope, appropriately thick. Of course, the fixtures may come down and the pipes might spring a leak but...hammer, sticky-tape, and a shonky repair job will have everything operational again within minutes.
Whack up a sign, hire a few young kids from the countryside, tell all your friends you've opened up a shop, light a few incense sticks and open up the doors for business.
Okay, so I might have over-simplified that slightly but there is a naivety that is at times admirable and refreshing. And at other times, it is just plain silly. I've witnessed 17 year-old girls open up a shoe shop in a crack in the wall that can't be seen by passers-by. On a larger scale, I've seen huge colonial villas in prime locations gutted, renovated, lavishly adorned in silk, lacquer, porcelain and bamboo and converted into restaurants. Months later, with no customers but still the full compliment of staff, they close.

On Saturday, I found that someone has established a little touch of Japan in an unlikely - and potentially unpropitious - location, way out of the Old Quarter by the side of a stagnant pond across from which is the Ngoc Ha community house. Other than those who know of the cut-through from Ngọc Hà Street to Đội Cấn Street, this is basically local traffic only and as far as I know the area is no 'little Tokyo'. I'm not sure of the target market and I'm not sure that the proprietor is either.
But in this location, the place has an edge, an open-air izakaya vibe and Hanoi alley chaos to boot.
The house specialty is purported in signage and menu to be bánh xèo, the fantastic rice flour pancake, yellow and crisp with a filling of shrimp, pork and bean sprouts. Here, the pictures and the product presented on the sizzling iron plate tell a different story, a crispy battered outside criss-crossed with mayonnaise, scattered with beni shōga and finely chopped spring onions. Inside, a filling of shredded cabbage and pork is hot and luscious.
In my mouth, it is the multi-syllabled flavour mish-mash of okonomiyaki; a creamy, rich, spicy, crunchy everything all-at-once - much more Japan than Vietnam.

In a clever up-sell just as I was wiping the mayo from my lips, the takoyaki were just being pronged out of their electric tray. I don't know about you but little fried balls of batter containing squid, when offered, are not to be refused.
I'm hoping this funky little take on Japan in the 'burbs of Hanoi is still open the next time I pass by.

Nha Trang Jaunt

The official reason I went to Nha Trang a while ago was to attend a wedding.
And the wedding was fun, a variety show with more highlights than a royal command performance. There was even a red carpet of sorts but that old western adage of never trying to outdo the bride was not being adhered to here. Out of taxis, a parade of glamour from the old world and the new stepped up into the reception centre, áo dài interspersed with revealing black cocktail dresses, glitz and shiny spangles and sequins catching the light, Revlon making a killing on make-up sales.
Inside, the MC facilitated the proceedings, wired up with decibels surely exceeding the limit recommended for prudent ear care. In turn, he delivered us a parade of virgins adorned in white with fluffy fairy wings, their walk up the aisle terminating on stage with thespian-like twirls and waves. A troupe of what looked like Swiss guards in red berets marched up next, brandishing large sticks attached with flowers, out the top of which industrial grade sparklers were shooting fire at their feet. A pre-pubescent ballroom-dancing couple shook their booty about in the next act. Nha Trang's wedding singers belted out a few tunes as did the father of the bride (beer in hand) and an aunt of the bride. Singing a traditional song from the Central Highlands, she nearly brought the house down.
Meantime, the people whose union we were gathered to celebrate were being given the rounds of the table.
Literally.
After pouring red champagne through a science experiment of tubes, flutes and dry ice and cutting not one, not two but five (three are fake) wedding cakes, the couple are being dragged from one table of guests to the next for toasts, smiles and pleasantries. By table number 33, the barely sipped champagne is as hot as tea, the smiles somewhat strained and the pleasantries reduced to "how did you get a berth at my wedding?" After such a marathon, they are craving food, drink and familiar faces.
But by then the guests are leaving. It's all over. And, without wanting to sound ungrateful, so was the official part of my journey to Nha Trang.
The next night I was seeking simplicity, not so much entertainment...and seafood. On the road that hugs the coast north of Nha Trang is a restaurant I've been visiting regularly since 2002. The menu is all things ocean and just across the road is the sea. The fish that night was raw and so fresh I convinced myself its nerve endings were still feigning movement.
Gỏi cá mai translates as raw salad of the tomorrow fish. On its platter, it spoke of promise. I wrapped the fish's little fillets in rice paper with lettuce, herbs and finely julienned pineapple, young banana, red pepper and cucumber. In a tương with chili and crushed peanuts, the completed rolls got their finishing touch.
And I got what I really came to Nha Trang for.