Cooking the Vietnamese Way

I never tire of eating Vietnamese cooking. The ingredients are always so fresh, use little added fat, and the frequent combination of chiles, herbs like basil and mint, garlic, and ginger, and peanuts are so delicious and mouth watering. They also have an interesting twist of French colonial history, so it isn't weird to put carrots and tofu on a baguette or eat a puff pastry to start out your meal.

The two main things to know about Vietnamese cooking are:
1) Fish sauce-you can't be afraid of fish sauce (nuoc mam). Yes, it smells like your brother's dirty gym socks that he insisted upon wearing three days in a row. But once you have either cooked with it or combined it with other ingredients, the smell mellows and it adds such an essential part to the flavor and smell of the dishes. Without it, your dishes will only be so-so.

2) Fresh ingredients and patient prepping of foods is key. A lot of the dishes are about delicately sliced vegetables mixed with fresh herbs over rice or noodles with maybe some sort of meat and a little sauce or broth. Substitutions can be made easily, so you don't have to panic if you don't have Thai Basil, you can use regular basil or even cilantro and just move on.

Even though we like to think we are so worldly in our local grocery stores, I still find it hard to find exactly all the ingredients I want at the local Fred Meyer's or Metropolitan Markup (Market). Just under two miles from my house, up on South 38th, is a crazy good, but slightly scruffy looking East Asia Supermarket, or maybe it's called Super East Asian Market, I can't remember. OK, maybe scruffy is a little too nice, really dirty looking would be better, like maybe they actually let the chickens run around in the shop before they butcher them--I like to think of it as the poor man's Uwajimaya. (I love Uwajimaya, but the nearest one is 36 miles up the road in Seattle and is pretty damned expensive.)

But please don't be put off by my filthy description. You can find artichoke tea here and daikon the size of your thigh and super cheap herbs and coconut milk for $1 a can and rice in 50lb sacks and rice sticks and noodles in all shapes and sizes. They also have delicate looking quail eggs, interesting East Asian beers, and plastic Chinese noodle bowls complete with classic red and white designs. I still haven't gotten up the nerve to buy any meat products here, as I prefer to buy organic meats whenever possible, but I've heard from others that the meat is fine. This is where I will be buying most of my ingredients for my foray into Vietnamese cooking.

I am diving into Quick and Easy Vietnamese by Nancy McDermott. I hope you will join me. The food is delicious.

Day 3: Pasta with Chopping-board Pesto, Melted Greens, and Gingerbread

If you take on a cooking project, half the recipes or make sure your husband takes leftovers to work so you don't eat two pieces of gingerbread for breakfast.

Pasta with Chopping-board Pistachio Pesto
Melting Greens with Bacon (variation)
Dark and Moist Gingerbread

Dinner was a garlic fiesta.

I am drawn to this pasta recipe for two major reasons.

First, I like the idea of pesto with pistachios, the flavor is different—saltier, roasted goodness-- and you get more of a crunch than with the traditional pine nuts.

Second, the authors recommend chopping everything together on the board at the same time. This is fun and a little messy because your chopping board gets a little full.

You start by chopping the salt, pepper, and garlic together and the smell is amazing. Then you slowly add ingredients until it is all there, one big sloppy, yummy mish-mash. One point of caution is that you barely cook the sauce so beware of the garlic if you have a breakfast meeting the next day! But we like garlic so I piled it on.

I used less pasta than they recommended (and I used whole wheat pasta because that never hurts) and it still didn’t seem like there was much sauce. But once the flavors were allowed to mingle with the pasta and cheese, it was pretty good.

I paired this with Melting Greens with the bacon variation. Basically, you cook coarsely chopped bacon in a big pot, then add chopped garlic and a dried red chile and then add water or broth and ripped up kale and cook for 10-15 minutes. I added a splash of white wine in the end as well, but that wasn’t in the recipe.

Now, if you are not a kale fan, this recipe will make you one. I already cook something similar like this every week in summer and fall because we get so much kale from our farm share but the added chile was an interesting twist. DO NOT LEAVE OUT THE CHILE! At the end of cooking, you remove the chile, but when we bit into the kale, there was a delightful tangy bit of heat on the tongue that took this recipe to a whole new level. I may never be able to make kale again without throwing in a chile.

The greens were a little strong paired with the pesto pasta. Next time I might just put the pasta with some steamed or roasted veggies on the side. The greens could be good next to a steak or pork chops. We topped off the meal by drinking a bottle of Clos du Val Cabernet Sauvignon. That really made me think about steak.

I knew I wouldn’t be cooking the next evening because we are going to an art opening so I wanted to squeeze in another recipe so I don’t fall behind in the cookbook.

Dark and Moist Gingerbread

This gingerbread is extremely easy to make and comes out fluffy and moist just like they promised. And it is cooked in a square cake pan instead of a bread pan so it is more like cake. I prefer bread shaped, however, because you can slice it thin and put butter and jam on the slices.

An interesting twist calls for black pepper in the spice mix and it made the flavors a little stronger. This is not a wimpy gingerbread flavor. Instead of serving it with whipped cream, I dusted it with powdered sugar and topped it off with sliced mint and strawberries, yum!

Six recipes down in How to Eat Supper!