Vietnamese Restaurant II
Is it sacrilegious to dine at a Vietnamese restaurant that serves pho and not order it? Especially on a perfect-weather day for the bowl of slippery noodles in steamy broth, one that was rainy and gloomy?
Probably. But because I regularly commit a dining faux pas—I always ask for a fork at Chinese restaurants despite being very proficient in using chopsticks—I’m okay with it. Besides pho, there’s another dish I really like to order at Vietnamese restaurants, which you’ll see.
A cup of pleasantly non-bitter green tea. It offered a similar comfort that a bowl of pho would have.
The ubiquitous fish sauce that accompanies so many Vietnamese dishes.
My dining companion’s Vermicelli with Grilled Chicken. I’m showing only one photo of this dish because homeboy had the audacity to want to eat his food immediately after it arrived. He said some nonsense about starving and paying for the entire meal. Geez, don’t you hate reasonable people?
My combination rice dish that I could move and abuse and take as many photos of as I wanted. So ha, you reasonable person, you!
A salad of lettuce, carrot, cucumber, and jícama.
This fried egg was a definite deciding factor in ordering the dish.
I thought about showing only these two egg photos and calling it a post.
As easy as that would have been, I cannot do that to y’all. The craziness must continue, like with this skewered shrimp. (By the way, I’ve read that you should soak bamboo skewers in cold water at least an hour before threading food onto them, to avoid the black burn marks when grilling.)
Grilled chicken.
Grilled chop that was half bone. What was up with that?! As hungry as I felt, I wasn’t in the mood to gnaw on a bone, KWIM? (Know What I Mean. Why did I use that Internet acronym only to spell it out for you?)
This was called Grilled Banana Cake.
Featuring grilled bananas stuffed with sweet rice, in coconut milk, and topped with toasted peanuts.
I could spoon-up any of those pieces right about now.
The stuffed banana was tasty enough (the end pieces were a bit hard to chew, though). However, we liked the sweet coconut milk the best. I think that if babies were fed more coconut milk, they’d be less cranky.
I was told this Chinese character means taste.
Fortune cookies!!!
Yes, I still get excited about getting them at the end of a meal, even though I’ve eaten hundreds and hundreds of the cookies in my lifetime.
You will hear pleasant news.
Hmm…I wonder if the compliment I received the day after this meal, “You speak great English.” counts?
Yummy! Were the bananas sweet enough? I’ve tried a lot of Filipino dessert dishes with bananas, and none of them were ever very sweet to me. My husband tells me I’m too used to American desserts which are usually overly sweetened.
Gosh. That dessert sounds absolutely divine. It’s so classically Asian-sounding – stewed fruit, coconut milk, crushed peanuts… Yum. YUM.
Wei-Wei
I looooove your pictures! The second picture looks so artistic and beautiful. (And it’s frickin’ dipping sauce!) Your friend’s dish looks amazing.
I recently ate Cuban food and there were fried bananas on my plate. Oh! And I also had Thai food and for dessert we got the mango and sweet sticky rice dish. Pretty dang good!
Your meal reminded me of the Filipino breakfast. Well, except for all that fresh vegetables.
Filipino breakfast, enough food for three meals combined in one:
http://www.inuyaki.com/archives/33
AI, you’re killing me, I’m drooling over the pictures. Everything looks so delicious. I haven’t had grilled banana cake in ages. Traditional grilled banana cake in VN is wrapped in banana leaves and grilled on very low heat charcoal grill. The charred banana leaves give the gluten sweet rice a slighty smoky flavor. I only see the frozen grilled banana cake in the VNese market, not freshly prepared one.
Sarah Lynn and Wei-Wei: I thought the bananas were moderately sweet. I was focusing more on the coconut milk to pay too much attention to the bananas, though.
Here’s a dessert soup that I’ve been making lately that you ladies may be interested in…and rest assured that the following is not a Cindy-recipe, but one I learned from a woman who used to work in a Chinese/Vietnamese restaurant
:
I don’t have exact measurements because the recipe is flexible according to tastes and preferences…
And I use a large and deep nonstick pan to make it…you can use something similar, just make sure it’s nonstick.
Fill the pan or pot about 3/4 of the way with water, and add a 13.5 fl oz can of coconut milk
Add 3 or 4 Japanese and/or American sweet potatoes, cubed
Add 1/2 or 1 Kabocha, cubed
Cover and boil for about 30 minutes on medium heat
Add 2 sliced, ripened Saba Bananas
Continue to boil for 20 minutes
Serve hot! You can make the coconut soup as thin or thick as you want. I like it to be at the consistency of a bisque. That is, thicker than chicken soup but thinner than gravy. If you add Kabocha, know that this will thicken the soup.
It’s easy to make (the hardest part is the de-seeding, peeling, and chopping), and really tasty. Oh, and nutritious!
I refrigerate the leftover soup, which thickens the next day.
Lian: I think the pictures turned out decent for being taken with a digital camera (versus a SLR). They’re all a little blurry despite our window-side table; it was quite an overcast day.
A relative of mine was recently telling me about his Cuban-restaurant experience, after you’d left this comment. So of course I had to ask if he tried fried bananas. He said he hadn’t, because he ordered a sandwich but a fried plantain was included with rice plates. The only Cuban food I’ve eaten is sandwiches (I liked the garlicky mayonnaise the best), but I want to try a rice plate next time.
And I’ve been on the lookout for the mango and sweet sticky rice dessert whenever I try a new Thai restaurant. All the ones I’ve been to didn’t offer this particular dessert. When you mentioned your cousin requesting that the restaurant make her an off-the-menu egg sandwich, well, it reminded me that I wanted to ask the last Thai restaurant to make the mango and sweet sticky rice dessert for me. But I was already feeling too self-conscious with my photo-taking…
Sooj: Filipino breakfasts look so yummy! I like how they comprise savory foods, which I don’t mind eating in the morning. And I’ve been intrigued with Filipino-style garlic rice since I saw photos of it on some food forum a few years ago.
Chau: Cackle, cackle. Seriously, though, I enjoyed my Vietnamese eats despite not ordering my favorite one, pho. Thanks for the description of the traditional Vietnamese grilled banana cake, which sounds delicious (especially the slightly smoky flavor). As I was eating my version, I kept trying to figure out where I’d had it before. Then I remembered that it tasted like the stewed bananas with tapioca (the tiny white balls) in coconut milk that I can buy for a dollar-something at local Vietnamese delis. Time to have that again, soon…
That recipe sounds yummy. So many things sound so yummy right now. I’m hungry. *Waiting for food to finish cooking*