Monthly Archives: September 2010

October – Vietnam

Posted on September 30, 2010 | 3 Comments

I will be starting my experience to Savor the World with the cuisine of Vietnam for the month of October.  Vietnam seems fitting for three main reasons;

1) My friend Minh and I are demonstrating a couple of Vietnamese dishes at the cooking demonstrations booth on October 1 at the Raleigh International Festival.

2) If you’ve read the background posts, you’ll know that my first real international friend was a refugee from Vietnam who I met in elementary school.  So in this way, I’m starting at the very beginning, which as we all know is “a very good place to start”.

3) Vietnamese food is healthy, relatively low fat with lots of fresh veggies –which I’m hoping may help offset all the fried foods I’ll be eating at the State Fair later this month…. mmmm…. my mouth is already watering thinking of the deep fried PB&J, funnel cakes and fried cheese….

I have already experimented with Vietnamese food a little bit, and regularly enjoy eating at two great local Vietnamese restaurants, Pho 9n9 in RTP and Dalat in Raleigh.  So it seems like Vietnamese food will be a good way to ease into this experience.  The flavors are familiar, and I have made both pho (a common Vietnamese soup which I’ll share more about later in the month) and summer rolls a few times.  At the same time, I’m not very comfortable using some of the key ingredients such as lemongrass and fish sauce, so there is more to learn.  And I know there are some other ingredients, vegetables and cooking techniques that I have yet to discover.

At our cooking demonstration on Friday, I will be demonstrating summer rolls (recipe below) and Minh will be demonstrating Lemongrass Beef.  I’ll try to write more about the International Festival experience with some photos by the end of the weekend.  If you get a chance to come out, I highly recommend it!

Vietnamese Summer Rolls

8 (8-1/4-inch) round rice paper wrappers
12 medium shrimp, cooked, peeled and halved lengthwise down the center
2 ounces dried rice sticks or rice vermicelli, cooked and drained according to package
A bunch each of fresh mint, basil and cilantro
Julienned carrot sticks
Romaine or Bibb lettuce leaves
1 English cucumber, peeled and cut into sticks about 4 inches long

1) Clear a work surface such as a large wooden cutting board for rolling the summer rolls. Place all filling ingredients in separate containers and arrange them around the work surface.

2) Fill a wide stockpot with about 3-4 inches of hot water . Evenly submerge one wrapper for about 30 seconds, or until it is soft and pliable. Remove from the water and place on the work surface. Tip: You are looking for the wrapper to be soft enough to roll without cracking, but not so soft that it easily falls apart or is punctured by the cucumber and carrot sticks. Soaking time varies with the brand/thickness of rice wrapper and the heat of your water.

3) Working quickly, lay 3 shrimp halves in a row, cut side up, just above the center of the wrapper (this is what will be visible through the top of the roll).  Layer a few mint leaves, basil leaves, a couple sprigs of cilantro. Add a small amount of noodles.  Place 2 cucumber sticks and 3 to 4 carrot pieces on either side of the noodle pile. Roll one piece of lettuce into a cigar shape and place it on top of the noodle pile.

4) Fold the bottom half of the rice paper wrapper over the filling. Holding it firmly in place, fold the sides of the wrapper in. Then, pressing firmly down to hold the folds in place, roll the entire pile up to close the top. This takes practice!

5) Turn each roll so that the rice paper seam faces downward and the row of shrimp faces up. Place in a single layer on a plate or in a casserole dish.

6) Serve rolls with a dipping sauce like the following, or a spicy vinegar sauce called nuoc cham;

Dipping sauce
4 Tbsp. hoisin sauce
2 tsp. creamy peanut butter
1 Tbsp. water (this can vary depending on how thick you like the dipping sauce)
1 Tbsp. chopped peanuts for garnish

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Posted in Appetizer, Vietnam

Background, pt.2 (love of cooking)

Posted on September 26, 2010 | Leave a comment

I grew up around my dad’s family, where food was definitely in the center of things.  My great-aunt Mary Emma Showalter was a home economics professor, she collected and edited over 1000 recipes for the Mennonite Community Cookbook, which can still be found in many Mennonite kitchens.  My dad’s sister Nancy also taught home economics and was skilled in the kitchen – I fondly remember her delicious German Chocolate Cake, Raisin-Filled Cookies and Shrimp Creole.  At our many holiday dinners, the ratio of pies to the number of dinner guests was often nearly 1:1, plus ice cream!

My Grandaddy was a country boy raised in rural Virginia who didn’t cook in the kitchen, but grilled the best steaks I have ever eaten or probably ever will again.  Not just steaks, but also salmon, potatoes, corn grilled in the husk, and Vidalia onions with olive oil wrapped in foil and cooked down on the coals.  When he was more than 80 years old, Grandaddy saw an advertisement for a panini press in one of his farming magazines, and promptly ordered himself a new cooking toy.  Memie (our nickname for my grandma) was a farm wife who grew a big garden with her very green thumb, canning and freezing through the harvest season, and cooking full meals, all meals, every day for her family.  I’ve already touched on my parents’ cooking skills and interests in the previous post, and you should know that they also own a bakery in Virginia.

Needless to say, surrounded by all these expert cooks I started in the kitchen at a young age. One early memory involves baking snickerdoodle cookies with our babysitter.  If you have ever made snickerdoodles, you’ll know they’re a perfect kids’ project, you roll the dough into balls and then roll them around in cinnamon sugar before baking (see recipe below).  When we were older, my brother Perry and I would often make crepes together on Saturday mornings, filling them with sugar and jam and drizzling syrup over the top.

The constant supply of fresh fruits and vegetables from our home garden and local environment no doubt also contributed to my love for food.  We had a small orchard of fruit trees and a large vegetable garden. We gathered wild asparagus growing beside country roads and watercress from the creek.  We harvested black raspberries, blackberries, black walnuts and persimmons from the surrounding woods.  I have to laugh today when people talk about edamame (soybeans) as a new thing, because we had heirloom edible soybeans that we grew every year in the garden and ate like lima beans.  I’m also remembering a picture of my brother as a toddler, his face covered with red beet juice from the fresh beets he had been enjoying.  The canned beets they served at school were disgusting, but we absolutely adored fresh beets, coarsely grated and steamed until tender but still just a bit crunchy – cooked this way they are amazingly sweet and flavorful (plus they still have most of their nutrients!).

The family vegetable garden turned into a 30+ acre truck farm where I worked every summer during high school and college, selling vegetables along the side of the road.  Besides the main crop of sweet corn, we grew more than 25 varieties of tomatoes, 15 kinds of sweet and hot peppers, melons, squash, okra, beans, the list goes on and on. My dad liked to grow unusual vegetables such as striped chioga beets, lebanese squash and purple beans.  One of the crops that grew really well was eggplant, but we had some trouble selling it all.  We would hear many customers say something like this, “I enjoy eating eggplant when I’ve tried it in restaurants – but I don’t know how to cook it.”  So one summer when we had a particularly booming crop to sell, I found some simple recipes to share and we started providing vegetable cooking and grilling advice to our customers too.

Before I paint too rosy a picture, all of my cooking experiences have not been positive.  For example, I can remember an attempt to make blackberry jelly where I ended up in tears after a series of frustrating events.  But food was important enough to keep trying, even when it didn’t always turn out perfectly. That was an important lesson once I was out on my own – I have made many mistakes, though the results are usually still edible.  But I learn something from each mistake and then it works better the next time.  I probably take more cooking risks as a single person, because I know that I’m the only one who has to eat it in the end.  And occasionally, a mistake turns into serendipitous discovery and the risk pays off, leading to a new favorite!

Snickerdoodles
1 ½ c. sugar
½ c. margarine, softened
½ c. vegetable shortening
2 eggs
2 ¾ c. flour
2 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. baking soda
¼ tsp. salt

Mix together sugar, margarine and shortening until smooth. Mix in eggs. Sift together the flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and eggs and mix into the wet ingredients. Refrigerate for at least an hour to firm up the dough.

Shape into 1 ¼-inch balls. Mix together ¼ c. sugar and 2 tsp. ground cinnamon. Roll balls in the mixture and place 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 8-10 minutes in a 400 degree F oven, or until slightly golden and set. Makes about 4 dozen cookies.

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Background, pt.1 (love of cultures)

Posted on September 25, 2010 | 1 Comment

From an early point in my life, I have been fascinated by two things – cultures and cooking.  And I guess both of those loves came quite naturally, now that I think about it.

Let’s begin with cultures.  My mom’s parents were missionaries who relocated their family to Montevideo, Uruguay when she was 4 years old. They embraced that culture in order to share their love of God with their neighbors in South America, remaining there for over 30 years until my grandfather’s death.  My mom moved back to the states when she was 16 to attend college in Virginia.  That’s where she met my dad, who also had some interest in latino cultures after a college semester abroad in El Salvador.

In the early 70′s my parents took a trip to Japan where they sampled many different foods.  One favorite was a spicy katsu curry dish – which my dad has been trying to replicate ever since.  He always says he knows it’s getting close to the original if our eyelids are sweating from the heat of the curry.  I ordered the dish in a Japanese restaurant in DC last summer to see what the original might have tasted like (pictured above).  My parents would throw Japan-themed dinner parties for their friends when I was a kid, my dad would put on his kimono and cook up tempura and other dishes they had learned to make.  On rainy days, my mom would fry up sopaipillas – puffy diamond-shaped doughnuts, and we’d bite off the corners to drizzle clover honey inside the hollow spaces.  On special occasions she would boil a can of sweetened condensed milk to make dulce de leche, which we devoured on saltine crackers.

Forgive me, I’m already digressing into my love of food – let’s get back to my history with cultures.  When I was in first or second grade, my teacher buddied me up with a girl whose family had just immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam. Tran barely knew any English and it was my first real experience with someone very different from myself, and yet somehow we managed to communicate and discovered that we were very much the same. Later in elementary school, I discovered that you could write to embassies in DC (this was before the internet, so think snail-mail) and they would send you stuff — glossy brochures with lots of pictures of people and places, alphabets of written foreign languages, recipes, and small souvenirs.  My brother and I spent one summer writing to at least 20 different embassies and waiting for those large manila envelopes to arrive in the mail.  In high school, one of my close friends was a refugee from Laos, and in college I had a Chinese roommate and a good friend/study partner from Ethiopia. Through these friendships I continued to soak up cultural learning, a welcome thing in that rural Virginia community which has only in recent years begun to boom with great ethnic diversity.

My undergraduate college required a cross-cultural experience, and I chose to take a semester abroad in Guatemala.  We spent the first two months living individually with families in the poorer neighborhoods of Guatemala City, studying language together in the mornings and history/culture in the afternoons.  On weekends we traveled around Guatemala and Belize, and the final month was spent traveling briefly through Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Some of my favorite memories from that trip are food-related; cooking with my host family (we’re making sugar cookies in this photo), frozen choco-bananas, markets full of new fruits that I’d never seen before, visiting a banana farm, etc.  Even a visit to McDonald’s in Guatemala City (to which I had to be dragged kicking and screaming!) resulted in a culinary journey back to a simpler time… when apple pies were actually fried in lovely trans fats :)

Well, I’d better save some memories to share with you later.  Suffice it to say that as an adult I have continued to enjoy and learn from many cross-cultural friendships in my jobs, graduate schools and church.

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