Vietnam - Tourist Food in Hoi An and Cooking School

We enjoyed 4 days in Vietnam away from family when we jetted off to Hoi An. In recent years, Hoi An has become very touristy and popular for its cultural tours. For us, we just wanted to rent bikes and hang out for 4 days relaxing. Here are a few of the highlights from Hoi An.

Tyical morning scene with Vietnamese coffee and beer (spelled bia). The beer was only $0.25 USD!! 

Banana flower salad


Lanterns at the central Hoi An area


They labeled this gelato but it was just ice cream



We spent most of the time biking around to the beach to hang out.


One of the popular Hoi Anese dishes was this chicken rice which is rice cooked in chicken stock with shredded chicken pieces and herbs. This one at the beach was pretty good. It tastes like Hainanese chicken rice.

On one of the days, we took a bicycle tour and cooking class combo. The bike tour lead us through the back roads and rice paddies of Hoi An. We learned how herbs were grown and I had the chance to try old school watering cans.

The tour also took us to a bean sprout farmer's house. He had piles of sand in his backyard used to grow bean sprouts. The nutrients in the sand are only good for one crop then a new pile of sand needs to be shipped in for the next crop. The old sand can be sold to make bricks and for any other purposes. At this point it decreases in value by 1/5 the price the farmer bought it for growing.

Back at the cooking school, everyone who signs up for the class gets an all-you-can eat breakfast buffet with all these Vietnamese goodies like pho, broken rice with pork, mini banh xeo crepes, and bun cha ca (fish cake noodles). The flavors are a bit mellow and generic but most of the food was good for a buffet.

Old school noodle making machine.

I got to try a silk worm larvae for the first time. Tastes rich and creamy and nutritious. It's like eating a minty, oniony salad with creamy tofu pockets that burst in your mouth!

Hoi An is known for the white rose steamed dumpling made from rice flour that's flattened and molded around shrimp and pork paste so it looks like rose petals. Here I am failing at flattening the dough.

Phil Lau eats cao lau noodles.

Yeah, making fresh spring roll wrappers in cooking class. No rips in my wrapper!

Class finished with two scoops of ice cream per person. Phil had Cinnamon and chocolate chip. I had passion fruit and coconut. Satisfied! I highly recommend Morning Glory cooking school if you're in Hoi An. It is very touristy and Westernized but for $43 per person, you get a well planned day. The cooking is not as hands on as I wanted, or as we experienced in Thailand. The bike tour is fun and the experience in general is entertaining.

Bye!

Vietnam - Photo Diary

Vietnam was a trip, I mean that in the hallucinogenic mushroom sense. I expected Earth shattering epiphanies that would alter the course of my entire future and dig deep into the core of my identity as an Asian immigrant. Mostly what I got was hours upon hours of swinging around in hammocks strung on trees with dirty chickens running around me, all of us trying to escape 90 degree weather. And of course, swatting flies. Lots of flies.

It was good to meet my family who are now a group of friendly strangers to me. I left Vietnam when I was so young and my mom's generation of siblings have mostly passed so I met a whole village of cousins old enough to be uncles and aunties. They received us with warm hospitality and made the stay slightly more comfortable - as comfortable as one can get while bathing using a bucket of water and a scoop. It does save much more water that way when you are only allowed 5 gallons to shower with, half of which had to be heated in a kettle. Makes a person think twice about taking 30 minute hot showers.

Before stepping out of the house, we would spray all natural mosquito repellent made from lemon and eucalyptus (typical me) then a layer of sun screen. Then fobby hats.

Traffic is crazy in Vietnam. I wasn't allowed to ride the motorbikes, only to sit and pose on it.

My classmate made this banner and surprised our class by sending a photo of himself on Mt. Everest holding the sign. You can't one-up Mt. Everest so I had to find a way to one-equal him. A good chunk of time was spent riding around rice paddies in Hoi An trying to find the perfect "SCU Cohort in Vietnam" photo.

We got lost and the sun was setting but who cares, look at this scenic shit we found.

Getting lost leads to great adventures like finding a farmer walking his water buffalo home for the day and asking him for a photo op. They are shorter than I imagined and their hide is like a dirty wild boar with thick sparse hair.

Beach days! They don't let you swim further than 50 meters(?) out from shore. Water was cold anyway.

Is it possible to look fobby if you technically are not fresh off a boat?

We spent Valentine's day in my cousin's backyard swinging on hammocks while my mom chatted for hours with her family. Until I noticed this luminous arachnid dangling in the trees above. Very fuckin romantic.

Went to a bird flu petting zoo.

Some cute Vietnamese chick Phil met.

She gave him a little present.

My cousins were really entertained by making Phil do girly poses.

Rice paddy tour

Bye bye!

Vietnam - Food with Family

 The first half of our Vietnam trip was spent with family in a small town called Go Cong. I was born here. I liken it to being in the middle of Arkansas or Oklahoma. In summary, we were bored out of our minds. But I did spend lots of time with family and experiencing home cooked meals in Vietnam.

The first day we arrived, my dad took us to a local pho restaurant. We walked a short distance down the street to a small corner cafe type of establishment with outdoor seating on plastic chairs. This regular sized bowl is equivalent to a small size in the US. Pho in America is actually better because the luxuries we can afford. The best pho broth is made from oxtail which is richer and more fatty. In America, you can afford to make a whole batch of broth using just oxtail. In Vietnam, the shop orders one cow for the entire day's service. This means they only have a few sections of oxtail and make their broth from other parts of the cow. The meat slices were also thicker because they are hand cut whereas our butchers use a machine to get thinner slices. Phil ordered 2 bowls and this made the restaurant owners very happy. Locals don't usually need 2 bowls to be full.

That green fruit is star apple (trai vu sua). If you literally translate the Vietnamese name, it means mother's milk. It comes in a round apple-like shape and is soft. The best way to eat it is to massage the whole fruit, rip out the stem, suck the white milky fruit through the opening left by the stem. Once the fruit is all shriveled up, you know you're done. That's why it's called mother's milk, it's just like a boob! Sweet, soft, juicy.

A special family lunch. We were told that typical family meals are not like this. A meal like this at my cousin's house was prepared because we were special guests. They killed 2 of their chickens for this chicken porridge. The chicken was really lean and chewy. Much different than chicken in the US. Definitely hormone-free and raised free range.

On a separate day, we had a large lunch with fresh spring rolls. There were too many people to fit around the table so my cousins cleaned the floor of their outdoor porch area and we all ate on the ground.

A nutritious soup made from fighting roosters and papaya. This is also a rare treat and possibly illegal and an aphrodisiac for men. These roosters were bred to fight. This guy probably lost of retired and is now someone's meal. The soup was sweet from the papaya and rich from the chicken. The chicken meat itself was even more chewy than regular backyard chickens.

Fried rice

This might be more chicken served with lemon grass

We stayed with my aunt who made some pretty interesting snacks for dinner. These are fresh shrimp just boiled and dipped in a fish sauce. It was really sweet and fresh. One of my favorite eats in Vietnam even though it was so simple.

[WARNING: The following food item is not for the faint of heart. If you don't like weird food like balut, please do not look.]

Looks like a normal bowl of quail eggs, but these are actually quail egg balut. They are specifically bred and incubated to have a quail embryo inside. The preparation is just to boil the eggs, peel, and eat with a salt/pepper/lemon dip and greens.

Gross? No, very delicious, nutritious, juicy. Full of protein and much easier to eat than duck egg balut because it's bite sized. This is my favorite bite in Vietnam. Is it inhumane? Yes, but when in Rome...There are so many things in Vietnam that are inhumane, and yet at the same they utilize all parts of an entire cow without discarding anything.