These baggies come standard with take out. The clearish orange one is nước mắm - fish sauce. You always always put that on rice or dry noodles or use it as a dipping sauce. It's the ketchup of Vietnam. The green bag is a type of soup I've had in the hotel cafeteria just about every other day; a simple broth full of some sort of leafy greens and small bits of ground meat.
Fried egg, grilled pork - there were seven or eight different meats to choose from and you can get as much as you want, though I imagine the price will fluctuate. Sauteed leeks and pickled daikon and carrots all sitting on a bed of cooked cabbage.
Can you see the rice? It's cơm tấm - broken rice - a specialty item. When rice is manufactured it's sifted for only the whole grains and the broken grains are sold for cheap. The rice I've been eating here is a short grain, but drier and not as sticky as the Japanese rice that I prefer.
Kitchen snack today: They told me we were going to be eating "chicken cake" because they are weird, but I was handed a bowl of deep fried chicken pieces with white and green onions and a mini baguette. This snack and what I had above are the best meals so far.
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Typhoon Pakhar blew through Vietnam this weekend, downgrading itself to Tropical Storm Pakhar by the time HCMC felt it. I saw branches lying in the street and two amazingly tall trees, each with a 3-4ft diameter, fully uprooted.
This looks yummy. Glad you found a good stall. Would you send photos of these street food vendors? I am very curious. I told you PoPo would not let us near them in Hong Kong. I am jealous. Laurence was the only one who had bad enough attitude to sneak anything behind her back.
ReplyDeleteThe Chicken Cake name sounds very Chinese. That is what we call the steamed meat pies in Cantonese, literally meat cake and when meat is unqualified it susually means pork. Suppose you could make beef cake except I have never done it.
So it was whole pieces of chicken not chopped / ground? Just boneless? They must not have the word for nuggets, which I find to be perfect for this kind of peices and parts. (I actually cannot find the word in Chinese either.) Otherwise fired chicken would give me a visual of pieces on the bone, which is still my preference for any sort of fried chicken. Meat cake is usually made from minced meat and may have other ingredients mixed in.
"Typhoon broken trees". Remember the heavy industrial grade steel garage doors peeled back like an open can?
ReplyDeleteMan, I'd forgotten about that when I saw these trees. No structural damage, that I saw, just the uprooted trees.
ReplyDeleteI'll take a picture of a food cart that I don't frequent so I don't feel like an idiot.
Yeah, chicken on the bone. I actually thought it was going to be a bao, but the "cake" was the baguette - like I said, they're weird.