Mouth is so happy right now: Chinese-style roasted pork with crispy skin and juices, pâté, pickled daikon and carrots, chili sauce, cucumber, mayonnaise. Fifty-eight cents. I picked the forest of cilantro off already. It is so dumb to not like cilantro and be in Vietnam.
More kitchen snacks: more clams, jumbo prawns, panko-breaded chicken tenders, oyster mushrooms in hot sauce, chitterlings and heart with button mushrooms and thai chilies (this was intensely delicious; one of my new favorite things), some sort of cold squid and bamboo salad, cha siu (the red chinese bbq pork), fresh fruit with prawn salt, french fries with prawn salt, mini baguettes stuffed with ice cream. Some of these things were made specifically for munching (the chitterlings and heart) and some were stolen from large banquet batches (all seafood). The first time I had the ice cream sandwich they told me this is a very vietnamese thing to do, same with fruit and prawn salt. The first night I worked dinner service at the restaurant they made me a plate of poached salmon with black caviar cream sauce, sauteed asparagus and mushrooms. I don't eat this stuff all day; more like a few bites here and there, except for the ice cream and bread. We break that out at least weekly.
Can I be honest and say I prefer the hot stuff to the pastry scraps? They bake like asians, obv, so things aren't balanced to my american palate and there's more gelatin than I would like because here the mousse must contend with epic humidity. That, and my favorite dessert flavors tend to be exotic fruits and I'm stuffing my face with fresh passionfruit, mango, and cherimoya all day so I really am not missing it.
P.S. There is some strange tasting meat in the soup noodles sometimes. Gamey. Tastes like organ meat, but is clearly muscle tissue. It's not dog, because that is a delicacy you have to request, but I really have no idea what it is.
You always make me hungry!
ReplyDeleteWhat is the pate in your sandwich? It must be a French influence. Seems like you have mentioned pate in other sandwiches before and they would put any kind of meat into a sandwich including Chinese roast pork. I must go to Pho Long soon.
Your taste buds are getting treats all the time. I thought the same about the fruits and the pastries, but then thought I was no judge for the pastries, plus we were not there for very long and didn’t really try enough. The fruits are something else. Paradise to say the least. I don’t think I can get enough fresh passion fruit. I got so mad at myself because I forgot about one I packed into my luggage and it rotted.
I am curious about the meat in your noodles. But you know the heart is a solid lump of muscles even though it is different from skeletal muscles (striated muscles, uninucleated cells) which is mostly what is eaten as meat in the Western world. Heart (Cardiac) muscles are a syncytium of multinucleated cells formed from the fusion of uninucleated cells. And lastly there is smooth muscles that lines many organs like intestines and blood vessels.