Mooncake Mockup

One of the best mooncakes...ever

 

Ice cream. I could eat it all day--breakfast, lunch, dinner, and in-between meals. I wish I could live in a house made of ice cream... but I would eat myself out of house and home.

Imagine how mouth-wateringly pleased I was to discover this variation on the seasonal specialty called mooncake. Instead of the traditional glazed pastry, often stuffed with lotus seed paste and egg yolk, this one was made of flan, green tea and green rice ice creams, and a "yolk" made of mango sorbet.

The flan was set in a mold that gave it the characteristic relief and detail of a real mooncake, and the top received a sprinkling of praline nuts. One slice of whole shebang revealed the mango-ey yolk and the layers of green and creamy white ice cream.

Not to let this ice cream mooncake stand alone on its own merit, the ice cream artists made a spectacular serving presentation. They placed this mooncake mockup on a banana leaf atop a wooden tray. They built a lotus flower out of white chocolate, spread sliced strawberries around the edges of the banana leaf, and drizzled syrup and candied ginger around the lot. For the additional touch of class, the whole thing was served with a pot of fragrant jasmine iced tea, complete with a thimble-sized cup.

For most of my life, my favorite ice cream pretender was the whattamelon roll. It's a slice of watermelon and lime sherbet, with chocolate chips throughout, made to look like a slice of summertime heaven. But not anymore. This ice cream variant of the mid-autumn festival specialty totally takes the cake.

Tastes of Hanoi

There's only one thing on the menu at this iconic restaurant: it's grilled fish piled high with dill and green onion.

 
 

Phở could be considered to be Vietnam's flagship dish. North Vietnam's style of this beef noodle dish is simple and straightforward, with a few cuts of beef, a couple pinches of green onion and cilantro, and a big clump of fresh flat noodles.

 
 

Although we wouldn't know it in the states, but phở happens to be a versatile noodle. Here they are fried, as phở xào.

 
 

Another variant is called phở cuốn. It's a cold roll of beef and herbs, wrapped up in a noodle sheet and dipped in nước chấm.

 
 

If there's any Vietnamese food I'll miss most of all when we leave Hanoi, it's cốm, a dish of roasted young rice. Tender and nutty, cốm's green hue comes from the natural color of the immature rice. Unfortunately, it's a regional specialty. We can't even find it in Saigon.

 
 

Another reason the cốm has become a favorite: it makes a great ice cream.

Bún Thịt Nướng

We had just pulled up plastic stools to the folding metal table. The lady who ran the place assembled our orders of bún thịt nướng. She set out green plastic soup bowls, lined the bottoms with handfuls of cripsy lettuce and fragrant basil, dropped heaping mounds of white, tender vermicelli noodles on top, then sprinkled pinches of green onion, toasted peanuts, and smoky grilled beef over the lot.

The lady who made our food was a serious sort who had had short hair, dyed to a black hue she might have had when she was 30 years younger. When she put the bowls in front of us, I was ready to make short work of it. Bún is ome of my favorite foods.

The way to eat bún is this. Pour a bowlful of garlicy-spicy-salty-sour nước mắm over the the pile. Mix the noodles, greens and meat like a tossed salad to coat with the sauce. Direct big bite-sized pinches towards mouth. Repeat.

I have on occasion seen people hold a chopstick in either hand when tossing a bowl of bún or other mixed foods. This way makes sense, because two utensils are quick to toss up a salad. So I decided to give the two-handed technique a whirl.

The lady who ran the place saw me with one chopstick in either hand. She pointed at my hands and asked a sharp question. Lu responded brightly, laughed a little, and told me the lady had asked if I knew how to use chopsticks.

This misunderstanding amused me. Feeling little devilish, I brought one of the chopsticks closeer to my eyes and scrutinized it, as if trying to find the power button.

The lady barked again. Lữ answered, almost apologetically, and the lady muttered something as she walked away. I looked up from my bowl, which I had been mixing with chopsticks in one hand, the proper way, I suppose. Lữ relayed the conversation.

"She said, are you sure he knows how to use those? I said yes, he does, he's just playing.

"And she said, if he's playing, I'm going to pull his ear."

An American idiom for fooling around is to pull someone's leg. For pulling the shopkeeper's leg, I nearly got my ear pulled in return. I guess that's only fair.

Ốc - They Carry Their Homes

I took a walk in the rain at the outskirts of town tonight, on roads that made me wonder, what was I thinking when I decided to take this walk? Through ankle-deep, murky curb runoff, over bridges with crowded oncoming scooters and no pedestrian walkway, across a tollbooth as uniformed guards with blinding flashlights harassed hapless truckdrivers. Tired of my taxing trek, I found a bus stop and waited for a bus, on the corner of a moonlit grassy field that once was natural flooded swamp, but has been drained to support commercial development. When the rains come, animals, which once called the swamp home, emerge under the cover of darkness. They hop and creep and crawl and splash, just like they used to before the land was drained.

From the bus stop, I saw three men skulking about in the vines and tall swampgrass. With dim flashlights, they probed the damp vegetation, and intermittently reached out to pluck something the size of a stone from the lush greenery. I snuck in to get a closer look at the bags, saw the form of a conical spiral pile, and realized that the plastic-sandaled men were hunting for snails. I gestured to a guy with a distended bag, smiled, and pointed at the bag with an open palm. He said ốc, ốc, ốc, ốc, rapidly as if he had just stubbed his toe. I think I made him nervous.

I pantomimed eating by drawing my five fingertips toward my mouth as if taking a bite of food. He nodded, which seemed to affirm my guess that he and his companions were gathering edible snails. I could be wrong, since he didn't say the word for yes, that's correct. But I'm pretty sure he was going to eat them. Or perhaps he was going to sell them to one of the numerous late-evening sidewalk cafes that specialize in snails, clams, and fertilized duck eggs, all served with bottles of beer. Finding enough snails to make a meal, or to sell for a decent profit, is a lot of work. Losing ground to development must make it even harder. It seems that the animals weren't the only ones that were left high and dry when the swamps were drained.

The word for snail is ốc. This is confirmed by several people. Interestingly, the word ốc according to Google seems to mean "house," probably because the little guys appear to carry their houses around on their backs. I thought I'd double check with Lữ, but she's not convinced that ốc means house. Whether Google is right or not, snails certainly do carry their homes on their backs.

Either way, it was interesting to see people foraging for dinner in an urban greenspace, just a few feet from bustling trucks and honking scooters at a busy intersection. I don't think I'll have the same luck if I try to forage for dinner in Central Park. And, what would I eat, anyway?

How to Roll and Bind Bánh Tét

photo by Lữ Như Tiên

In what may be my longest photo-layout yet, I thought I'd share a how-to for rolling and tying bánh tét. When you're an expert at making this classic dish of sticky rice and filling, the whole process takes just a few minutes.

Besides the ingredients, the necessary equipment is banana leaves, string or grass cord, and a giant kettle with a lid for boiling these sticky rice cakes.

Recipes for the rice and for the fillings vary. Unfortunately, I don't have one for the coconut rice, the mung bean and porkfat filling, or the bananas in syrup that you see here. I might make them a repost later on if I can track them down.

Of course, if you really want to do this dish right, you're gonna need to invite about a dozen friends and family to come over and participate in the process. After all, isn't that how food is supposed to be?
 

Banana leaf goes smooth side up.

A bowlful of coconut rice is next.

The rice gets spread evenly...

...into a square-shape.

Here goes the mung bean filling...

...or the banana, as you like.

The roll gets, er, rolled.

The center gets tied.

Two leaf strips cap the roll.

Then it's tied on both ends.

Long grass ties a package knot.

The first ties are replaced.

Ties are equally spaced.

The excess sticks out the top.

The longest strand of grass...

...wraps the rest of the excess...

...all the way up until the end.

The excess is tied off, and done!

The rolls boil for eight to nine hours.

They do look prettier once they're cooked.

photo by Lữ Như Tiên

Đám Giổ

Wikipedia, you've failed me, and you shall be punished. I came to you for information about the Vietnamese death anniversary. You told me the event is called giổ, and Wiki-cited compound words include: ngày giỗ, or day of the death; đám giỗ, or death anniversary ceremony; and bữa giỗ, or death anniversary feast. But you are wrong, Wiki. I just talked with Lữ, and she said the lone term giỗ means to console, not death anniversary, as you have so erroneously claimed. She said the term for the death anniversary is đám giổ, and Wiki is fail. That's okay, you reader-edited encyclopedia, you're not the only fail. The modern day omniscient oracle, Google, translated đám giổ to mean feast. Not death anniversary feast--just plain ol' piles-of-food feast. Google, go stand in the corner next to Wikipedia. Update: we just found out that the word for console is not giỗ, but dỗ, and the two words sound the same when spoken with a southern accent. The bottom line is: no one ever says giỗ for the death anniversary. Everyone says the words đám and giỗ together.

On Sunday morning, Lữ's cousins held a đám giổ at their house to honor the late mother of the husband. As far as the Wiki compound words go, the đám giổ truly was a celebration. More than sixty guests showed up. Ironically, I was told that it was a small gathering, and not a lot of people had been invited. And with a team of serious cooks working overtime to make a mountain of food, it truly was a feast.

Bánh bò nướng

On each table were plates that spilled over with golden, crispy bánh xèo crepes stuffed with clams, shrimp, and beansprouts; bowls of simmered chicken and curried beef with carrots cut like flowers; roasted pork with caramel-colored crackling skin; stacks of white, scissor-cut rice noodles; green leafy veggies and fragrant mint basil by the pile; loaves of sliced baquettes; wheels of red watermelon; leaf-wrapped rounds of yellow and maroon bánh tét slices; and one of my all time favorites: bánh bò nướng, a baked white sugar cake with a moist spongy texture and a fermented fruit flavor, which to Mike's and my surprise was supposed to be eaten with bites of roast pork. This repast of epic proportions was served at 10 a.m., just in time for second breakfast.

There is an order to service. The first to be served were the spirits of the ancestors. The cousin's husband placed the most attractive plates, one of each dish, onto the altar. Then he poured wine into cups and set them next to the dishes. And he lit incense. Whispy coils rose as it burned, and its smoke filled the breezy, sun-drenched room with a scent of reverence and remembrance. Meanwhile, Dì Tư's husband went through the tables, lighting more incense and pouring wine three times into a glass on each table. Ater the spirits were given enough time to eat their fill, the plates were taken down and placed on one of half a dozen tables.

Second to eat are (almost) everyone else. The tables filled in, hands cracked open cans of root beer and poured it over ice, and mouthfuls of glorious food traveled from serving dish to bowl to mouth, while occasionally making a brief stop at a dipping plate for a splash of soy sauce with garlic and chili, or for a dash of nước mắm. The men shouted and pointed and grabbed select bits of food and dropped them in Mike's and my bowls. In particular, the Vietnamese get a kick out of serving the steamed and dressed heads of chicken to folks like Mike and me. And Mike and I get a kick out of letting folks, like our tablemates, watch us eat chicken heads.

The middle age men at our table drank wine while they ate. The oldest men teetotaled, which may explain how they were able to live so long. During the meal, a man who wasn't exactly eating with us hovered over our table, cracked jokes, poured lots of unfiltered rice wine from a plastic pitcher, and passed the glasses around the table. The wine was served in the same shot-sized glasses in which tea was served before the meal. Nobody had their own glass--they were shared. The last person to have a drink passed the refilled glass off to the next person, who typically downed the wine in a gulp. Mike lifted a communal glass to eye level and said hey, alcohol kills germs, right?

After everyone else had eaten, the women who had made all the food in the first place finally sat down to put what was left of the food into their bellies. To me, Lữ's cousin seemed the lead cook in this whole affair. But she never even had a single bite of her own food. Nearly everything that came out of her kitchen, besides bread, noodles, or rice, had some sort of meat in it, and she's vegetarian this month. This happens to be the seventh month in the lunar calendar. In addition to the days when the moon is new or full, practicing Buddhists take the seventh month to eat vegetarian, an act which invests in good karma for the spirits of ancestors.

Which brings us back to the issue of not accepting whatever "fact" you read on the internet. In a post a couple days ago, I said we're currently in the sixth month. Sorry. I miscalculated and reported an error, based on a previous error from July. Now, Riffing Indochina is going to stand over there in the corner with Wikipedia and Google.

Real Cooks

There are two characteristics of real cooks.

Real cooks can do more with an open flame than grill meat. Anyone can soak a steak or chicken in a marinade and slap it over coals--real cooks can take a fire and cook anything.

Real cooks keep the food coming. Dish after dish, plate after plate. No matter how many guests, real cooks make sure there are always delicious leftovers.

Lữ's cousin is a real cook. (It still amazes me how she can cook rice over an open fire, in a metal pot no less.)

Bánh tét

I've been told that in Vietnamese culture, people might not know on what day they were born. In contrast, they hold an enormous celebration to observe the day of an ancestor's death. To prepare for these celebrations, family and friends gather and cook enough dishes to feed a hundred people.

One of these dishes is bánh tét, a glutinous rice and filling mixture wrapped in banana leaves and cooked for hours. It's usually served for new years, hence the name tét. To prepare this dish requires many skills: preparing the ingredients, wrapping and binding the rolls, and boiling them--in this case, the ability to cook over a fire is another crucial skill. We got the chance to try our hands at making these savory and sweet rolls during a return trip to Vĩnh Long, to observe an annual death anniversary for the mother of the husband of Lữ's cousin.

As before, we traveled into the Mekong Delta by bus, and arrived at the house of Lữ's aunt, Dì Tư, on Friday. As before, Dì Tư welcomed us outside, hustled us into the house, and cracked open a coconut for each of us before spreading a heap of food on the table for our dinner. She made sweet grilled pork with lemongrass, and a chicken soup with bamboo shoots and green onions. Bamboo shoots happen to be in season; for the best bamboo, you have to go to the farmer, because the stuff in the market could be a few days old. For dessert, Dì Tư sliced open some yellow Thai rambutans and the sweetest longyans I've ever had. Bellies stuffed, we washed and headed for bed early, to be up around dawn and on our way to the cousins' to help make bánh tét.

In the morning, we rode scooters to the cousins' beautiful newly built house, nestled between a south-flowing cocoa-colored river and an orchard teeming with pomelo, green skinned oranges, papaya, and limes. Lu's cousin and several ladies I hadn't met before sat by the kitchen door and spread bowlfuls of a glutinous rice mixture of dried coconut, salt, sugar and green onion onto squares of banana leaf. Outside, her husband shoveled dirt from a trench, which is where he later put the footing for a wall. He looked up, saw me, smiled, and waved. Lu's cousin offered us iced coffee. I said, if it's no trouble. Her husband put down his shovel, started the kettle, cracked the ice, and assembled four mugs of coffee the color of milk tea.

Making bánh tét is a social occassion, an event that draws many helpers. Every square inch of cooking space in the kitchen was occupied by someone assisting in the preparation. The immediate reasons for all the helpers is obvious--I would estimate that it takes a skilled person about 10 minutes to fill and wrap a single roll. The ladies made more than 50, which would have taken one person an entire day to prepare. But the purpose of gathering to make bánh tét is more than pragmatic. People get together to because a common purpose instills a sense of community. Lữ observed that sense is missing in Vietnamese-American households, remembering all the times her mom would make bánh tét alone.

We sat on the floor and watched the bánh tét-making process. The rice mixture is spread on a banana leaf, then a doughy yellow stick of mung bean paste or short sweet bananas in syrup is laid on the rice. The whole banana leaf-rice-filling package is rolled up tight, bound three times, then tied up like a roast. The cord comes from a pretty little plant with a green, grassy crown. Depending on the way each bánh tét is tied, there will be either one or two braids of grass hanging from one end of the roll, which tells you what's inside--one braid for banana, two for beans.

While Mike and Lữ tried their hands at tying the rolls of bánh tét, I watched one of the ladies to pick up techniques and listened to hear what challenges met Mike and Lữ in their attempts. Apparently, it's bad to tie the rolls too loosely. Keeping this pointer in mind, I put some muscle into the task when I started to tie one up. My first couple of ties were nice and tight, and the banana leaf bulged from between the wrappings, with evenly-spaced bindings. But as I got to the middle of the roll, thick mikly coconut-rice liquid seeped from the bottom of the roll. My hands slipped from the viscousy goo, and the cords broke as I tried extra hard to keep hold. What started out as a neatly tied roll began to turn into a mess, which did not go unnoticed. My misfit bánh tét sent the ladies into fits of laughter.

I felt my face flush in my embarrassment. My first chance to do something in front of all these new people, and I screwed it up. I know I'm not supposed to take getting laughed at too seriously. I also know that the laughter wasn't scornful or mocking. If anything, it was supposed to be supportive, in a weird and unfamiliar way. But I'm hardwired by childhood tragedies to see getting laughed at as anything but supportive. I still have demons of public failure and ridicule to overcome.

Not everyone took notice of my mess-up with the bánh tét. The slapping sound of small feet on tile announced the arrival of a four-year-old boy who sprinted into the kitchen. With a buzz cut and bright orange polo, he crouched to slurp a strawful of iced tea from a thermos bucket among the grasslike strands on the floor. The kid was naive and clumsy, which made him fun to watch. I have to admit--actually, I hate to admit it--but the joy I felt in watching this little plodding kid probably wasn't much different from the joy the ladies felt in watching my blundering with the bánh tét binding. And, it kind of helped to drive the lesson home, too.

All the rolls, both one-braided and two, went into a 50-gallon pot to boil over a fire. Eight or nine hours later, the bánh tét was cooked, hanging to cool, and ready for the death anniversary on the following day. We got a preview taste, and sliced open a banana one to find the sugars had carmelized to a rich maroon color, and the rice had taken on a hint of green. It was absolutely beautiful. And now, we'll be taking home the recipe to cook them ourselves. For me, however, my first order of business when I get back will be to post pictures first.

Quicker Coconut Cracking

The last post on coconut cracking offered a how-to method to prepare a nicely presented, table ready coconut. In this method, I'm gonna show you something that doesn't give a nice looking final product, but gets the job done in a fraction of the time. I saw a small little lady with a big ol' meat cleaver give three coconuts four whacks each, and we were drinking in seconds. With four mighty chops, you'll get to the real juice faster than someone can open canned juice with a can opener.

Same as before, the first step is to cut the bottom off.

The flat-bottomed coconut will be stable for chopping.

The object is to make two parallel pairs of cuts deep enough to break the inner shell.

Give the coconut a good hard whack at about 70-80 degrees from the perpendicular.

Make the three other cuts, and then pry out the wedge and remove the pieces of the broken inner shell.

If the inner shell didn't shatter, dig the knife into a crack and pry it open. Cut a hole in the meat. Pour into a pitcher.

 
Now that's the stuff right there.

Food Noir

It was late, and the cupboards were emptier than a banker's heart. Our bellies rumbled like the L over MacDougal Street. We hit the pavement in search of good eats. Poor Mike's a working stiff, so me and Lữ set off by ourselves. We were headed in the direction of dinner--destination, anywhere.

The streets of Saigon were rain-wet, and the heavy air was thick with scooter horns, exhaust, and yellow. Yellow street signs, yellow bike lights, yellow trash in the curb. The rats saw us coming a little too late, ran past our feet like a shot, and slipped in between the cracks of an old concrete wall.

We took the cobblestone sidewalk, where messy, barefoot kids made believe that a plastic golden ball someone would use to play soccer. Their sport hid in shadows cast by neon lights and convenient stores. We see a gang of men in their 20's playing a strange and unfamiliar game with Xiangqi pieces. Three or four players, I couldn't be sure, each held a stack of the plastic pieces, and on a mark, smashed one plastic piece face down on the metal game board and flipped it over. Their peers, who seemed to be placing bets on the game, shouted their joy or anguish with no restraint.

I raised my head, nose to the black, starless sky, and brought in whiffs of barbecued meat. We followed the trail left by the smokey scent, and it led us to a dusky alley. Even the cold white fluorescent lights couldn't beat back the darkness. The food stalls all had grimey stripe cloth overhangs, with crowds of people huddled over stainless steel tables, who made short work of the contents of bowls and glasses.

We found our culprit. Barbecue smoke rose in blue clouds from a hooded outdoor grill. Beneath the hood, a wiry man with a brown t-shirt and a face like soot stood and smeared racks of pork pieces with sweet, tangy sauce and slapped them on the fire. It looked good enough to eat.

The lady opened a short table, sat us down on squat stools, and put two bowls of bún thịt nướng in front of our noses. With fresh herbs, beansprouts, rice noodles, chili, and three kinds of grilled meats, all drenched in fish sauce, I set to work, and for the first time in memory, finished a bowl of food faster than Lữ.

It was a meal. But I knew that sometime, somewhere, the stomach is going to be empty again. Well, that's just the way it goes.

Cute Cannibal

Xuxifarm's mascot is quite the Happy Hannibal

We have some pretty disturbing advertisements when it comes to food. Recall the M&M commercials, in which snackers chat with anthropomorphic candies shortly before devouring them--if you think about it, eating an M&M after having a conversation with it is really disturbing. And here, I ran across a billboard that made me gag. This barnyard scene is a classic case of cannibalism. In the foreground is a giant pig indulging in a giant tube of processed swine meat. This pig squeals with delight as he sprints away from another pig, cows and chickens all gorging themselves on a porkmeat picnic. I saw this sign a couple of times in downtown Saigon, and finally got a picture of it. What struck me as most bizarre is not how marketers anthropomorphise food as a gimmick to get us to eat it, it's how we eat it anyway.

Coconut Cracking

A coco-nundrum:
what's the best way to get into a coconut and still conserve an attractive serving container worthy of a tropical beach tiki-bar?

There's hardly anything in the world worse than when you have a coconut and no way to open it. You decide in desperation to drop it off a 7-story rooftop, or sneak up on an idling car at a stoplight to pop it under one of the tires. You forage for any contraption: a pen, a rock, teeth. (I highly recommend against using teeth; the husk is quite bitter.) It's agony when just a scant few inches of husk separate you from heavenly tropical nectar. But, there's good news! The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the blade reigns supreme in coconut cutting. Having a edge won't guarantee your attempt to crack the nut will make the cut. So here's a how-to that I hope will help you hack well and hack true.

There are many ways of getting into a coconut, and the following method is not the fastest or most efficient. However, this approach produces a special presentation. The husk becomes a table-ready container. The aperture is wide, so you can add ice cubes or dig around with a spoon to gather the delicious meat contained therein. The product is the iconic coconut served at tiki-bars, still in its husk, and adorned with swizzle sticks, pineapple wedges, and little paper umbrellas. Here is how it's done:

Stem-side goes down.
 
 

To cut a flat bottom, make a horizontal hack near the stem.
 

Twist the blade to pry the husk away from the nut.
 

Continue to remove the husk until the bottom is flat.
 

Repeat the process on the other side. Make shallow cuts to avoid breaking the hard inner nut.
 

Shave the husk to expose the crown of the inner nut.
 
 

Give a deft whack along the edge of the crown. Turn the coconut and whack the opposite side. Repeat as needed.

Once the crown breaks, pry the broken piece away from the nut, insert a straw, ice, pineapple juice, lime, etc., and enjoy.

Chôm Chôm - Rambutan

Clusters of rambutan fruit

With a bright red skin like a slab of rubber, and a thick coat of soft curved hair like the hooks in velcro, the rambutan fruit looks like the egg of an alien. Peeling back the skin reveals a white translucent orb like albumen. At the core of this gummy, slightly grape-flavored flesh is an edible seed that tastes slightly nutty. The whole experience of eating a rambutan is as delicious as its appearance is unusual. We got to experience a rambutan harvest at an orchard in Vĩnh Long, and we brought home 25 pounds of the wonderful but bizarre looking fruit.

In the morning after we arrived in Vĩnh Long, Dì Tư took us for a walk to the rambutan orchard near her house. But first, we had to cross the river to get to a river island where the orchard is. We made our way to the dock for a ferry that shuttles people back and forth. The ferry pulled in, the metal ferry gangplank slid up the concrete dock, and we boarded. The ferry backed out from the dock, turned around, and chugged through the malty-brown water for the island. The current was strong, and the ferry aimed far upstream to compensate. We got to the other side and disembarked. After meeting a friend of Dì Tư, we took to the sidewalk for the orchard.

On the way we passed a cornucopia of fruits hanging from trees: enormous jackfruit, globular pomelo, green-skinned oranges, clusters of longyans, various types of bananas, and coconuts at the tops of palm trees. Tunnels dug beneath the sidewalk channel water from the river into canals between the fruit trees. The verdant quality of the forest is matched by its productivity. It's hard to imagine anyone going for want of food in the delta.

The bamboo tool

At the orchard, we found spiky fruits of reds, yellows, and greens dangling in clusters far out of reach. The guard handed us a pair of bamboo poles with forked tips at one end. The way to gather rambutan is to find bright red fruit and spear the branch around five or ten inches above them. Twisting the pole breaks the branch, and the fork holds the harvest in place. You drop the pole down and gather the bounty. Within twenty minutes we gathered more than 25 pounds of the delicious fruit, which we carried back to the guardhouse for weighing. The guard priced our bounty at $2.50, Dì Tư's friend tied the branches together into bundles, and we carried them back to the ferry.

Since we've been home, we've been slowly making a dent in our harvest. We've been eating it every day, and have given away grocery bags brimming with rambutan to more than four people, and we still have enough to fill up a kitchen sink. Also we found out, during one of Lữ's trips around Vietnam, that the seed of the rambutan is edible. Not only is it edible, it's really tasty, with the consistency of a giant fresh unroasted peanut, and the flavor of coconut. And tonight, Lữ made chè with rambutan, jackfruit, dragonfruit, avocado, yogurt and condensed milk over ice. It was divine. I'm not sure we'll get tired of the rambutan before we run out, but I'm happy to find out.

Fun with Food

Grocery stores in far-off lands are often good for a couple of laughs. When I was in Taiwan, I posted this about one of the funnier marketing descriptions. Since then, I've stumbled upon many similar promotional cut-ups, and have collected them here. Be warned. Some of my observations are absurd. Some are irreverent (sorry Mom!) I hope you enjoy the first Fun with Food post.

1. Nut House
The craziest part: how much the wacky packaging resembles that of another brand.

2. Marion: "Filled with Mom's Heart
Just like the ones mom used to make, by tearing out her heart and baking it in shortbread

3. Tò nam chua: "Probably the Best in Vietnam"
We're just not quite sure.

4. Red Bull and Gold Cow
Store them together and in a few months you'll get Orange Calf.

5. Quality: "Do not use borax. Do not use formaldehyde."
There's always somebody.

6. Phúc An Bakery Bánh Pía
Made with real Phúc An durian and green beans. By the way, their website has awesome theme music.

7. Danisa Traditional Butter Cookies
If butter cookies are good, than a whole aisle of butter cookies is awesome!