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Migrating to Dreamwidth
I've migrated the content here to Dreamwidth. The new Russia-imposed anti-gay ToS gave me the kick in the pants I needed to get moving on this. -
Vietnamese food - African edition
In Botswana (Vumbura camp maybe), there was something called Vietnamese Shaking Beef on the menu one night. I ordered it, of course. My sessions with my Vietnamese food guru, John, had not yet introduced me to this dish, so I was keen to try it and see how the American version compared with the African ( Read more... ) -
Sometime those odd email messages are important
Got an email late yesterday afternoon that initially looked like it might be a scam. It was from an email address unknown from me. It had some odd formatting/punctuation issues. It claimed to be from my mother (who is currently travelling in France). However, instead of asking for money, it told me she'd broken her arm. There were details in it ( Read more... ) -
Vietnamese restaurants, part 10
Back to Ahn Hong last Thursday with John. This time it was the long-threatened congee with pig-parts*. Congee, of course, is rice porridge and can have just about anything added to it. I think John would class this as Vietnamese comfort food. Spare parts added this time included blood pudding, heart, tripe, liver, and some more standard meaty ( Read more... ) -
Vietnamese restaurants, part 2.5
Back to Ahn Hong with John and another coworker for 7 kinds of beef. This time, John pointed out a plant/herb on side platter of vegetables used to fill out the spring rolls. There were just a few stalks of it on the plate. On the first visit, I think I'd missed this stuff entirely because there's at least 5 times as much basil on the plate. ( Read more... ) -
Vietnamese restaurants, part 9
This time we went to Pho Le (1356 Dorchester Ave) for pho*. It's not John's favorite soup which is why we left it till this late in the series. Also, it's cold now, so soup works well. We both got the pho with beef slices, beef tendon, and tripe. All were thinly sliced and delicious ( Read more... ) -
Vietnamese restaurants, part 8
This time a group from work went to Pho Hoa (1370 Dorchester Ave). We all had variations on Hu Tieu, a kind of seafood soup. One type had egg noodles and clear noodles. Another (mine) had just the clear noodles. A third was pork-free. The first two also came with small slices of ham. We were also provided with a large platter of bean sprouts ( Read more... ) -
Cats
This morning, Tatonka head-butted my paperback book off the bed. I guess she knows a rival when she sees one. -
Vietnamese restaurants, part 5.5
Yesterday, John and I and two coworkers went to My Sister's Crawfish, which I described in part 5 of this series. This time, I had the Bun Rieu soup. I had previously described this as "crab stock, crab meatballs, noodles, etc." One of the etc bits was fish meatballs, another was blocks of what initially appeared to be dark red jello. John was ( Read more... ) -
Vietnamese restaurants, parts 6 and 7
For part 6, we returned to Saigon Seafood for salt and pepper lobster and salted fish fried rice. The salt and pepper lobster, according to John is more a Chinese than Vietnamese disk. It consists of lobster cut into pieces that are breaded and fried (deep fried?). It's tasty, but as is typical with lobster, you have to do some work to extract ( Read more... )