Tasty morsels from the table of Thy Tran
A recent breakfast at T-28 Cafe in the Outer Sunset reminded me just how good a cup of hot, strong milk tea tastes on lazy weekend mornings. Although the richness of a well-aged pu-erh or the emerald sweetness of a spring shin-cha give me great pleasure as a tea drinker, neither have a place in my heart like down-home milk tea.
As we draw smaller and smaller circles around our food community, we often forget the power of recipes to connect us to each other.
Nancy’s “Benz Cake†recipes in her baker’s shorthand.
Recipes in the personal sense. I’m not talking about the results of a keyword search or a formula in that latest best-selling cookbook, not the pasta-of-the-month at the back of a magazine or the marketing copy on the back of a box. Along with vegetables grown by farmers with real names and faces, a local food system includes dishes with memories of people we actually know.
Okay, enough with all the pho.
I think it’s time for folks to try some other Vietnamese dishes. There are hundreds of snacks and soups, both in Vietnam proper and in Little Saigons around the world, but for reasons I’m still trying to understand, both restaurateurs and diners settle into predictable menus.
Savory bits of shrimp, mung beans and scallion oil top little steamed rice cakes.
Continue reading “Banh Cuon & Banh Beo: Vietnamese Steamed Rice Treats”
It’s that time of the year again when I wish I had a garden. Little pots on a fire escape give me regular sprigs of thyme and shiso and, if I’m feeling ambitious, I might harvest handfuls of Sweet 100s. It’s nothing, however, like watching tiny pea shoots unfurl into astonishing vines or digging up a stash of potatoes from beneath a dried-up stem.
Continue reading “Cultivating one’s garden”
Lest readers things that I only like to eat meat (and by meat, I mean, of course, pork) I’m dedicating today’s post to one of my favorite cusines: South Indian.
After a recent crash course in using a Sumeet mixer-grinder, Ramach and Vidya introduced me to one of their standby eateries. I had planned to make my way back up 880 to Fremont for some good Indian eats, but Vidya assured me that a detour to Sunnyvale would be worth my time. Never to turn down a personal introduction to food, I postponed a few more rounds of pani puri for a plate of endless rice.
Continue reading “South Indian Rice Courses”