It’s not strictly equivalent, but… spraying stuff with oil, sticking it in the oven quite close to the heating element (about 2/3 of the way up) and turning it over at the halfway mark (when the upper surface has gone golden) is a pretty good and painless substitute for deep-frying [1].

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[1] Deep frying has two drawbacks: the first is that it’s fairly messy with high risks of burns (yes, clumsy cook here), and the second is that I can only do it in batches of 4-5 objects in order not to crowd my wok. By contrast, I can stick 20 fried rolls into the oven at a time (more if you count the fact that I’m using both oven grids, one on the bottom to cook the inside, and the one on the top to do the final “frying” stage).
Also, spraying oil is way more healthy since there’s less of it around than with deep frying.

Aka thịt heo quay, a beloved Vietnamese favourite [1]. OK, so fair warning: this isn’t a complicated recipe per se, but it requires quite a fair bit of planning, since the actual preparation begins on the previous day, and the meat has to be taken out of the fridge an hour in advance. The main attraction to this is the crispy skin, so getting it to happen is a key point of the recipe. The trick is to an extra amount of oomph: many recipes use baking soda for the purpose, but the one I had used vinegar and salt. Also, you should get your pork skin as dry as possible, hence the night in the fridge and the boiling water trick.

 

 

The pork belly as it comes out of the oven.

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[1] It’s a Chinese dish, strictly speaking. But given how prominent thịt heo quay has become in Vietnam, I’m adding it to the official Vietnamese repertoire along with xá xíu and other dishes involving 5-spice.

Was originally shooting for 6k words on this one, and I ought to have remembered that a two-strand narration with six main characters was a bad idea for length… Very fortunately, I checked the guidelines for the market I’m supposed to submit this to, and realised I’d misremembered and that it was going up to 10k (I doubt they’re going to be very happy about the 9k, but there’s clearly no way I can cut text out of this. If anything, it’s too short).

Don’t have a title yet: it’s called The Turtle’s Citadel after one of the main characters, but it’s a really bad title and I need to change it as soon as my magical title generator (aka the H) has read it and offered opinions. Also waiting for bunch of readers to read it and see how much is unclear. Lots of space scenes, which is unusual for me (I find space boring. Fortunately, a squad of homicidal attack drones generally makes things very interesting for everyone concerned). Also, lots of reflections on postcolonialism, imperialism and cultural clashes, as par for the course.

The derelict ward was in an isolated section of outsider space, one of the numerous spots left blank on interstellar maps, no more or no less tantalising than its neighbouring quadrants. To most people, it would be just that: a boring part of a long journey to be avoided–skipped over by Mind-ships as they cut through deep spaces, passed around at low speeds by outsider ships while their passengers slept in their hibernation cradles.

Only if anyone got closer would they see the hulking masses of ships: the glint of starlight on metal, the sharp, pristine beauty of their hulls, even though they all lay quiescent and crippled, forever unable to move–living corpses kept as a reminder of how far they had fallen; the outsiders’ brash statement of their military might, a reminder that their weapons held the means to fell any Mind-ships they chose to hound.

On the sensors of The Cinnabar Mansions, the ships all appeared small and diminished, like toy models or avatars–things Lan Nhen could have held in the palm of her hand and just as easily crushed. As the sensors’ line of sight moved–catching ship after ship in their field of view, wreck after wreck, indistinct masses of burnt and twisted metal, of ripped-out engines, of shattered life pods and crushed shuttles–Lan Nhen felt as if an icy fist were squeezing her heart into shards. To think of the Minds within–dead or crippled, forever unable to move…

So, I went to the butcher’s yesterday and asked them for a whole chunk of pork belly for thịt heo quay–just the meat, no need to prepare it in any special way or anything. I should have known something was up when the butcher looked at me oddly, but I didn’t twig until they asked me “so, what are you going to do with it exactly?”. Then I remembered that the French tend to buy pork belly in little chunks to use as lardons or bacon, and that people wanting a huge uncut chunk of pork belly with the skin on were not exactly common… [1]

Darn. Last time we moved, it took more than 3 visits to the butcher’s before I got flagged as “that girl who makes the weird recipes with our meat…” [2]

Current mood: amused

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[1] Bit surprised though, because the neighbourhood is fairly cosmopolitan, and I can’t believe I’m the only one in need of that kind of ingredients on a regular basis…
[2] It took about a year and a half for my butcher to work out something was up–after repeated requests for minced unsalted pork meat. (again, not so much a French ingredient. At least I assume not, given the reaction)

Very quick post to let you know that I’ve guest-posted over at Khaalidah’s blog on worldbuilding and its attendant issues: the post is here (thanks very much to Khaalidah for the invitation and her ongoing patience with my missing her deadlines…) It’s less an admonition that a series of questions I’ve been asking myself–and to which I freely admit not having answers to. Any thoughts/discussions much welcome!

(aka thịt bò ruốc sả)

Aka what I did when I had too much lemongrass in my fridge. This is a variant of a Vietnamese dish. The original doesn’t use minced meat–I don’t think minced beef is a great hit in Vietnamese cooking, as a general rule… But I also had spare minced meat, as you probably guessed. Any tender part of the animal will do if you don’t want/don’t have minced meat. This is a bit of a heavy dish in terms of flavour, so it goes well with refreshing vegetables (here, salad and cucumber, but you could subsitute with, say, broccoli or bok choy, or anything that doesn’t reek too violently of winter dishes).

Mắm ruốc, fermented shrimp paste, is one of those Vietnamese condiments that quickly makes your entire fridge smell fishy. But here its taste is sublimed by the cooking process, and the resulting dish has a nice shrimpy kick without actually retaining the strong smell (something that could also be said for nước mắm and a host of other condiments!).

 

And here’s the artwork by Jim Burns for my story “Ship’s Brother”, which will be in Interzone 241. Full table of contents here (I share a TOC with Gareth L Powell, yay!).

(click to zoom)

This is part of the Xuya continuity and deals with Vietnamese in space. Snippet (with diacritics added in):

You never liked your sister.

I know you tried your best, that you would stay awake at night thinking on filial piety and family duty, praying to your ancestors and the bodhisattva Quan Âm to find strength, but that it would always come back to that core of dark thoughts within you, that fundamental fright you carried with you like a yin shadow in your heart.

(the sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that I used “yin” instead of the more correct “âm”–Vietnamese yin and yang are âm and dương respectively. I would have used the correct words, but since this was a passing reference and was never ever explained, I thought there’d be more chance of people recognising it)

-Requires Hate on “The Disease of Geek Pride: world-building and cultural appropriation”. Warning: like most of RH’s articles, it’s full of performance rage, but she does raise a lot of good points on how worldbuilding for worldbuilding’s sake can turn into a raging disrespectful mess.
-Tricia Sullivan on “Some Thoughts on SFF and Reality Checks”. A post that tackles some of the same issues as RH’s, in a more moderate tone. As Tricia says: what if authors, through shiny worldbuilding, erase someone else’s reality? What if the Vietnam War becomes replaced by a stream of good American soldiers fighting the evil communists? (or the reverse. Not really saying one is better than the other)
-On the same subject, Marie Brennan has a series of posts on Information Density and whether it is possible to educate the reader away from what they know while keeping a narrative going at full clip: here and here

I guess that, for me, it all boils down to: worldbuilding doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You have obligations not only to produce something cool and shiny to keep your reader entertained–but since your narration will affect other people who read it and shape their idea of the world/the history, you also have an obligation not to distort what you take from, as much as is humanely possible (and “not distorting” can get tricky).

Current mood: thoughtful.

(aka tương đậu phọng)

This is a peanuty sauce that goes well with gỏi cuốn (normally insofar as I know, gỏi cuốn are served with a heavy nước lèo sauce, which involves other things. I’m not yet very clear on what yet, research is ongoing). But as a handy replacement, this isn’t half bad. Very very peanuty (the alternate recipe I had for this involved hoisin and was very sweet, but I find the gỏi cuốn go better with peanuty), and the H’s new dipping sauce favourite. Who knew he liked peanuts quite so much…

 

Bonus: two proverbs!
“Bụng làm, dạ chịu”: “the stomach makes, the heart/mind bears”. Insofar as I can tell, you reap what you sow (or maybe it should be you are what you eat”?. Bonus more usual proverb: “Gieo gió, gặp bão”: “sow the wind, meet the storm”.

In other news, I have learnt more vocabulary by translating a fairy tale (Mỵ Nương and Trương Chi). I’m pretty sure mandarin ranks of Ancient Việt Nam are of no practical use, but “hát” (to sing) could conceivably come in handy. Still torn over words like “cung” (palace, temple), ngôi (throne), and “nhan sắc tuyệt trần” (exceptional, divine beauty), but who knows, I might need them some day…