Progress continues apace; I’m turning to vocabulary words that might actually be useful out there, namely: “nhà băng” (bank), “thông hành” (passport), and “khách sạn” (hotel). My vocabulary continues to be overwhelmingly focused on food, though: at the very least, menu-reading isn’t going to be a problem (nor is ordering, at least if they don’t answer back…).

Had last lesson before leaving; if nothing else, it confirmed that boy, I need to work on my neutral and short-descending accent (and my diphtongs and my “th”, and so on, and so forth). Should be fun…

That’s it from me. Don’t know how much internet I’m going to have over there (it’s not that there isn’t any, but rather that we might be busy). See you in two weeks?

You’ll need:
-240g crab meat, coarsely chopped
-1 tsp salt (or 1 tsp nước mắm)
-1 tsp sugar
-Sprinkling of pepper (optional)
-2 garlic cloves, chopped or crushed
-2 shallots, sliced

-1 egg
-50g batter mix (mine says bột bánh cóng. Sometimes sold as tempura mix or batter mix in Asian markets, and basically some combination of rice and wheat flour and thickeners such as cornflour or tapioca starch. A quick googling using my newly-found Vietnamese-fu tells me that you can get the batter mix by mixing four fifths rice flour and one fifth wheat flour, so that’d work out as 40g rice flour, 10g wheat flour and 1 tsp of cornstarch [1])
-3 tblsp water

Dipping sauce: your choice of sriracha sauce, or some other dip. I used Mai Pham’s sweet soy sauce because I had leftovers in the fridge. Basically, mix all the ingredients listed below, let it rest for 10 minutes, and serve at room temperature.
-3 tblsp sweet soy sauce
-2 tblsp water
-1 tblsp minced ginger
-1 tsp ground chili paste (tương ớt tỏi)
-2-3 Thai bird chilies, cut into thin rings

For the fritters:

Fry the garlic and the shallots together for about 30s, until fragrant. Mix the crab, the salt, sugar, pepper and garlic/shallots together, and leave together for a bit. Taste a bit, and adjust salt/sugar if needed.

Meanwhile, mix the egg, the batter mix and the water: the result should be a thickish dough. Add the crab mixture, and stir until well coated.

Heat up about 3 tblsp. oil in a wok or frying pan.

Take a tablespoon (NOT the round, deep ones you use for measuring, but the actual soup spoons that you use for eating. It’s important to have something elongated and shallow), and scoop out from the mixture. Dump this in the wok. It’ll be a bit messy at first, but then the heat will kick in, and the mixture will congeal together as it cooks. Repeat until the pan is full. Turn over after a few minutes, when the bottom part is golden. Fry on the other side.

Drain on paper towels, and put the next batch in.

The proper way to serve this is as a snack with the dipping sauce; however, you can also eat this with rice and some fried vegetables (we used peppers).

Meaning pretty much self-evident.

Also, I managed to say the equivalent of “I speak a little Vietnamese, here are the words I know” over twitter and not get laughed at! (it did pose a funny set of problems, because the pronoun “I” depends on the perceived age of your interlocutor, and the pronoun “you” depends on their age and gender. Now guess what you do when you have neither? Flounder, quite obviously… [1]) It’s amusing how the internet generates new sorts of language problems that you never really think about…

Words learnt: 150 (plus stuff I don’t consciously learn, such as food and funky pronouns. See “mình”, the pronoun used between husband and wife, which also has the meaning of “body”). It has occurred to me that part of the problem with this %%% language is that it’s the first language I learnt that is so distant from French: English and Spanish both have a striking number of similarities with French, especially for newspaper speak. For instance, I can understand a sentence like “The Prime Minister of Great Britain declared that the crisis in the eurozone…” even if I didn’t know all the words, because so many of them are similar to French. Now, in Vietnamese, “prime minister” is “thủ thống”, “declare” is “tuyên bố”–and let’s not even get into “eurozone”… You do have surprise words: “súp” is “soup”, “phó mát” is “cheese” (aka “fromage”), “nhà ga” is “station” (aka “gare”. “nhà” is just “house, building”); but far fewer you’d have in Spanish (where I can fake understanding of a lot of words, because hey, Romance languages!). I have to reach for the dictionary every two words on a good day (and even more than that, because the grammar is so different from French and the whole act of translating really requires firing neurons in the right mindset. Kind of reminds me of Ancient Greek, actually. In worse…

So… My understanding of written Vietnamese is definitely improving (in the new lesson, I understood what they were saying to each other with just a few well-placed explanations from Mom); my pronunciation still kind of sucks. Let’s not speak of my spelling, which has got Mom going into fits semi-regularly. She’ll say a word, and I’ll write it down, and know that I got it wrong. The “this pronunciation translates to this accent” isn’t happening so well right now, whereas the “this accent translates into this pronunciation” is a little bit better ingrained. I can repeat fairly accurately; I can’t really manage unprompted unless it’s very simple things (“hello”, “thank you”, “please give me a bowl of phở” *g*). Not surprising: I’ve always been more visual than auditive (yup, writer. Why do you ask?) As I was saying to Mom, the main thing where I’ve improved is that I’m reasonably sure that I can read and understand a Vietnamese menu with close to no help (barring the odd unknown vegetable, though Vietnamese is very kind by providing classifiers: “rau” for herbs, “cây” for leafy things, “trái” for fruit, “củ” for tubers…). I *might* possibly be able to order, if I steel myself not to follow the path of least resistance and speak English.

Why does this matter, you ask? Weeelll… The first two weeks of February, the H and I will be traipsing through Vietnam. Specifically, through Huể (high time I visited the imperial capital, or what’s left of it), Hội An, Sài Gòn, and the South around Sài Gòn (yes, I know it’s HCMV now. Never quite got used to it). I’m down to two people warning me the accents of the Centre are horrible–that I should be more than adequately equipped to handle Southerners, might possibly manage to understand Northerners, but that the Centre is a law onto itself. Given that I can barely make myself understood by Southerners, I can’t help but think that the Huể/Hội An section of the trip is going to be so much fun… (Sài Gòn will be better, both because, hey, Southerners, and also because Grandma/the uncles will be around)

Three more lessons to go before we leave. Ouch.

Unlike the Muslim man, who uses space to establish male domination by excluding women from the public arena, the Western man manipulates time and light. He declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look 14 years old

(I think what Mernissi means here is “time and slenderness”, because “time and light” makes no sense in the context of the article)
(via ideealisme Don’t agree with everything, but it’s an interesting analysis of current standards of beauty)
-Kate Elliott on “Re-reading and the Experience of Narrative”: interesting thoughts on how the sense of urgency can shape certain modern narratives; and on how re-reading can parallel life:

In life, we come back to the same events or choices, back to similar things, and we can never see them in exactly the way we saw them the first time, or the last but one time, when we encountered a similar moment or that same issue.

-Ari Marmell on “The Shared DNA of Steampunk and Epic Fantasy”. Worth munching on, though I’m not entirely sure I buy the premise in its entirety (the basic nostalgia drive is bang-on, but the parallels that are drawn feel a little too neat. Haven’t had time to think about this properly yet).
-And a random food link: thịt heo kho trứng (caramelised/braised pork with eggs) in steamed buns, from Blue Apocalypse. Yum.

Bánh chuối nướng literally means grilled banana cake (see how my vocabulary is improving? ), and it looks something like this:

Have I got your attention now?

(recipe under the cut)

By and large, Vietnamese cuisine doesn’t do desserts, at least not in the Western sense: a plate of fresh fruit is always suitable for serving at the end of meals, no matter how lavish they might be. Vietnam doesn’t really do pies, baked chocolate cakes, pièces montées, or the full range of pastries you can find in, say, France.

However, there are a few desserts, which tend to be very small doses of concentrated sugary goodnesss. This is one of them, and it’s dead simple to make. All you need is a few bananas, some sliced sandwich bread, and coconut cream, et voilà, you’re done!

The recipe is from Anh’s A Food Lover’s Journey: since I basically copied it from Anh’s blog, I invite you to check it out at that address.

Just a few notes on the process from me: bananas, especially ripe ones, are a pain in the %%% neck to slice lengthwise, so don’t worry if they end up a bit mashed in the process. You want thin slices, though.

If you’ve ever wondered about the difference between coconut cream and coconut milk: both are made by mixing the liquid that’s actually inside the coconut (coconut water) with the pulped flesh of the coconut. Depending on how much flesh vs. water you got, you either have milk or cream: cream has a very high content in pulp flesh and thus a creamier consistency. So the 200mL are definitely coconut cream (milk would see you not put enough coconut in the mixture).

Anh took the crust away on her bread; I found that with white bread, the crust was basically so soft that I could leave it on and this did not detract the pudding from settling in. I didn’t have any brown sugar, so I put in 80g of caster sugar, dissolved it in warm coconut milk, and did fine.

The baking pan: I wouldn’t line it with baking paper, honestly. With me, the baking paper got soaked through by the coconut cream, which made it all but impossible to separate it from the cooked pudding. A standard (porcelain or metal) pan plus a good knife should work fine.

The process of putting the cake together is very much lasagna-like: layer of banana, layer of bread dipped in sweet coconut, layer of banana, … I sprinkled some sugar on top of the last (banana) layer in addition to 2-3 tablespoons of neutral oil, which enabled the thing to caramelise in the oven. The cooking time for me was closer to 1h00 at 180°C, and then 15 extra minutes at 200°C: the insides were still not congealed together at the one-hour mark, and the top hadn’t yet got that caramelised sheen.

And here is the beast, fresh out of the oven!

(and promise, there will be a post that isn’t about eating or baking yummy stuff soon)

Yes, it looks gooey (that would be the cornstarch plus a liberal appliance of high heat), but it’s so very yummy. The flavours of the lemongrass, ginger and vinegar all combine for an explosion of taste right where it matters. My sis’s favourite dish when she was younger. Not my favourite dish (I tend more towards the shrimp and crab end of the spectrum), but it’s still such good comfort food.

(recipe from Bach Ngo’s Classic Cuisine of Vietnam)

Serves 4
You’ll need:
-300g chicken
-1 stalk lemongrass
-2 tablespoons fish sauce
-2 tablespoons shredded ginger
-2 tablespoons rice vinegar
-6 tablespoons water
-1 teaspoon cornstarch
-1/2 teaspoon sugar
-3 cloves garlic
-1 large onion
-Sprinkling of black pepper

-Mix the ginger and the vinegar. Set aside.
-Prepare the lemongrass stalk: discard any dried outer leaves, discard the upper two-thirds of the stalk, and slice the remainder paper-thin. Slice the chicken into bite-sized pieces. Put the chicken in a bowl along with 1 tablespoon of the fish sauce, and sprinkle black pepper. Mix, and set aside.
-Mix the cornstarch, sugar, water and remaining fish sauce, and set aside.
-Chop the garlic, and slice the onion into wedges.
-In a large-bottom casserole dish on medium fire, put in oil, and fry the garlic for ~30s, until fragrant. Add the onion, and cook until soft. Add the chicken, and fry for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Cover, and cook for an additional 5 minutes. Then stir in the ginger-vinegar mixture and the cornstarch-fish sauce-sugar one. Mix well. Cover again, and cook for 5 minutes. Then uncover, set heat until the sauce boils, and finish off by congealing the sauce (basically, make the cornstarch boil and thicken).
-Serve with rice.

I found this recipe in Bach Ngo’s The Classic Cuisine of Vietnam (a book which, incidentally, I heartily recommend). It’s an awesome way of melding lemongrass and sesame, two very yummy ingredients. I suspect, from comparing the name and the final result, that I’ve missed something (a bánh ướt is a wet rice paper wrap, kind of like bánh cuốn, whereas the original recipe wraps the meat in dried bánh trắng rice papers–like the ones for spring rolls. But I might have missed something there, quite possibly by misinterpreting the book…), but what the heck, it’s still awesome to eat! The book offers to roll it up in rice papers, but since the batch I made was so large, the H and I ended up exploring variations: we served it with bún, and also with rice and salad and herbs.

And our beef with rice and salad (yes, the brownish patch of blurriness in the uppper left-hand patch of the picture is the H, who was too hungry to wait until I’d finished the pictures)

(more behind the cut, to spare you the pictures and lengthy text)

Serves 4-6.

You’ll need:
-1 pound beef (sirloin or a similarly tender part of the beast)
-1 tablespoon sesame oil
-1 tablespoon fish sauce
-2 stalks lemon grass
-2 shallots, or the white part of 3 scallions
-2-3 garlic cloves
-1 teaspoon brown sugar
-1 tablespoon sesame seed

For the wraps:
-Salad
-Mint and coriander (I suspect rau răm or red perilla would go better with this than European mint, actually)
-Rice paper (bánh trắng)

For the dipping sauce:
-Nước lèo (see here for a recipe)

Slice the beef thinly. Discard the outer stalks of the lemongrass (the large ones with the leaves. I have never bought lemongrass in France that actually had those, so I just rinse mine, but it could be that elsewhere you have those leaves). Discard the upper two-thirds of the lemongrass, and slice into very thin pieces.

Using a mortar and pestle (or food processor), pound the shallots, sugar and garlic together until you get a thick paste (I’ve found it helps to slice the shallots first, and to leave the pieces to dry in a warm place on kitchen paper for about 30 min, otherwise it ends up way too mushy). Add the sliced lemongrass, the sesame oil, the fish sauce, and the sesame seeds.

Put the beef in, and leave to marinate for 30 minutes or more. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 220°C.

Line an ovenproof dish with foil, and put in the beef and marinade so that the pieces are touching (but not in a very thick layer, otherwise this will not cook). Put in the oven, and bake for 30 minutes, or until the beef is cooked. If you have a broiler/grill function in your oven, you can grill the meat (but cook for ~15-20 minutes instead of 30, and flip the meat on its side halfway through the cooking process to avoid burnt beef!).

Leave to cool before serving (if serving with bún or rice papers).

-To serve with rice papers: soften the rice paper in water, wrap some beef pieces, some salad, some coriander and some mint. Roll like you would an envelope: sides first, and then a tight upwards roll so that you end up with a cylinder (plenty of videos on the web on how to roll rice papers).
-To serve with bún: put the bún in boiling water for around 2 minutes, drain, rinse under cold water. Leave to cool. Then in a bowl, put salad, bún, and herbs, top with the beef, and add a sprinkling of the sauce.
-To serve with rice: I should think it’s pretty self-explanatory

Bonus picture: here are the shrimps skewers we made this weekend (not posting the recipe because though they look good, the cooking process clearly needs to be streamlined before it’s anything like efficient).

I am currently learning preposition and interrogative words (the words that you tack on the end of a sentence to signal that it’s a question. Yup, it’s a tonal language, which means that raising your voice at the end of a sentence just results in your mangling the last words by giving it a rising accent…). Not exactly fun, but necessary.

-David Gemmell: hum, a lot of books? Finished the Drenai books, and found one I hadn’t read (the very last one, Swords of Night and Day). The earlier ones are still those that carry the most punch for me; I suspect partly because of nostalgia. Also read Lion of Macedon/Dark Prince, which is basically Greek legends on crack (I exaggerate a bit, since Gemmell obviously documented himself well and has always had a fondness for Antiquity settings in his books; but not by much. The entire many-worlds experience, and the Source vs Spirit of Chaos thing are very entertaining, but I very much doubt that they have anything of “authentic” Ancient Greece about them. Still, what I very much enjoyed about them is their scope: the books take place over decades, and it’s refreshing to see alliances form and break as time passes. It also allows the author space to show the characters grow and age, which isn’t often found in genre fiction–especially in epic fantasy–and this gives a gravitas to the books which prevents them from tipping into outright silliness. Not by much, admittedly).

My Vietnamese progresses; I can now get *some* words recognised by my mother when I say them (don’t laugh. The potential for screwing up words in this language is oh-so-boundless). And this weekend is going to be busy busy, as I’ll be at Rencontres de L’Imaginaire in Sèvres with the H, hopefully signing a number of books greater than zero…

Also, this: awesome xkcd comic. I want to go back in time and build one of those in high school.