chocolatebuddha

Vietnamese food is as captivating as the land and the demure smiling young ladies dressed in their sensuous Ao Dais. Unlike the grandiose of neighbouring Thailand, Vietnamese cuisine leans away from the fragrant flavours of lemongrass, kaffir lime and galangal. However when it comes to chillis, I’ve had far spicier chillis in Vietnam than in Thailand!

So fierce was the chilli that I can still recall its bite vividly. Every morning at the twelve room hotel in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, breakfast was truly a marriage of east and west. Along with freshly baked French baguette, they served rice noodle soup and a small omelette. Innocently I dropped a tiny slice of fresh cut chilli and thought, “The chilli is still orange-tinted, had not turned red yet.”

By the short time when I sipped my first spoonful of broth, the fieriness of that orange-tinged sliced chilli had contaminated the entire bowl! And that marked the end of the eastern breakfast portion.

Rice noodles play a big role in Vietnamese cuisine since they eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. At the market, freshly made rice noodles are sold by the kilograms. Unlike the rice noodles or kuay teow found in Malaysia, the Vietnamese version has a finer texture and thinner width. Best of all, they are not smoldered with oil and are made fresh daily. The noodles don’t have a long shelve life and will turn bad in a day or two.

This thing between food and me is surely in the blood because each time my dad returns from an overseas trip, his hand luggage is often filled with fresh goodies. Just two weeks ago, we enjoyed extra large, juicy and luscious nectarines from Sydney plucked fresh in summer. They were even carefully wrapped in soft tissue, by my dad, to prevent bruises!

On the days he comes home from Ho Chi Minh City, we will prepare a chicken and prawn broth to await the arrival of fresh flat rice noodles from the market. He claims that his favourite noodle lady speaks Teochew, our family’s dialect, and hence she’d sell him her best each time.

Regardless of whether she did or not, we still enjoyed tremendously our home version of Vietnamese rice noodle soup served with a dose of homemade sambal belacan, fried shallots, beansprouts, chicken, prawn and fresh chives topped with a generous dash of fish sauce and freshly squeezed lime.

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