Let me preface this post with an apology for being away from Pistache for so long. Let’s hope this one puts me back in the game.
From May 13th to August 1st, my friend Jessika and I backpacked our way through Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Here’s a small taste of the trip.
When faced with a menu written solely in Vietnamese, or then again, when there’s no menu at all, you inevitably become adventurous. Such was the nature of our South East Asian adventures.
Very quickly, you learn to point, nod, smile and patiently wait for… well, who knows!
Take this chicken for example. Hanoi, Vietnam, May 16 2012. After desperately scanning the menu for any English word, we resorted to Charades. We assumed chicken would have appeared somewhere on the menu, so there we sat, flapping our elbows at a very puzzled waitress. (Imagine our hesitation as we tried to ask for rice and could come up with no way of acting out the four letter word…we would eat chicken, and chicken only).
The Vietnamese market.
Pho
Despite the shananigans, the meal was delicious. It was half the animal, cut straight through the bone and in no particular order. It came with the head, but more importantly, with a wedge of lime, kefir lime leaves, chilis and salt. It was the first of many successes!
By the time we’d left Vietnam, we’d eaten fertilized duck eggs, silk worm larvae and pho ( pronounced ‘phuh’, it’s soup). We’d pointed at barbecued skewers of salmon, beef, corn and duck tongue (surprisingly tasty)!
The Vietnamese market supplied its fair share of oddities aswell. We found pink slop that we discovered was pork … though we’re still not sure how the transformation from pig to slime actually happens.
Dog. It’s raised like cattle, or porc. Its only purpose is to be slaughtered and eaten, so there’s really no emotional attachment to the animal. The controversy about eating dog is the method of slaughter. The animals are riled up before their throats are slit, so as to diffuse ‘aggressivity hormones’ through the meat, giving it its characteristically gamey taste.
The pink porc slop… When I inquired as to what it was, looking helplessly confused, the squatting saleswoman laughed at me, picked up a spatula covered in the stuff and slopped it back into the bowl, leaving me with a nice little splattering of goo on my front. It was all in good humour.
We saw dog, roasted, raw and on the backs of motorcycles. We saw frogs getting whacked violently against stone, skinned and pulled apart by expert hands. We saw herbs that we’d never heard of because they simply had no English name!
Whole, salt-crusted fish, stuffed with lemongrass stalks, chilis and kefir lime leaves. This was actually in Laos.
There were delicacies too. There was salted and grilled whole fish, tender and perfectly seasoned. There was morning glory, stir-fried with a dozen whole cloves of garlic. There was Vietnamese coffee, a thick black brew poured straight out of a beat-up water bottle and served with sweetened condensed milk over ice – sounds strange, but it’s delicious. And in fact, it’s the only good coffee available in South East Asia.
Vietnamese Coffee
After two weeks of the herbacious, delicate and wholly savorous Vietnam, we rode twenty hours in a bus headed to Laos; a country with a near-perfect intermediate cuisine between Vietnamese and Thai. It kept the nameless herbs, the morning glory, and the French remnants of Baguette. But it grabbed onto Thailand’s coconut and lemongrass. And it boasted heaps of garlic and chilli.
Thailand was impressively bold. Coconut milk, ginger and Keffir lime assaulted our senses in the most awe-inspiring way. Tom Yum and Tom Kha soup were both resounding successes of our cooking class, despite their simplicity.
Tom Yum soup
The green papaya salad was fresh, crunchy and spicy. And it was less than a dollar at the street-corner stall.
Enjoying a dinner of refreshing papaya salad. The small basket beside me is filled with ‘fish balls.’ Somewhat less of a delicacy in our opinion.
We also saw our fair share of bugs: deep-fried bamboo worms, grasshoppers and beetle-like insects. We tried them all – more out of a pig-headed adventurousness than a drive for the delicious and refined.
Big. Edible. Bugs.
Next came Malaysia, a whole other ball game. The country actually featured three cuisines: Malay, Indian and Chinese. The malay food had the typical South East Asian flavours, though it was spiked with curry leaves and a pungent fermented-shrimp paste. There were skewers of chicken satay dipped in a thick, sweet peanut sauce. And there were fresh spring rolls (which we semi-mastered in our Malay cooking class). An unusually resilient rice paper got smeared with plum sauce, then topped with bean sprouts, chicken and about 10 other ingredients.
Our Malay spring rolls
All the while, right next door, were incredible Chinese street stalls with true homemade noodles and dumplings; the best that any of us had ever tasted.
A local enjoys the Chinese noodles.
That’s not to mention the breakfasts of Indian flatbread called roti that we enjoyed repetitively. It tore apart so flakily and soaked up dahl so readily – ’twas a perfect harmony of texture and flavour. But it certainly wasn’t what North America knows as breakfast.
Now, what to say about the food in Indonesia. It’s more difficult to describe this cuisine, because the country is a massive cluster of 18 000 thousand islands.
And it stood out most as a magical, scuba dive paradise. So the food we ate was whatever we could order, eat and pay for in the hour we had between dives…which happened to be mostly tourist fare. It was still delicious, despite being westernized. We did however have some excellent family-style Indonesian food on our 4 person liveaboard in the Komodo islands.
The liveaboard. It sleeps four people comfortably. The divemaster, chef and driver/mechanic sleep on deck.
With limited kitchen space, our homestyle cook, Rain, served us unbelievably creamy ‘pumpkin soup’ (their pumpkin is more like squash), deep fried fish, marinated chicken and many more comforting dishes. It was solid Indonesian home food, always served with rice, and always perfectly satisfying.
Cooking with Rain
As a whole, this trip was the ultimate culinary experience. So much of what we put in our mouths was unlike anything we’d ever tasted. We couldn’t pinpoint the herb or spice. Sometimes, we couldn’t even say what type of meat (or meat-like substance) was on our plates. We got all sorts of bowel illnesses, the details of which will forever remain within the confines of our memories. But we never ate poorly, and we never paid much. The adventure was always worthwile, and will always remain irreplaceable.
La Petite Pistache 