Recipe for a Party or Larger Group
Fish Sauce
This recipe for Vietnamese style Spring Rolls is a good one for a party, as it makes 50 rolls. Recipe adapted from Bach-Yen Boum.
Vietnamese Spring Rolls
Vietnamese
Shrimp Tail Handles
Shrimp Meets Crab
Bean Sprouts
This Vietnamese take on the ever-popular Spring Rolls is intended to provide a light appetizer for no more than 8. It combines Crab, Shrimp, and Vegetables. Recipe adapted from Bach Ngo.
Spring Rolls
Ram Cuon
Vietnamese
Ingredients:
8 whole dried Rice Papers Continue reading
Fish Sauce, Nuoc Mam and Sea Ghost Fingers
The National Dish Is a Soup — Even at Breakfast
“Only the French imposed their own cuisine upon their Asiatic possessions.” — David Dodge [1]
“He was not yet Ho Chi Minh. It was 1917 and he was Nguyen Ai Quoc and he was a pastry cook under the great Escoffier.” — Robert Olen Butler [2]
Three Crabs Brand Fish Sauce
Vietnamese cooking is light and delicate, healthy, and remarkably varied. Its famous dishes can be very unusual and even have poetic names, like one for Crab Claws called Sea Ghost Fingers. Continue reading
Crossroads of Asia
Lingering Vinegar and Garlic
“There’s a trick if you want to know that it’s a Filipino an apartment belongs to; the garlic and vinegar can linger around a good long while.” — N.V.M. Golnzalez, The Bamboo Dancers [1]
There are more than 7,000 islands in the Philippines. And its people speak some 87 languages.[2, 3]
Lumpia Shanghai
Fusion Food and the Greatest Appetizer
Can there be any common factors in the cuisine of such a far-flung and diverse people? There may be some common elements, but we have to look for them in the past.
The ancestors of today’s Filipinos spoke languages of the Malayo-Polynesian language family. This far-flung language group stretches from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east, with Hawaii in the middle.
These people were sea-farers, expert seamen and navigators. Fish were an essential part of their diet, and seafood remains a key element of Philippine cuisine today. Continue reading