Nothing beats mom's home cooking

My friend Tai’s mother is a great cook.  She is worked on the sleeper trains for 10 years that traversed the entire country going from Saigon to Hanoi.  In her small galley kitchen she must have cooked a lot of different stuff, plus she was exposed to the incredible regional differences that exist in this country.  What you see on the Vietnamese menus in the states is a hybrid version of both north and south.  We mainly still see southern Vietnamese stuff because they are the majority of immigrants to the states.  Tai’s mother has distilled these experiences and is capable of cooking many of the regions of food.  

 The first one I tried was the fish cooked in a sour soup with a lot of this tasty very woody vegetable that looked like a stalk from an aloe vera plant.  It has no flavor when eaten raw but when cooked it absorbs all of what it is cooked with.  It is a great way to add crunch.   The fish was then combined with the Vietnamese plate of herbs and a rice paper wrapper and then dunked in a hoisin-based sauce that also had boiled pork liver mixed in it.  This is a combination that takes a pungent ingredient and makes it work.  These wraps also keep with tradition and use seafood and pork together.

She is also really good at reimagining ramen noodles.  First you soak the ramen in some hot water for a bit and then you can take them out and combine them with shrimp, beef and bok choy topped with a bit of black pepper to create an elegant stir fried noodle dish.  This evening we all sat on the tiled floor around some of these tasty foods.