Travel and cooking

We travel whenever funds and jobs allow. We recently spent a couple of weeks exploring Vietnam, with a side trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia. We also enjoyed a wonderful half day in Narita, Japan, during a welcome layover on our long flight home to Pittsburgh. I am writing the trip up at http://travelswithdarly.blogspot.com/

As with a previous trip to Tuscany last year, as well as other journeys, except Ireland, I come home flush with food memories and compelled to explore the recipes of the cultures I've just devoured. Recently two excellent cookbooks have presented themselves. The first is something of an instant classic, the second is a real gem of a Vietnamese cookbook.

Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet was written and photographed by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. A recent publication, it is a beautifully bound tome that discusses the cultures of SE Asia in some detail. The book has wonderful, evocative photography of food, landscape, and people, and offers insightful views into the cultures that create the food. The emphasis is very much on common, everyday food. I was particularly impressed with the chapter on street food, but I've also enjoyed the comments on "mostly" vegetable dishes.

(Though Buddhist cultures have a long history of vegetarianism, there is a natural tendency by even non-vegetarians in Asia to eating heaps of vegetables with much less animal protein than we consume in the west. Meat is almost used as a flavoring agent rather than as the focal point of the plate. It is also expensive, while vegetables are less so.)

I've prepared a few dishes from the book, adapting them a little, as I generally do with most non-baking recipes I come across. Sauteed Chinese greens with bacon and ginger was crunchy and delicious. The seared tofu with pork had great textures and flavor too, served next to the greens with a little Indonesian rice.

I was also delighted to find a recipe for lemongrass pork patties to make bahn mi sandwiches, a Vietnames staple. These were a highlight of our trip, and I've written about them in some detail in my travel blog. While not expecting to accurately duplicate our favorite sandwich, I was very happy with the results. I'm going to buy a small hibachi to more accurately grill the tasty pork patties over charcoal as the weather in Pittsburgh eventually warms.

The Simple Art of Vietnamese Cooking by Binh Duong and Marcia Kiesel is a well-written exploration, and though less of a coffee table book than Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet the recipes are also clear and easy to follow.

As I noted, we enjoyed a brief layover in Narita Japan. I wrote about the delicious unagi, or eel, we had for lunch there on my travel blog. When describing this to a friend he mentioned Consider the Eel, by Richard Schweid. Eel was once consumed widely in America. It is one of the staples that helped save the Mayflower colony; when shown it was available by a sympathetic Indian, these early colonists (the half that survived that first brutal winter) wept tears of joy.

Somehow, eel fell out of favor in the US. Still widely consumed throughout Europe and Asia, it generally appears here at sushi bars and perhaps around Christmas as part of the traditional Italian feast of fishes.

These little fellows are spawned near the Bermuda Triangle and, depending on their species (one of two), traverse the perilous ocean to either America or Europe as tiny little see-through worms. They next find and enter the river where their ancestors came from, changing from salt water to fresh water fish, and spend anywhere from 20 to 40 years living there. At some point their bodies change and they migrate all the way back to the Saragaso Sea, their birthplace, where they lay and fertilize their eggs, and then die.

Knowing this now, I appreciate the delicious eel we shared in Narita just that little bit more.