Good Morning Vietnam Part II

I feel I would be gravely remiss if I didn’t devote at least one posting to the amazing food here. Because, as ya’ll know I’m all about the food.

The biggest treat for me so far is the fruit. They have amazing fruit here that you can’t get in the states. Right now I have two front runners vying for my affection. The first is a mango, not like the mangos we have at home, this is an uber mango. The taste is less peppery, more sweet and the texture is like sorbet, it literally melts in your mouth. My other favorite is the dragon fruit. A dragon fruit is the size of small nerf football and is hot pink with green thorns. The inside is milky white with thousands of tiny black seeds. It’s moist and sweet and wonderful. I’ve had it every single day since I’ve been here. We also tried a fruit call mung cow…I’m positive that I butchered the spelling, but that’s the gist of how it sounds. It looks like a small artichoke. You rub away the skin and eat the soft flesh inside. There are a lot of seeds, slightly bigger than watermelon seeds and puffed. The seeds are so pretty that I considered taking them home to see if I could make jewelry out of them! The taste was a combination of banana, pineapple and orange.

The oranges here are green with a more intense flavor than what we are used to. The watermelon and pineapple are amazing too. We also had a kind of grapefruit that is the size of a volley ball and green. The meat inside is pink and almost dry. The custom here is to eat fruit for dessert dipped in a combination of salt and chili powder. No I’m not kidding, don’t knock it till you try it, it rocks.

Other than the amazing fruit….of which I’ve left some out for lack of space…every meal has been an adventure. All of our meals in Ben Tre were family style with four courses. My favorites all involved fish. We had fried fish that you soaked in a fish stock flavored with strips of green mango (different than the one I mentioned above) The flavor was unlike anything I’ve ever had before. My other favorite was a fish ball stew with chrysanthemum greens. Now normally a dish with “fish balls” in the title wouldn’t trip my trigger, but Lord almighty I’ve never had the pleasure of eating a fish ball in Vietnam before. Delish.

If you were to poll our group the hands down favorite food is Pho…a kind of soup loaded with noodles, meat, seafood and I don’t know what, but it’s a little bit of heaven. Bliss in a bowl the size of your head.

Trey’s favorite is rice porridge. It looked pretty questionable to me…runny mushy rice soup. Darn if that bowl of gunk didn’t taste yummy too. I don’t know how they do it!

That’s all I have time to rave about, I’m getting hungry and it’s closing in on dinner time!

Wishing you all happy full tummies.
Peace-
Sandy