After my morning classes, I met and taught a new private
student for 2 hours in the afternoon. He
is a Real Estate Agent from Tokyo, Japan interested in improving his Business
English. It went really well and we plan
to meet 2-4 hours per week.
I walked around Ben Tanh market for an hour, bought nice
fake Ray Banz that have the UV protection apparently (I tested out 2 – one with
and one without) – haggling it down from 200,000 to 150,000VND (from about $10
to $7.50). Aw yeah.
Yet, even after all that walking, I ended up “settling” for
the banh seo across the street from
me (where I ate on Thursday night!) I was craving it and it is definitely one
of my new favourite foods! Because of
that, I don’t have a new dish to show you today. But cry not! ...
Today’s dish, banh
chung comes from another Vietnamese day – a day filled with surprise and
intrigue. This is one of Vietnam`s oldest foods and is very
traditional, yet still very common to find.
On holidays, they make much larger ones, too! The Banh Chung dish looks
like a beautifully-wrapped gift, complete with a bow. The outside is made from banana leaf and on the inside is a sticky banh (“cake” – not actually cake in
the English sense of the word). I mostly
see it is squares, rolls (oval) and triangles.
It is essentially sticky rice that has been compacted together and in
the middle of the rice is a surprise: generally pork, egg and beans (beans that
have been cooked and mashed into a dry paste). The mixture is all molded,
compacted and wrapped up in the leaf! Sometimes the outside of the rice even takes
on the colour of the leaf that it is wrapped in, like the pink-purple one down below:
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