Bun Bo - Yummo!

I've learned something.  In the match between life and blog, life wins.  I'd threatened self with: "If it's not done in the next two weeks..." - but somehow the fire wasn't hot enough.  As a 1-2 week follow-up from my last post on Hanoi, I'd meant to write a companion post sharing a tried-and-tested recipe for Bun Bo Xao - that delicious dish I first encountered in Hanoi.  Best of intentions, et cetera, et cetera... over a month later, but here is that companion post.

To try and replicate the dish, I went over to a good friend's who has an insatiable appetite for Vietnamese food and a rather handy knack for making it, too!  The good news is that our first attempt at Bun Bo Xao was a smashing success!
Bun Bo Xao is a noodle salad with beef and lots of fresh herbs and veggies.  It's healthy and full of mouth-watering flavour.

I heavily borrowed from Helen's recipe on www.danangcuisine.com but did make some modifications.
Here's how we made it (served 3):

Ingredients:
500g rump steak
4 cloves garlic - finely chopped
1 stalk lemongrass
Herbs (1 small bag of: mint, basil (preferably thai, but normal is fine), coriander) - all roughly chopped
1 carrot, shredded
1/2 cucumber, sliced and halved
1/2 onion (yellow or red), sliced
1.5 T oyster sauce
1/2 t salt
1/2 t pepper
3 T vegetable (or rapeseed) oil
Rice Noodles (enough for everyone to have a large portion)
crushed roasted peanut (2 T per person)
Fried shallot (1 T per person)
4 T Fish Sauce
4 T sugar (regular or cane)
1 Lime
1 Small red chilli pepper (or more if desired)

1. Slice the rump steak very thinly and against the grain (Helen's suggestion as she says it keeps it tender)
2. Place the meat in a bowl and add 1/2 the chopped garlic, the lemongrass, 1 T oil, the oyster sauce, pepper, salt.  Mix well and let marinate for 20 minutes or more.
3. Meanwhile, prepare other ingredients and place in bowls or on a plate.
4. Heat 2 T oil in pan till hot - add one chopped clove of garlic and the onion.  Cook for 1 minute and then add beef.  Cook until brown all over - we left it pink on the inside.
5. Cook noodles per package instructions.
6. Prepare the salad dressing (Nuoc Cham) to be drizzled on top of the dish:  Mix 2T fish sauce, 2T sugar, 10T water (proportion always 1:1:5).  Then add final chopped garlic clove, chopped chilli, and juice of one lime
7. Once everything is ready, place everything on the table for people to build their own Bun Bo.  I placed a hearty portion of noodles at the bottom, then added fresh herbs, shredded carrot and sliced cucumber.. then the onion and beef.. and topped with crushed peanuts, fried shallots, and a few tablespoons of Nuoc Cham.

The result was delicious and took me right back to that bia hoi where I first enjoyed Bun Bo in Hanoi.
There is a fair bit of preparation for this dish, but it's very very simple to make and will, no doubt, be a regular in our kitchen from now on.

Ăn ngon miệng! (Enjoy!)

Playing Frogger in Hanoi

This time a year ago, we went on a blissful trip to Asia for a few weeks.  Our arrival to Vietnam wasn't the smoothest.  Despite being a huge planner and researcher before any trip, I somehow missed the fact that Vietnam requires a visa to enter the country.  While everyone else was getting out their organised folders and  visa photos as our flight descended into Hanoi, we began calmly breaking a sweat and pondering the delicacies of Vietnamese prison food.  Thankfully, the airport mercifully offers an "expedited visa," with a very formal process of looking you up and down and naming their price... I'll call this the idiot tax - if you're that stupid to get to the airport without a visa, you rightfully owe the idiot tax.

Crisis expensively averted, we held on for dear life in the taxi to our hotel.  Despite a mild mention of the swarms of motorcycles, Lonely Planet couldn't have prepared me for the chaos that was Hanoi.  Stepping out of the hotel was like a very advanced game of Frogger for people with a death-wish.  We were advised to walk confidently at a constant but slow pace and cars / motorcycles would drive around you. Here's some demonstrations - none performed by me or my now-husband as we never quite mastered the art of crossing a street in Hanoi.   An estimated 30 people die per day in Hanoi due to road accidents.  This video we took explains why (watch the various people take a leisurely stroll across!):

Street chaos aside, Hanoi was an enjoyable place to begin our exploration of Vietnam.  The food and nightlife were excellent - with some very memorable meals.

In search of the highly-reputed street food of Hanoi, we sought out Bun Bo Nam Bo - famous for the one dish on offer - Bun Bo, a bowl of rice noodles, beef, lots of fresh herbs, bean sprouts, fried onions, crushed peanuts and a small amount of beef broth.  Locals and tourists lined up for this dish and sat side by side at long tables.  You wait your turn, order (one? two? five?), then sit at the table until a hot bowl of Bun Bo is placed before you.  There's no atmosphere to soak up - just a functional cafe to feed hungry, busy people as they buzz through the day.  But that doesn't mean there isn't time to sit there and savour every morsel of the Bun Bo and wash it down with a Bia Hanoi - the local brew.

Haven't yet tried to replicate this dish yet - but I think it's high-time I did! 

Cheese-Making Course at Abbey Home Farm

While learning how to make cheese through books and online forums (and good ole trial and error) has yielded some positive results, there's nothing quite like having hands-on training with an experienced cheesemaker.  This is why I was ecstatic for November 24th to finally arrive - a long-awaited birthday gift from friends (given to me back in May) meant that I was spending the day in Cirencester at a beautiful farm, learning from a pro.

We arrived around 9am and enjoyed walking round the well-presented organic food shop - full of fresh fruits and veggies picked from the farm.  We had a coffee in the cafe and met Clive, the award-winning-yet-incredibly-humble cheesemaker who would be our teacher for the day.

How Now!!!!

Follow me! He said - and so we took a rambling walk through Abbey Home Farm, passing some friendly cows on our way.  We followed Clive to where the magic happens - a cheese-making facility full of large-scale cheese gadgets - and instantly my list for Santa was filled with ideas!  

Once there, we put on some science-lab looking jackets and sexy smurf shoe covers.  Note to self: Must look into obtaining similar garb at home to increase quality (and success rate) of my cheese.

The class was great for beginners as well as people, like me, who may have done some dabbling in the kitchen before.  Clive was excellent at explaining things very simply, but then was quite happy to field the 20-30 questions fired at him by me and my fellow classmates in our childlike curiosity of all things cheese.

Our sage , Clive

We warmed milk, added the special secret blend of cultures (not so secret in the end as Clive did share with us the list of cultures it includes), and let it stand for a while.  With time to kill, Clive offered us a tasting of all the cheese he makes - oh, go on then!  One of the cheeses was Dancys Fancy - his award-winning soft-cheese.  Instantly a favourite, it was welcome news to find out this was the cheese we were making today (assuming we were suitable pupils).  

We next warmed the milk again slightly and added the rennet to ripen the cheese.  Since we had more time to wait while the curds separated from the whey, Clive showed us how to make butter.  As an aside - butter making was quite interesting to watch as the cream transformed - at one point looking very similar to scrambled eggs.  We each had a go at shaping some butter using the grooved butter paddles.  (Dropped my butter once which was only 1 more time than anyone else.)

After butters were shaped and stored in the refrigerator (until the end of the course when we could take them home), we checked on the cheese which was ready to be cut.  We cut our curds, let them rest for just a bit, gently stirred them with our hands,and then it was time to place the curds into moulds where they will reside until the cheese is ready to be eaten!

    

We headed in for lunch - made by the organic cafe. It was a hearty vegetarian meal with a large side of Q&A with Clive - he sure had plenty of patience dealing with my many questions.  He also showed us where the cheeses are stored and gave us a taste of a few cheddars in different stages of ageing. It was really interesting to compare the mild, simple taste of a 3-month old cheddar with a nearly-ready, strong 16-month old cheddar.

We visited our cheeses, now in moulds, once more to bid them farewell and wish them good luck in the ageing process (which I've been told is where a lot of things go wrong).  Clive will look after them until they are ready to be eaten at which point he'll send them to us!  With any luck, they'll be ready (and more importantly, tasty) just before Christmas...