Ethnically Chinese but born in Vietnam, my parents fled Saigon for a better life in their late-20s with me barely 2 years old. We ended up in New York City with few physical possessions but with a life-long affinity to Vietnamese food.

Growing up, and not realizing it at the time, I could always distinguish which of my mom’s home-cooked dishes were Chinese and which were Vietnamese.

How? The Chinese dishes were spoken of in Chinese and the Vietnamese dishes were said in Vietnamese – simple huh?

When I moved to Dubai in 2007, there was only one Vietnamese restaurant, Hoi An, and it was in the Shangri-La hotel so you can just imagine that the food prices were too prohibitive for frequent dining. Just an appetizer alone would set you back $20 which is about how much a simple meal for 2 people would cost in a budget-friendly Vietnamese restaurant.

One more Vietnamese restaurant opened up this year, bringing the grand total in Dubai to TWO, but once again, it is a high-end establishment, called Voi, and billed as a “fine dining Vietnamese and French Colonial restaurant” located in Jumeirah’s Zabeel Saray hotel on the Palm Jumeirah.

Without budget dining options, I started recreating many of my mom’s dishes at home but it was challenging at times because my mom, being a natural in the kitchen, doesn’t use any set recipes nor measurements so I supplemented her recipes with two Vietnamese cookbooks.

As I began cooking at home, I realized how limited my knowledge was of Vietnamese cuisine.

I wanted to learn more and to try my hand at making some of the foods that my mom didn’t know how to make like Nem. I also wanted to make the flavorings for Vietnamese Curry or Bo Kho from scratch instead of using pre-made spice packets. Somehow, in my Google searches, I landed on a “Delicious Vietnam” post and discovered a whole bunch of blogs that featured not only traditional but also inventive and fusion Vietnamese dishes.

I am excited to be have hosted this month’s Delicious Vietnam, a monthly blogging event celebrating Vietnamese cuisine created by A Food Lovers Journey and Ravenous Couple.

Below is the round-up of the November submissions. This round-up is, sadly, the second-to-last of the series as next month, this two-year blogging event as we know it will conclude it’s run and migrate to its own Facebook page.

But before it ends, you have the chance to enter a giveaway and win a copy of Indochine, the new cookbook from Luke Nguyen. Anh from A Food Lovers Journey will be hosting the final Delicious Vietnam edition and details of the giveaway can be found on her blog here.

I hope you enjoy the round-up below and hope to see you in December’s edition!

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1)  Magic: Homemade Organic Soy Milk

An old storybook memory of Jack and the Beanstalk comes alive again with Lan at Angry Asian Creations (Baltimore, MD) as she recounts a story of a magical drink reminiscent of her childhood with her eldest uncle and his family.

Her magic beans of choice? Organic soy beans – for which she didn’t have to barter a cow but went the modern route of purchasing at Whole Foods.

If you’ve never made Organic Soy Milk before (I haven’t), all you need are soy beans, water, a little bit of sugar, a pinch of salt, and a cheesecloth. Easier than I would have imagined!

2)  Introduction to Vietnamese Water Fern Cake (Bánh Bèo)

These beautiful little servings of steamed rice cakes topped with shrimp and pork crackling and drizzled with Vietnamese fish sauce is a popular snack food.

Quynh Anh of QA Kitchen (Amsterdam, Netherlands) gives us the secret of how to make perfect Bánh bèo or Water Fern Cakes. She has it down to not just a science, but an art - balancing the proper proportions of rice flour and tapioca flour with water. She also explains some of the regional differences of size and texture.

Even preparing the shrimp topping is an art and can range from dicing to mincing to shredding to flattening the shrimp with a knife then breaking it apart during the cooking stage.

I don’t think I’ve every tried Bánh bèo but you can be sure that if I ever see it on a menu, it will be one of the first things I’d order.

3)  French-Vietnamese Grilled Époisses Rice Crackling (Bánh Dap Pháp Viet)

OMG! Dang and Oanh of Rau Om (based in Michigan and California) totally had me at “Époisses” in their description of French-Vietnamese Grilled Époisses Rice Crackling.

I hated despised cheese up until a few years ago but have now acquired such a taste for it that I’ve even come to love a strong, stinky, put-it-in-two-nesting-tupperware-containers-yet-still-stinks-up-the-fridge cheese, like Époisses.

From Dang and Oanh: “In our post this month, we’d like to introduce a new dish that combines infamous delicacies from Vietnamese and French cuisines. In our take on the north-central dish banh dap, we finally had a chance to combine Époisses with mam to astonishingly harmonious effects. The flavor of mam and époisses combined beautifully, with salty mam dominating the initial sensations and rich, creamy Époisses lingering on the palate afterwards.”

4)  Vietnamese Cabbage Rolls

Here is a food equation for you: Cabbage + Rolls = ?

Just look at that photo of beautifully wrapped cabbage rolls amidst knotted garlic chives! No question mark about it – it just screams: put me in your mouth right now with some extra sauce so that you can taste my inner goodness.

Doug of Javaholic (Northern California, USA) recreates this Vietnamese comfort food that he’s grown to love. While tofu can be used as a vegetarian filling, he prefers (as do I) the pork version. Nom-nom-nom.

5)  Thit Bò Nuong Lá Lot (Vietnamese Grilled Beef Wrapped in Betel Leaves)

I must say that I’ve never heard of betel leaves before and am now intrigued by this leaf that is not only prevalent in Vietnamese food but also its culture (betel leaves are used ceremonially in traditional Vietnamese weddings).

Nam of The Culinary Chronicles (San Diego, CA, USA) tells of a restaurant specialty that I recall my mom telling me about but have yet to experience first-hand and that is something known as Beef-Seven-Ways (Bò 7 Món).

Her favorite course is the Grilled Beef Wrapped in Betel Leaves in which the “leaves are quite fragrant and literally produces a trigger effect for my mouth to start watering when I smell it being grilled.”

6)  Black Tea Rice (Com âm phu trà  den)

One of the monthly blogging events that I participate in (and am hopelessly late with posting the finished dish and photos) dared me to cook up something savory with tea for the November challenge.

I still haven’t gotten around to doing anything for this challenge but I was excited to see that Mai from Flavor Boulevard (Berkeley, CA, USA) channeled this cooking with tea thing into her recipe of Black Tea Hades Rice.

Mai imparts some lessons and tips learned in her experiment: (1) loose-leaf teas versus tea bags and (2) how “green tea gives the rice the tea fragrance, and black tea gives it the tea taste, but neither gives enough of both.” Try for yourself!

And once you’ve done it, remember this: “tea rice needs companions, too, something savory enough to make it exciting but plain enough to not overpower its flavors.”

7)  Vietnamese Fish Porridge (Cháo Cá)

Whether Chinese or Vietnamese, one of the things that both cultures have in common is the comforting effects of rice porridge (aka congee). Often fed to weaning babies as a first food (in quite large quantities too, I’ve observed), it courses through our Asian veins.

Hong and Kim of Ravenous Couple (Los Angeles, CA, USA) presents a very traditional southern way of making Fish Porridge, made famous in the Mekong delta region which is known for its abudance of fish, other sea life and for its floating markets.

8 )  Vietnamese Preserved Mustard Cabbage (Dua Muoi)

I shared a similar experience with Anh of A Food Lover’s Journey (Melbourne, Australia) – looks like we both returned from visiting our parents with pickling on the brain.

For me, it was a new venture into pickling daikon and carrots (mostly for Vietnamese Banh Mi/sandwiches and for snacking ) and for Anh, it was Vietnamese Preserved Mustard Cabbage. Unlike my mom though, Anh’s parents have invested in a special pickling jar – who knew there was such a thing!

These preserved mustard greens can be used in all sorts of dishes, from soups to stir-fries, or can be eaten straight out of the jar.

9)  Make Your Own Vietnamese Curry Powder

And finally, my submission for the month is home-made Vietnamese Curry Powder. Having nearly run out of my own precious stash that I had brought over from the US, and finding no recipe sources on-line, I used a commercially available powder as a base to create my own special blend.

It received the seal of approval from Scotch and can’t wait to taste-test it on my parents the next time I see them.

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I hope this round-up has left your taste buds anxious to try and make some of these dishes or to visit a Vietnamese restaurant .

Perhaps you will consider participating in next month’s final edition of Delicious Vietnam. Put it on your food blogging calendars and be sure to send your submissions to Anh by December 31, 2011. Happy blogging!

Related posts:

1. Join me for this month’s Delicious Vietnam blogging event!
2. Thanksgiving 2011 – Feasting, Drinking, and Fundraising
3. Chicken Curry Spring Rolls (“Cary Cha Gio”)
4. Vietnamese Chicken Curry Soup (Ca Ri Ga) – Make it Your Own!
5. Make Your Own Vietnamese Curry Powder

Tavola Food Blogger Breakfast

I’ve been feeling a little under the weather this week with either allergies or a bad cold and with all the sneezing and sniffling I felt like my head was going to fall off and explode.

Feeling a bit better today and probably shouldn’t be drinking this glass of white wine in my hand, but hey, being sick is hard work!

So the day after the Fooderati Arabia (FiA) Cake-a-Thon, I meet up with fellow Fooderatis at Tavola on Jumeirah Beach Road as invitees to their Food Bloggers’ Breakfast. A whole weekend of foodie fun – how awesome is that?

Tavola is like a Williams Sonoma or a Sur la Table back in the States. It’s where Scotch and I have gone to buy our Staub cookware, Global knives, and Kitchen Aid mixer. The staff at Tavola have always been helpful and friendly when we had to special order most of our items because they they don’t often have in-stock yellow French ovens nor yellow Kitchen Aid mixers (can you guess my favorite color?). Every time I walk in to the store I feel like a kid in a candy shop!

Tavola talks about knife care and usage

After a lovely breakfast of canapés and fresh juices, we were given a demonstration on the different kinds of knives (chef, Santoku, bread, filleting, carving, paring, etc), how to care for them, and how to best sharpen them. We were asked to guess which of the following was the best method to sharpen a knife: sharpening steel, sharpening stone, or a pre-angled knife sharpener like this Zwilling one.

The answer given to us was the sharpening stone but only if used properly as different knives will require a different sharpening angle. Personally, I have all three and have shied away from using the sharpening stone because I don’t know how to use it and find that the steel rod and the pre-angled sharpener to be much easier to use.

My biggest problem with caring for my knives is that I keep dropping them on the floor! Kitchen Klutz, remember? Now how can I solve that problem? Even my large Chinese cleaver has a piece broken off from the many times I have dropped it . Luckily I haven’t injured myself or anyone else.

I have a mid-range set of Kitchen-Aid knives that I’d like to slowly replace with higher quality knives so I was coveting each and every Zwilling and Japanese knife that was on display at the demo. I have a love-hate relationship with Global at the moment. Love because their knives are so sharp and awesome. Hate because they are so awesomely sharp that I’m still sporting a bumpy scar on my finger from one year ago from a carving knife accident.

After the knife demo, Tavola’s Retail Manager, Wakami Saab, gave us an overview of “Moritsuke” which is the Japanese art of food plating and arrangement. She plated three dishes to show us the principles.

Moritsuke Presentation

I’ve always felt that Japanese styling and design – whether interiors, architecture, food, or gadgets – always seem to elicit a soothing and balanced sensation and a nature connotation.

Wakami Saab talked about some of these concepts and how they are used in Japanese food styling such as contrasting shapes, numerology, colors choice, and simulating height and natural movement.

In this potato salad, a square plate was chosen to contrast with the round tomatoes, the salad was piled upwards to give it height, and parsley was used as a garnish to add color to the dish.

Potato Salad

In this marinated roast beef, she showed us how to make the white radish (daikon) garnish. After peeling the radish and cutting it into a round chunk, she set it between two chopsticks. Then she made intersecting cuts into the radish (the chopsticks prevented the knife from cutting all the way to the bottom of the radish) and soaked it in salted water for a few minutes.

Once the radish had softened, it can be opened to look like a flower. I just bought a white radish from Carrefour and can’t wait to try this technique out.

Marinated Beef Roast with Daikon Flower

Our last presenter was Fiona Archibold – a succesful food stylist in the UAE. She was extremely friendly and very enthusiastic about her work.

When Fiona appeared with her suede, burnt-yellow tool belt, I think many of us were in awe and it may have been the most highly coveted item at Tavola that morning. I know I wanted one for the simple reason that I love gadgets and I love things to hold said gadgets in.

Food Stylist Fiona Archibold

I was cracking myself up at the thought of my husband’s face if I had come home after Fiona’s presentation sporting a new food styling tool belt.

As she styled and primped a few dishes right before our eyes, she shared with us many of the techniques and tools that she used in her food styling and gave us pointers that we could use in our own homes. She also mentioned that some food stylists believe it to be bad luck to eat the finished styled product.

Besides a roasted quail dish, she also styled a Spinach Fettuccine Alfredo with Grilled Prawns:

Fettuccine Alfredo with Prawns

Days before the workshop, Fiona asked us if there were any particular dishes that we found to be difficult in styling and someone had mentioned stews so she showed us how we could style a Beef Bourguignon:

Beef Bourguignon

I got really excited when Fiona whipped out the blow torch to caramelize some of the beef. There’s just something about fire that just adds a bit of drama and flare to a presentation.

There were Tavola prizes to be given a way and the top prize was a Bamix hand blender which I didn’t win but for once in my life I did win something. My name got picked to receive a copy of  ”When Suzanne Cooks” by Suzanne Husseini who was in attendance and was kind enough to sign my book.

“When Suzanne Cooks” contains recipes of “modern flavours of Arabia” and has beautiful full-page photos of all the recipes and looks non-pretentious. I’ve very excited about trying out the recipes alongside my oft neglected UAE recipe project.

Thank you Kari and Tavola for hosting this awesomely educational event!

Related posts:

1. Happy 1st Birthday UAE Food Bloggers!
2. A Cake-a-Thon for UAE Food Bloggers
3. A Long Day’s Travel – Lost Luggage – Mom’s Comfort Food

Vanilla Bean Cupcakes with Dulce de Leche Frosting - from Red Panda Bakes

Last weekend was a busy one for Fooderati Arabia (aka FiA) – the UAE food bloggers group.

On Friday, we celebrated FiA’s one-year birthday with a sugar-high afternoon full of cakes, cakes, and more cakes. Yes, a Cake-a-thon!

Then on Saturday, we attended a Food Bloggers Breakfast at Tavola where we were given presentations on knife selection, usage and care; the art of Japanese food plating (Moritsuke); and food styling by Fiona Archibold. I’ll be blogging more about this Tavola event in a future post.

Layered Fondant Cake - from According to Dina

FiA officially turned one in July, but with many people out of town for the summer, we were only able to celebrate as a group this past Friday.

Most birthdays only have one birthday cake. But since this is a food bloggers birthday celebration, we had 15+ cakes!

Please click on the photos to be transported to the website of the blogger who created the cake.

Triple Chocolate Cake - from Spontaneous Euphoria

Earlier this year, in this post, I’ve written about how FiA brought me out of my blogging slump, connected me with a wonderful and talented group of like-minded bloggers, and how I’ve made many new foodie friends and delved into the depths of new as well as familiar cuisines.

Sticky Gingerbread with Poached Pears - from My Custard Pie

I am constantly looking forward to our many get-togethers: whether picnics, potlucks, restaurant openings, food safaris, or impromptu lunches and dinners.

For my contribution to the Cake-a-thon, I was going to make the only cake I knew how, a French Chocolate Cake from my Come Dine With Me competition but at the last moment I was time-crunched and asked my husband Scotch to make one instead.

Gluten-free banana date and hazelnut muffins - from The Hedonista

Scotch is a far better baker than I am (must be the British blood) and most of the baking tools we have in the house (baking scales, tins with removable bottoms) were all his doing. In fact, I think he bought me my Kitchen Aid Artisan mixer because he secretly wanted to use it for his baking needs.

For the Cake-a-thon, he made what he christened a Chocolate Concrete Cake - a fudgy cake with chocolate ganache frosting and covered in chocolate shavings. It was based on a recipe from BBC Good Food.

He spent all morning baking and prepping this cake and it turned out amazingly moist, rich, and very fudgy! We should have brought some vanilla ice cream to enjoy with it.

Scotch's "Chocolate Concrete Cake"

The FiA Cake-a-thon was held at TeaJuncTion in Oud Metha, just behind the Mövenpick hotel. It was my first time at TeaJunction and when I entered the cafe, I couldn’t believe how huge the place felt with its massively tall ceilings. We commandeered the terrace area on the upper level.

Scotch and I ordered some fruity iced teas and a Cutting Chai and they were very good. I would have ordered more if I weren’t already loaded up on sugar from sampling so many cakes!

FiA Cake-a-Thon @ TeaJuncTion

My son, Wee Scotch, had a great time playing with the other children, charming the adults, and eating a whole lot of muffins, cupcakes, and more cake.

He was pretty well behaved until the end when all the sugar probably made him a bit hyper. At one point, he ran off and quickly disappeared from my line of sight. When I caught up with him..and before I could stop him…he had plunged his little fist into a cake and was licking it off his fingers!

I'm too cute for Mama to get mad at me!

Here is a slideshow of him and his cake-licking shenanigans:

I tried to cut Wee Scotch off and told him, “No more cake!”

He understood me but of course he didn’t listen. Instead, he defiantly shoved a large piece of Abigail’s Ube cake into his mouth and then deliberately smeared it all over his face! I tried to look stern and angry but inside I was laughing because he looked so cute!

One Final Piece of Cake

We had a great time and I was so glad that Scotch could meet some of my food blogger friends for the first time.

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More Cake Creations From the FiA Cake-a-Thon:

• Ube macapuno cake (purple yam cake with sweet cocnut strings and whip cream cheese frosting) – My Nappytales
• Walnut cake with 7-minute frosting – Eat Write Think
• Croque en bouche with ginger custard filling – Radotuille
• “Mars bar boston cream pie” - I Live in a Frying Pan and Sheban
• Semolina and yoghurt cake with rosewater syrup – Irini Savva
• Coffee cream cake – Foodie Corner
• Black forest cake – Stovetop Dancing
• Strawberry Snow White cake – Love and Other Spices
• Cake from Paul’s French Bakery - Scribblelicious
• Mini-cakes from Pascal Tepper Bakery - FooDee (also links to video of the cake-a-thon event)

Related posts:

1. Happy 1st Birthday UAE Food Bloggers!
2. A Morning @ Tavola – learning about Moritsuke, food styling with Fiona Archibold, and gawking at shiny knives
3. A Long Day’s Travel – Lost Luggage – Mom’s Comfort Food
4. Wee Scotch Turns One Year Old!
5. Come Dine With Me – Day 1 of 6 – A Risotto Disaster?

A few months ago, my friend and fellow food blogger, Nausheen from Dubai Bites, sent me a link to a Facebook group and suggested that I join.

Since it was a food related group, I didn’t hesitate to click “Ask to Join Group”.

The best thing about it? It was local – involving primarily UAE food bloggers. A microcosm of the larger food blogging community. The thing about food bloggers is that there’s so many of us. There are more interesting food blogs than I will ever have time to read.

Being a part of a local blogging community means that I can put a face to everyone’s blog name, twitter handle, and Facebook page. I’ve met some of the most talented writers and photographers who have inspired me to be as good as they are one day.

Most importantly, I’ve met a whole new set of friends and enjoy reading and learning from all the varied and diverse blogs that they have created.

As a resource, the group has been invaluable to me for things like locating hard to find or unknown-to-me ingredients (like where can I buy zeresht in Dubai?), for answering technical blogging questions (like which comment plugin to use), and for the moral support they’ve provided in the form of tweets when I’m having a bad day or when I “broke” my blog and didn’t know how to get it back online.

I started this blog in 2007 (when it was called “Out and About in Dubai”) to keep my friends and family updated on the happenings of my new life in Dubai. But after a few months, I stopped blogging for a few years because I lost focus. There was so much to write about that I took the easy/lazy road and didn’t write about any of it.

Photos from an FiA picnic in March where I met many fellow UAE food bloggers for the first time

Since joining Fooderati Arabia (or FiA), the name of the UAE food bloggers group, it has helped me find my calling. All those incessant food photos that I’ve been taking all these decades (gosh I feel old using that word)? And all the time that I’ve been going on and on about the perfect pizza or the worst wiener or the best bulgogi?

Well it could now all be written up and photographed in my blog! Because food and photography are two things that I feel passionate about and what most people who know me, know me for. The transformation of this blog into Ginger and Scotch in May of this year made my blog’s reincarnation and my return to blogging complete.

So I would like to thank Nausheen for tossing me into the frying pan…a reference to the lovely Arva of I Live in a Frying Pan who’s brainchild of a community of a UAE food bloggers has now reached the tender age of 1 year and whose members now surpass 50.

Arva has also written a touching and heart-warming post about FiA turning 1-year old. I hope you will take a moment to read it to get a sense of how FiA was created – complete with a humorous timeline - how it’s grown, and how invaluable being a part of this group has become to many of us.

If you are a UAE food blogger and would like to join an awesome (if I do say so myself), diverse, sometimes crazy but always fun- and food-loving group please visit our FiA Facebook page. Besides regular outings to local restaurants, we also organize knowledge-sharing workshops, cultural awareness luncheons, food tastings and many other fun activities!

We also publish many of our posts on FooderatiArabia.com - please check it out for more UAE-based food blogging!

Related posts:

1. A Cake-a-Thon for UAE Food Bloggers
2. Happy 40th Birthday to the UAE (plus some skydiving videos)
3. Happy New Year!
4. A Morning @ Tavola – learning about Moritsuke, food styling with Fiona Archibold, and gawking at shiny knives
5. Happy 2012!

If you are a non-discriminating carnivore and enjoy eating both pork and beef but suddenly had to live in a world without one or the other, which would you choose?

Two months ago, on a trip to India, where cows are sacred and beef is rarely served on menus except at some hotel restaurants, I decided that I could forgo pork because the thought of living in a world where I could never again have  juicy rib-eye steaks, larger-than-life T-bones, or hamburgers with all the helpings was just too much to bear. Scotch concurred.

But then I made my first ever roast pork crackling and the smells and sounds of pork belly bubbling in my oven (holy bubbling smokes batman!) and the long awaited taste test (long awaited in this case was 1 hour in the oven plus 10 minutes resting time) was out of this world heavenly.

The texture (crunch, crunch, crunch….crunch) of perfectly crisp skin combined with a layer of juicy fat combined with yet another layer of sweet succulent meat just transported me to a hedonistic plane of food nirvana and made me forget that there was anything else in the world better than this. Ah, pork.

So….what do you think you can give up? Pork or beef?

[I hope this post gets delivered to your emails or feed reader in its entirety because I've re-installed WordPress and deactivated all non-essential plugins in an attempt to  fix my feed problem and if it's fixed, that means I can finally post the rest of the pork belly photos tomorrow....]

Related posts:

1. Lobster Mac ‘n Cheese Success and Beef Wellington Disaster
2. Chinese Roast Pork Belly – “Siew Yoke”
3. Inaugural Week, Day 3 – Ginger and Scotch Pork Ribs
4. Back from Roatan (Honduras)
5. Thursday Thirteen #6 – Favorite Foods that Keep Me Running