Of all the types of cuisines I like and cook semi-regularly, I probably make far less Vietnamese food than I’d ideally want to have at home. A big reason for that is most of the Vietnamese dishes I absolutely love are pretty laborious. No one is whipping up banh xeo on a weeknight for a casual dinner. And if you want to enjoy central Vietnamese delicacies like banh it tran (sticky rice dumplings stuffed with mashed mung bean, minced pork, and shrimp), or banh beo (steamed bite-sized rice cakes topped with shrimp) — well, that’s going to be a whole weekend affair, with their multi-step process. These dishes are so frustrating because they are so time-consuming and laborious to make, yet they are eaten in mere seconds. The people who eat these dishes do not always understand or appreciate how much love, effort, and skill goes into making these tasty delights.

While enjoying the banh chung from Banh NYC restaurant the last couple days, I watched as both Kaia and Chris excitedly ate their portions. Kaia had her happy drool face on when we put the banh chung, still in its steamy banana leaves, in front of her. Banh chung is a dish that requires a lot of steps, a lot of patience, and a lot of skill. There is required skill for each step, whether that’s soaking the rice or soaking, steaming, mashing, and seasoning the mung beans, or preparing and marinating the pork. But there’s also skill that your hands just need to *know* to wrap and fold the leaves just so, so that the final steamed package is this perfect square. I attempted the tying of the string at the Tet Lunar New Year event hosted by VHC a couple weeks ago; that was super hard! I messed up twice and then finally gave it to our volunteer workshop instructor to help me fix my wrongs. This is one of those dishes I don’t even bother attempting to make; I leave this to the pros. But maybe there would be value in attempting it as a cooking project once or twice, just to see if I could do it. Dishes like these are slowly but surely becoming a lost art. For our Lunar New Year party this year, ‘m thinking about making banh bot loc, which are bite-sized shrimp/pork tapioca dumplings, individually wrapped and steamed in banana leaves. The last time I ate these was when my mom found a Vietnamese home caterer, and she did a private order of these little chewy babies; she even sent me back to New York with some to store in our freezer so that I could steam them for future meals. While AI takes over the world, what it will never be able to do is replace the love and art that goes into crafting special dishes like banh bot loc or banh chung. That really needs a real human touch — even if Chris debates that because he likes to troll my obsession with handmade, homemade things all the time.