Tonight, we hosted a belated Chinese-Vietnamese New Year dinner, and I made five different dishes, including something I’ve always be interested in making, but was always scared to test out: Vietnamese fried spring rolls. I grew up with my mom making them, although with flour wrappers vs. rice paper wrappers, which are actually the most traditional kind in Vietnam. After seeing how relatively straightforward the process was with frying in a shallow pan at the Vietnamese cooking class Chris got me last month, and how good the rice paper wrappers came out, I decided that I would try this out for our dinner party tonight. If I could do it in the cooking class, I had to be able to do it at home, right? And with a Costco-priced container of canola oil, the oil would not be a huge investment. So I successfully made them tonight. I made the filling out of minced pork, shrimp, mung bean noodles, wood ear and cloud ear mushrooms, carrot, shallot, cilantro, and scallion. I tested out the seasoning by pan frying a little before stuffing and rolling them in rice paper. And I made sure to toggle the heat between medium and medium-low to make sure the oil didn’t burn. They weren’t as evenly golden as they always are in the restaurants, but they came out tasty and how I expected them to look. I was pretty proud of myself in the end. Now, the only thing I regret is not doubling the recipe and storing the second batch in the freezer for quick fried spring rolls in the future.

Whenever I think of Southeast Asian food, I think of the explosive flavors that characterize its dishes. It is rare that you eat anything in countries like Thailand, Malaysia, or Vietnam that you would describe as “subtle.” Most of the time, there are very strong, assertive flavors, or a combination of sweet, salty, sour, and savory that make the dish pop. The most “subtle” dish I can think of is Hainanese chicken rice, of which Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand all have their own variations, but even then, the chicken rice is so filled with the umami chicken fat flavor that even that, I would never call subtle or faint in taste.

After watching a number of videos on YouTube of Mark Wiens discussing Thai cooking, especially that of his mother-in-law at home in Bangkok, as well as reading Thai and Vietnamese food blogs, what I’ve found is that when making sauces and curries, the center of it all is always, always a good and solid mortar and pestle. After taking a Vietnamese street food cooking class that Chris got me last week, I watched the chef instructor make a mango salad dressing and nuoc cham dipping sauce in a mortar and pestle, and when she tossed all the ingredients together, I was definitely surprised. I’ve made all these sauces before, yet somehow, hers tasted far superior to mine, and we were using the exact same ingredients down to the brand of fish sauce! There is something magical that happens when pounding and hand grinding in between rough pieces of granite that brings out all the oils and flavors of each ingredient and mingles it all together that can never quite be achieved by mincing with a knife or blending in a food processor. It just isn’t the same, and Samin Nosrat calls this out in her Salt Acid Fat Heat book/TV series, as well as her pesto article in The New York Times.

So, now I have a very first-world kitchen dilemma: do I get a granite mortar and pestle, or do I not? It is not so much a debate of whether I can afford it. I once had a friend’s wife look at me like I was the cheapest person on earth when I made a comment in her kitchen after she made a beautiful tart for a dinner party: “Oh, it would be fun to own a tart pan!” She wrinkled her nose. “You know they only cost like 10 bucks, right? You can afford it.” My response? “Well, it’s not about the cost as it is the storage of something that I may use about…. once a year max and whether it even makes sense to buy it if the usage is so low.” However, at about $58 for the Thai one that Serious Eats advocates for, it’s certainly not the cheapest kitchen purchase. It’s more an issue of size (its full capacity in cups is about six) and weight (it’s super heavy because it’s STONE!), and thus space. If I dropped something like that, it would most definitely cause damage to our hardwood floors, if not the actual granite counters in our kitchen. Eeek. If I got one, I’d need to have it permanently displayed somewhere in the kitchen… and I’m pretty much at capacity for kitchen display space at this point.

🙁

Last weekend when I slow roasted lamb barbacoa wrapped in banana leaves, I did a video of the process and posted it to Instagram Story, where it received quite a number of views and surprisingly, a lot more direct private messages than I’d ever received for any video I’ve uploaded. People commented on how impressive and professional the cooking looked. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it had less to do with how “professional” the process looked, and more to do with the fact that cooking with big banana leaves just appears to be laborious and fancy, especially to people who don’t cook much. A pound of banana leaves at the Vietnamese market costs about $1.30, and all I had to do to prep them was to dip them in hot water to wash off any potential dirt or grime. All I did was wrap the big lamb leg in it. That was really it.

Because I had so many leftover banana leaves, I wanted to find another use for them soon so that the novelty wouldn’t wear off, so I not only used my remaining ancho and guajillo chili marinade to flavor chicken, but I also wrapped these up into banana leaves and steamed them. I even tied and knotted them with slivers of banana leaf. These videos today also received a lot of comments; it really was very little work to get this done, but it’s obvious that banana leaves add a “wow” factor to my audience who enjoys my cooking. I also noticed that the flavor of the banana leaf came through more in the chicken tonight than it did in the lamb last week, so I think I will reserve my remaining banana leaves for steaming smaller pieces of meat or other fillings.

When the circumstances of our country are out of my control… which is pretty much every day that I am not able to vote, I just have to throw my energy at the things that I love, like food and cooking. I spent the last couple of days shopping and prepping for our lamb barbacoa meal tonight. I made the ancho and guajillo-chile-based marinade on Friday, purchased the tomatillos for the salsa verde yesterday, and then wrapped up the Australian lamb leg in banana leaves today and roasted it for just over two hours. I wasn’t sure how long to roast it for given the original recipe had an eight-pound leg and said to roast it for eight hours, and I had a five-pound leg. So I started researching roasting a lamb leg and decided that just over two hours would be enough… but it really wasn’t. It was certainly done. It tasted good and certainly tasted like lamb and barbacoa, but the pull-apart tenderness was not there likely because I didn’t roast it for long enough. Then, I went back to the harissa lamb leg recipe I used last time I made lamb at home that was very tender, and that was a four-pound leg that I left in the oven for five hours. The roasting also wasn’t long enough for the banana leaf flavor to really penetrate the meat. I cut up the meat feeling disappointed.

This is one of the reasons I hear when people say that even if they are meat eaters, they don’t like or just completely avoid preparing meat at home. It can be hit or miss with the timing, doneness, and tenderness. Then, there’s also the factor of messiness because meat fat tends to get everywhere, even when you don’t expect it.