A home-cooked feast
In a small town along the road to Hoi An, our guide arranged for a home-cooked meal. He’d known the family for years, and often took his tour groups to their house for dinner. I was curious to see what kind of delicacies came out of a home kitchen, as opposed to a restaurant.
I hung out in the kitchen for a bit and watched them cook, before we all sat down to a feast!
Our appetizer was a delicate pork roll fried to perfection. Sometimes, I find restaurant rolls a bit heavy. Either the dough is too thick, or the filling isn’t fresh enough, or the roll is overly oily. Not these. They were delicious! The outside was light and crispy, like fried lace. And the inside was a mixture of well-seasoned pork. As always, a sweet sauce of sugar, vinegar, garlic, and chili peppers, formed a tasty dipping sauce.
Before it’s fried, the raw rice dough wrapper looks like lace!
As a second appetizer, our hosts brought tiny stuffed tomatoes to the table. They filled halved cherry tomatoes with a mixture of pork, mushrooms, carrots, and onions. I popped one into my mouth and the tomato burst into juicy, meaty morsels. Delicious! And adorable.
Next up was a new take on jackfruit. At the temple lunch the day before, I’d been impressed with how much jackfruit’s texture reminded me of flaked tuna. In this dish, the texture was bouncy, chewy, and highly absorbent. More reminiscent of raw mushrooms. After sautéing the jackfruit, the cook added cilantro, toasted sesame seeds, and slivers of fried tofu.
The main attraction? A pork and potato stew. The potatoes were fried and then added to the dish. Imagine dipping a French fry into a porky sauce. The outside still has bite, but overall it’s soft, and has soaked up all the tasty meat juices. Yum. The pork was also pan-fried beforehand, so its caramelized exterior gave way to fatty juicy meat inside.
To cut the fat was a dish of morning glory sautéed with garlic. Morning glory, also known as water spinach, reminds me of the flat-leaf spinach Americans are familiar with. Although its stalks are hollow, the long, thin stalks look a bit like Italian broccolini. To be honest, I’d never tasted morning glory before visiting Vietnam. But I can certainly see why it’s so popular. Thanks to its tender shoots and leaves that absorb flavor beautifully, it’s the preferred stir-fry vegetable throughout Vietnam and Thailand.
Raw morning glory before it’s cooked.
For dessert, we ended the meal with fresh pineapple slices dipped in chili salt. If you’ve never tried chili salt on fruit, I HIGHLY recommend that combo. It may sound odd, but in the same way that salted caramel works, this works. Sweet-tart pineapple is the prefect backdrop for crunchy salt and red-hot chili. What a wonderful, light end to our multi-course home-cooked feast.
