The Maltese Bacon

Corn and Tomato Omelette

A Vietnamese omelette is eaten during the day or in the evening. It's great in a pinch, as a supplement to a family style meal of rice and other dishes. Say you have one more person dropping in for lunch and need a little something more fast, this omelette is your answer. It's not traditionally made with tomatoes or corn, but I like it like this. And in case you're wondering fish sauce and eggs is the jam, rivalling duck fat and eggs.

Vietnamese Omelette My Way
 3 eggs
 1 small tomato chopped
 1 tablespoon corn kernels, optional  (not much more than this or it will be too sweet)
 one scallion, green and white part separated. white part chopped and green part either chopped or sliced
 1/2 teaspoon fish sauce (or to taste)
 black pepper to taste
 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
 thin pat of butter

 1. Heat small pan (b/w 6-8 inches) with oil to medium heat.
 2. Crack the eggs into a bowl. Add the fish sauce, green part of the scallion and black pepper. Whisk until mixed well.
3.Add the white part of the scallion, the tomato and the corn to the pan. Stir around until tomato softens, maybe 2 minutes. Spread the mixture evenly around the pan.
4.Pour the egg mixture evenly into the pan. After about one minute, turn down heat slightly, and flip the omelette carefully. (You can do this by sliding omelette on a plate. If you cannot do this simply put a lid on the omelette for a minute to cook and set.) After another minute the omelette should be set. Carefully slide it onto a plate, open faced. Spread a pat of butter on omelette. Slice the omelette into 1/6th's, like a pizza.

Pan Fried Salt and Pepper Shrimp

The only time I remember eating salt and pepper shrimp growing up was during Vietnamese wedding receptions, invariably held at Chinese banquet halls. I never paid them too much attention as they had to compete with the more exciting prospects of crunchy jellyfish salad, Peking duck and steamed carp.They would appear heads and shells on, looming larger than life.  (They reminded me of crayfish, who were my sworn enemies - residual scars left over from falling into a river full of them when I was young. They didn't bite me or nothin', but I couldn't shake the thought that they had been crawling all over me.)

In New York, salt and pepper shrimp is widely available at Vietnamese restaurants, which are mostly owned by ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese. You can call it Vietnamese shrimp, but I believe it's a dish that has been co-opted, thanks to those wedding banquets. ( Why are Vietnamese wedding receptions often held at Chinese restaurants? Not sure of the exact origins of this tradition, but the Chinese did rule over Vietnam for over 1000 years and their banquet food is seen as more formal. Also, the Vietnamese don't really have a lot of big restaurants appropriate for a wedding reception, which they need because there is often hundreds of people invited.)

I made these salt and pepper shrimp, without their heads on, as you can see. It would be good with the shells on, but I wasn't in the mood. I have simply fried it in a pan with a minimum of fuss, and they were terrific. If you want to make it more 'banquet style', fry the shrimp with some scallions, chili and shallot as instructed here.

Salt and Pepper Shrimp (Tom Rang Muoi)
 1/2 pound of shrimp (peeled and deveined is optional. If you want to keep the shell on you can snip the back with scissors to devein it if you want to get fussy)
 2-3 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 cup of corn oil (or a combo of oil and butter)
salt
pepper

Salt the shrimp and let sit for a few minutes. (How much salt? A little more than 'lightly' salted)  Then rinse under cold water. This plumps up the shrimp and freshens them up. Now lightly salt the shrimp. Add freshly grated black pepper - as much as you can handle. Dip the shrimp in cornstarch. In a smallish saute pan (or wok), heat the oil to very hot, but not smoking. Spread the shrimp in the pan evenly. Hopefully they will all fit. After a minute or so, turn them on the other side. After another minute or two when they have turned pink, take them out of the pan. Squeeze some lime on and eat. 

Beef Rice Porridge for the Soul

Last week, when I had a cold that rendered me nearly useless, I made some Cháo, or Vietnamese congee or porridge. Cháo is a given when a Vietnamese kid gets sick. Another given is getting your back scraped with a spoon and some Tiger Balm until it turns scarlet red (the sight would make Child Protection Services shiver and open a whole debate about cultural relativism). But that Tiger Balm always felt great, making me sweat and giving off a tingly sensation. Then, I would be presented with a piping hot bowl of cháo to heat me up even more. After eating, I would invariably feel cool, calm and refreshed.

So I made some cháo for myself, without Mommy (after making a couple phone calls to friends asking them to feel sorry for me) and zoned out to the TV. Although, whatever palliative effects I was getting from the soup were offset by the stress in watching 24.

Cháo Bo (Beef Porridge)

In an ideal world, you would have tons of chicken broth lying around to make cháo, but if you don't it's okay (I never do). You can make up for the lack of chicken broth with fish sauce and meat drippings. 

1/8 to 1/4 pound ground beef (I like my cháo with very little meat. I've eaten it with ground lamb too which is also good, if you like a gamey flavor. If you do use lamb, use less of the meat drippings in the stock)
1 clove garlic, lightly mashed but intact
1/2 cup jasmine rice
1 tablespoon minced ginger
7 cups chicken broth (or combo of chicken broth and water, you should have at least two cups of chicken broth on hand.)
fishsauce to taste ( if you have only 2 cups of chicken broth I would use almost 2 Tablespoons fish sauce)
1 - 1 1/2 teaspoons sesame oil
black pepper
salt
1 chopped scallion (separate the white and green parts- you will use them at different times)
cilantro for garnish
lime (optional)

 1. Rinse the rice a few times in cold water to wash out some of the starch.
2. Put the rice in a pot along with the broth/water, the ginger, fish sauce and white part of the scallion. Bring to a boil and then lower to a mild simmer. Stir the rice. Leave on simmer for 1 hour, partially covered. Stir occasionally.
3. While the rice is boiling, heat up the sesame oil in a pan. Add the garlic clove and stir around so that it flavors all the oil. Add the meat, making sure to break up the meat into a mince. Salt and pepper the meat. Cook the meat to a medium rare. (The meat will cook more in the broth.) Throw out the garlic clove.
4. Take the drippings from the pan and pour up to 2 Tablespoons of it into the pot of boiling rice. Set the meat aside. Taste the rice soup a few minutes after you have added the meat drippings and see if you need to add more fish sauce. Add some black pepper too.
5. When the rice is just about finished boiling, pour the meat in. Serve in bowls with plenty of chopped green scallion parts, cilantro and black pepper. Squeeze with a drop of lime if you want. Serves 3.

Spicy, Sour and Sweet: Salmon, Tamarind and Pineapple Soup

    One of my favorite parts of everyday Vietnamese food is the giant communal bowl of soup that adorns each meal. You can eat some soup during any part of the meal, which I tend to do because I like it so much. But usually you spoon some in at the end of the meal, to clean your palate, quench your thirst and sweep away the remaining grains of rice in your bowl. (I am always telling my mother she needs to drink more water, but she thinks all she needs is a little soup for hydration.)

    And the Vietnamese make these soups, or canh, with the simplest of ingredients. Just a few tablespoons of meat or dried shrimp, a little fish sauce, a vegetable, a lot of water and some fresh herbs are all you need to make endless variations of it. The soup serves as cheap and tasty way to encourage more rice-eating to a population which typically gets 3/4 of its calories from rice alone.

But those flashy southerners in Saigon like to make more complicated soups, because they can, with all that produce at their disposal. Take for example, Canh Chua Ca, a sour fish soup which incorporates fish, tomato, pineapple, bean sprouts, herbs,a celery-like vegetable, taro, sugar and spice.  It's "the abundance of the south in a bowl," Andrea Nguyen said in the Wall Street Journal. 

(I did not realize until recently that Southern Vietnamese food is seen as more bombastic and Northern food is considered  "plain". My mom cooks both Northern and Southern food, and I was never aware of which dishes were Northern and which were Southern so I never realized the difference. Like many families, my mother's was forced to move south to Saigon, when the communists took over Hanoi.)

Salmon, Tamarind and Pineapple Soup (Canh Ca Chua) 

I made my own version with the vegetables I had on hand in the fridge.

Serves 4 with rice and as part of a meal with other dishes

1/2 pound salmon skinned and cut into 2 inch chunks (I skinned the fish after I cooked it because I was using a salmon steak. Catfish is traditionally used but any meaty white fish like bass will also do. Shrimp can be used as well, but that takes only 2 minutes to be cooked.)
3 medium-small sized tomatoes (if you are feeling fussy, you can peel them)
1/2 of a medium sized carrot, sliced thin or minced (1 celery rib is usually used)
1 onion diced
2 cloves of garlic minced
1/2 cup napa cabbage sliced (bean sprouts are usually used)
4 1/2 cups water
3/4 teaspoon tamarind paste
1 dried red pepper, or 1-3 chopped and seeded bird eye chilies
3/4 cup pineapple cut into triangle shaped pieces about 1 1/2 inches long
1 tablespoon and 2 teaspoons of fish sauce (or more to taste)
1/2 teaspoon salt (or more to taste)
1/2 teaspoon sugar ( I like mine lightly sweet but you may want to add a bit more)
1 tablespoon lemongrass chopped fine (very optional)
chopped cilantro or dill for garnish
chopped scallion for garnish
(if you can find rau ram, you should add some of this herb on top)
black pepper

Heat 1 tablespoon vegetable oil in soup pot on medium heat. Saute onion, carrot (or celery), garlic and tomato for a few minutes. Add water, sugar, fish sauce, chili pepper, tamarind paste and salt. Bring to a mellow boil. Taste and add more salt or fish sauce. Add cabbage. One minute later add fish and pineapple. Cook for 5 minutes. Add some black pepper. Garnish with plenty of chopped scallion and cilantro.

Chinese Sausage with Sticky Rice and Ginger Scallion Oil

 
If I could eat Chinese sausage every morning with a bowl of sticky rice, I would. Whenever I go home to see my parents my mom is always sweet enough to make some for breakfast. I started making it recently, and am finding it difficult to want to make anything else. It had taken me so long to make it because I was always so blocked with the idea of steaming the darn sticky rice. (But I don't have a steamer, and and why does rice need to be steamed and i just can't freakin' deal. Where are my tortillas? )

Luckily, I meditated for a long time and some tension cleared up and my ego suppressed to levels low enough so that I was finally able to proceed with the sticky rice. I went looking for a steamer a couple times but didn't find one. Then I remembered Adela using a regular old plate to steam that lovely carp one night. This is why Adela is a doctor who can perform deliveries involving human beings and I still can't tie my shoes properly. So here we are. One makeshift steamer:

Watching raw rice being steamed into perfect grains is like magic. While the rice is steaming, cut your Chinese sausage. Cut it very thin, on the diagonal, and saute in a little oil. Saute some minced rehydrated shitake as well. This is the type of Chinese sausage I like:

It says "lap xuong tuoi" and is from Westminster, CA which is also known as Little Saigon.  According to my mom, Vietnamese style Chinese sausage has more wine and less fat. There are a million sausage brands out there and some of them are terrible. If the sausage feels as hard as a rock, that is probably how it will digest. E-mail me for directions on how to find this particular brand.

Top the rice with the sausage and the shitake mushrooms. Eat with ginger scallion oil and a little Maggi seasoning.

Ginger Scallion Oil adapted from Francis Lam

Make a batch and have for the rest of the week to add lots of flavor to stir fries or plain rice. This stuff is amazing.

1/4 cup corn or peanut oil
maybe 3/4 Tablespoon of ginger
3 scallions loosely chopped
salt

In a food processor, grind the ginger and scallion. Put in a tall bowl or cup. Add healthy pinches of salt. (It should be enough to salt the 1/4 cup of oil.) Heat oil until just smoking. Pour oil over ginger scallion. Be careful, because it will smoke and sputter when you pour it.

Sticky Rice

With sticky rice, soak 1-2 cups of rice overnight (for at least for 2 hours) in cold water. Drain and rinse it. Create a makeshift steamer by balancing a plate on a bowl in a large deep pan/stock pot.Fill the pan with water up to about 2/3 the way of the bowl or as high as you can. Put the rice on the plate. Bring the water to a boil and put the lid on. Steam on a low simmer for 20 minutes. During that time stir a few times to make sure the rice cooks evenly.

Winks and Shows Her Thigh at the Chicken Police

 

Chicken has been abused in so many creative ways in this freewheeling country of ours. When I see the piles of dry chicken breasts sitting in deli cases, hard as rocks and slathered with barbecue or teriyaki sauce to conceal their crimes, I get depressed. And every serious food lover knows that ordering chicken in an American/Euro restaurant is just silly because it will surely be the most innocuous dish. I have made my own contributions to chicken mediocrity, having made countless Trader Joe's frozen chicken breasts in college.

But a well cooked chicken, at the right moment, is something else entirely. So simple, honest and good. A chicken rubbed with lemon and roasted just so on a lazy Sunday evening warms me cynical heart. And chicken steamed to juicy succulence and dipped in a chili ginger sauce - well, my cravings for that never go away for very long. Then there is Vietnamese roast chicken.  Fish sauce, sugar and garlic all conspire to make a crispy skin even more savory and desirable. The chicken drippings are stirred into the rice (this is called Saigon schmaltz rice).

Ga Ro Ti (serves 2 with vegetables and rice)
(adapted from Sunday Nite Dinner)

• 1 pound chicken thighs (about 4 chicken thighs)
• 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
• lots of ground black pepper- this is key
• 1  tablespoon soy sauce
• 1  tablespoon fish sauce
• 1 1/2  tablespoons vegetable oil
• 2 garlic cloves, minced

1. Trim excess skin and visible fat from chicken thighs using kitchen shears; set aside.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together 1 tablespoon of the oil, the sugar, pepper, soy sauce and fish saucel until well combined. Stir in garlic. Add the chicken thighs and evenly distribute the marinade between the thighs. For extra flavor, stuff a little garlic and marinade under the skin. Cover and marinate for 12 to 24 hours in the fridge. (You can marinate for as little as 20 minutes with good results.)
3. Adjust oven rack to middle position; heat oven to 350°F. Heat 1/2 tablespoon oil in a large nonstick, oven-proof skillet over medium high heat. Add the chicken to the skillet skin side down, reduce heat to medium and fry until the skin is deep golden brown, about 6 - 8 minutes. Flip chicken and brown other side for 2-3 minutes; set chicken aside. Don't overcrowd chicken during browning; work in batches if necessary.
4. Drain rendered fat from pan and remove any burnt garlic and set aside to be used for rice; leaving a thin film of oil in the skillet. Return chicken to skillet, skin side up and place into oven. Roast chicken for 30-40 minutes depending on the size of the thighs. To check for doneness, poke the chicken with a knife; the juices should run clear (bone-in thighs 170°F internal temp, boneless thighs 165°F internal temp). Remove chicken from skillet and serve with rice that has some of the chicken fat mixed in.

Eating Out In Northern Virginia: Eden Center

stock photo of bún bò Huế courtesy of  bopuc

When I go to my parent's house in Northern Virginia I can always look forward to a meal or two at Eden Center. What is Eden Center? It is the Vietnamese culinary capital of the mid-Atlantic area, that's what. The strip mall of my dreams. Straight off my bus ride, I was whisked there for an early dinner of cha ca Hanoi- grilled turmeric catfish eaten with noodles, fresh herbs and black sesame cracker. Awesome, but not as good as my mother's. We also ate bánh xèo - scrumptious turmeric pancake filled with pork, shrimp and bean sprouts. I would tell you the name of the restaurant, but my parents were told by one of the waiters once that the owners don't allow them to keep their tips. This makes me crazy and I don't want to promote them, if it turns out to be true.

But my parents said you can also get good cha ca and bánh xèo at the restaurant Huong Viet, which is also in the Eden Center. My parents usually go there for their bún bò Huế, a spicy noodle soup. It is considered the mother of all soups and originates from the old imperial city of Hue, the sassy part of Vietnam (the food is spicier, and the uncles from there that marry into your family write fervent poems.)

Each bowl of soup comes with its own pork hock and dark, tender slices of beef shank. I usually pawn the hock off on my parents because I am find little merit on gnawing on a long boiled shin bone. It does wonders to the broth, but alone is not very exciting. My mother told the waiter to tell the chef to marinate the hock because she thinks it shouldn't just be boiled plain, a reprimand that did not stop her from eating every last bite.

The broth is very rich and gets its intense earthiness from the boiling of the pork meat and beef bones with lemongrass, chili pepper and shrimp sauce. At the table, the soup is topped off with bean sprouts, a squeeze of lime, thai basil, and thinly sliced banana blossom for some bright freshness and crunch. The result is complex and sublime.

Huong Viet
6785 Wilson Blvd
Falls Church, VA 22044
703-538-7110

side note: Eden Center also has a really good medium sized grocery store. (good quality Chinese sausage, good variety of vegetables and sauces)

House Specials

I was in the Southern California area recently to celebrate my cousin Chris’ wedding. The first evening I was there, we were trying on our Vietnamese wedding clothes at the tailor’s when the talk of what to eat for dinner comes up. My mother insists that we go to eat the famous Vietnamese “7 Courses of Beef” (Bò 7 món) because she has a craving. It just isn’t the same in northern Virginia, where my parents now reside. There is some bickering among the aunts about which restaurant to go to. When it’s been decided that we will go to Hong An in Garden Grove, my aunt runs out to buy a special green herb, hung que, to bring to the restaurant to eat with the dinner.

Usually, we don’t eat the full courses when we go. We pick and choose what we want to eat. We ate the grilled beef (bo nuong vi), which you do table side at a small grill that they bring. The beef is sliced very thin and coated in oil and lemon grass. You wrap the beef around some rice paper, which the restaurant served raw. So, we had to dip it in water and let it hang dry. Emily and William, my cousin Anh Quan's kids, really got a kick out of this. After you lay down your rice paper, you load up it up with lettuce, cooked beef, thinly sliced raw plantain, mint, various other herbs you may want (including an herb called fish lettuce that tastes frighteningly like its name). Roll this up and dip it in fermented shrimp paste sauce. (My mom mailed me a sweater recently which she said was the color of shrimp paste, an interesting portent of the meal to come.)

It was so good. I was in Maltese Bacon heaven. If I had Diddy’s money, there would be no diamonds or trips to Ibiza. I would charter a helicopter and fly all my friends to Garden Grove for 7 courses of beef. We also ate beef wrapped in Hawaiian La Lot leaves (Bo Nuong La Lop), meatballs (bo nuong mo chai), and a steamed beef dish that is mixed up with noodles, nuts and mushrooms (Bo Cha Dum).

The morning after the wedding, we had a “brunch”, which the bride and groom interpreted to mean a 10 course Chinese banquet at King Harbor in Garden Grove. It was a meat storm of food.

This was the menu for each table:

Crabmeat with fish maw soup
A giant plate of braised butter lobster yee mein (my favorite of the meal...lo mein taken to the next level.)
beef chunk ‘French style’
salt and pepper fried shrimp
steamed whole fish
stir fried pea shoots (love this vegetable)
fried squid (Emily's favorite)
clams with pepper black bean sauce (William's favorite)
fried crispy chicken
sweet bean soup for dessert

This happened at 11:30 am.

Hong An
9862 Westminster Ave. Suite B
Garden Grove, CA 92843
714-534-5384

King Harbor Restaurant
13018 Harbor Blvd.
Garden Grove, CA 92843
714-636-9103

Noodle Blitzkrieg: Part 1 of Probably Several

Here's an initial offering of three places I love to get noodles at:

Chao Chao Noodle Soup

New Chao Chow
Open from 8:10am to 10pm, this noodle shop does a brisk business with the locals, from the knuckle-tattooed Chinatown tough guy to the older lady wearing giant sunglasses ("My usual. ONLY SHRIMP! I don't eat the otha stuff. You guys don't have Chinese parsley today?" ) The place is cheery, the service is quick, and the small soup is a perfect size for lunch. The combination rice stick noodle soup (Hu Tieu), is a composed dish ($4.25), with the broth appearing on the side. The noodles come heaped with fresh fish cake, sliced pork, ground pork, bean sprouts, fried onions, one shrimp and sliced pork innard, which I gently push to the side. The shrimp is an indication of the Chiu Chow people's coastal roots in Guandong on the eastern side of China. The basic flavorings of the dish hark back to the Vietnamese Hu Tieu noodle soup, which may have come from the Chiu Chow population that emigrated to Vietnam.

New Chao Chow
111 Mott St.
North of Canal St.
(212) 226-2590

Naeng Myun

Li Hua
This is what I crave when the dial hits 90 degrees, and I don't feel like walking in the summery stink of Chinatown. It's naeng myun, an icy cold beef soup with chewy sweet potato noodles (or buckwheat noodles in other recipes) and topped with brisket, Asian pear, hardboiled egg, and sliced cucumber. It's like eating a sublime beef slurpee. I was initially intrigued by naeng-myun when I read that a Mr. Jung-Hyun Kim had opened up a restaurant in Seoul so that he could eat this dish three times a day everyday. He eventually opened up 4 more restaurants in New York, Paraguay and Korea. There is movie material here somewhere. (A man opens up one naeng myun restaurant after another to mourn a long lost sweetheart, separated by the 38th parallel, who he used to share this dish with. One day, she walks into his Paraguay branch, which he so happens to be doing an efficiency inspection of. "Of all the naeng-myun joints in town, you had to walk into mine," he says. "Well, this is technically the only one on the continent," she replies. ) The naeng myun is not listed on the permanent menu, so just ask for it. If you don't feel like eating romantic naeng myun, don't miss the duk mandoo-guk, a soup of dumplings and sliced rice cake in a murky white beef and egg broth.

Li Hua
171 Grand St.
At Baxter St
212-343-0090

Pho Bo Vien

Pho Bang
Pho Bang is my diner. I have done everything short of my taxes here, using their space as my psychic and organizational center. Many an hour there has been spent reading, scribbling, staring at the nice Vietnamese lady in the poster, and even writing a half-baked short story set in Pho Bang itself. The waiters are sweet and let me be. They were a little baffled when I had my birthday dinner there last week. They were like, this chick has friends?

Their house specialty, the pho beef noodle soup is a great restaurant version. I don't mean to use "restaurant version" as a huge qualifier, but you have to understand. I can't gush like crazy about any restaurant phos. In all my years, our family has only found 2 acceptable pho restaurants to eat at (one in San Jose and one in Virginia) because the criteria is a definitive home-style broth and the standard of measurement is my mother's, which is famous. But really, the one at Pho Bang is nice, I've eaten the pho tai with rare beef about 80 times. Sometimes I get the beef meatball one (pho bo vien), which has fun, chewy bite. I also recommend the one special they advertise on the wall, a rice noodle crepe stuffed with pork and mushroom and served with ham (banh cuon) and all their vermicelli (bun) dishes.

Pho Bang
157 Mott St, New York 10013
North of Grand St.
212-966-3797

The Great McDonald's Stir Fry

This certainly didn't start out as a story involving McDonald's. I wanted to make a legitimate Vietnamese dish of beef and french fries, a colonized spin on the French bistro classic steak frites. You never find it in restaurants because it's just something you would cook at home. I decided I'd had enough of not getting to eat it, which meant that I would have to learn how to cook it myself. I consulted the web and my cookbook, The Classic Cuisine of Vietnam, and made an amalgamation of my findings. It was the first time I've ever made my own french fries, a very satisfying experience. Dropping raw potato in hot oil and watching the vat bubble up and transform the sticks into golden lovelies...aaah.

In the end, the dish was only a partial success. I liked it well enough, but I knew it could be better. I hadn't consulted central command, my mother. Look at the picture below. Do you see how there is no caramelization on the beef? It looks dead, it doesn't sing. All of the recipes I had read had given me vague instructions about the stir frying process, resulting in beef that was slightly tough.

So, I called my mom up. The first thing she said was  "Why did you make your own french fries? Go to McDonald's." When I was a kid, I knew she used frozen french fries, but wasn't aware of the switch to McDonalds. Well, considering she makes this dish to be eaten with 2 or 3 other dishes on a weeknight, the use of McDonald's makes perfect sense, time-wise. Then she said, "Ask them for fresh french fries, no salt." Hmm. I don't have my mother's pluck, certainly not at the Canal Street McDonald's. I got mine with salt, and hoped for the best.

The most crucial advice she gave me, though, involved the handling of the beef. First, you have to use flank steak (London Broil). You have to cut it across the grain, to tenderize it, and then you have to marinate it, to tenderize it some more. And this piece of advice, is what I will carry with me for as long as I stir fry: when the pan is smoking hot, add the beef in, spread it over the pan and DON'T TOUCH IT. Just let it sit there browning. Then, you can stir it around. When I am stir-frying, I have this tendency to want to stir constantly. That's alright when you are working with vegetables, but thinly sliced beef has to caramelize the same way as a thick piece of steak, just in a shorter amount of time.

My mom uses soy sauce instead of fish sauce, which all the the other recipes called for. As a general rule, she likes soy sauce for beef and chicken sautés. I wonder if this is because she is from Hanoi which is the closest major city to China. Also, the other big thing she does, which none of the recipes mentioned, was to take the beef out and let it sit in a bowl, while you make the sauce. You add the beef again at the very end. This bit really makes the dish, saving the beef from getting soggy and overcooked. The dish was infinitely better - deliceux! A major breakthrough in the future of my meat stir fries.

Mom's Beef with French Fry Recipe (Thit Bo Va Khoai Tay Chien)

Marinade: Marinate 1/2 pound London Broil/flank steak (very thinly sliced against the grain) with 1 minced clove of garlic, 1 teaspoon soy sauce, 2 spoons oil (vegetable or olive), black pepper, 1/8 teaspoon sugar

Sauce: 1 tomato diced, 1/2 onion chopped chopstick size (which is mom-speak for a small dice), 1 1/2 tea spoon of tapioca powder diluted in 2 oz of water or chicken broth and 1 teaspoon soy sauce (I didn't have tapioca powder so I used 1/2 teaspoon of cornstarch diluted in 5 tablespoons cold water and 1 teaspoon soy sauce. I do agree with her that tapioca flour gives a clearer sauce, making it more brothy instead of gloopy).

Other: Home made french fries or 1 medium Mcdonald's french fries (The fries can sit around for awhile, you don't have to rush around trying to make it so that the fries are fresh, because they keep well for this dish), 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro, 1 cup rice.

1) Prepare rice according to instructions. Heat 2 teaspoons oil in the pan on high heat until the pan is smoking. Put the marinated beef in and spread it over the pan. Do not stir it. Let it sit there for 2 minutes until the bottom of the beef is browned. Stir for a little bit (maybe 15 seconds). Then take the beef out and set aside in a bowl. (It should be cooked medium rare.)

2) In the same pan, heat additional 2 teaspoons oil on medium high heat. Add onion and stir well for 2 minutes. Add tomato and stir well for 2 more minutes.

Add tapioca or cornstarch mixture. Stir well until the tomatoes have cooked down into the mixture and the sauce is slightly thickened. Add the cooked beef. Stir for a second, just to heat it up a bit. Then add fries and stir for a second.

Take out of pan immediately. Garnish with cilantro and some black pepper on top. Serve immediately with rice.