No - NOT chrysanthemums!!!!

Vietnamese food can be absolutely delicious however, as with any cuisine in any country, you have to be careful what you eat and where you eat it. My untrained western eyes are still having difficulty spotting the difference between    the delicious, the indifferent and the disgusting when trawling my way through menus. 

I have now eaten in top restaurants, traditional street restaurants, from pavement vendors, Westernised coffee shops, Vietnamese food emporia and some of the restaurants owned (mainly by Australians I guess) that serve up a range of western delights plus their own version of some Vietnamese favourites.

Sometimes I am transported by the exotic mix of delicious textures and flavours and occasionally one bite is enough to tell me that one more bite will lead directly to the Saigon squitters or worse.  

One flavour that I have yet to acquire a taste for is the ubiquitous Nuoc Mam, a highly pungent condiment of fermented fish and sea salt that is added as liberally or a lightly as salt and pepper might be. I guess it is the Vietnamese equivalent of Anchovy paste the only difference being that it is has had en extra few months of fermentation and is used in a very wide variety of dishes.

I decided that it might be a good idea to learn more by shopping for previously unknown ingredients and by trying to cook a range of local dishes. Rick Stein to the rescue!  I was given a copy of his South East Asian cook book before starting this adventure and it was one of the first items to find a place in my packing boxes.

The first hurdle was to translate the recipes from English to Vietnamese. The second hurdle was to get at least two natives to agree on a the proper name for any of the selected ingredients. I converted the ingredients to photos to see if that would help. However, as I may have mentioned before, these dear people are not very visually literate and many of them have not yet discovered that they need glasses either.

Armed with my two A4 sheets of photos and some suggested names for the ingredients I started shopping in earnest. The dried goods would surely be the easiest so I went down to my favourite city centre store to make a start. They are getting to know me now. A young lad watches my bike and one of the young girls picks up a basket to follow me around the impossibly narrow aisles of  Phuong Ha (left). I collect this and that but am not able to find some of the more exotic things like Palm Sugar, Kaffir Lime Leaves and  turmeric root. 

At the till, I share my photo shopping list with the owner. She gets a huddle assistants around her and then dispatches them hither and thither to seek out the missing items. In due course they return one by one. Some had been digging in the store room bur others had plainly been shopping in neighbouring businesses and rushed back to re-sell them to me for a small profit. I just love their attitude and their enterprising spirit!

Next, the fresh ingredients. I need the help of Jo's housekeeper, Kim Chi, to help me navigate the local wet market armed, once again, with a photo shopping list. This time I haven't bothered with the translations since  no-one seems to be able to agree.  This market is smaller and better ventilated than the city ones so the smell of Nuoc Mam isn't so overpowering. 

Binh Khanh wet market

Like any market, this place is lively and colourful and the Vietnamese vendors are chatty and cheerful. they don't get many Western people in this local market so my arrival caused a good deal of  amusement.

Chicken components !

I start with a picture of chicken breasts. This was not instantly recognisable because this is not how the Viets buy chicken at all. The photo I had looked like a tray of breasts at Tesco in Leeds. What I was finally offered was an entire breast carcasse with the skin on - how absolutely FANTASTIC!  

I cannot remember the last time I saw breast with skin let alone attached to the bone...........and they were enormous. This carcasse was a big as some small turkeys. This would be perfect for making the stock for my Pho. See here some of the other delights the chicken lady had on offer.

 One of my other main ingredients was prawns. We visited a delightful woman who had two trays of different prawns and some squid on the side. 

There was a bit of a cafuffle while we sorted out the price and the number of prawns I required because somewhere in the translation she thought I asked for 12 kilos - a shock she had to share with neighbouring stall holders!!!  

Anyway, I finally selected the 12 prawns I needed and she then meticulously topped and peeled each one not forgetting to ask me if I would like the eggs she found in some of the females.

We left the market laden with at least a dozen carrier bags of all kinds of ingredients. The most difficult one to buy turned out to be one of the most common of things. No-one seemed to understand my photo of coriander. 

One guy, who spoke quite good English thought he knew what it was and asked me to wait while he went in search of a particular stall holder who had already packed up for the day. 

He dragged him out of his hammock, got him to unlock his cold store and finally they proudly emerged with a large bunch of yellow chrysanthemums! Maybe, now,you can begin to see  my problem!!