3 Things to Kickstart Summer 2024

🍢 A carefree Indian menu + 🍑 ugly fruit seconds + 👣 nice feet

We’re having a fun chat on the Substack app about travel in Asia and Asian airlines. Check in out and add your experiences or ask a question!

And, if you’ve been hanging around on Tik Tok, there’s oddball information about bacteria in cooked rice. Kristen Miglore wrote about B. Cereus (seriously!) for the New York Times and interviewed me for her informative rice story. (Gift link)

After every long trip, I inevitably dive into cooking. I miss my home and all my stuff. I’m always energized by the ingredients in my travels and want to channel that enthusiasm into making my own food. It’s also a way to cleanse and balance out all the travel eating out.

Among the things that I made this week:

• Bún thang - A Hanoi-style noodle soup with chicken, pork, shrimp, and egg. I make a simplified version of the recipe in Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by pressure cooking a chicken carcass from my freezer, shrimp shells, and vegetable scraps (leek, daikon peel and a sad carrot), then poaching a chicken breast, a little pork shoulder and 4 big shrimp. Egg omelet and rau ram are in the bowl with bun round rice noodles. At the table, I add a smidgen of fermented shrimp sauce (mam tom).

• Shaking tofu - I halved the recipe in Vietnamese Food Any Day and use pan-fried tofu that I’d frozen before we left for Asia. I’m still not a huge fan of freezing tofu. It’s texturally so chewy and dry, making it not as tasty when fresh or recently fried and refrigerated (here’s my easy fried tofu how-to). This was also a great way to eat up some of the herbs in my garden!

• Grilled char siu pork steaks - So simple, especially with the marinade from this recipe on my website. I just didn’t skewer the meat! The pork was sliced about 5/8 inch thick and each piece was about 4 inches square.

• Bread - My starter needed refreshing and I have a minor obsession with the red and white wheat flour from this mill. If you’re into baking, it’s worth checking out and using their unique shipping system.

• Five-spice mushroom pate - We adore this recipe from Ever-Green Vietnamese. I like the pate on banh mi and my husband enjoys it on Ritz crackers along with bites of pickled shallot (also from EGV). Rory uncorked a white Burgundy to make our midweek happy hour extra happy.

Indian Ideas

Upon our return, I also craved Indian food. South Asia has influenced and continues to influence much of Southeast Asia, including southern Thailand and Vietnam. Indian spices and cooking techniques left their impressions on our cuisines.

I needed something easy to satisfy my craving and I made a northern Indian favorite — chicken tikka skewers from Maya Kaimal’s 2023 book, Indian Flavor Every Day. That recipe is a keeper, and I trust Maya’s recipes and writing.

I cooked the chicken skewers on a grill pan but Maya calls for broiling. You can grill them outdoors too! The fabulous chicken tikka recipe is posted at my website for you to use.

If you’re looking to make a South Asian meal, buy frozen naan from Trader Joe’s or cook up some basmati rice, add dal, and perhaps a Burmese green tomato salad. If you get ambitious (or want extra deliciousness), make some smoky eggplant and/or seared ginger raita.

Praise for Fruit Seconds

Asians are really into fresh fruit. There’s always fruit on the table to offer guests and people talk with authority about their preferences. For instance, as we drove to Hai Duong in Northern Vietnam recently, my cousin’s husband and our driver chatted at length about their favorite lychee variety. Relatives gifted me bags of tangy crunchy plums to eat with chile salt. During our catch-up call, my mom asked if I ate enough mangosteen on my trip.

With that mindset, I went to our farmer’s markets last week looking for fruit. I buy first quality and seconds too. The seconds are not the prettiest but they’re often extra ripe and at peak deliciousness. They’re also less expensive.

You’re helping out the farmer and minimizing food waste! To find seconds, ask a vendor for fruit for making jam. You can make jam, freeze the fruit for later, or just eat them. We do all those things because summer is when we load up on the sweetest, juiciest fruits.

Of note for Santa Cruz residents — last week at the Saturday Cabrillo Farmer’s Market, we bought a bag of strawberries from P and K Farms. Their stall was so fragrant with strawberries, I couldn’t resist. I thought we’d have to freeze most of them but instead, we sorted them, kept them in a shoe box in the fridge and ate them after lunch and dinner on a daily basis. By Thursday night, they were gone.

At the Wednesday Santa Cruz downtown market, I spied Blenheim apricots at the Schletewitz Family Farm stall. That variety of sweet, delicate apricot has a very short season so I loaded up on 8 pounds of Blenheim seconds and 2 pounds of first-quality fruit.

“Put the seconds in the sink, rinse them, pit them and have fun,” Mr. Schletewitz said. I froze the seconds to eat (they’re good slightly frozen!) and I’ll surely be making this gingery apricot jam to savor the fruit in winter.

Summery Feet

In the main, I’m unladylike. I barely know how to apply makeup. My hair often looks wild because I’m willy nilly with hair products. But being in Asia reminded me that it’s nice to look nice. Many Korean and Japanese women do really have gorgeous skin. Korean men have great skin too! In Vietnam and Thailand there are billboards advertising beauty products for everyone. Clothing is pressed and hair is neat.

My post-menopause skin is a work in progress (care to offer your tips?) but my feet are something I can effectively deal with. Going sockless in summer means my feet will get calloused quick and I recently committed to a skin scraper that’s basically like a Parmesan grater. The foot rasp looked scary but with all the rave reviews on Amazon, I had to try it. (Microplane has one too, if you want to match what you likely have in your kitchen.)

It works with dry skin but when I soaked my feet in warm water with epsom salt, more skin came off faster. Don’t lean in on the rasp like your foot is a piece of Parmesan! Be gentle, as if you’re grating soft cheddar! Moisturize afterwards. I use the rasp once every two weeks or so.

The rasped feet inspired me to paint my toenails, something I do maybe once a decade but maybe that’ll change now that I wanna show off my feet? Look closely and you’ll see that I’ve got a long way to go before I’ll be hired at any Viet nail salon. BUT, I can safely say a Viet person did my pedicure.

BTW — those Birkenstocks are patent leather in a color called "butter”! I shop the “last chance” page at their site which I’ve linked to in case you’re in the mood.