On Praying and Keeping Bubbly Chilled (nearly) Always
🌽 3.5 Vietnamese corn recipes + cookbook award nomination!
Hello there!
This week’s dispatch is early because I’ll be super busy tomorrow morning readying to teach.
My family always says grace before meals and the person who took it most seriously was my father. Bố Già (“Old Daddy”, a Viet term of endearment) recited daily prayers in Vietnamese, which sounded like a chant to my ears. For holidays and special celebrations, he prepared a mini speech on gratitude to thank “the people who made the food for us and bless those who do not always have food.” He did his pre-meal speechifying in English so all the grandkids and in-laws could understand.
Since my dad passed away in 2021, my mom has overseen grace. Mẹ Già enforces looser rules: we’re on our own on being grateful at breakfast and lunch, BUT at dinner, the oldest male who comes close to repping Bố Gia has to gift the table a blessing. My brother, Dan, or my husband, Rory, usually gets that duty. They come to the table prepared. 😁 I’m just the cook.
We recently celebrated my mom’s 90th birthday with a home cooked family dinner. My brother jokingly assigned prayers to Bob, my cousin’s unsuspecting 70s-something midwestern husband who’s a bit Rodney Dangerfield-ish. Dan looked down the table at my mom, who slightly grimaced at his putting Bob on the spot. Dan pivoted, said the blessing, and we dove in.
My mom and I oversaw the savories, which included silky asparagus and shiitake soup from Ever-Green Vietnamese (page 146; I added crab) and Hanoi-style grilled pork bún chả in Vietnamese Food Any Day (page 201). My sisters brought dessert: fresh longans, lychees and mangos; a bespoke agar agar mold “cake”; and tiramisu.
My siblings and I are firmly in middle age, and with my mom in her tenth decade of life, I’ve been counting my blessings more often.
Getting out of Vietnam was the hardest thing to do, my mom says. She’s right. It’s been, relatively speaking, downhill from there but I lose sight of that.
I’d like to be better at celebrating life in real time while wonderful and joyful things are happening.
This week I experienced many points of grace, including:
Gathering county fair-worthy dahlias from a neighbor who shared their backyard bounty. As Rory and I walked home with the flowers, people smiled and stopped to ask about them or waved 👋.
Receiving Made Here from Elaine Mao and the NYC Send Chinatown Love project. Her book inscription meant a lot.
Accompanying Rory to a retirement community where he did a Q&A with about 50 people. Everyone (naturally) raised their hand when asked if they vote. (Rory is a political scientist.)
Emailing my Hanoi-based cousin about delicate family matters. In Vietnamese! Twice! My mom says I repped her well. My Duolingo practice is advancing me beyond grade school proficiency.
Reading about how yoga may stave off cognitive decline and a promising alternative to old school pap smears.
🏆 And then yesterday, after a long walk, I opened an email that notified me that Ever-Green Vietnamese is in the final running for an award from the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals). I have to say with great humility that I am very familiar with being an award finalist, but this time it’s different.
EGV is in the cookbook photography and styling category so the award spotlights my work with the folks who helped me make a brainy beauty. Photographer Aubrie Pick is no longer with us. My stylist and pal, Karen Shinto, has worked on all seven books with me. Neither one of them have been named in an award’s final running until now. I hope EGV prevails for us all.
While I checked out the listing of award finalists, Rory slyly slid a bottle of bubbly in the freezer. 20 minutes later, he pulled it out and grabbed a fluted glass.
Me: Really? I gotta test a recipe for Pim’s Thai cookbook. I’m gonna get loopy fast.
Rory: C’mon. We need to celebrate our successes big and small.
Me: Ok. Open it!
🎥 Which explains this video. BTW, that rosy Chandon 🍾 tastes nice and is affordable (~ $16 at Costco), but the bubbles are biggish, if that matters to you.
🌽 A kind note praising Ever-Green Vietnamese’s corn milk (sữa bắp) got me thinking about how corn figures into the Viet repertoire and how much I enjoy it. I pounced on a sale, buying more ears than I should have for a household of two.
Containing lots of fiber, corn is nature’s broom. It’s native to the Americas but Viet people adore corn. Several Viet websites espouse the wonderful sweetness of bắp Mỹ (American corn). The corn grown in Vietnam isn’t usually too sweet so people tend to add sugar to corn recipes. We can use less or none in Vietnamese American corn dishes.
If you want to expand your corn-y world, I suggest adding some very easy Viet ideas, such as:
Stir-fried corn (bắp xào), a spicy-salty-sweet street snack that I first tasted in Ho Chi Minh City. Have Vietnamese Food Any Day? My recipe is on page 51; Don’t have the book? I just posted the recipe here.
Corn-coconut sweet soup (chè bắp) recipe from years ago that I adore. It’s a Viet classic, even if you don’t have pandan leaves for the recipe.
Coconutty Viet corn milk, which I make using the silk, cob and a little husk for extra flavor. For EGV’s corn milk recipe, which can be used for a cocktail, see page 277 of the book. I previously shared the book’s recipe here. I like it over ice and you can also freeze corn milk as popsicles!
My corn milk and popsicle playbook:
Make a full batch of corn milk. Drink half of the milk (add a touch of rum for a corn cocktail), then freeze the rest to make Corn Milk Popsicles (Kem Sữa Bắp). For each 2 cups of corn milk, season with 3 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk (standard or coconut); if you like, add an extra 1/4 teaspoon vanilla. Pour into popsicle molds and freeze as usual. Yields about 6 pops.
This Sunday, I’ll be teaching the first online cooking class. Folks like Maia are getting ingredients! Yay! (Yes, you can still sign up. Upcoming class info is here.)
We prudently did not drink up all that bubbly. I’m saving it for celebrating on Sunday around 4:30pm PST, after class is done.
First things first, congratulations on being an IACP finalist for Evergreen. Well-deserved and fantastic your team is getting this recognition. Second, thanks for another rich posting. A wealth of interesting, fun, and useful information. All in on summer corn!
Happy belated birthday to your mom! 90!!! I hope my mom lives that long and is as spritely and joyful as yours. She is currently in her mid-60s and I am growing ever aware of her aging, especially after reading this post (I am in my late 20s). It is almost going to be her birthday as well - her first birthday after the passing of my dad recently (he was 78). I enjoyed reading your post ("A Loving Farewell to My Father") - your father seemed very similar to my dad in his interest for tech and desire to connect with his kids, as well as living across the Pacific in his lifetime. My father had served in the South Vietnamese Air Force and was in re-education camp for over 6 years before escaping to Indonesia, then the US, and meeting my mom in 1990 in San Jose, CA. I must remind myself that our parents' lives, wherever they were in life at the time, were essentially put on pause because of the war, and they had to rebuild everything in a completely different country on top of raising children. Despite this, they still had so much life and love to give to us.
My mom is practicing the Buddhist tradition of exclusively eating vegan/vegetarian during the 49 day grieving period, and, while she already had a very clean, mostly pescatarian diet, she is struggling to find inspiration to make vegan/vegetarian dishes. It was the perfect opportunity for me to purchase your Ever-Green Vietnamese cookbook to share with her for her birthday, and I am planning on making one of the recipes together with her and my sister to celebrate. Hope to let you know how it goes.
Congrats on being a finalist for Ever-Green Vietnamese - it is so deserved! I hope you know the huge, positive impact that you are making on your readers by sharing your stories and Vietnamese heritage. Thank you!