yesterday's meals

Here in my house in Dang Tung, sometimes the findings are tasty, sometimes they’re unsatisfying, sometimes they just exist and you don’t have much of anything to comment on, good or bad, you’re just happy to be full.

Yesterday was a good day. For lunch, we had fried fish served with m’choo svai (green mangoes shredded and marinated in sweet, salty fish sauce tinged with MSG) and pickles sliced up and spiced with chili peppers. For dinner, my host family had beef, and I had pumpkin stir-fried with green onions and duck eggs, one of my favorite dishes.



Fried fish, m'choo svai, and spicy pickles.

The type of fish we had was ‘trai k’mong,’ the fish you order. Here we cook it whole, and then at the table you pull off the head (taking the good meat off it), fish out the bones, and enjoy it over your rice with the pickles or m’choo as an accompaniment. There’s no flour involved in the frying mixture; I’ll have to watch my host sister, Bong Ann, more closely next time she makes it to see if it’s fried in anything besides oil. Our rice was really good yesterday, too—my host sister left it on high heat for too long, leaving it to ‘chireeyay,’ which basically means that it got all sticky and soft. Mmm.



Rice!

I haven’t learned how to make the pumpkin stir-fry yet either, though I know the first step is peeling off most of the skin on the outside of the pumpkin with a knife (and then tossing the skin in the yard). The dish is rich and filling and varied; the green onion gives it zing, there’s pepper for bite, and the pumpkin exudes sweetness. I plan to learn how to make it and my other favorite dishes over the summer here just before I finish service; at that point I should be able to tell you more about how to re-create ones like this one.



pumpkin stir-fry

An added bonus to family lunches and dinners is the presence of Li-Di (my 4-year-old host sister) and Li-Ching (my 2-year-old host sister. They had some pretty awesome gestures for our food photo shoot.