The blog kicked off New Year’s Eve in Barrow, Alaska for some fireworks in the -14F cold. I hope even the foodies amongst you enjoy some tales from the trail about traveling.

In Buenos Aires Recently

I am settled back into the US after a two week detour to Argentina and Antarctica.  That trip could have been a blog in itself.  Several loyal readers of my Vietnamese food adventures have asked what’s next.  I hadn’t really given that much thought until this week.

While in Antarctica I realized I’ve been lucky enough to have now stepped foot on all seven continents along with a gigantic slice of the world so foreign to many of my fellow Americans.  The one area missing from all my travels is actually quite close to home…The United States.  Outside of work trips, so little of this great country has crossed my path.

My goal in the coming two years or so is to travel to each of the 50 states and find somewhere or someone quite removed from the beaten path.  I hope to showcase one example from each state that most people have never heard of or will never themselves witness.

This yet to be named blog kicks off New Year’s Eve in Barrow, Alaska which is the northernmost city in the United States.  I will brave 24 hour darkness and temps around -30F (-30C) to bring you the best of what Alaska’s North Slope has to offer.  What better place than Barrow to head so far off the trail that an airplane is the only way in.

Maybe along the way through the US of A we’ll even come across some decent Vietnamese food in honor of my previous blog.  Who knows where the road will travel as long as it’s the road less traveled.

When I have the blog’s address and name up and running, I will make a post here.  I am looking forward to sharing with you something unique that will unfold unscripted and at its own pace.

I am not a chef or food critic.  I have no training in anything culinary, and make no pretense about knowing anything about food other than what I have taught myself this year.   I am just a regular guy who enjoys flavor packed foods, and I hope to share my love of Vietnamese cuisine and culture with anyone who is interested.

Along the way I have consumed I don’t know how many thousands of calories, walked literally thousands of miles exploring cities, met some great people, and even shed over 30 pounds (15 kilos).  Perhaps I should trademark the Saigon Diet for my hefty brethren back home in the US.

I depart Vietnam for good after a several year stay and am a better person for it.  My bags are packed but noticeably absent are the tacky souvenirs peddled all over tourist areas.  I feel I am taking with me something even better and more memorable though not as tangible as lacquered wood or a conical hat.  This culinary journey is something I shall forever remember and is the best memory of Vietnam I could possibly take home.

Getting out on foot almost daily on long three hour walks led me and friends brave enough to tag along deep into a side of Vietnam largely unexplored by tourists and expats alike.  Where my two feet took me was so far off the guidebook maps and is probably the version of Vietnam uncut and unfiltered that westerners are seeking out via their guidebooks yet never find.

Thank you Vietnam for providing such a wonderful canvas to explore new tastes.  And most importantly, thank you all of my fellow food lovers and friends who stopped by to check out the daily menu.  If you have enjoyed what you have read, please pass www.getoffthetrail.com onto anyone you feel might enjoy it.

Phở Bò

Phở.  Yes, phở.  Phở is our final stop on this diverse food journey.  What’s that?  You were expecting something a little more exotic like marinated pig bladder or five flavors chicken tongue for the grand finale?  Actually I am not even sure if those are edible parts of our barnyard friends, but I am going to hazard a guess that in Vietnam they just might be.  Who knows? I’ve learned that in this country just about anything goes.  And even if these were foods, my tastes run a whole lot less inventive and extreme I have discovered.

Phở bò isn’t even one of my more favorite foods over here and actually probably ranks down there around #360 just edging out fertile duck eggs and their ilk.  So why sit down to a bowl of beef noodle soup when so much enticing amazing variety awaits?

The answer is quite simple.  Phở bò is the food that launched this voyage deep into Vietnam’s cuisine.  Once upon a time this was about the only food I dared eat here, and I ate it daily.  Anything else scared the you know what out of me for I feared a meal from one the ubiquitous run down restaurants would rain hell and terror upon me in the form of gastro-intestinal horror.  I can report after a year of eating in places that redefine filth and squalor, I did not become sick.  Not once.  Miracles will never cease.  Or I have an iron stomach.   Or incredible luck.

Fresh Herbs and Beef

So once again I found myself going back down the street near my apartment to a rundown phở parlor yet again for this final authentic sampling in its native habitat.  Besides, this is probably the most well known of Vietnamese foods in America where I am now headed.

And once upon a time before living in Vietnam seemed even the remotest possibility, this is all I thought existed over here foodwise.  Living in Hanoi originally led me to believe this fact to be true.  They sure do throw down some phở up there, but as we have found out, the variety of non phở meals is just about endless from one end of the country to the other.

Also, this restaurant is the typical open front, unairconditioned, bare bones type joint I have come to love over here.  Just think…Just a mere 365 meals ago, places such as this gave me great pause, and now I can’t get enough.  And now I can even order in Vietnamese, and understand the basics such as numbers.  Progress sure is sweet, and even sweeter is shedding so many of my former food inhibitions along the way.

Yes, this bowl of phở bò was much richer in memories than its actual flavor.  Adding fresh coriander, Thai basil, rice paddy herb and sliced birdseye chili peppers did perk up the rather mundane beef broth though.  How can I even describe the soup portion?  Let’s see…imagine a beef stock with hints of star anise, garlic and other spices I won’t even begin to guess.  It all simmers in a giant cauldron while a pleasant smell wafts all over anyone who steps foot in this concrete shrine to foods made the time consuming, traditional way I have come to love about the Vietnamese kitchen.

Soup Kitchen

Thank you Vietnam for providing such a varied bounty.  If only I had another 365 days to really dive into the local food scene to explore even deeper.  Perhaps my next project will be cooking many of these foods in my American kitchen.  Check back sometime…you never know!

Bún Thịt Nướng Chả Giò

As far as almost final Vietnamese meals go, this one is about as unlike anything I will find in America as they come.  And that is a great thing.  I do want to end this food journey with some memorable yet far from whacky selections.  Bún thịt nướng chả giò is a who’s who of most everything I like about Vietnamese food…Marinated grilled meats, rice noodles, sweetened fish sauce, cucumbers, pickled carrots, peanuts, crispy spring rolls, bean sprouts, and a variety of herbs.  It’s all in there.  Hungry yet?  Yeah, I thought so.  I am, too again thinking about this one.

Though this meal is a close cousin to the breakfast pork and noodles so common all across Saigon, a few nuances make this version from Hue something quite new for me.  The chewy bits of nem chua were one such flavor sensation I had never before sampled.  They are simply squares of a sour pork paste boiled up inside banana leaves.  Their texture is akin to one of those spongy vegetarian sausage patties found in the freezer case after having taken a few spins around the inside of a microwave.

Biting into a batch of herbs nestled in the side of the bowl washed that mouth puckering taste of soap all over my tongue.  No, this was not actual soap or half cleaned ceramic but rather some herb I have ingested before.  Seriously, this tasted just like soap.  You know how sometimes a taste or smell can take us down memory lane?  Immediately I thought about how my mom always threatened to wash my mouth out with soap when I was a really young kid if I committed some sort of verbal infraction with bad words.

I suppose moms the world over can rejoice should their adult kids get a bite of this green stuff.  It’s like their punishment being meted out decades later without warning.  I was half expecting my mom to jump out from behind a wall and yell “gotcha sucker!”

I tried different combinations of this soap herb and meats, noodles, and other herbs to no avail.  Soap, soap, and more soap.  OK, I think I’ve done my repentance here for any and all bad words I may have uttered when I was a kid.  And thankfully all those threats to wash my mouth out with soap turned out to be idle in nature for that soapy taste truly is vile if this herb is any indication.

This odd tasting mess turns out to be cilantro of all things.  I don’t get it.  Mixed into some foods like a nice tomato salsa I can eat it just fine.  Even in some Vietnamese foods the plain leaves taste great with a bite of grilled meat.  Yet toss some cilantro into a bowl of these noodles, and the cook might as well have shoved a bar of Irish Spring soap down my throat.  Perhaps some strains of cilantro are different than others.

Why at times I can handle cilantro and not others will just remain one of life’s little food mysteries for me.  What isn’t a mystery is that this bowl of meats and rice vermicelli hit the spot and allowed to me to reflect on how far I’ve come in terms of sampling new foods once so mysterious and foreign to my tastes that used to run so sheltered.

Mì Sủi Cảo

A dose of cool, nonhumid air got me out on foot on my last work overnight in Hanoi but hunger stopped short my wanderings on Xuan Dieu Road in the Tay Ho neighborhood.  The trusty old won ton soup joint across from Tracy’s drew me right in, and this basic concrete hut has nourished me enough in the past for me to know it’s consistently decent.

A teenage kid held a picture menu with strangely translated names inches from my eyes, and the old saying a picture is worth a thousand words became so true.  He kept pointing to three blurred images as if to tempt me into ordering one of those soups, so I bit.  Sure, why not I thought.  I’ll take the shrimp wonton he so insistently motioned to.

Well, that was a colossal mistake.  He shook his hand as if to say no while irritation washed over his face.  Since choice number one crapped out, I asked for another shrimp variety he kept pointing to with utmost vigor and got the same result.  He then pointed over and over again to the same three pictures as if this game of charades made sense.  Once again I asked for the shrimp and once again he said no.  Why would anyone point to items as if to say yes, when no is really what is meant?  Only in Hanoi.

Even asking for something completely ignored by his finger yielded the same hand waiving for no.  How do you say just bring me the cook’s choice and quit with this nonsense?  Why even show me a menu if nothing on it is for sale?  Pointing yet again to mì sủi cảo led the guy to finally give me some sort of look that I assumed meant that choice was now on the approved list.

Why wasn’t it ok the first two times?  I just don’t understand Vietnam sometimes.  This place is like some sort of giant inexplicable riddle beyond my comprehension.  Asking for something three times seemed to work like a charm though.

The soup finally arrived and was a who’s who of everything likable.  Soft doughy wontons filled with savory pork or shrimp, a fried wonton, thin al dente noodles, slices of sweet roast pork, and leafy tart greens filled a sweet broth.  I skipped the pasty liver and whatever that honeycomb like fatty blob was though.  Imagine a honeycomb soaked in water and all soggy and swollen.  I am convinced it was culled from deep within one our barnyard buddies, and its gastro-intestinal origins are best left unknown.

On a delightfully cool day what’s better than some hot won ton soup to warm things up?  This particular one was new for me though the experience surrounding it has played out countless times.   In the end this meal was a success and chalk another new one up for this food journey one bite at a time.

Goi Cai To

This meal represents so much more than a salad of grilled meats, tomatoes, fried shallots, pickled vegetables and raw lemongrass.  Mixing everything together along with a fish sauce based spicy dressing sent me on a taste journey even a year ago I could never have imagined.  That I missed out on so much is mostly my fault for I had already been in Vietnam a long time before starting to sample its wonderful delights.  Part fear, part indifference, and part worry about food poisoning had all held me back.

Fish mint on its own has both fascinated and repulsed me since it first defiled my tongue.  How can any anything so leafy and innocuous smack so much of tuna?  Imagine biting into some lettuce and the taste of fish washes all over your mouth.  Exactly!  Now you know how I have felt all along.

This changed all of a sudden with a simple lunch time meal.  Somehow fish mint isn’t so treacherous as all, and it works well with the other flavors.  This ladies and gentlemen is the key…it is meant to complement everything rather than stand on its own.  I had always sampled it alone rather than pairing it with other herbs and competing flavors.  The strong taste threw me off of course, and I thought no way in hell am I going to ruin my food with it.

Well fast forward a few hundred meals and all of a sudden things are making sense.  Vietnamese cuisine is a careful balance of sweet, sour, salt and spice.  No one ingredient ever seems to outshine the others, and when tempered with other herbs, fish mint believe it or not blends into the background.

Rather than eviscerating my taste buds, this herb added just enough flavor to make this meal memorable.  Next time fish mint crosses my path, I am diving right in and mixing it in with everything else on the plate.

I had to laugh when the girl produced forks for us out of nowhere and handed them over as if she had found some sort of culinary treasure.  No, no forks here.  I am definitely not the same guy I was at the beginning of the journey.  Chopsticks seem the more natural way to heave scoops of fish mint flavored delights into this hungry mouth.

It Looked Good…

Troi oi!  It’s pronounced choi oi and these two simple words roll out Vietnamese mouths in reaction to just about any situation possibly arising in daily life.  Witness something crazy?  Troi oi!  Almost get hit by a motorbike?  Troi oi as well.  Someone surprise you?  Yes, you guessed it.  Troi oi indeed.

Loosely translated as “oh my God,” troi oi to the highest degree best describes lunch today.  Never did I expect that returning to District 1’s Con 31 would annihilate my food sensibilities in the span of mere seconds.  This com binh dan, or “peasant rice” joint, or has nourished me well here in Saigon and I have such wonderful memories of crispy sweet chili glazed fried chicken, tender frog legs, squid stir fry and more.

Well, troi oi indeed. Lunch today sure did derail and drive me right into the ditch.  It’s my own fault really for daring to venture outside the safety of my relatively benign food box.  Fish caramelized in a clay pot is such a wonderful dish, and one I look forward to.  When I saw rows of these brown containers of cá kho tộ simmering I knew right away an amazing meal waited.  Caramelized fish only means that the heat causes the sugar based sauce to thicken nicely.

Cá Kho Tộ

With a quick flick of the chopsticks, I had this fish out of the pot and on a bed of perfectly steamed rice.  Only problem was this hunk of fish was about as unappetizing a piece of animal I have ever seen.  A fatty something was hanging off the main body of meat and gave me great pause.  Upon closer inspection, some spongy layers near the gills and all sorts of innards jumped right at at me.

I think I threw up a little in my mouth and cursed myself out for not ordering the fried chicken or stir fry beef.  Even the skin had hardened from the heat of the pot, and the scales reminded me of snake skin.  I got to thinking maybe this was a snake rather than fish and this vision only served to gag a little bit more.  This thing was boa constrictor thick, and I had to quickly reconvince myself this was indeed just a chunk of bony, fatty, inedible (for westerners at least) ocean going nonsense.

The tasty, spicy sauce infused with flecks of chili pepper and lemongrass hit the spot with the rice and this lunch quickly became a carbfest rather than one based on a nice protein.  Oh well, you win some and loose some.  I am sure this chunk of fish is probably some sort of prized delicacy over here.  In a way I am glad I ordered it though I couldn’t take more than one bite.  It reminded me how different cultures can take the same food and present it in a myriad of ways.

Sườn Non Ram Mặn

I wish I knew how to tell the friendly ladies at Café 91 I am moving back to the US this week, and that their food the past year has been one of the high points of my time in Vietnam.  My limited vocabulary allows me to explain I am headed home, but learning how to say I won’t be coming back never occurred to me.  Dozens upon dozens of their filling and cheap meals inside that concrete joint have nourished my interest in all things Vietnamese, and the vast majority have been amazing foods I can’t wait to recreate back home.

Returning time and time again has ensured my belly got filled with everything from curry frog legs to squid stuffed with spicy pork to clay pot fish and anything and everything in between.  Paying just over a dollar for meat, rice, vegetable, soup and a banana is the sweetest part of the meal, and I cringe when I think that a decent lunch will soon cost seven plus bucks once I return to the US.

I remember once upon a time when Café 91’s selections seemed so exotic and scary and I prayed one or two items just might be on display that would be somewhat palatable to my formerly vanilla tastes.  That was then.  Now ever single metal serving pan enticed me and I wished I could sample each of them.  Vietnam is like that.  This complex land grows on you over time, and what was once so strange now seems so normal.

Simple but Delicious

Ribs are one of my more favorite foods, and a pile of miniature bones with a chunk of meat wrapped around them got my attention.  Yeah, I know.  Braised short ribs hardly rise to any semblance of interesting given that a pan of curried frog legs was coagulating right next door, but for one of my last meals in Vietnam, I craved something I would truly enjoy.

The serving lady saw that I had wolfed down the amazing bowl of soup first.  She quickly refilled my tiny bowl, and I was so grateful for her random act of kindness.  The peppery clear broth filled with some sort of soft, diced squash hit the spot and whetted my palate for the rest of the flavors still to come.

The ribs were a bit tough of course, but that fish sauce based marinade came right through in the best of ways.  The combination of sweet, spicy and salt washed over my tongue and I got to thinking how sad I will be in a week that my time over here must draw to an end.

As I ladled some of that oily spiciness on my rice and ingested about a week’s worth of carbs in less than a minute, I looked back over at the metal cart containing all the lunch selections.  A line of office workers had formed and I couldn’t help but wonder if they realized how lucky they are to have this type of cuisine as their everyday fare.

Korean Style Beef

Seeing how the Vietnamese kitchen interprets tough chewy chunks of beef with recipes supposedly from other lands is always a feast for the senses. While downtown with a friend on the hunt for the world’s tackiest souvenir, a brief shower of rain just about gave us the world’s biggest soaking. We ducked into Parksons Department Store to wait out this storm with no signs of immediately relenting.

Rather than sitting around staring at the rain from the cosmetics department by the door, we headed up the escalators to the food court.  Why not put the time to good use and make a meal out of this?  Besides, that window of opportunity for a proper street food meal was just about to close on us and we didn’t want to go hungry.  And not to be mean here or anything, but it is quite amusing to watch people step on and off a department store escalator who are not quite used to this lazy means of floor to floor conveyence.  Oh the little things that entertain me.

Standing boldly front and center in that food court is a Vietnamese joint advertising Chinese food with a Korean beef item, and of course I could not pass up such fusion cuisine.  The wall mounted pictures all smacked of mall food court selections quite at home in Des Moines or Dallas.  Yes, this was indeed going to be a most interesting taste explosion.

Even before my first bite, I knew what to expect since this is not my first time to the Vietnamese food rodeo.  Of course the beef (I assume it was cow) was tough beyond belief.  That poor cow.  It gave its life so we could enjoy succulent slabs of its muscle, but this chewy stuff made a mockery of that animal’s untimely demise.

Block of Rice

As I chewed and chewed and chewed and then chewed some more, I got to thinking where have I tasted this slightly sweet, slightly vinegary, slightly soy flavor before?  This sure was quite distinct but something I’ve definitely tasted before.  Yes, that’s it…Potato chips.  You read correctly…Potato chips. The Alaska king crab flavor ones to be exact…Identical.  Well, at least with the chips they are crunchy, chewable and digestible.

The sauce was great smeared all over the mound of rice and of course onions are hard to screw up.  Try as I might though, I just couldn’t muster the energy needed to properly eat that beef.  That’s ok though.  We had set out on a mission to find tacky souvenirs.  We may not have found what we initially intended, but at least we got a memorable yet tacky “Korean” style souvenir lunch out of it.