How I (Inadvertantly) Cut Beef Out of My Diet

It helps to be poor sometimes. Not poor in the Christ (or Buddha) sense of the term: collecting alms, food stamps, no booze. More like being poor in the young 20-something, artist/writer/early professional sense. Which is less Carrie Bradshaw and more like Jane Eyre, frugal and a little bit plain.

So one repercussion of being poor is I'm less able to afford to eat a lot of meat. Because meat is expensive. In comparison to vegetables, tofu and lentils, a pound of roast will cost you more than ingredients for a salad. And it won't last for as many meals. These days, I make a lot of soups, chilis and curries. Mainly because they last longer and I could stretch the $20 it took to buy myself those ingredients further. Meat is never the main course. Instead, it goes right in the pot with everything else.

I guess it's just a natural byproduct of growing up with a predominantly Asian diet, where it was always meat mixed with vegetables and served with a vegetable soup and rice, rather than the very American diet of a slice of steak or roasted chicken with potatoes on the side. At my mother's dinner table, every component (meat, vegetables, rice, and fruit for dessert) was perfectly balanced. Even pho, that most famous of Vietnamese dishes, is mostly noodles and vegetables. The only meat component are the slices of beef and the broth.

So when I started cooking for myself, the taste of instant ramen from a cup soon lost its novelty. When you grow up eating fresh ingredients that were never boxed and stored for weeks, and you continue to make that the staple in your diet, it becomes more and more difficult to eat anything from a box. It gets worst as you get older and your taste buds become more discerning. It's not the overwhelming taste of cardboard boxiness. It's more like every mouthful is filled with preservatives and it's an unpleasant assault on your taste buds because it's artificial and it's not supposed to be in there. It's like having a foreign object in your body which does not belong, your body will automatically reject it.

And Now for Something Completely Different: Bún Riêu!

Well, it's been a long while since I've posted, and I've noticed my output this year is not as prolific as last year (when I first started). Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that since I've been interning in Syracuse this semester and covering local events in a small city, my life has been less eventful (and not as much of a fodder for a blog post).

Though with the approaching deadline of graduation looming ever the closer, the stress seems to be melting. Not completely, but dripping down bit by bit. Maybe it's the frog effect and I'm not really feeling the heat because it's rising ever so gradually. Or perhaps I've become desensitized to it at this point (more on that later). Which gives me more time to blog about something completely random: Vietnamese food!

The Waiting Game or How to Make Caramel (Updated With Pictures!)

One of my favorite past-times is baking. For me, I take a line from the movie "Julie and Julia" (I tend to quote movie lines, which are incredibly easy to remember), which says, "I love that after a day when nothing is sure...you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It's such a comfort."

Take the uncertainty of life as a writer, where you never know if anyone will ever get back to you for an interview, or if an editor will love or hate your story, it's part of the reason why I bake.

Calling all Harry Potter fans! Butterbeer recipe

To honor the opening of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1," on Nov. 19, I make another guest-star appearance. This time on my friend Kathleen Hessman's food blog where she films me making butterbeer, that ubiquitous drink found in the "Harry Potter" series.

The recipe can also be found on the site.

And this, readers, is what professionals do during a party. And if you're a journalist, you have a camera to record every special moment so you can put it on your personal blog later.

"Butterbeer!"

Pumpkin and Cookies

When I was about 7 (give or take a year or two), my family carved the first and only pumpkin we would ever carve. I like to think it was because they loved me so much and wanted to give me a proper American Halloween. Though in actuality, it probably had something to do with me begging and begging to have a traditional American Halloween.

So we went out and bought a giant pumpkin and I watched as my dad and my older sister (Thao!), scooped out the pumpkin innards and carved out a traditional looking Jack-O-Lantern. Of course, no one told us the logistics of putting a candle in the pumpkin and lighting it up so we just had a hallowed out pumpkin sitting on the windowsill of the living room. It wasn't quite traditional but it was close enough.

The Bo Kho (Beef Stew) Post

In my family, dinners were a tradition. It didn't matter what you were doing when dinnertime rolled around: doing homework, chores, going out with friends. When Mom called, you picked yourself and you get to the dining room. It was time for dinner. Growing up, I did not crave Vietnamese food. Rice, pho, chicken roasted in fish sauce and ginger, unexciting. It was the necessary chore towards my reward of McDonald Happy Meals at the end of the week.

Of course, as I got older, my palette developed, though even in my teenage years, I still preferred hamburgers. Then I got to college and somehow, the foodie emerged, shedding the old, fat-loving coat behind. The proverbial butterfly that was started enjoying fine foods and insects instead of just plain leaves (I quite like this analogy, it makes me feel pretty). There, living in the dorms at UCLA, surrounded by burgers, sandwiches and pizza, I ran in the opposite direction.

I wanted bun rieu (vermicelli in a shrimp soup), banh canh tom cua (udon in a crab-meat soup), com (rice). In short, I wanted everything I didn't want the first 18 years of my life, something that was fresh and healthy, not oily and fattening.