Getting Ready for Tet
With only one week left before the Lunar Year 4705 begins, there’s still a lot to prepare. I need to finish everything by February 18, the beginning of a particularly auspicious Year of the Boar. Some of the more important items on my TO DO list…
- Scrub, dust, mop, and wash everything from floor to ceiling.
- Invite my first visitor of the year. Alex (my smart, successful, super-nice doctor friend) moved to L.A., so I’ll have to find someone else to carry luck and prosperity into my home.
- Prepare banh chung from Andrea’s hardcore, traditional recipe in her new cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. It’s four pages long and includes instructions on how to make your own mold. We’ve already exchanged some notes on our favorite techniques and ingredients (remember the pork fat!) as well as some major no-no’s (forget the green food coloring). If I’m feeling flush, I might even try making the more difficult shaped banh tet.
- Fill every room with flowers. Stop at the SF Wholesale Flower Mart for good prices on quince blossoms, forsythia boughs, bright red gladioli, narcissus bulbs, and bamboo.
- Call my mom to ask for her recipe for caramel daikon pickles.
- Buy new clothes for the new year.
- Pick up the polymer plates, mix up some pink and red inks, and finish printing our Tet cards.
- Track down one of those mommy pig sweet buns at a Chinatown bakery.
- Relax and enjoy the start of another wonderful year!
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Category: asian food and drink, holidays and traditions
About the Author (Author Archive)
Thy Tran writes literary nonfiction about food, the rituals of the kitchen, and the many ways eating and cooking both connect and separate communities around the world. She co-authored the award-winning guide, Kitchen Companion, and her work has appeared in numerous other books, including Asia in the San Francisco Bay Area: A Cultural Travel Guide and Cooking at Home with the Culinary Institute of America. Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Fine Cooking and Saveur. A recipient of a literary grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Thy is currently working on a collection of essays about how food changes in families across time and place. Though trained as a professional chef, she works on cookbooks by day, then creates literary chapbooks by night. An old letterpress and two cabinets of wood and lead type occupy a corner of her writing studio, for she is as committed to the art and craft of bookmaking as she is to the power of words themselves. In addition to writing, editing, teaching and printing, Thy remains active in local food justice and global food sovereignty movements. Visit her website, wanderingspoon.com, to learn more about her culinary adventures.Subscribe
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