Lucky me, the flu came visiting last week. Even after three days of sleeping in bed and swallowing nothing more than bananas and Advil, I could tell my uninvited guest had no intention of leaving. Time to get serious.

Cooking was out of the question -- I could barely stand up straight with the long, invisible spikes piercing both sides of my brain -- so I smiled as sweetly as possible at my husband and said three words: Pho ga. Please.

He'd never made the soup before nor did he have a mother who cooked it once a week, so I scribbled down some notes on a scrap of paper. I fell back asleep before he left for the grocery store, and by the time I woke up again, blessed me, I could smell the lovely scent of star anise and cinnamon and ginger all the way into the bedroom.

Now, lest you think that I'm married to a kitchen wizard, let me just say that during the five years he lived alone, the only meat he ever bought was bacon and he never, ever, not once, turned on his oven. Fortunately, the best foods for the soul are always the simplest.

Pho ga is an excellent way to prepare meals ahead of time. My mom used to simmer the chicken on Sunday, boil a big batch of noodles, wash all the herbs, and then refrigerate the components separately. It only takes about 10 minutes to reheat the stock and noodles for a comforting bowl of soup anytime during the week.

Eating my way through my husband's very first pot of pho ga brought me back to the land of the living. Here, verbatim, is the recipe:

Half-Conscious Notes on Making Pho Ga

Preparation
1. Cut chicken in half & pull off fatty chunks @ tail

2. Cover with cold water. Add onion (halved), some carrot logs, lots of star anise (8-10) a few cloves, teaspoon of peppercorns, and cinnamon stick. And Bay Leaf for the French. Add giblets, etc. & fennel seeds.

3. Bring just [double underlined] to a boil, then lower heat, cover partially & simmer gently 1 1/2 hour.

4. Remove chicken. remove big chunks of meat & return carcass. continue simmer 2-3 hrs.

Shopping List and Additional Notes

Ingredients
One 4-5 pound chicken
1 package wide rice noodles
A small hand of ginger
1 large onion
1 small carrot
Spices: star anise, cinnamon stick (preferably Vietnamese cassia), peppercorns, cloves, fennel seed
Fish sauce
Fried shallots

Fresh herbs: scallions, cilantro, Thai basil, saw-leaf herb, Bay leaf (optional)
Mung bean sprouts
Lime wedges
Fresh Thai chiles

This is the dream list for a homemade bowl of pho ga. Decent shortcuts include using good-quality, prepared stock and the meat of a rotisserie chicken. If you keep a box of premixed spice packets in your pantry (they look like big teabags), you can infuse plain chicken stock with Vietnamese flavors in 20 minutes. I've been known to enjoy a bowl of pho with only scallions for garnish, but each additional herb really does make a huge difference.

When buying rice noodles for this soup, look for the words banh pho ga on the label. If you're lucky enough to find fresh ones, you'll just need to immerse them for 10 or 15 seconds in very hot water. Dried noodles require 2 to 3 minutes of boiling.

I have a wide, extremely sharp cleaver that eases right through chicken bones. Halving chickens is also super simple if you have good kitchen shears. If you don't have a pair...get some. One of the must useful tools ever. Look for the heavy-duty ones with a round indentation at the base of the blades; that's what allows you to snip through the ribs and along the backbone. For those who think this all too much, just go ahead and buy chicken parts (bone-in!), but be sure to simmer the meat for only 30 or 40 minutes before stripping it off the bones. Having exposed bone marrow extracts more flavor. Besides, anyone who's tried to remove a whole chicken from a pot of simmering water can vouch for the wisdom of chicken halves or parts.

If you can, throw in a few extra chicken wings or, best of all, a couple of feet.

My family never bothered to strain the soup. All the aromatics and bones sink to the bottom of the pot, and we'd just ladle the soup from the top. If you prefer, though, you can strain the stock and reheat.

Vinegared onions are a favorite topping that's rarely available in restaurants. To make your own:
1. Slice an onion very thinly.
2. Drizzle generously with white vinegar.
3. Stir in lots of coarsely ground black pepper.
4. Let stand for 10 minutes and then serve alongside the herb platter.

Arrange sprigs of the fresh herbs, lime wedges, bean sprouts and chiles on large platters for finishing the soup at the table. Set a big bottle of fish sauce right on the table, too, because this is a Vietnamese meal, after all.

I like to pour boiling water (from cooking the noodles) over the bean sprouts to blanch them so they aren't hard and cold in the soup. (Shhhh, don't tell my Saigon-born mom. That's a Northern trick that I adopted after leaving home.)

For each diner, place a small nest of noodles in a large, preheated bowl. Cover with very hot stock and add a handful of shredded chicken. Sprinkle with chopped scallions, chopped cilantro and fried shallots. Let guests fine-tune their bowls with herbs and other flavorings as desired.

What do you do when the rain won't relent, when those gorgeous bay windows welcome in the wind, and when staying home in your pajamas is not only comfortable but life-saving?

Why, make soup, of course!

Soup of the Day

Yesterday's soup highlighted a lucky pantry find -- a forgotten can of Italian white beans. First into the pot went a lonely though generously proportioned carrot, two stalks of celery, a tight-skinned onion, and the final sprigs of holiday herbs: oregano, thyme, rosemary, and parsley. After these were sauteed to fragrant softness, in followed chicken stock, hand-torn plum tomatoes plus their juices, and those toothsome white beans.

I let the pot simmer for as long as it took to read a few chapters from The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency. For an extra chapter, I tossed in some leftover roasted potatoes, the last of the red wine jus from the New Year's rib roast, then any and all dark greens hiding out in the fridge. That meant, for this pot, some slightly wilted mustard and a wedge of ever hardy cabbage.

Sense a theme here? A simmering soup pot is the best way to clean out your kitchen while steaming up your windows. Slice some bread, pull out the biggest mugs you have, and -- voila! -- the best food ever for curling up on the couch.

Mandu Soup

Around now, the first of the year, is also the time to enjoy ddeok mandu guk, Korean dumplings served in a simple broth. My friend Jineui invited me over to her brand-spanking-new kitchen in Sacramento to celebrate the start of a delicious 2008. Her promise to make mandu was all I needed to hop in the car.

Some dedicated cooks still make their mandu dough by hand, but many just buy thick, round prepared potsticker wrappers. (Be sure to look for “potsticker” on the label; “gyoza” or “wonton” wrappers are too thin for the distinctively chewy mandu texture.)

Jineui’s filling starts with ground beef and tofu that's been crushed finely between her fingers. She blanches bean sprouts then chops them. She adds minced cabbage, salt, pepper, and not much else. No sesame oil for her (“makes them taste funny”), but she does take time to squeeze moisture out of the vegetables. An egg wash helps seal the half-moons, and then the dumplings go into bamboo steamers lined with cabbage leaves.

(Photo by Jasmine Lee)

Serve the first batch of mandu straight from the steamer with dipping sauce. Serve the next few batches in bowls of clear stock with a light sprinkling of green onions and maybe some nori or egg strips if you're wanting to be fancy. Freeze the other few hundred or so mandu to eat through the rest of the winter. (I have one friend blessed with a mother who visits once a year and leaves about 2,000 or so homemade dumplings in their garage freezer before heading back across the Pacific.)

You can read how different families ring in the new year with mandu at the Kimchi Mamas. The Asia Society posted a simple recipe from the Korean National Tourism Organization, about as official as it gets for a humble dumpling, but a much more detailed recipe with helpful technique shots and lessons learned from past mistakes appears at My Korean Kitchen.

Oxtail Soup

Another Korean treat, ox-tail soup, is as easy as they come: Dump a few pounds of bones in a pot, add water plus a healthy pinch of salt, and then simmer for six hours, three if you're in a hurry. Jineui, always going the extra mile, likes to blanche her bones first for a clearer stock. During their long simmering, the bones give off their milky white goodness into a supremely flavorful broth. Serve with a spicy sesame seed dipping sauce. For those of us who live on the edge (fault lines and BSE be damned!) a bowl of liquified marrow manages to be both comforting and decadent at the same time.

What happens if you leave the pot over the wok burner instead of the special, low-flamed simmer burner? Umm...add more water and know that a few crispy brown bits floating around just means more flavor.

Vietnamese Crab Soup

On the more labor intensive side of soups comes one of my favorite Vietnamese dishes. Few restaurants even attempt to offer bun rieu, and a mere handful get it close to right. After feasting on Dungeness, I make broth with crab shells, shrimp shells and pork bones. Tomatoes add brightness, fried tofu offers some chewiness and, for old-school folks like me, cubes of freshly coagulated blood punctuate with silky richness. There's a raft of crab and shrimp bound with egg that hovers over rice noodles. And, finally, there are platters at the table piled high with sprigs of fresh mint and rau ram, chiffonade of cabbage and banana blossom, wedges of lime, tiny but fearless bird eye's chiles, and a dollop or two of shrimp paste to provide those layers of flavor that make Vietnamese food so distinctly fresh and complex.

So...what if you don't want to spend a day at the stove? Then head over to Pho King in East Oakland for a proper bowl. Di Da, one of my favorite Vietnamese restaurants in San Jose, an excellent establishment that happens to be vegetarian, also offers a wonderful, satisfying interpretation of bun rieu.

Pho King
638 International Boulevard, Oakland
(510) 444-0448

Di Da
2597 Senter Road, San Jose
(408) 998-8826

Soupsong

In my last love note to soups, I'm pointing you to the best resource ever for recipes celebratory and everyday, favorite and obscure. I fell hard for Pat Solley the "Soup Lady" a decade ago, while we were trapped in a car among the hills of West Virginia. Her job at the J. Edgar Hoover Building kinda, sorta freaked me out, but her dedication to all things brothy tugged at my heart. Of course, my stomach was never in doubt -- Pat knows more about soup history, traditions, tales, jokes and, of course, recipes from around the world than anyone else I've met. It's rare to find someone who can quote Herodotus and Bob Dylan in the same breath while cooking with all four burners going at once. She's now ensconced far away in Paris, but fortunately I keep warm with her Soupsong website and her excellent book An Exaltation of Soups.

(Illustration by D.C. Bloom)

A recent lunch with a caravan of hungry friends reminded me of the insurmountable difference between eating in America and eating in Vietnam. Even when the food is excellent, even with folks I love, even when the weather is as freaky hot as it's been this week.

Expansive menus, with dishes numbering into the three digits, and the a la carte approach to dining in the West culminated again in an experience that's difficult for me to reconcile with Vietnamese food: every single person at the table was eating something completely different.

My bowl of noodles was wedged between a dish of curry on the left and grilled beef with rice paper on the right. Across from me were fried frog legs, and at the end of the table was a pile of pork chops. When such radically different dishes are slung onto a table, the spirit of the food itself is lost.

Restaurants in Vietnam tend to specialize in one, two, maybe three variations on a single dish. Everyone in the restaurant, let alone everyone at the table, is slurping soup or wrapping shrimp together. If different courses are served, they come family style, and everyone shares from the middle of the table.

As for true family style, when the Tran clan gathers, we'll clear out the living room furniture, sit in a huge circle on the floor, and place multiple platters of the same dish to share in the middle. There's no such thing as a buffet for the cousins to pick and choose.

Then again...where would we be without American individuality? The freedom to choose, the freedom to express our inner desires, the freedom to break out of the circle, the freedom to be alone.

Clockwise around the table:

Banh hoi, delicate squares of rice noodles, define an entire class of dishes. Here, grilled beef rolls are the savory star.

Duck soup with dried bamboo shoots is a hard-to-find treat.

Shredded duck meat tossed with cabbage falls into the goi category, special salads that start formal meals or accompany congee soup.

Vietnamese "gatorade" made from salted plums and lime juice. An acquired taste for some but most definitely good for your body on the hottest days.

Chicken curry reveals the country's old ties with India and Thailand.

Hearty and spicy, bun bo hue highlights thick, round rice noodles, slices of pork, and chewy nuggets of pig's feet.

Plates of fresh herbs...

...and fresh vegetables define a southern Vietnamese table.

A generous platter of sweetly charred pork chops will feed someone for a week.

Not quite the river prawns promised, but still rich with shrimp brains.

Fried frog legs, one of the restaurant's specialties, are the upscale version of buffalo wings. Lime and black pepper add zest.

The soft, fresh tofu is fried to order.

Spring rolls the New-World way...

...and the Old-World way.

The line out front hints at the lunchtime wait at this very popular restaurant, an excellent place to compose a medley of Vietnamese dishes.

Vung Tau II Restaurant
1750 N Milpitas Blvd.
Milpitas, CA 95035
(408) 934-9327

It's been a long time since I've worshipped anything beyond dumplings or doughnuts on Sunday mornings, but this weekend I joined Stockton's Sikh community at their historic temple on Grant Street. The act of sharing food as spiritual devotion has deep roots in many of the world's religions. At Buddhist temples, serving vegetarian food to the public is a way to raise money for community work. At Sikh temples, offering a meal free to anyone who asks is an act of spiritual generosity mandated by the religion's founders.

As I research immigrant foodways here in Northern California, I've been struck by how temples have emerged as the center of many of these transplanted communities. In the Bay Area, there are many temples where you can experience the intersection of devotional prayers and delicious meals.

Here's a short list of three worth visiting:

Chua Duc Vien
2420 Mclaughlin Avenue (at Tully)
San Jose, California
(408) 993-9158

Chua Duc Vien is the only Buddhist temple run entirely by women in Northern California. The late Thich Dam Luu and the Vietnamese Buddhists she inspired, from small children to elders, raised money to build this temple by collecting and recycling cans, paper and cardboard for years. (Thich is Vietnamese for "Venerable," the title of respect for monks and nuns.) Serving the large and well-established San Jose Vietnamese community, it offers a place of prayer and contemplation every day of the week. You'll see women bowing with incense as part of their daily regimen next to families posing for celebratory portraits.

If you're exploring the nearby Vietnamese enclaves, it's a peaceful place to rest after the bustle of Lion Plaza to the east or the sheen of Grand Century Mall to the north. For those tempting fate, there's a small room to the side of the temple where you can pray for your fortune. Watch those before you to get the knack of tossing the numbered sticks -- it's all about the wrists -- then find a friendly person to translate the corresponding message.

The temple welcomes visitors, and on Sundays, the nuns erect a tent to serve vegetarian versions of popular Vietnamese dishes and special sweets such as banh cam, perfectly round, sesame-sprinkled "orange cakes." On a recent visit, they were serving one of my favorites soups, bun rieu, with thin rice noodles, tofu puffs and fresh tomatoes. The food is neither fancy nor expensive, but all proceeds go to the nuns' community work.

Sikh Gurdwara Sahib
1930 S. Grant Street (at E. 5th)
Stockton, California

This Stockton temple holds a place of pride for California Sikhs. Built on land purchased in 1912, it was the first gurdwara("doorway to the guru") built in the U.S by early immigrants from the Punjab who worked in the nearby orchards and along the transcontinental railway. Since then, many other gurdwaras have been built, including the Gurdwara Sahib in Fremont and the impressive Sri Guru Nanak Gurdwara in Yuba City. All have kitchens that will serve food to anyone who appears at the temple and asks, no matter what time of the day or night. In Stockton, nearly 1,000 people flow through the lunch line every Sunday, and on important holidays, the temple may feed 10,000 to 20,000 visitors.

One of the central institutions of the Sikh religion is the langar, the communal meal where volunteers help prepare, serve and clean. Sharing food emphasizes the equality and brotherhood of the Sikh religion. Requiring all community members and visitors to eat the same food together in the same room at the same time has special significance within the context of India's historical caste system. Prayers and recitations accompany the meal, a reminder of the importance of a contemplative life.

Simple but well-spiced, satisfying vegetarian food comes from the langar's kitchen, including vegetable curries, flatbreads, dal, and fresh salads. Breakfast might be paratha with fenugreek greens, served with a generous dollop of whipped butter. In the afternoon, you might snack on caulifower pakora, dried dates and a selection of sweets with chai. Within the temple, you may also be offered karah prashad, a rich, sweet pudding made from flour, butter and sugar. Served after a priest has recited prayers, the prashad is holy food. Accept the prashad with both hands and be sure to to ask for a small amount if you don't think you can finish all of it.

There is no charge for the food prepared in the langar, and since Sikhs do not proselytize, you needn't worry that their free meals are an attempt to convert you. When you visit a gurdwara, remember to wear clothing that allows you to sit modestly on the floor. Both men and women must cover their hair and remove their shoes before entering.

At the Stockton gurdwara: Making enough roti for a thousand hungry people involves ten women patting and rolling dough from 6 to 10 every Sunday morning.

Wat Mongkolratanaram
a.k.a. The Thai Buddhist Temple
1911 Russell Street (at Martin Luther King, Jr. Way)
Berkeley, California 94703
(510) 849-3419

If you haven't yet been to Berkeley's Thai Temple, then you're missing one of the best community meals in the Bay Area. It's pretty well established, so you'll need to arrive before 11 am to beat the lines. Tables are arranged in long rows in the shade of the temple complex, built with money raised by these weekend feasts. During holidays, dance and song are background to the meal. On regular weekends, it's one of the best places to experience the food-stall feel of Southeast Asia right here in California.

The Thai monks and the amazing women who cook the food have it figured out, from the handy silver tokens to the separate stations for drinks, desserts, soups, rice plates and -- not to be missed -- the papaya salad cut and pounded to order. (Go ahead and ask for it spicy, and don't forget the little marinated crabs.) Other treats include luscious coconut-scallion cakes and lemongrass sausage. During mango season, remember to save space for the sticky rice and fresh mangoes. Fortunately, the stalls pack food to go, so you can enjoy seconds and desserts later.

If you're expecting the best Thai food in the world and if you don't like eating at communal tables...well, this isn't the scene for you. But if you can appreciate real people cooking and sharing their food with you, then the Thai temple meals are a wonderful experience. Plan on going with friends and sharing. No subdued piety here. Since the dining area is set up outside and since the food is not part of a service, it's a casual, fun meal that still goes to a very good cause.

Okay, enough with all the pho.

I think it's time for folks to try some other Vietnamese dishes. There are hundreds of snacks and soups, both in Vietnam proper and in Little Saigons around the world, but for reasons I'm still trying to understand, both restaurateurs and diners settle into predictable menus.

Savory bits of shrimp, mung beans and scallion oil top little steamed rice cakes.

Vietnamese cuisine today is where Chinese food was in the 50s, though some decade soon I'm sure restaurants will begin expanding beyond summer rolls, spring rolls, shaking beef and sizzling/happy/singing crepes. Perhaps it will be when we let go of the Western kitchen's saute line, or when the rubber plantation decor finally goes the way of the tiki room, or when tourists from Vietnam can visit here as readily as we fly there.

Until then, I'd like to encourage you to try two of my favorite hot-weather dishes.

Now that you're familiar with rice noodles in broth, go enjoy a plate of banh cuon and banh beo. Vietnamese cooks coax rice grains into endless shapes and textures, and these two dishes are classic ways to enjoy the cuisine's distinctive layering of flavors.

Banh Cuon

The best banh cuon are made to order. The set-up is simple: thin fabric stretched over the mouth of a wide pot, a few inches of simmering water, an oiled surface for rolling. A flat ladle and a long wooden stick are the only gadgets you need. Unfortunately, the skill required to coax a thin rice batter into a transparent round of edible silk must be passed from generation to generation.

Watch how a master steams and rolls an order of banh cuon:

Wrapping savory fillings, such as pork or mushroom, is the most common way to use the steamed rice sheets, though other versions have ingredients sprinkled above plain rolls rather than wrapped within them. Fresh herbs, like young mint leaves, and fried shallots should appear somewhere nearby. Just before you eat the rice rolls, you'll flood them with a dilute version of that ubiquitous dipping sauce made from nuoc mam.

Banh Beo

If you steam rice batter in tiny dishes rather than on a thin layer of fabric, then you'll have piles of cute banh beo. Something magical happens in the steamer to create a dimple in each round, perfect for holding bits of flavorful ingredients. The classic toppings are delicate in texture while concentrated in taste: dried shrimp cooked to neon orange, mung beans ground to golden fluffiness, perfect dice of crisp pork rind, or scallions wilted just until sweet. The same thin sauce flavors these lovely dimpled rice cakes.

My fleet of dipping bowls -- only 39 cents each at Kamei on Clement -- serve double duty as molds for banh beo.

Here's the easiest way to eat banh beo: use chopsticks to nudge each round onto a soup spoon, make sure there's a representative amount of sauce and topping included, and then slurp the generous mouthful in one, happy bite.

EATING OUT

If you live in Oakland, you're not far from a restaurant that serves both banh cuon and banh beo.

Tay Ho Restaurant
344 12th Street (@ Webster)
Oakland, CA 94607
(510) 836-6388

COOKING CLASS

If you want to learn how to work with rice batters and how to make banh beo in your own kitchen (so easy!) then join cookbook author Andrea Nguyen and yours truly for a special hands-on cooking class. It's a weekend class sponsored by Slow Food at Terry Paulding's amazing teaching kitchen in Emeryville.

In this class, we'll also teach you how to work with dried rice paper and how to make truly crisp banh xeo. Vietnamese salads, sweets, beer, and salty plum limeade round out the menu.

Vietnamese Transformations of Rice
Sunday, May 20, 2007
5 pm to 8 pm
at Creative Kitchen
1410D 62nd Street, Emeryville, CA
Slow Food members $50/nonmembers $60.

Andrea has a detailed flyer (pdf) at her website. You can also contact Frankie Whitman at fwhitman at pacbell.net for more information or to register.

Hope to see you in class!

I am a person who has tasted a lot of different foods during my life. Before my trip last month to Vietnam, I had only traveled to Europe and around the U.S. so my experiences are limited to those places, but we live in a global village and there are lots of foods available in California, right? Within two days of being in Vietnam, I had tasted five new fruits that I had never tasted before. Most of them I had never even seen or heard of either.

To say that going to Vietnam rocked my taste buds would be an understatement. This trip awakened me to so many new flavor profiles and tastes -- I know that my culinary life will not be the same after this trip.

Here are some of the fruits that were new to me in Vietnam.

RAMBUTAN

Rambutans get the award for being the most flashy fruit that I tasted with their hairy, uninviting exterior. Pop them open with a knife, and inside you find a white, gelatinous ball around a relatively large pit. Related to lychees, and very similar in flavor, rambutans are delicious. They have a delicate flavor, and when they are ripe they are quite sweet with a good amount of tartness.

CUSTARD APPLE or SUGAR APPLE

Throughout the trip, everyone we met referred to these as custard apples, however now that I have the benefit of the world wide web, it seems that they are more popularly referred to as sugar apples. They have a bumpy green skin that turns black as it ripens. The inside texture reminded me of a ripe banana - very custardy in consistency. It's a sweet fruit with shiny black pits that you spit out as you eat through it.

DRAGONFRUIT

Dragonfruit is a beautiful sight. On the outside, the bright pink you see above. On the inside, a white fruit with very small edible black seeds. I have been told that when these are at their peak of ripeness they are quite delicious. But the dragonfruits that I tried were rather unremarkable, mostly watery with a little sweetness and acidity. Maybe the gorgeous exterior set up unreasonable expectations?

SOURSOP

Most of the time that I saw a fruit I didn't know, I would buy one from the vendor and ask them to cut it up on site so that I could figure out what it was and if I liked it. I spied these soursops, and knowing that they were the favorite fruit of a friend, tried to have the vendor cut one up for me. She made a couple of universal signs which were basically telling me to get lost, and refused to sell me anything. I found out later that soursop needs quite a bit of preparation: one must go through the inside fruit and remove the fibrous parts and the seeds before it's ready to eat.

A couple days later, a fruit vendor prepared it properly for us and I was able to taste it. The flavor is quite acidic, with a strong sweet fruit overtone that makes the entire mouthful quite pleasant. Due to it's consistency, soursop lends itself to shakes, drinks, and ice creams quite nicely.

ROSE APPLE

When I first saw this fruit, I posted a photo on my blog to find out what it was. When the identification came back, a couple of commenters gave me their opinions of the flavor. My favorite comment stated "It is a wonderful sweet fruit, which has the odd texture of styrofoam to me". Styrofoam is right. They are unusually lightweight as there's just not much to them. The flavor is close to an apple, though it wasn't my favorite.

GREEN MANGO

Though I eat mangoes like a fiend when I can find them, I had never tasted a green mango. Much like green papaya, it's quite astringent and sour. I most liked it when wrapped in a spring roll and providing a contrast to other flavors on a dish. Not to be completely childish about this, but I think I would like a green mango much more if it didn't have the word MANGO in it. The word mango conjures up a wonderful, sweet, sensual flavor that is one of my favorite things in the world. And a green mango is nothing like it's ripe cousin. So maybe one day I will get over this whole issue and learn to appreciate green mangoes for what they are.

There were other fruits I tried for which I don't have photographs. The jackfruit is an enormous fruit, and the only way to sensibly buy it is in small bags already taken apart. It's not as smelly as durian, but it is smelly enough that one hotel I was in had a large sign in the lobby declaring "No Durian or Jackfruit Allowed in Rooms". And there's a reason for that. If the smell doesn't bother you, the flavor is very banana-like mixed with a slight citrus flavor. I loved it.

Passionfruit was my official fruit of this trip. I would buy them whenever I saw them (which was not often) and gobbled them up before I had to share. I don't remember what exactly was in the passionfruit cocktails that I drank for three nights in a row, but they were heavenly, and I am going to have to find a way to recreate them.

Mangosteens were another fruit I had never tasted. The mangosteen has a hard, dark purple exterior and a bright green stem - kind of like an eggplant but smaller and harder. Inside, you find a segmented fruit which you can pry out and eat, discarding the seeds as you come upon them. The mangosteen just tastes like the tropics to me. The juice exploded in your mouth as you eat the pieces, and it's a sweet, full flavor with just enough acid to keep it interesting. I can't wait to have mangosteens again.

I haven't done much research here in the Bay Area, but am curious if I am going to be able to get any of these fruits here. From what I've read, fresh mangosteens are going to be impossible. But what about rambutan? jackfruit? or my beloved passionfruit?

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!