Bun or Pho!

On Sunday, a couple of friends took us to a Vietnamese restaurant down East London. I have never tried Vietnamese food before and so I didn't know what kind of dishes they would serve. The most common dish is of course, the Vietnamese spring roll, but even then I had never tried the traditional spring roll!

For starters, we ate traditional spring rolls, which had cold shredded cucumber, carrots, meat, rice noodles, leek and rolled up with rice paper pastry. It was dipped in a hoi sin sauce with crusty peanuts. Also had traditional egg pancake, which is a large crispy egg omelete, but crispy and it had a filling of beansprouts, chicken, prawns, onions. Apparently its nice to put some mint leaves and lettuce and then dip it in some sweet chilli sauce. The final starter, was a rolled up leave with meat in. We are presented with a dish of lettuce leaves, a branch of mint leaves and pickled vegetables. We wrapped up these ingredients and ate it just like a peking duck and pancakes. It tasted so refreshing and tasty!

My main course was a raw steak and chicken pho, pronounced 'fur'. Pho is basically rice noodles in a bowl with vegetables and a nice soup base. There were slices of raw steak on the top of the bowl of noodles and you had to mix it into the soup, so the hot soup cooks the raw meat. The taste of the meat was tender and sweet. The soup was meat stock, I had put in raw beansprouts and mint into the bowl and so these vegetables made the whole dish taste fresh, crunchy and tasty.

My hubby had a 'bun', pronounced how it's spelt. Bun is a Vietnamese noodles salad ad the noodles is served cold. There were barbequed meat, some pork jerk stuff, cold shredded vegetables and he had to mix all this with the sweet chilli sauce. I must say that I prefer his dish! I liked the sweet and refreshing taste of the combined ingredients.

I learnt a lot about Vietnamese food and I think I will try to learn more when I go to Vietnam later this year. We are going to attend a cookery course there and so I will try and note down the kind of food they cook there and try and get some recipes fom the teachers. I might even try and bring back some dried ingredients which we cannot buy over here!

I concluded that I like Vietnamese food. The cuisine gives a refreshing, cool flavour to your taste buds and you are not eating too much coconut, chilli or just one type of ingredient, unlike other cuisines.

Next time when I go to eat Vietnamese food, I am not sure whether to pick a 'bun' or a 'pho'! At least I know what they are though!