Da Lat, Aside from Rain

I saw Da Lat mostly from underneath a curtain of rain. And not the usual bathwater-mist tropical spray that only serves to decrease the ratio of sweat to water on your body, but big droplets of freezing rain that felt like hail on a motorcycle. For the first two days, it had the decency to rain only after 2pm like a good rainy-season city, but after that, the starting time started creeping forward slowly until it was raining at 9:30am. While I paid good money and risked my life on a scooter to get soaked underneath several actual waterfalls in the area, it wasn’t the plan to ruin all my electronics and irreparably mildew-ify my shoes. So our last two days were spent mostly holing up and listening to thunder.

Before that happened, there was a nem nướng house. Actually, there were several, all on the same block, a phenomenon common to Vietnam, where the same types of food cluster and the restaurants copy each other’s names. But this nem nướng house, Nem Nướng Dũng Lộc, was the smallest of the group, the most crowded, and smelled the best, as it was 30% filled with one guy holding armfuls of nem on sticks and rotating the ones already on the grill. I don’t normally like nem nướng that much, probably because it’s the flagship dish at the only Vietnamese restaurant all the white people know about in my hometown, but the smell of grilling pork won me over. Also, the spread was impressive: nem, fried corn, daikon, carrots, cucumbers, pickled onions, and a heaping – and, we found, refillable – platter of fresh green mountain-grown leaves and chives. (The Mekong Delta had lots of vegetables too, but I found that they tended to be bitter, probably because they were grown near/in the floating garbage dumps known as the distributaries of the Mekong River. They may be the livelihood of a region, and they may be beautiful and muddy and picturesque, but I watched way too many people throw their household trash in them, pee in them, dump gasoline into them, and otherwise defile them to want to think too hard of eating out of it too.) Anyway, Da Lat’s sweet, fresh vegetables were a welcome change, and the ratio of vegetables to grilled meat was sufficiently high as to feel like I was eating a healthy salad (dipped in thick peanutty liver sauce, of course).

Another restaurant, whose sign lauded wonton noodle soup, whose tables were filled with wonton noodle soup, and whose name suggested you’d better at the least get noodles, had a menu about 6 pages long, but, obediently, I got the wonton noodle soup. It was a compact bowl covered with tough pork slices like papier-mache, but opened up to reveal excellent soft pork wontons and clearly homemade noodles. Just while I was sitting there – and I was eating fast that day so my vegetarian companion could eat soon too – the staff brought about 20 drawerfuls (yes, drawers – like in a chest of drawers) of fresh noodles in little rolls down from the third floor to keep up with demand.

A breakfast nook whose defining feature was two ladies with takoyako-like pans, squatting outside and deftly pressing two quail eggs together in pots to make mochi-sized cakes, served a plate of five such cakes that were unremarkable until dipped in the sweet, pork-ball-infused broth. When my companion notified the water he was a vegetarian, the waiter disappeared for about 2 seconds into the back with the broth, and returned with broth sans pork balls. Magically vegetarian!

The young waiter at one snail restaurant, which (like all good snail restaurants) had tanks full of the shellfish on offer at the front of their restaurant being sprayed with water periodically, handed us, straightfacedly, an English menu, a single sheet that consisted of beef, chicken, and seafood fried rice. I looked at him like he was crazy, which he was. “What about the snails?” I asked him, gesturing at the entire side wall of the restaurant. He looked at me blankly and pointed at the fried rice on the menu again. I finally had to ask for the Vietnamese menu, which listed all the snails by name with four options of preparation of each and was about 10 pages long. I wonder if tourists walk in there and actually think that fried rice is all the restaurant serves, and the snails are all for decoration. (The food was OK, but they overcook their large snails to rubber.)

One night was so wet that it was completely impossible to go out, so we made a dinner of yellow kiwi, avocado, jackfruit, orange, and the stuffed vacuum-packed squid I got at the Hakodate airport. The squid was underwhelming (as vacuum-packed squid should be) but Da Lat fruit, like Da Lat vegetables, is spectacular. Everything grows round and fat and juicy. Even the avocado, which I wasn’t expecting much out of because huge avocados tend to be watery, was almost a meat dish by itself. The hotel owner, watching this strange dinner theater, had no comments about the airport squid, but was scandalized by us daring to put salt on avocado (instead of blending it up with sugar and condensed milk to make a smoothie). He declined a sample.

Review: Destination 3 (Dongbei)

China and I have a long-standing love-hate relationship.

At the end of the summer in 2013, when I compiled my top ten favorite meals from a trip through Japan, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia, I was surprised to find that four of them were from China. I forget how good the food can be when I’m distracted by how difficult China is to exist in on a day-to-day basis.

I’ve spent so many afternoons getting honked at by buses, pushed on the shoulder by crossing guards, jostled in front of by pretty much anyone joining a ‘line’, cigarette smoke blown in my face, spat in front of, told that an establishment does not in fact have what is printed on their menu or that it is actually twice as much as it states in print, only to end up, at the end of the day, eating local cold-water river fish lovingly stuffed with herbs and spit-grilled to perfection, or dumplings made with rare fungus and young leaves collected from the mountainside, or a zillion razor clams steamed in foil, for something under the equivalent of $2-3.

And then I can’t even go home and write about it, because the Chinese government blocks access to Google, Facebook, Blogger, WordPress, Reddit, YouTube, and many more websites that I didn’t know I found indispensable until they weren’t available anymore. For good measure, sometimes the internet just plain stops working altogether, or the people next door start having an earsplitting karaoke party.

So despite spending 75% of my time in China thoroughly annoyed, I keep coming back. And there’s another reason for that. The friend I travel with and visit in China is fluent in Mandarin, which opens up a whole new world to me in terms of access to things tourists don’t generally access, understand, or even know exist. I’ve eaten a variety of snails out of a paper cup in the shantytown district of Shanghai, listened to a blind masseuse thunder about socialism and visas as he elbows my kidneys and cracks my neck alarmingly, visited the North Korean border at Tianchi Lake in Changbaishan Nature Reserve (which required a bewildering number of train, bus and taxi transfers that could never have been deciphered in English), and been able to interrogate-by-proxy every street vendor whose wares are hidden in steamers or behind the counter rather than having to rely on what I can see (a-la-Taiwanese night markets). And while people in public will bodily shove you out of the way to enter a reserved-seats train one second earlier, I admit that the attitude of most once you’re actually in their house or business is brusque but accommodating, and eventually, curious. So I would gather I know more about Chinese food and culture than any other country I’ve visited, even though I still speak very little Mandarin, can only recognize a few characters, and never feel the pull to return to China once I’ve left.

Again, though, I keep doing it. During this two-week trip I visited the northeast (Dongbei) region, visiting Changchun, Yanji, and Baihe (the gateway town for Changbaishan). Changchun, the provincial capital, was my home base. Yanji is a majority-ethnic-Korean city near the North Korean border (apparently a very porous border as that border goes) and Baihe is basically a resort town built up to serve the hordes of tourists visiting Changbaishan (though, confusingly, they centered it over 30km away from the park).

I expected Baihe to taste like, well, a boring overpriced resort town, but actually I had three of my most interesting meals there, which was fitting given that this was also where I felt the resulting ‘earthquake’ of North Korea’s most recent nuclear test. Downstairs from our hotel, there was a restaurant who served, on two separate nights, a dumpling feast consisting of rare fungus dumplings and young, dark green mountain leaf dumplings, and a plate of small whole cold water river fish in spicy garlic-cilantro sauce. We enjoyed these new flavors (the former tasted like a Chinese medicine shop smells – in a good way) while listening to a couple scream at each other outside a convenience store across the street. I knew that I had failed to adequately suck the fish heads clean of meat when the waitress asked me, “Are you used to Chinese food?” which I know really meant “You eat that fish wrong!”

Yanji was a stop we were looking forward to, hoping to get some unique Korean food, but what we ended up with was naengmyon (cold noodle) soup with a random watermelon slice in it for dinner, and kimbap (Korean rolled sushi) slathered in pink mayonnaise for lunch the next day. Happily, once I wiped the Pepto-Bismol covering off, the roll was very good, stuffed with fish eggs and radish.

I had plenty of time in Changchun to explore, as well as a kitchen at home to cook with, but I am ashamed to report I used the kitchen for only one purpose: to hardboil duck, goose, and wild chicken eggs that I bought from what they call the bazaar. The egg lady’s wares were the first thing I saw in the massive stadium-like indoor market, and she seemed to have every kind of egg from every kind of bird in the region. She didn’t have an ostrich egg, but I also didn’t have 40 people to share it with, so that worked out fine. I learned after cooking them that goose eggs > duck eggs > wild chicken eggs >>>>> regular chicken eggs, mostly because of the high yolk-white ratio, which is unfortunate for me given that I spent years in Long Beach searching for duck eggs and finding nothing.

I heard that Changchun sources its seafood from North Korea, which is dubiously legal at best, but is a good explanation for why a very landlocked capital has so much shellfish on offer, from razor clams to cockroach-looking lobster hybrids to crayfish to tiny blue crabs to large red crabs to oysters. On two separate occasions, I bought heavy foil-wrapped packets bursting with razor clams and regular clams steamed in spicy red broth with accompanying glass noodles for between $2 and $3, and not one single clam was bad. They were all sweet and chewy with tender innards, and I ate so many at once that my mouth started to tingle (whether from a latent shellfish allergy that only emerges when I eat 50 clams or from the mala spice blend used, I’m not sure). I also tried a xiaokao place’s specialty roast fish, which came out on a scorching black platter and was an incredibly frustrating meal because the fish flesh was so sweet and flaky, and the skin so blackened and deep spiced, but the bones so numerous and tiny that they pricked me in the gums like little Novocaine needles while being too small for me to find and remove before they pricked me. I sucked that fish clean enough to avoid any passively judgmental comments by our waitress, though.

Another thing Changchun should not by rights have, but does anyway, is a wide array of fruit, including tropical fruit like mango, rambutan, durian, starfruit, and papaya. Every day for the last week I was here I would stop at the same mango juice stand and wonder why its room-temperature thick sweetness was so much better than mango juice in countries where mango-juice-vendors could literally reach up from their carts and pick mangoes from the trees.

Though my friend told me that Changchun normally has much more street food, and that many of the alleys and carts were closed for inspection, one alley did open on the last night and provide me with something I’d never seen before: a naan-adjacent blackened flatbread cooked stuck to the side of a kiln, lined before cooking with seaweed and pork. It crackled between the teeth more like papadam than like naan and was sweet for some reason, but not that sickly fake-buttery sweet many Asian bakeries slather on their bread and cakes. More like honey. And the lack of street food is less bothersome when many restaurants retain street-food-level pricing and cluster in open-doored rows along narrow streets, or create permanent stands in bazaars like the one featuring the egg lady. These close-enough-to-street-food establishments served me such interesting meals as bright orange carrot-infused wheat noodles with a thick mushroom dipping sauce, a hot, flaky fresh hamburger-sized pastry filled with ground pork and overflowing with very pickled sour vegetables, a miniature bright red numbing Sichuan-style hot pot with white fish and huge piles of potato, bamboo shoots, and leaves, garlic-topped grilled oysters, and durian pancake.

When we did go to fancier sit-down restaurants, it was usually to escape Chinese food and overpay for things like fig, goat cheese, and pine nut pizza, or bibimbap infused with cheese. I may pooh-pooh those things from the comfort and diversity of my home in the USA, but when my mouth burns from days of hot/numbing spice and endless oil, I will absolutely savor figs, pine nuts, and goat cheese, even if the pizza dough is lackluster by almost any standard. Also, what pizza place in the US would accompany their pizza with passionfruit-calamansi juice or a blueberry smoothie?

Today (well, yesterday: remember, Chinese firewall?), I board a plane to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, suitcase stuffed with dried strawberries and blueberries and freeze-dried figs (China is awesome at dried fruits, especially when it refrains from adding sugar). Ho Chi Minh City is one of my favorite places, food-wise, in the world, and I think I’ve eaten much of what it has to offer during my previous two trips, but this time I’m going to try and go further afield to the Mekong Delta and the Vietnamese-Cambodian border at Ha Tien and Chau Doc, as well as to Mui Ne and Da Lat. No matter what happens, I’ll make sure to eat lots of snails.

Custard Apples and the Capital of Food

It’s been tough, culinarily speaking, for the past week or so, being on the relatively rural East Coast of Taiwan. Non-culinarily-speaking, of course, it’s been wonderful. I spent 80 miles with my butt on a scooter, surrounded 360 degrees around with expansive ocean views, carpeted with palm trees, anchored by endless mountains. Puffy clouds stuck to the mountains like glue, never quite making it over to cover the sun that was slowly cooking me alive. To escape it, I ‘had’ to take a random side path in the general direction of the ocean, hoping to find a swimmable beach. I found a secluded cove sparsely spotted with students of a Taiwanese surfing class, with black volcanic sand and regular, rolling, body-surfable waves. Standing ankle deep in the water, spooning the insides out of a smooth-yet-gritty custard apple and spitting the seeds into the waves, I considered aborting my circumnavigation of Taiwan right there and just planting in Dulan for the remainder of my week and a half. Instead, after the custard apple had gone, we continued up the coast to Yuli and back down the East Rift Valley to search out an indigenous restaurant that first turned us away for not having reservations, and then, upon seeing how burnt and exhausted we were, squeezed us into a table with strangers and served us a set meal (that, unfortunately, was so salty my tastebuds died for a full day afterward, but the pleasure here was in the journey).

Taitung itself’s saving grace, as advertised, was the plentiful and cheap fruit, particularly the aforementioned custard apple. I bought exclusively from a lady who took it upon herself to crack the top off the first custard apple of my life and scooped out the first spoonful for me. (At least, I told her it was my first custard apple. I’ve had soursop, which a perfunctory Google search tells me is the same thing, but if it is, the version is Taitung is so much better as to be effectively a different species.) As for the rest of the food, I should have just stuck with whatever was pulled out of the sea that day, because my best meal there was a single, palm-sized grilled whole fish served with lemon and salt.

I’m in Tainan now, though, where I essentially fell out of my hotel’s sliding glass doors and into a famous bowl of noodles with black vinegar and shrimp broth. Served with saucy pork-topped sauteed yam leaves, both dishes were aggressively garlicky, but other than that, mild and understated enough to stand the test of a leisurely half-hour lunch. And coming out THAT door, I was bombarded with dessert shops (Hokkaido-style cheesecake, cupcakes, soft serve, gelato, milk tea ice cream…) juice bars (with ingredients from dragonfruit to osmanthus to kiwi), smoking grills full of skewers, and all manner of whole, chopped, raw, grilled, boiled, and/or souped seafood. Keep in mind too that this was 3:00pm, a time when most Taiwanese in other cities are deep into midafternoon heat-induced siesta time and all their restaurants are shuttered.

So I’m guessing Tainan will be as overwhelming to my tastebuds as the East Coast scenery was to my eyes.

Drawn Fruit and Real Fruit

I am passing a pineapple bun bakery at the same time as the sky opens up to let out all of its rain. This is lucky for a number of reasons: one, rain hasn’t sullied Taipei’s triple-digit temperatures all week; two, this pineapple bun bakery has had a line every time I’ve walked by it and is deserted now; and three, the bakery has an awning. Serendipity.

I order a bun with butter inside, entirely out of character as I have had less than tasty experiences with pastries in East Asia unexpectedly being full of butter, like butter is a reasonable substitute for whipped cream or custard (it isn’t). But I order it here because it is what the bakery is known for, and far be it from me to turn my back on trying something that hundreds of Shida University students buy bags and bags of every day after class. Even if pineapple buns don’t have any pineapple in them and are so named only for the design on the top of the bread. Even then.

I find upon ordering that I am actually lucky for four reasons, and the fourth is that they’re just pulling a tray of freshly baked buns out of the oven. I get mine and it’s too hot to touch, so I first dangle it by a pinky, then toss it from hand to mouth to hand as I dash the few blocks home.

Oddly, the experience of eating it is heavily atmosphere-dependent. I’m a well-documented taste hardliner, maintaining a laser focus on the objective taste of the food to the exclusion of everything else: if the dish is good, it’s good, period, whether I’m indoors or outdoors, on a plastic stool or a lavish lounge chair or standing at a counter, whether it’s dinnertime or lunchtime, whether I’m melting in the heat or shivering with my hands around a mug of tea.

In the case of this pineapple bun, though, the crunch of the topping may give a sweet contrast to the soft rest of it, but I am well aware that if the cold hard butter didn’t give relief to the soft, fiercely hot bread, exactly mirroring the way the cold, sharp rain gave relief to the fiercely hot, sunny day, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much.

I try hard, in Taroko National Park, to find food that is decent, but failing that, to at least find food that has some qualities that mirror the staggering, photographically uncapturable scale of the precipitous mountains, marble-walled and grotto-pocked gorges, and rushing, deafening slate river, but I can’t, so I allow the food to fade into the background, eating (I assume) like those mysterious creatures who claim they ‘eat to live, not live to eat’. Dumplings, noodle bowls, stir fried vegetables over rice, repeat.

The sole exception to this vacation from foodie-hood is fruit, particularly the peaches and plums sold at the highest bus stop in Taroko (Tienxiang). Women ply the bus stop, fruit in one hand, knife in the other. Without looking down, they cut slices from the fruit and offer them to everyone getting off the bus. The line of people exiting the bus then curves to the right as every single passenger, shocked by the explosive juiciness and flavor of this slice, joins a new line, this time to buy fruit. The fact that the price exceeds US farmers market prices matters not.

I also feast on guava and yellow watermelon slices for breakfast, free from the hostel, and while on the first day I’m savoring every juicy bite, by the third day I feel like it’s entirely normal (yet still wonderful) to wake up and fill up on abundant tropical fruit that just appears on my plate. The bar is set higher now for Taitung to wow me with its famous custard apple (and durian and starfruit and pomelo and real pineapples)!

Dragonfruit: fraternal twins

There are two varieties of dragonfruit (well, three, but the two varieties of purple-skinned dragonfruit are the only ones I've encountered in the wild): white-fleshed and purple-fleshed.

There might only be a psychosomatic difference in flavor, but I'm saying it anyway:

I love purple-fleshed dragonfruit.

Dinner on the Nanning-Hà Nội overnight train

I love it so much I have absolutely no problem posting an unflattering picture of me with purple smeared on my nose after chomping into this dragonfruit like an animal instead of walking three train cars down to the dining car and getting a fork.

It tastes like a raspberry, a kiwi, and a passion fruit had a very flamboyant baby!

The white kind is boring.  Not bad - it's certainly got the edge on lots of fruit - but surprisingly mild.  You've got to be kidding me, fruit: you look like an exotic butterfly or a tropical leaf or, well, a dragon, on the outside and then I cut you open and you're all pasty and taste like a muted kiwi?  Unacceptable.

Nope.

Dragonfruits like to play tricks.

WHAT IS THIS WIZARDRY?
(thanks, Ian Maguire)

I can ALMOST tell the difference from the outside, but not reliably enough.  You'll see me combing Asian fruit markets, holding dragonfruits up to the light, prodding them with my finger, examining their leaves, and peeking down their little dragonfruit navels.

Nanning, China: I am in the background, ready to pounce.

It's not bad enough that I am an abnormally tall white girl in Asia, of course; I also have to molest the poor vendors' wares.  When I come upon one of those stalls that slices one fruit open as an inviting display, I have to forcibly restrain myself from hugging its owner.  Luckily for the comfort zones of fruit vendors everywhere, it's not a great idea to slice open a display fruit in a hot, humid, buggy climate.

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Where to find dragonfruit in Orange County:

Many places.  Dragonfruit is getting more mainstream in the States.  They have it at H-Marts, 99 Ranches, Siêu Thị Thuận Pháts, and other big Asian grocery chains around the area.  Occasionally I'll even see a few sad specimens in the 'tropical' section at Ralph's.

Where to find purple dragonfruit in Orange County:

Like for good rambutan, you may have to go to the smaller Vietnamese fruit markets (again, anything whose sign says 'trái cây').  I have gotten lucky exactly once, when a close inspection of the leaves yielded me a goldmine of purple goodness.

How to tell the difference:

This is NOT foolproof, but here are some hints:

The leaves on the purple-fleshed ones tend to be a little shorter and more curled.  The give in the rind is a little softer: the difference between white-fleshed ones and purple-fleshed ones is like the difference between a ripe Clementine and a ripe satsuma.  Finally, the white-fleshed ones tend to be more oval and elongated, while the purple-fleshed ones are squatter.

How to eat:

If you want to be all fancy, you can cut them in half, scoop the flesh out with a spoon, cut it into cubes, and pour the cubes into the skin, which now serves as a bowl.  Personally, I just eat it in the messiest, least polite way possible - it gets it into my mouth faster.

Rambutan: the realization

The catalyst for my philosophy about food is a southeast Asian fruit that looks like an inflamed sea urchin and tastes like a hybrid between a grape and a coconut.

When you saw this, your first thought was to put it in your mouth, right?

This is rambutan: from the Indonesian rambut (hair).

I first saw rambutan piled in a barrel on an eastern Indonesian street in 2006.  A smiling, betel-nut chewing man watched over it casually from his spot leaning against the bank.  He was flanked by people selling stinkbomb-like durians*, fragrant stacks of jackfruit, and bunches of greyish longans and lychees, but I made a beeline for the rambutan as though guided by a string.

This is the Jayapura street market at night.  Rambutan man works by day and stands at far right.

It was still my first week in the country and I barely knew how to say numbers.  We communicated with hand signals.  Rp. 20,000 per kilo. 

I paid, took my baggie to the beach, and plopped down on the sand staring at these angry-looking, spiny red orbs, which stared inscrutably back at me. 

It helps that inside they look like eyeballs.

See, I had no one to teach me.  No one told me I had to peel them or that the seeds were poisonous** or that I had to scrape the surface of the seed with my teeth to get a corkscrew of perfect fruit, otherwise the flesh would just collapse in a sea of delicious juice.

But I figured it out, and, well...

AWESOME!

Here I am realizing that if I hadn’t spun a globe randomly with my finger on it and if I hadn’t decided to actually follow my finger and if I hadn’t been able to somehow get a work visa for one of the most war-torn provinces in Indonesia and if I hadn’t come to work for this particular company and seen this particular rambutan-selling man, I may never have had this experience.

I thought, and still think: all I knew up until then was pears and apricots and apples and sometimes the odd mango. It was easy to think I knew what my favorite fruit was, but (I realized as I swallowed the rambutan flesh) there was no way I could have, and there will never be a way I can, until I’ve tried every fruit in the world.

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Where to find rambutan in Orange County:

Since Orange County is home to Little Saigon, the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside of Hồ Chí Minh City, the most reliable places to find rambutan tend to be tiny Vietnamese fruit markets (anything with the words trái cây on the awning should do).  In Vietnamese, the word for rambutan is chôm chôm (pronounced chohm chohm).  The two I frequent (that also happen to be right next to each other) are:

Trái Cây Ngon

8920 Bolsa Ave

Westminster, CA 92683

Thai Son

8922 Bolsa Ave

Westminster, CA 92683

Occasionally, Albertsons, Wholesome Choice, or Whole Foods will carry them, but the price will be anywhere from doubled to sextupled what it should be.  Depending on the season, a Vietnamese fruit market will charge between $2.50 and $6 per pound, while I once witnessed Whole Foods charging $18.99!  Not only that, the ones in the traditional supermarkets tend to be brown and wilted.  Better brown and wilted rambutan than no rambutan - their thick skin makes them hardy and resistant to overripening - but if you have the choice, take advantage of the fresh, cheap ones.

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*Spoiler: durians are delicious despite their odor.

**Whether the rambutan seed is or is not in fact poisonous is a matter of much online debate.  Suffice it to say that my Indonesian co-worker shrieked in terror when she saw me pop a whole one in my mouth a few days later.