I know, another dessert from me, what’s the world coming to? Baking-phobic that I am, I have had one signal success in the world of desserts and that’s my pandan cheesecake. I’ve always loved pandan, a flavour that does the work of a kind of Asian vanilla. It is sweet but with a background nuttiness that works in both sweet and savoury dishes. Pandan leaves are wrapped around chicken and grilled in Southeast Asia, but you most often come across pandan in the form of a concentrated essence, like vanilla, used to make bright green cakes or dessert noodles. I have a couple of problems with these uses though: first, the bottles of essence taste kind of chemically and second, I am really not a fan of those dry Asian cakes. I know, it’s probably a cultural bias but I do think cake is one area in which European and American cultures have Asia beaten. So, I came up with the idea of an East meets West dessert: New York style creamy cheesecake flavoured with pandan.

Over the weekend we had a visit from the Crocodiles, down from London and expecting to be impressed with some kind of Asian feast. It was nervous-making: they are very serious foodies with strong opinions on Chinese food in particular. I didn’t have the nerve to cook Chinese for them but I did put together a fun Vietnamese menu: thick rice noodles with fried pork skin and coconut milk, aromatic braised pork osso buco, sour soup with monkfish, and bitter melon salad. The pandan cheesecake seemed like an appropriate end to the meal, even though it’s not Vietnamese. I think I love it because it represents my cooking background – New York influenced by the Asian flavours of Chinatown.

Pandan Cheesecake

• 3 digestive biscuits
• 6 ginger biscuits
• 85 g melted butter
• 900 g cream cheese
• 6 large eggs
• 2 cups caster sugar
• 400 g sour cream
• 1/4 cup pandan juice (see below)

Your first order of business is to extract the pandan juice, and this you can use for all kinds of things. You need pandan leaves, fresh or frozen, to begin with, which are available from many Asian markets.

Chop 12 leaves into 2 inch chunks, put them in a food processor or blender and add about a 1/2 cup of water.

Now blend until they are as mushed up as possible – you might need to stop and stir them a few times as the leaves are a bit resistant.

Next, put the mix through a cheesecloth and sieve into a bowl. Squish and squeeze the leaves with a spatula or your fingers to get all the liquid out.

You’ll end up with a thin but deep jade coloured liquid that’s ready for cooking.

Heat the oven to 250 F / 130 C / gas mark 1/2. This cake is going to cook very very gently! Butter a springform pan. In a large bowl, mix the cream cheese and sugar with a hand mixer. In a separate bowl, beat six eggs, just to mix, then add these in to the cheese and sugar. This is the part where you have to just not think about how many calories you are planning to ingest. Add the pandan juice and the sour cream and mix well.

At this point, the cake mix will seem very liquidy. The pandan juice adds quite a bit of liquid but have faith. Pour into the springform pan and place on a baking tray on the bottom shelf in the oven. Cook for two hours – keep an eye on it as it may take a bit more or less. When the outside is firm but toward the centre is still pretty wibbly, turn off the oven and let it cool a bit in there. Then take it out and cover with a teatowel to cool before putting in the fridge to set for a few hours.

Serves 12.

Bangkok is a pretty bustling city already so Bangkok Chinatown was always going to be a bit madcap. We took the regular bus-type boat down the river and emerged into a shopping street that ‘bustling’ doesn’t even begin to describe. Holy hell, I have never seen anything so crowded and claustrophobic in all my life! I don’t actually have any photos of the experience because there was no real way to take meaningful photographs. We were squashed up like the mosh pit of a Morrissey gig, but with only cheap consumer goods as our objects of lust. We just shuffled along with the rhythms of the heaving crowd for what felt like miles till we found a cross-street and then legged it out of there. This picture below is of a relatively quiet, relaxed and empty thoroughfare…

But for all its insanity, I really enjoyed Bangkok Chinatown. The Chinese lanterns were pretty and there was a different energy to the place than the rest of the city. Also fascinating were the proximities of other immigrant communities: walk west a couple of blocks and you’re among sari stores, pan sellers and samosa stalls. Walk north and you’re in an older Chinatown full of mildly decrepit shophouses selling all manner of knick-knacks.

Naturally, I was partly there for the food and it didn’t disappoint. In fact, my first sensation was being overwhelmed by choice: every corner had maybe five or six food stalls and I was anxious about how much I’d miss, no matter what I chose to eat. I started off with some green sugary coconut things that I wasn’t a huge fan of. I love pandan but whatever I bought tasted mostly of sugar. Mr Lemur enjoyed it more than me as he has a South American sweet tooth. Once in the real market area, I found more to my savoury tastes, but what really piqued my interest were these odd dumpling displays.

The dumplings themselves are not odd – they’re the kind of flat, rice flour dumplings that are often filled with slightly bitter Chinese greens and I love them. But these enormous displays of dumpling architecture built around the edges of vast drums reminded me of nothing more than something from the nest of Ridley Scott’s Alien. I think it’s the gelatinous, sticky consistency of the dough, which is so appealing in the mouth, but becomes a bit abject en masse like this. I expected something to emerge from the bottom of the pile and bite me. Plus, the perfect tiling of the wall doesn’t give me the impression that these dumplings are being cooked and served quickly…it was a hot day and the alien dumpling nest looked, well, dank. I ate one and lived to tell the tale, but I was slightly concerned about food safety here, I have to admit.

To recover from the freaky Alien dumplings we stopped off in Hong Kong Noodles cafe for some dim sum. This wasn’t the best dim sum I’ve ever had in my life but it was perfectly serviceable and one shrimp dumpling with chili sauce was amazing. Siu mai and har gow were fine with good fresh seafood and it was mostly good to find a place to sit down after all the crazy crowds.

The only thing I really couldn’t bring myself to try was these little Asian ‘tacos’ that they sell at lots of food stands. I know they’re not tacos and I am willing to bet that they’re delicious. But the filling just looks SO MUCH like nasty American orange cheese and sour cream that they put me right off.

Last weekend, I finally caught up with Thrifty Gal and got to try out my tua nao, or fermented soy bean pods. Thrifty Gal is a vegetarian who never eats Southeast Asian food in restaurants because she also has a nut allergy and it all just seems too Russian Roulette-ish. Of course, I delight in making Asian food that won’t kill her, and I was especially excited because I’d discovered in Chiang Mai a vegetarian alternative to shrimp paste. Southeast Asian food is tricky for vegetarian cooking because fish sauce and shrimp paste aren’t ingredients but foundational flavours, imparting salt and umami to dishes. You can salt with soy sauce or plain old sodium chloride, but rich umami sensations are a bit harder to achieve. Fermented fish and shrimp are basic to Thai cooking and I’ve read that poor families sometimes eat little but rice and fermented fish in the leaner months: you can’t just omit flavours this essential to a cuisine. But in the Shan market in Chiang Mai, Naomi showed me tua nao, flat dry disks of fermented soybeans which do the same job in Northern Thai and Burmese cuisines. Perhaps because these regions are further from the sea, they developed a soy-based means of creating deeply savoury notes.

Sadly, you probably can’t buy your own tua nao unless you have a seriously good Thai market to hand. But I think it’s worth experimenting with other forms of fermented beans: Chinese fermented bean paste in a jar is a good option, and though I’ve never cooked with Japanese natto, I’ve heard it’s similar. At a pinch, maybe even miso paste would work, though it doesn’t have the funky aroma. Thrifty Gal looked deeply skeptical when I gave her the tua nao to smell, but she was pretty content with the end result: a richly flavoured tofu and mushroom curry, Northern Thai style without coconut milk, but instead with a zesty broth.

Buddha’s Jungle Curry

Curry paste:

• 3 large or 6 small shallots
• 5 stalks of lemongrass
• a large head of krachai
• 2 inches ginger
• 2 inches galangal
• 10 Thai long dried red chilies
• 2 lime leaves
• a small handful of cilantro
• 1 garlic clove
• 1 tbsp tua nao or fermented bean paste

Jungle curry:

• 1 block of tofu, cubed
• a large handful each crimini and oyster mushrooms, roughly sliced
• a large handful of green beans
• 3 tbsp soy sauce
• 3 cloves garlic, pounded
• 2 tbsp palm sugar
• 1 cup vegetable stock or water
• 2 more lime leaves
• juice of 1 lime
• a small handful of Thai basil

To make the curry paste, peel and chop the shallots, krachai, galangal, ginger, lemongrass and garlic and process with the lime leaves, chilies and cilantro. If you are lucky enough to have tua nao, grill them till bubbled and toasty smelling on each side (I used a cast-iron skillet) then break into bits and whizz in a mini-prep till you have a powder. Add into the curry paste, or spoon in fermented bean paste and stir.

The paste will taste pretty darn hot at this point but don’t worry, it mellows when cooked. Next, in a wok, heat about 3 tbsp oil and, when hot, add garlic and then curry paste. Fry till scented and not raw looking, then add mushrooms.

Stir fry until they colour and release their juices, then add green beans, lime leaves and about 1/2 cup water or stock. Add sugar and soy sauce, bearing in mind that your stock might be salty, so taste before dumping in all the soy. You want enough liquid to cook the beans but not enough to make the curry watery. It should end up as a rich, flavourful broth. Add more if necessary and cook for 5 minutes. Toward the end, stir in the tofu. Cook for another couple of minutes, turning the tofu cubes gently to ensure they completely soak in the curry. Finally, add lime juice to taste and stir in the Thai basil leaves.

Recipe serves 4. Adapted from Naomi Duguid’s Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, which has a great (but not vegetarian) recipe for jungle curry as well as tips on using tua nao.

Regular readers will have noticed that I’m not really a dessert person. First of all, I don’t have an enormously sweet tooth but mostly I am just not a baker. I completely subscribe to the idea that the world is split into cooks and bakers and I’m massively impressed by anyone who can do both. My grandmother was a baker: family lore has it that she was frustrated by my grandfather’s culinary conservatism and channeled all of her creative energies into the medium of cake. As a child, I loved going to her house because there was always a freshly made coconut cake or an Albert cake on hand. My mother, by contrast, is a cook: her lasagne is legendary and she makes a pretty good chicken korma too. I’ve inherited my mother’s love of cooking but whereas she can actually make a lovely dessert, I am terrified of the entire world of baking. I never know what things are supposed to look like at each stage and it all seems so unforgiving. That’s why I love this beautiful Seville orange cake recipe, which seems entirely idiot-proof…

This is a variant of a recipe that’s done the rounds of many food blogs. It starts from Claudia Roden’s orange cake in her wonderful Book of Jewish Food. The recipe was popularised by Nigella Lawson, who I think more or less copied it for her clementine cake. It first came to me from multi-talented baking goddess E, who had a healthier version with agave nectar and dark chocolate which I made and enjoyed. The cake is amazingly moist – I dislike any hint of dryness in cake and this one is both deeply moist and surprisingly light. I’d forgotten all about it until last week, when I had a pile of lovely January Seville oranges and was trawling for ideas of what to do with them. It struck me that perhaps the orange/clementine cake might be adaptable, and the idea of a slightly less sweet orange cake appealed. I love the sweet/bitter flavour of Seville orange marmalade and it seemed eminently suitable to this unusual cake. The magic of this recipe is that you boil the oranges till they’re soft and then blend them whole, peel and all. Since the whole entire point of Seville marmalade is the peel, this wonderful moist cake seemed like the perfect vehicle for the flavours of the oranges.

Seville orange cake

• 400g Seville oranges – I used 4 (however – start with extra in case of bursting!)
• 6 eggs
• 250 g caster sugar
• 250 g ground almonds
• 1 tsp baking powder
•  125 g icing sugar
• butter for cake tin

First, put the oranges in a big pot, cover well with water, and bring to the boil. Simmer for two hours, refilling the water as necessary.

When you take them out, check for any that have burst and discard, as they’ll be waterlogged. Cut four good ones in half, and remove pips. (There are loads of pips in Sevilles but they come out fairly easily.)

Dump the oranges into a food processor and blend till smoothish. You don’t want any overly big lumps of peel in your cake. In a bowl, beat the eggs and add almonds, sugar and baking powder. Give a good stir and then pour into the processor with the oranges. Blend till you have a smooth batter.

Butter a 9″ springform cake pan and line with parchment on the bottom. Pour in the batter and heat the oven to gas mark 5 / 190 C / 375 F. Now, Nigella says to cook for 50-60 minutes, but various bloggers including Smitten Kitchen say that it cooks much faster than that. I didn’t find that it did – mine took the whole 50 minutes, but I think my oven runs a bit cool. It’s probably worth checking after a half hour.

I decided to top the cake with an icing sugar glaze to add some extra sweetness. Slowly mix warm water into the icing sugar until the glaze is smooth and thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Spread it over the cake once it’s cool. (You’ll notice from the pictures that my glaze was a bit too runny. Seriously, I told you I can’t bake! It tastes good regardless though…)

Adapted from Claudia Roden’s Orange Cake and Nigella Lawson’s Clementine Cake recipes.

Remember when I wrote about how nice and welcoming Vietnamese people are? Well, this is another one of those instances. When we were on our Mekong homestay, the breakfast provided was a perfectly lovely spread of omelettes and French baguettes with jam. But as we sat on the verandah waiting for our Vietnamese coffees to drip through, our guide Anh arrived on her bike from the village with a whole other set of breakfast goodies. She’d heard me say that I didn’t eat eggs and knew that I loved eating little snacks at morning markets, so she’d picked up an array of local treats at the market for me. How sweet is that?

The ones pictured above are bánh chuôí (the little rhizomes made with rice flour and banana, which were really delicious and kind of reminiscent of the steamed banana cake we had in Saigon) and bánh bò (the flat white discs, which look very plain but were actually really good, flavoured subtly with coconut milk).

Around the outside of this plate are bánh bèo, made with rice and beans, and in the middle are bánh lá, which are also made with coconut milk and look a bit like papardelle. These are probably the least photogenic of the lot but they tasted amazing dipped in coconut milk. And of course there was still a vast pile of French bread to get through with lovely runny fruit preserves.

It was incredibly relaxing to sit on the verandah, looking out at the jackfruit trees and eating our way through all these beautiful looking breakfast snacks. I mean, really, not only did Anh go out and buy these for me, our homestay hosts presented them so beautifully. They could have been annoyed that the picky guest didn’t want to eat their eggs but instead they created this elegant Vietnamese spread. Tourist with a personal touch is one thing but the Vietnamese welcome was a whole other level. (Let me give you another example. I had mentioned to Anh at one point that this trip was for a ‘special’ birthday. When we were in our hotel in Chau Doc, she arrived at our door with a package: a birthday cake with my name and age iced onto it, candles, lighter, vase and a single rose. When we were checking into the hotel, she’d had a sly look at my passport to find out how old I was and my exact birthday, and had gone out and had a cake iced for me! I was so touched. There I was, thousands of miles from home, and someone had brought me a personalised birthday cake.) So, this was a simple breakfast but a really lovely gesture. Fortified, we went out to explore the Mekong around Co Co, where the fruit trees are abundant and the fruit sellers also super friendly.

One of the many bits and bobs I brought home from Thailand was a jar of nam prik pow. Or at least, I think that’s what it is. At one of Chiang Mai’s night markets, I came across a stall selling candied fruits and savoury things in jars. Obviously, I couldn’t actually read any of the labels but I was drawn to a particular set of little plastic pots. The stallholder opened some of them for me and it was clear they were variants of chili and shrimp pastes. I bought two – one an almost black, deeply fishy scented tar with a musty kick, the other a rich jewelled red colour with a lighter garlic, chili and fish sauce smell. They’re obviously mass produced, but they taste a good deal better than any of the jarred nam prik pow you can buy over here. I’ve been dying to try them out. (If anyone reads Thai, I’d love to know what it actually says…)

Unfortunately, my original plan for a variant on yam som-oh went awry at the shops, where basically nothing I wanted to purchase was available. No coconut milk, no grapefruit, etc. I think I went into a bit of a panic because I came home with a completely random Ready Steady Cook style bag of ingredients. Rump steak, portabella mushrooms, spring greens and red peppers? Er, ok. My local greengrocer (i.e. the Mean Polish Store) doesn’t exactly carry a wide range of Asian vegetables but still, I have no idea where those mushrooms came from. That being said, I ended up with a rather nice dish – lots of wok-fried greens and thinly-sliced beef with the roasty hot garlicky flavour of nam prik pow seared onto them.

To make this dish vegetarian, obviously it’s easy enough to omit the beef and just use greens and mushrooms. Likewise, soy sauce can sub for fish sauce in the usual way (use a bit less and dilute more with water as I find soy a bit saltier). More challenging is the nam prik pow but you can buy veggie nam prik pow in many Asian markets. It’s worth seeking out, or indeed making your own, as the stuff’s a wonder to have in the fridge.

Spicy Thai beef and greens

• 1 small rump steak
• 1 head of spring greens
• 2 portabella mushrooms
• 1 red pepper
• 2 cloves garlic
• 3 long Thai red chilies
• 1 tbsp nam prik pow (or to taste)
• 1/4 cup measure, half filled with fish sauce and half warm water
• 2 tbsp palm sugar
• 1 lime

To prepare, slice the meat very thinly, cut the mushrooms and pepper into rather less thin slices, and also slice the greens. Finely chop the garlic and chilies. Get the wok good and hot before adding a glug of oil, then add mushrooms. When they’ve coloured, add garlic and chilies.

Next add the greens and the pepper. Of course, the key thing in wok frying is not adding too much volume. Greens seem pretty volumetastic at first but then cook down pretty fast. Still, don’t make this for more than two people or your wok won’t stay hot enough. You want the greens to get that toasty wok hei flavour.

Finally, add the beef and the nam prik pow and fry for a minute. You want the paste to cook and also sear into the beef and greens. Then add fish sauce, water, and sugar and stir to dissolve the chili paste and sugar into the liquid. Mix everything well. Once that’s done, turn off the heat and add the lime juice. Serve immediately.

I should offer a prize for guessing correctly what exactly is in this picture. When we first arrived in Chau Doc, in the northern Mekong, we were perplexed and utterly transfixed by these obscenely glistening mountains that were to be found in stalls all over the night market. Context and smell told us there was a fish component but what else was going on? We remained in the dark until the next morning, when all became clear at the morning market. Before I get there, though, a little about Chau Doc. It’s one of the bigger cities on the Mekong and the last major stopping point before the Cambodian border. As a result, it has the slightly rakish demeanour of the border town (although it’s a ways to the actual border) as well as a substantial Khmer influence in its food and culture. Although there is a tourist market on the waterfront, I didn’t see any actual tourists there, and most of the town had a real provincial feel – urban but not especially concerned to be cosmopolitan. We felt nicely far from home.

In the morning we went up the local ‘mountain’, which all the guidebooks list as a major attraction. Now let’s be clear here: it’s not a mountain. I’m Scottish, Mr Lemur is Chilean and so we know mountains when we see them. Sam mountain is a hill. Nonetheless, given the flatness of the delta landscape around it, it makes for a pretty amazing view.

We sat at one of the viewing platforms on the mountain top sipping a well-earned* glass of iced coffee, then it was back down to town for breakfast in the market. I asked our Vietnamese guide, Anh, what the fish-mountains were and she explained they are mam, fermented and/or salted fish that is a speciality of Chau Doc and can be made in dozens, possibly hundreds of different forms. The popular type above is river fish fermented with strands of green papaya. So are all the giant mountains of mam Close Encounters-style representations of Sam Mountain in the medium of fermented fish? As we walked around the market we saw various configurations of the mam mountain, some with bigger fish, some with crab, some studded with chilies and many with papaya.

I was massively curious about the stuff and so was very pleased when one stall-holder offered me some of the papaya mam to try.

You might think fermented fish with papaya would be a challenging taste sensation, especially on its own, first thing in the morning, but I can report that it was surprisingly delicious. The funkiness of the fermented fish was cut by the sweet papaya, and somehow the way the ingredients had melded together like any Southeast Asian dish on the principles of balance. Salty, sweet and sour were in harmony and honestly, I could have eaten the stuff down with a spoon. I seriously considered buying a bag to take home but Mr Lemur looked at me sternly and asked what I was going to do when fermented fish leaked all over everything we’d bought in Thailand. Sigh.

We moved on to more conventional breakfast eating, which the market had aplenty. We had some of these hot hot hot semolina cakes, one plain and the other stuffed with tiny roasted bananas.

Then I found a stall with roast pork, which smelled so divine. I think there was supposed to be more to the dish than being given a chunk of pork on a stick, but communication problems ensued and pork on a stick was what I got. Regardless, it was some of the best, stickiest, tastiest pork I’ve ever eaten so I can’t really complain. Except I wanted MOAR PORK.

Finally, we grabbed some stick rice rolls stuffed with coconut and beans.

Chau Doc market was more specialised than Vinh Long: it had lots of fruit and vegetable stalls, to be sure, and also a huge section with clothes, jewellery and other non-food items. But we kept coming back to mountainous piles of mam, which is only right for a town that lives and breathes on the river.

*Well-earned because we got up very early, not because we hiked up the mountain. That would be crazy talk. Obviously we drove. I know I rode a bike but let’s not get over-ambitious here. I walked down the mountain…

When I was really sick, I wasn’t cooking at all and dinners were whatever I could persuade poor Mr Lemur to put together for us. (This may explain my substantial weight loss, although I really do not recommend the influenza diet.) Now I’m feeling a lot better and well enough to cook, but I’m still fairly weak and in need of simple and nutritious fare. I was craving poached chicken – not the Woody Allen joke of boiled chicken that’s been put through the de-flavourising machine but properly poached chicken that’s juicy, soft and infused with delicate flavours. To go with the tenderness of the chicken, I decided on a mix of peashoots and sunflower shoots – equally tender young vegetables without the indigestibility of winter greens. But you need something to bring all this delicacy into focus, or else it really would be an invalid meal rather than a energising one. Ginger is good for the stomach and ideal with chicken, so I added a zingy Vietnamese-inspired dressing of ginger, chili and lemongrass to wake the whole dish up. Cooking this dish made me feel a whole lot less like a sick girl, but the dish itself isn’t just for the delicate of constitution. Anyone feeling a bit worn down by post-holiday blues could enjoy its revitalising qualities.

Aromatic poached chicken

• 2 chicken breasts
• 3 lemongrass stalks
• 2 large chunks of ginger
• 20 peppercorns
• 1/4 cup or more fish sauce
• 1 lemon
• 3 tbsp caster sugar
• 3 tbsp water
• 3-6 long Thai red chilies, to taste
• 1/2 cucumber
• a bag of pea shoots, sunflower shoots or whatever mixed shoots and young leaves you have available
• a handful of mint
• a small handful of cilantro

Your first order of business is to poach the chicken. Put the breasts in a heavy pot (Le Creuset of similar, anything that holds heat well) and just cover with cold water. Take one knob of ginger, peel and bash with the back of a knife, then add to the water. Cut off the parts of the lemongrass that are too hard to eat, slice in half and add these to the water. Add the peppercorns and a generous glug of fish sauce. Now bring the water up not to a boil but to the gentlest of simmers. You just want little bubbles forming, no more. Turn the heat down to keep it this way for 5 minutes, then turn the heat off and put a lid on the pot. Leave it for 30 minutes. You will have beautifully moist and perfect chicken without any further effort on your part. Hurrah!

While the chicken is cooking merrily under its own steam, make the dressing. Finely chop the chilies, the other big chunk of ginger, and the good bits of the lemongrass. Add 3 tbsp each of fish sauce, sugar and warm water, plus the juice of the lemon. You might want to add the lemon juice gradually and taste as you go. I found with the level of ginger and sugar, the dressing could take quite a lot of acid. Remember the heat will be greatly dissipated in the final dish so be bold with the ginger and chilies.

Next, wash the sprouts well and cut the cucumber into matchsticks. Tear or chop up the mint and cilantro leaves and mix all together in a bowl. When the chicken is cooked, let it cool and then tear into shreds and mix into the greens. Toss well with the dressing.

And that’s really all there is to it. Not only do you end up with a vibrant and healthy dinner, the poaching liquid is now light Asian-flavoured chicken stock you can store and use for something else. I feel immensely better for having cooked an actual meal and even more improved for eating it. Now, if I could please maybe get my voice back (almost three weeks of laryngitis!), 2012 would start to seem like a less miserable place…

Serves 2-3, over rice

In among all the street food, I wanted to go to one fancy-ish restaurant while in Saigon and a couple of people had recommended Ngon. To get us in the mood, we went for a pre-dinner cocktail at the 23rd floor bar in the (very upscale) Sheraton Hotel, which has a fine view over the city and rather nice 2-for-1 cocktails during happy hour. Unfortunately, we remembered once we got there that we hadn’t written down the address of Ngon, so we asked the hotel concierge. He showed us on a map but we also got a taste of high-end hotel living, because he was really concerned to put us in a taxi. You mustn’t walk, he insisted, it’s not safe. He almost had us believing we were going to some sketchy part of town, but of course, looking at the map it was clear the restaurant was right in the centre, more or less where we’d been wandering all week. If the Sheraton advises against walking to Ngon, its guests must see almost nothing of Saigon except out the windows of a taxi. When we got there (unmolested), I almost didn’t want to go in because it looked too fancy. Ngon is in an old colonial building, beautifully restored, and the garden section is full of fairy lights hung from the many trees that fill the space. It’s really quite magical. I was afraid the food would be Anglicised and overpriced, but we’d shlepped all the way there so we went in. I’m so glad we did…it was one of the best meals we ate in Vietnam and cost less than our Christmas barbeque.

We started with some appetisers, including báhn tàm bì, or large rice noodles with shredded pork skin and coconut milk. This is what I love about Vietnam: there is pretty much no concept of dumbing down dishes for Western palates. Maybe it’s because the tourist economy hasn’t taken over to the extent that is has in Thailand. Maybe it’s because Vietnamese cuisine is not considered to be “spicy” and therefore doesn’t need alteration. Maybe it’s because the fancy restaurants in Saigon are still aimed as much at well-to-do locals as tourists. Whatever the reason, it makes me happy beyond measure to find pork skin noodles on a translated menu. Also this dish was insanely good. Just OMG deliciousness. Sweet coconut milk, savoury crunchy pork skin and soft pillowy noodles. I could eat this every day.

We noticed something odd on the menu: whereas most of the rolls came in standard portions, there was one roll, cuôn tré, that was listed per piece. Why was it so much more expensive than everything else? It didn’t seem to have obviously luxurious ingredients. This was already enough to pique my interest, but the filling of pig’s ear, alpinia and garlic wrapped in guava leaf sounded amazing. We ordered two.

I had no idea what alpinia was and had to look it up – apparently it’s a form of galangal. Not quite knowing what either alpinia or guava leaf would taste like, this roll was a revelation. The pig’s ear and garlic provided a rich warm base, while the herbal components were bright, almost piney. I suspect the guava leaf is the expensive part and it was worth every penny. We loved these rolls and I’m still kind of wishing we’d ordered more.

Our main course was more predictable, albeit very nicely done. We had bánh hoi with shrimp wrapped on sugar cane.

I can’t resist bánh hoi, the texture of the noodle squares is really appealing and this version came with lots of interesting things to wrap, like star fruit and thinly sliced yellow eggplant. It wasn’t as exciting as the small plates but it was good. It also exemplified the range of food at Ngon: some dishes were familiar from Vietnamese restaurants abroad and these might not be the most adventurous options, but they were still done well, with nice original touches like the eggplant and starfruit. Others were totally new to me, and many of the dishes I saw go by to other tables I had no idea what they were but oh, how I wanted them.

We finished with a steamed banana cake, at which the waiter gave an approving nod to our order. He knew what he was about too, because the cake was sticky and banana-laden, and generously drizzled with coconut cream.

And of course, no meal in Saigon would be complete without a cup of Vietnamese iced coffee. (There’s a lot of stuff online about how this place is “safe” for tourists and they use bottled water for their ice. I obviously threw those rules over right from day one and drank ice constantly from all manner of vendors, but for those who care about such things, there’s that.)

Everything we ate at Ngon was beautifully made, with clean flavours and a lightness of touch. I think there’s a trick to ordering, because some of the dishes looked a little banal – the German tourists beside us seemed happy enough with their food but it looked kind of dull to me. Similarly, while our bánh hoi was nice, it didn’t set my world on fire, but the pig skin noodles and the guava leaf rolls were spectacular. You definitely have to order on the pig’s ear side of the menu, if you see what I mean.  Yes, it’s kind of touristy, but if you’re in Saigon, you really should check it out.

Nhà Hàng Ngon, 160 Pasteur St, Saigon

Well, after a fairly horrible two weeks of illness, I’m finally feeling well enough to resume blogging. I’m by no means better yet – after a proper flu with secondary bronchitis and laryngitis I’m still weak as a kitten and sleeping almost as much as my cat – but I’m itching to write more about Vietnam and Thailand. I’m hoping in the coming weeks to intersperse travel posts on Southeast Asia with what I’m cooking now. But since I’m still on a sick-girl diet of plain rice and chicken, cooked by the wonderful Mr Lemur, it might be a few days before I’m back at the stove. For now, I’m starting a short series of market posts. Like any foodie, one of my favourite things to do in any new destination is to check out the food market, and throughout our trip we spent mornings and often evenings wandering around stalls, tasting new foods and just looking longingly at produce. I’ve been saving these posts up to enliven a dull January with vibrant images. First up, the Mekong delta town of Vinh Long.

We stopped off in Vinh Long town relatively briefly in between cycling in the little villages of the surrounding islands and taking a boat trip up the Mekong river. We originally planned simply to pick up some cash and provisions but when we got to Vinh Long we saw that the morning market was in full swing. And what a market it was! I’ve been to a lot of markets in my time but this one was amazing: alive with people and animals, loud and sometimes mildly alarming. The wet market was properly slippery, and I often had to step back more or less into buckets of seething crabs to get out of someone’s way. Everywhere, fish were flapping around and the few marine creatures that were already dead were, like these squid, overflowing from containers all around.

Some of the food for sale was unusual to the Western eye, like the tanks full of snakes that offer high-end meat for the Vietnamese table. The bigger the snake, the more expensive, so some tanks had really scary contents.

Everywhere you went, live animals were piled up in crates or lined up for inspection. It can feel uncomfortable to see your dinner still alive – I’m sure my vegetarian readers are feeling especially queasy – but then again as a meat eater, I think we should be aware of where our meat comes from. Certainly, Vietnamese shoppers aren’t alienated from the farm and they know exactly how fresh their food is. This is obviously a good thing but the experience takes a bit of getting used to. The chickens and geese in this section seemed kind of unhappy, though maybe I was projecting.

But it wasn’t all alarming meats. The market also had a beautiful vegetable section, filled with giant piles of fruits, vegetables and herbs, many of which I didn’t recognise. This doesn’t actually happen all that often – usually you know what more of less everything is in a vegetable market. Vinh Long had an astonishing range of greenery. Here are some gorgeous zucchini flowers, lotus heads, okra, bitter melon, papaya, and some herbs I don’t recognise.

There were piles and piles of fresh and dried noodles.

We came across a durian stall in the fruit section and thought that the time had really come to try some. Durian is famously stinky and the sellers wrap up the pre-sectioned fruit in cling film to keep the smell in check. I’ve often wanted to try the fruit that’s famously banned in many Asian buses, hotels and other public spaces and whose flavour is often described in terms of parmesan, vomit and garbage. So we jumped in and bought a piece. And…I didn’t really think it tasted of any of those things. It reminded me forcefully of caramelised shallots, with a hint of roast pork, all in a loose custardy form. I quite liked it, certainly didn’t find it disgusting or vomity, but to be honest, as they say of babies, I couldn’t eat a whole one. We ate a little and gave the rest back. The durian lady clearly enjoyed freaking out the white people.

Our most exciting discovery of Vinh Long, though, was this vegetable preparation. It looked to me a lot like Italian puntarelle, the thinly julienned strips of chicory that appear across Roman markets in winter and make a delicious salad with anchovy and garlic.

Obviously, this wasn’t exactly the same thing but I kept seeing stalls selling these white curls and others with green ones too. What were they? I had to find out. It turns out that they are banana flowers, which are finely shredded and turned into a salad, sometimes alongside morning glory. It was clearly the season for this delicacy as I could see it on so many stalls…and this information stood me in good stead back in Saigon where we had fantastic banana flower salad at the Christmas barbeque and in a couple of other places too. Poking around markets is pretty much awesome in its own right, but it’s even better when it points you toward what’s in season and what you need to be eating now.