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A few weeks ago a friend and I were at a Vietnamese market in the Bronx of all places when we came across the delicacy pictured here. Since the damn thing was so cute she purchased two for herself. I only bought one, largely because cuteness doesn't score quite as many points with me. Looking around the store, I noticed several moon cakes and it soon dawned on me that this little piggy is meant to celebrate the Vietnamese version of the Chinese Moon Festival, which took place yesterday.

The other day I decided to eat the little guy. Like many moon cakes, he was packed with a sweet filling, in this case lotus seed paste. For some reason I started with the head. I soon made short work of the dense cake, which served as breakfast along with a cup of green tea.

Since you can't read the little tag, here's the gist of it. The English name of this confection is "The gold pig with riches and honor." The Vietnamese text reads, "Bánh Heo Phú Qui Bánh Con Heo Trung Thu." My curiosity about exotic foods runs pretty much neck and neck with my obsession with foreignlanguages. Thanks to the wonders of VDict, I was able to translate the Vietnamese. VDict stumbled over the word "qui," but here's its translation "pig pie endow mid-autumn pig pie qui." All of which seems to make sense since Trung Thu is the Vietnamese name for the Moon Festival.
Now that I ate the little guy, I'm waiting for the riches and honor to start rolling in. Still, I can't help think that I should have eaten it by the light of last night's full moon to seal the deal.

Fans of Vietnamese cooking will find a wealth of wonderful recipes to choose from Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors. The book is written, with an obvious amount of enthusiasm and knowledge of the topic, by Andrea Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam and opens the book with a touching story of leaving Saigon with little but family, memories and recipes. Many of those recipes are included in the book or were the inspiration for dishes. Along with the recipes, Nguyen includes some background on Vietnamese culture, particularly as it pertains to food, eating and cooking.

There are more than 175 recipes in the book, as well as a number of tempting photographs of the dishes. All are easy to follow and, with the exception of a few long ingredient lists, they are not very intimidating anyway. The book is divided into chapters by categories, such as meats, vegetables, noodles, soups, sauces and sweets, along with several others. Pho and bánh mì recipes are included as some of the more familiar Vietnamese dishes, while others range from Garlicky oven-roasted chicken (which seems to know few cultural bounds) to the more exotic Chicken Dumpling and Chrysanthemum Leaf Soup, Beef Flank and Ginger Simmered in Caramel Sauce.

In the past it wasn't so, but now it looks like Asia has taken on the challenge and stepped up to bat in the organic produce game. Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and most especially China have moved into the game. So far China is producing 85% of the organics in the region, but the other countries are gearing up and increasing production every year. The quality they produce is very good, with China growing excellent crops at great prices.

Europe and North America currently consume a vast majority of the worlds organic produce with Asia only just starting to join in, but they are starting to catch up. Since organic still costs more to produce each of these countries consumes less by far than they export. The West consumes organics for a variety of reasons from perceived health benefits to sustainability, animal welfare, humanitarian reasons, and environmental concerns; while the East's focus is primarily on the supposed health benefits. Although "Buddhist countries like Thailand and Singapore also tend to favour organic production because of its perceived harmony with nature."

There is a tendency that as production goes up, prices should come down, and so organic foods will be more in demand domestically in Asia over the next few years as well. So expect to see more and more of the world's high quality organic produce coming from Asia in the next decade as additional countries join in, and production rises dramatically.

Joe and I already have beef about this (pun absolutely intended). The guy absolutely loves banh mi, the Vietnamese version of a hoagie -- a French roll stuffed with grilled meat (Vietnamese meatballs, grilled chicken, beef, pork, or other choice cuts of animal), julienned cucumbers, lightly pickled carrots and daikon, and a few condiments. I, on the other hand, am not fond of Vietnamese cuisine to begin with, and found the banh mi I tried at Pho 99 in Los Angeles to be a somewhat strange juxtaposition of cuisines. To be quite honest, it seems sort of plain for as much hype as it gets. I'd just rather eat those same ingredients, mixed with rice noodles, out of a bowl. Am I missing something, Joe??

I will concede to the fact that banh mi tend to be very inexpensive, though I find it hard to comprehend that Joe spent $12 on his at 5 Ninth. That's a lot of money for any sandwich, banh mi or otherwise.

If you enjoy Tony Bourdain's adventures into exotic cuisines and like watching him experience things that we don't normally get to see on a day-to-day- basis (iguana? cobra heart?), then you've got to check out the most recent post from Deep End Dining's Eddie Lin. He goes to Little Saigon in Orange County, CA to meet a cookbook author and her father, and instead of simply enjoying the simplicity of a bowl of pho, tries pho topped with a bull's organ, and were' not talking about internal organs here, folks. Eddies' pho had bull's penis.

And it doesn't just stop there. His dining companions also encourage him to try pre-mature egg yolks (not premature fertilized eggs, which he has eaten before), and snails with bananas.

Hey, pho isn't just about noodles and broth anymore.

I love food, but I will admit that I am not a hugely adventurous eater. I love to watch the likes of Tony Bourdain travel to faraway places and eat things like, oh, cobra hearts, but i doubt that I'd be able to stomach it myself. In fact, I can hardly stand to think about some of the foods of my own cultural cuisine, Korean.

Frogs aren't considered all that adventurous, and yet, I doubt I could have eaten it, as Reid of Ono Kine Grindz did on a recent trip from his home in Hawaii to San Francisco. The restaurant is Dragonfly, a contemporary Vietnamese restaurant that he read about. He hasn't written any notes about what it tasted like yet, but the picture makes them look, at least to me, pretty damn good.

Cacao trees have been grown in southern Vietnam for a good six years. Now the Mekong Delta has joined the country's other provinces. Ben Tre province recently began exporting processed cocoa with a whopping 12-ton shipment to the U.K. And it plans to keep up the pace with another 12-ton batch next month.  
The province has 5,000 acres of cacao trees and plans to expand to 25,000 by 2010. That's a lot of processed cocoa. I'm all for the economic development of Vietnamese agriculture, but my secret hope is that the Brits start doing some really interesting things with chocolate now that they have all that cocoa.

[photo: Thanh Nien News]

MSN has posted a list of the top 10 cities for foodies, as determined by a travel site. The cities chosen are all over the globe, picked for a combination of unique dishes, celebrity chefs and all-around good cuisine. Barcelona, Brussels, Lyon and Rome were lauded for their long standing traditions, while Las Vegas and New York were included for having just about everything. While San Francisco did get a nod for its non-Asian cuisine, it seems to have been selected mainly on the availability of good Chinese food. Asian flavors are what put Tokyo, Vancouver and Hanoi on the list, too.

It appears that the definition of a foodie as someone who is willing (and possibly desperate) to eat anything has been put into play with this list, as along with Asian flair, Hanoi was picked for "unusual delicacies like dog or snake," including "fried snake skin, snake spring rolls, snake soup, and minced snake dumpling." Weird meats are all well and good, but to plan a whole trip around them seems a bit extreme.

Nevertheless, their list includes:

It's not that the Vietnamese government has anything against grapefruit per se. Rather the powers that be have banned the URL www.buoi.com.vn because of a confusion that arises from the Vietnamese language's use of markings to indicate one of six pronunciation tones, reports the BBC. Without the proper accent marks, buoi reads the same as the slang for penis. Unfortunately for the grapefruit wholesaler in Ha Tinh province who tried to register the name there is as yet no way to indicate such diacritical marks in Web site addresses.

There's nothing like a bowl of hot, steamy Vietnamese beef noodle soup, or pho, on a cold winter's day. It's my choice over chicken noodle soup or even my childhood fave, cream of tomato, when I'm sick. The spice clears the sinuses, the bean sprouts, Thai basil and mint brighten my palate, and the broth warms the cockles of my heart. This pho comes from the excellent Portland, Oregon Pho Hung.

[Photo Sarah Gilbert]

Sticky Rice is a new blog in Hanoi, Vietnam. The author isn't afraid to eat in the streets and share the results with those of us who can't be there. The food here is Banh Canh, created streetside in the old quarter by a woman who hauled the food in on baskets. Par-boiled greens, hot noodles, crab and tomato stock and a garnish of dried shallot and pork crackling crunch went into this bowl of lunch on the run. I could do without the pork bits on top but otherwise it looks great.