motorbike mayhem in the streets of Hanoi |
Bun Rieu street seller's stall, good things come in small packages |
*Those fresh herbs are served with almost every dish that we ordered. I think they mainly consist of freshly collected Thai Basil, Vietnamese Mint, Coriander and Banana flowers. You will get a full bowl full of these fresh herbs with every meal and it is up to you to add as many of them as you like. If I ever decide to cook anything Vietnamese, I think I will already fail because I will not be able to buy any of those herbs over here.
I had the soup early in the morning and the fresh and savory taste of it knocked my right of my feet. Now, don't get me wrong, I did taste a good amount of deliciously tasting soups in my lifetime. Just to name two of my all time favorites, there is the the Indonesian Baso soup, a spicy soup with beef balls (they say that yet another important personality shares this love of Baso with me and that is Mr. Obama), another one is the famous Thai Tom Ka Gai soup, which is a hot and spicy chicken soup with coconut milk. Now I am not sure what it was that made me fall in love with this soup but the first morning, right there around 10.34 am, I fell in love with the Bun Rieu.
While sitting on a teeny tiny little plastic chair ( honestly, those chairs have not been built with the average European body in mind), which was built with the purpose of the chairs being easy to transport on a motorbike and keeping a normal sized ass for an average of 10 minutes (time you need to devour the soup) 30 centimeters above of a really dirty road
dirty streets of Hanoi, wet market on a rainy day |
Fresh bowl of delicious Bun Rieu at the street side |
I will definitely try and get the recipe for this soup, so keep watching this space. Even if my bets are on that I will never ever be able to cook the soup as good as the lady from this street stand could do (already I will have a hard time finding all the ingredients), I will still give it a try. And never forget what Martin Yan used to say: If Yan can cook, so can you! (though I am not sure if he ever cooked the Bun Rieu before).
Anyway, for now, enjoy feasting with your eyes and stay tuned for the recipe to pop up on my blog, hopefully soon.
This is also one of my favourite Vietnamese dishes. All in all, we went back 3 times to have the Bun Rieu from the same lady. She is also very generous with the serving and happy to add more soup, tofu, etc for the customers, hehehe ;-) Well written Bro!
ReplyDeleteJust to hear about it......... mmmmmm... Very nice written Thomas! Can't wait to read more! :-) Your friend from Ecuador. ELENA LOPEZ
ReplyDeleteWait till i will write about my holiday in Ecuador :) haha...
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