For the love of sticky rices and Noodle soups

I guess I can't hide the love for noodle soups and traditional foods of VN. When I go to restaurant sometimes with friends, I usually am a bit disappointed about the content of the menu in Vnese restaurant. Certainly, Vnese foods do not vary like many other foods, but we do have many dishes other PHO, nem (cha gio), springrolls (goi cuon)...etc. Moreover, there is another problem of degrading the foods, I mean making VN foods or dishes is taking much labour and time, but the price for it is so cheap. One of the reason is because one restaurant offer foods at a reasonable price, the next one is gonna to offer it cheaper to compete. Hence, Vnese foods are cheap!

Hmm, I should not blame anyone, that's about business, you have to offer something that the customers demand. That is why if we want real quality Vnese foods, we have to know how to cook ;-). Probably it is not gonna be as good as eating those dishes in Vn in the past (because with the problems with vegetables...currently in VN, am not sure, it is safe to eat there), but they sure still reveal our memories.

When I was in VN, every morning waking up, I could hear the calling of early merchants selling street foods (yeah, that's my VN), especially different sort of sticky rices such as corn sticky rice, black stucky rice with mung beans, peanut sticky rice, mung beans sticky rice, black beans sticky rice...etc. All of them taste super delicious and fill your stomach full for at least several hours. They are usually served with coconut and salted sesames (roasted) and wrapped in babana leaves ;-). My favourite is the corn sticky rice with smashed mung beans, and coconut. Here in Belgium, I could not find the right corn to make it, so I once tried the frozen version of the ready-to-eat one (that I swear I will never make that mistake again ;-)).

Here in the picture, we have the black sticky rice with smashed mung beans, coconut and salted peanuts.

Of course, breakfast in VN isn't just that, we have a lot of many types of noodle soups, not only PHO, most of the noodle are made of rice like bun moc, bun thang, bun rieu, hu tieu, banh canh...the list goes on. I love all the noodle soups. Not only the broth is made differently from one to another, but the way it is served just distinguish itself.

Anyway, here we have bun thang that I made the other day ;-)