Tag Archives: Vietnamese

Fleeting: What is in a Name? (Part One of Two)

So while I was in Việt Nam, I found out (and I don’t remember how) that when I came home from that hospital over thirty-odd years ago… originally my “given name” or rather “first name” was my Vietnamese Name (which is now my “middle name”).

Say what?

Without revealing my entire name… right now it looks like this:

FIRST MIDDLE LAST
Westernized Vietnamese Surname/Family

Whileas when I was borne it was originally this:

FIRST MIDDLE LAST
Vietnamese Westernized Surname/Family

Interesting. Mind you my mother was having this conversation about names in the car with various other relatives and the question of changing names came up and she mentioned that if you need to make a name change you just go to city hall. When asked more about it she told them that she did it for me when I was a baby. (I may not speak Vietnamese, but I definitely understand it… don’t I make a good spy? :D)

When I asked her about it, she mentioned that she did it within a year after I born to make it easier for me to live and survive in the United States. Makes sense… Now I am wondering how much would my life have changed if my name was different… and trust me, we may not place a lot of emphasis on names… but a direct change like that does change a person’s outlook on life.

Out of curiosity one day I decided to look into the meaning of my (names) and this was what I was able to discover:

WESTERNIZED VIETNAMESE SURNAME/FAMILY NAME
Who is Like God Noble – Intellectual Brightness (unknown believed to be “lake”)

So what is the meaning of my name? Well… let’s look at Kabalarians for the hell of it:
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Recipe: BBQ Pork on Seasoned Rice

Once a week (or every other week) a friend of mine and I would gchat taking about various dishes or meals we’re planning to eat that day, what we ate, recipes we tried, etc.

So earlier this week I was trying to figure out what to eat based on what I had on hand at home. The problem I have is that I am planning to leave for a trip out of country so whatever I make I wanted to make sure it is just enough to last til I have to fly out so nothing gets wasted. Then I realized that I had about a pound of BBQ pork and a pound of roasted pork that were sitting in the freezer that I had purchased from meat shop weeks prior. So I moved the BBQ pork to the fridge and decided to just cook up a batch of rice and have BBQ pork on rice.

But that was just plain boring. One thing in Vietnamese cuisine is that we love our oiled green onions. So I purchased a bag of them at the local grocery and chopped them up and simmered them with a little bit of vegetable oil. In the meantime I got the crock pot going with white rice and water and instead of plain white rice I decided to season it up a bit for additional flavor.

I got this idea after visiting a Persian restaurant about a month ago and they had a batch of dill rice that I really liked, but instead of cooking the rice and mixing the dill afterwards I decided to cook the dill in while the rice was cooking so that the flavor would (hopefully) be saturated into every grain of rice.

Turned out I was right and voila! A batch of dill flavored rice with BBQ pork. Nom nom nom nom. Now I think I would give this a try with other seasonings too to kind of spice up the traditional white rice to make sure the flavor is well saturated.

Unfortunately I didn’t take pictures like I am prone to do when I go out for meals… I was too hungry to think about “ooh must take pictures so others could see!” ah well maybe next week, except I think I will try something different and see.
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Recipe: Corned Beef Hash… on Rice

While grocery shopping a few weeks ago, I came across a bit of corned beef and decided to purchase it on a whim. Coming from an Asian family, corned beef isn’t exactly a common meat in the household, though we all have had a bit of a corned beef as a deli meat and as sandwiches.

So why did I decide to get a slab of corned beef? Who knows… and it took well over a week before I figured out what to do with it… Corned Beef Hash!

Well duh, why didn’t I think of this before? The recipe would be similar to that of the Vietnamese dish: Bo Luc Lac aka Vietnamese Shaking Beef. Over at RasaMalaysia the Ravenous Couple were asked to write a guest post blog about the dish as well as their recipe:

INGREDIENTS:
Beef Marinade
1.5 lbs beef sirloin (or any cut you like) cut into 1″ cubes
2 tbs minced garlic
1.5 tbs sugar
2 tbs oyster sauce
1 tbs fish sauce
1 tbs sesame oil
1 ts thick soy sauce

Vinaigrette
1/2 cup rice vinegar
1.5 tbs sugar
1/2 tbs salt

Dipping Sauce
Juice of 1 lime
1/2 ts kosher salt
1/2 ts fresh cracked pepper

1 red onion, thinly sliced
2 bunches of watercress, long stems trimmed
2 tomatoes, thinly sliced

Cooking oil for frying

METHOD:
Prepare marinade by combining garlic, oyster sauce, sugar, fish sauce, thick soy sauce and sesame oil with the beef for at least half an hour, preferably 1-2 hrs.
Prepare vinaigrette by mixing rice vinegar with salt and sugar. It should be a balance of sour, salty and sweet.

Thinly slice the red onion and use about 3-4 tbs of the vinaigrette to pickle and set aside covered in fridge for about 10 minutes. Prepare bed of watercress and tomatoes in a serving platter and set aside.

Heat a large wok or pan over high heat. Add about 2 tbs cooking oil and when it begins to smoke, add an even layer of beef and allow to sear for about 2 minutes, before “shaking” to sear the opposite sides for about another 1-2 minute more to brown all the sides. Do this in batches to cook all the beef if necessary.

Transfer beef to bed of watercress and tomatoes. Drizzle another 3-4 tbs of vinaigrette over the beef and greens and top with pickled red onions. Lastly, squeeze lime juice over salt and pepper in a small ramekin.

Enjoy!

COOK’S NOTE:
We like our beef medium rare and test the meat by touch and sight–it will plump up slightly and be bouncy to the touch with a spatula.

Granted, at home we had a much more simplistic version of the above recipe, but this is very good nonetheless. But, instead of adapting the above recipe for the corned beef, I figured I would go with my original idea of making Corned Beef Hash to test for taste and texture before seeing if I could create an adaptation of the above with the Corned Beef.
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