YOGAYUGA

Overall the trip was good though I can’t say I am a big fan of Vietnamese food and things to do in Vietnam. I guess I like the atmosphere and feeling of Thailand the most in Asia compared with other Asian countries. Moreover, I much prefer spicy food. Vietnamese cuisine is rather mild for me. The French influence of Saigon is what I like the most. I did manage to have a French cuisine in one of the local well known French restaurants last night, La Camargue. It took us more than an hour to get there as the first address we got was the old one. However, we found it at last after we had been told the restaurant moved to another area. The food was good though my appetite isn’t very good lately. Vietnamese people are overall very friendly. Once I stucked in the middle of road, and didn’t know how to cross to the opposite side, a very nice lady took me through. (there were too many motorbikes travelling around on the road) She was so kind, same as many others who instructed us how to find our directions though they can’t speak English. Ho Chi Minh was also kind to us as it was supposed to rain with thundering during the period we were there, but it ended up no heavy rain. It rained in short time only the first day we arrived. The local taxi is very cheap. Few minutes ride with taxi, it costs less than USD1.00 per trip. The longest ride we took with taxi was the trip from airport to our hotel that took 25 mins. It costs USD7.00. I found no McDonald in the city, but many KFC around though.

The rest of photos are on Flickr, enjoy!

The last Vietnamese local cuisine of the trip…

At La Camargue, one of the best French restaurans in Saigon….

The beef rice noodle soup again as well as the ice coffee at the boarding gate of airport…

It’s a great ice cream place. You can have ice cream with fresh fruits made for you right after ordered. I love the architecture. It’s the old French colony building.

A delightful and tasty Vietnamese cuisine restaurant in Ho Chi Minh city, where you can have very nice Vietnamese food. It’s a kind of classy restaurant in Ho Chi Minh, where Hollywood stars also visit. I like their interior decoration a lot. I feel Vietnamese cuisine is kind of mixing with Chinese food culture in many ways. It’s quite light in flavour generally. Air conditioning is not really common in Ho Chi Minh I found, as it is actually not existed in any kind of restaurants included this one. I am glad that they do have big windows by the table we sat as well as decorative fan otherwise I would feel like being in the desert.

Very nice floor tile….

Vietnamese rice wrapped roll and spring roll. I love all their herbs as the flavour is so refreshing.

Green pea sweet cake and squid with white pepper.

Spa of Vietnam is a big bargain. L’ Apothiquaire is the Artisan Spa that you can’t miss in Ho Chi Minh. I only spent USD75.00 for 4 hours Spa included the Spa cuisine. The package included facial treatment, full body and foot massage as well as the Spa cuisine. The pick up service was also included. It’s not the price that you can pay in Thailand and China for such luxury service. This is a popular place of lady tourists from Hong Kong, Japan and Europe.

They came to our hotel, and picked us up with an antique car.

We had dinner by the pool. Their cusine wasn’t something fancy but simple and refreshing. We had rice noodle and fried chicken in sweet and sour sauce with peanuts for garish. The dessert was tasty banana cake. It was so relaxing having a light dinner after the great Spa.

This is absolutely something you can’t miss to eat in Vietnam, it’s the traditional thick rice noodle soup with half cooked beef. We tried the one, which was the best in town. The soup base was great with rich beef flavour. I also love their herbs and basil for garish.

My dad did some great food for our new year lunch today. Shanghainese homemade food again…Shanghainese fried noodle and Shanghainese fried new year cake…

We had a great Shanghai and Hangzhou cuisines with relatives tonight. Shanghai cuisine is always one of my favourite Chinese cuisines. Due to my family background, it is a particular one that me and my dad love the most. We do also cook it often at home. You can see from what I posted on my blog about our family dinners. However, some of these dishes are not easy to be homemade, so we need to visit restaurants from time to time. Six of us had 20 dishes totally, but I only took 11 photos of it. The food was great, and unbelievable delicious. Yummy!! I indeed ate a lot during this Chinese New Year. It’s hard to stop eating under such cold weather. The cold of this year is unusual. It has been under 50F/8C in my area during the past one week. Food does keep me warm!

We have our homemade abalone again today for Chinese New Year family dinner.

This is our traditional family made Shanghai hotpot, which we have every year. You can find lots of ingredients in it included scallops, sea shells, fish meat wrapped with fry eggs, glass noodles, bamboo shoot, Shanghainese dry meat, Chinese mushroom and Chinese cabbage. Delicious, isn’t it?

And our homemade barbecue sauce king pawn!!

I totally understand now how to cook western style Chinese food after I watched “Take Home Chef”. Every time when I had Chinese food in overseas, I always found the taste and style are very different from our food in Hong Kong and China. The chefs of those overseas Chinese restaurants are also Chinese, so I don’t think there is any reason related to it. It’s definitely related to the way they cook. They cook in western ways that suitable for taste of westerners.

The Aussi chef of Take Home Chef showed how to cook Chinese barbecue porks on his show. The way he did it, which is totally different from our traditional way. We have the pork fired in the big oven, but he did it with a Chinese wok. Basically, he fried it with Cantonese style barbecue sauce. No wonder when I saw the Chinese barbecue pork in Chinese restaurants overseas that looks like stir fry sliced pork.

I like watching this programme as the chef spots strangers in the supermarket, and cooks them food at their homes. It may not be real, but they act so natural. It’s very entertaining. Western chef teaches how to cook Chinese food, which is the most interesting part of the show. He even showed how to make fortune cookie. This is funny enough. We all know that fortune cookies only appear in Chinese restaurants overseas regardless in the U.K., the U.S., N.Z., France and even Hungary. Perhaps, chefs of Hong Kong don’t even know how to make those cookies. This is such fabulous idea of the show. I love it!

Well, the photo is not clear enough to show what the western Chinese barbecue pork looks like, but I guess Chinese can tell.

Yes, I made it!! My dad taught me. This is so complicated to cook. Well, certainly, I am not good enough for it but at least I tried. We bought the Chinese abalones last week, and prepared it for a whole week. I had them dried under the sun for several times during the past week. It’s very important that you have to be sure that they are absolutely dry before you keep them in a proper container. It has to be soaked in the water for few days before you cook it. This is how I did it:

After the abalones being soaked in the water, it became soft. I made soup with it together with chicken and dry scallops, then its flavour will be brought into the soup. After the soup has been cooked for more than an hour, I took the abalones away from the soup and cooked it separately. The abalones were still not ready on this stage, because they were not soft enough to eat. I cooked it with dry scallops again in another pot for almost another three hours. I served it on a plate without any sauce. It tastes good though I knew there was something missing. I didn’t prepare sauce for it. It’s better to eat it with Chinese mushroom in seafood sauce. It doesn’t look good without sauce, but it’s good to taste its pure flavour. I cooked four, so we had one each. It’s much economical to have your self made abalones at home because the same standard of abalones as what we had in the restaurant usually costs around HKD300.00 each. Anyway, I will make it even better next time.