COMSTRAT 383

Weekly blog posts on the Vietnamese food culture and traveling.

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It has been great to be able to share my culture to everyone. It was also a chance for me to learn what I didn't know. Most importantly, I got to know so many blogs within the same area of interest. It's surprising that not only Vietnamese but also many foreigners are interested in the Vietnamese culture. 

I'd love to continue exploring and sharing in the near future. I'd go further into recipes, holidays, travel tips, and restaurant reviews.

Thank you for following my blog. Let's have Vietnamese food for dinner!

See you again.

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Where is Vietnamese Food Going?

The food business will never go out of fashion. Vietnamese food has been sweeping the United States since 1970s, when thousands of Vietnamese refugees arrived. Phở was the first to be introduced, then other dishes. Vietnamese restaurants has been growing in quantity and quality around the states. Vietnamese food became the most popular cuisine in Washington state, according to Huffington Post. 

We now have Vietnamese restaurants in all 50 states. It will continue to grow. Some restaurants fuse Vietnamese food with other cuisine, such as Chinese and French, to create a new taste. Soon enough, there will be at least one Vietnamese restaurant in each city in the U.S.

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Quick Fix

In cooking Vietnamese food, you actually don't need a premium beef cut to have an amazing tenderness and juiciness. Here are something you can do while preparing beef to make it more tender and juicy.

Marinate with oil for about half an hour before cooking. Remember to reduce the amount of oil when cooking to make it less oily. You can substitute oil with vinegar or wine, and marinate it for about 15 minutes.

Cross-slide the muscles. Most of the time, you can see lines of the muscle fibers going one-way, don't cut along and parallel with those lines, but across it. This is only needed when you are preparing thin slices to stir-fry, will not really work for cubes and chunks.

Cook it fast. If you cook it over the heat for too long, it will drain out the juice, your beef will then be dried and hard to chew. For stir-frying, heat up the pan first, then pour the right amount of oil; when the oil is hot enough, add beef, constantly stirring until cooked, then remove it from the heat.

Because we don't have the budget to afford everyday expensive beef, so we have to use tricks. These tricks have 99% chance of success, and I'm still doing it almost everyday to save my teeth.

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Can Bánh Mì Be The Next Trending Vietnamese Food?

Bánh Mì is the general name for a variety of Vietnamese sandwich. French baguettes came to Vietnam during the colonization period in 19th century. Vietnamese Bánh Mì is a mix of western ingredients, such as the baguette itself, paté and mayonnaise, with Vietnamese ingredients, such as eggs, Vietnamese sausages (chả lụa) and some herbs. It has been breakfasts of Vietnamese students and workers for decades.

Recently, Bánh Mì has become popular in the United States and around the world. With a bit of modification to fit the taste of each region, Bánh Mì still has its own signature combinations of meat, vegetables and egg/mayonnaise sauce inside a baguette. It is such a good mix of nutrition needed in a meal, which might be why Bánh Mì has become people’s favorite.

Source: Luke Vu’s Flickr

It can easily be found in any Vietnamese area around the U.S. with several choices of fillings, like grilled pork, Vietnamese sausages, paté and meatball. Bánh Mì is convinient and portable. People can make themselves a Bánh Mì or buy one on the way to work, and heat it up later and it will be fresh as new.

Bánh Mì might be the next trending Vietnamese food after Phở.

The Vietnamese Student Association at WSU is selling their delicious Bánh Mì again this year. Pre-order should be up soon. Or you can buy it directly in CUB 414, from 12 to 2:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 9. I will keep you updated.

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My Review on Adam Cooks Everything

Adam Cooks Everything is a new YouTube Channel of cooking tutorials. And as its name, Adam does cook everything, sweet treats, holidays’ food, cake and cocktails. I believe there is a team working on this channel, and they put quite a lot of effort in building it. I usually watch cooking videos focusing on visual and lighting aspect; food in those videos usually looks so delicious that I want to try it out right away. Most cooking channels often keep their videos short and straight into the process, because the recipe is the reason why audiences are watching their videos. However, Adam Cooks Everything has a unique approach, they have fun while showing audiences how to cook. For example, in the Christmas Fruit Cake Recipe video, they build a story of Elf Adam creating his new YouTube cooking show with his first recipe, a Christmas fruit cake. He also puts on a show in the cooking process, such as throwing a knife or an egg easily without a problem. 

The videos often have themes, such as Holidays, Gluten Free or Try This Instead (imitating well-known recipes). It’s easy to find recipes by looking at each category.

This channel is not a professional cooking channel, from my experience watching so many cooking videos. They might not be professional yet, because the channel was created just over a year ago. Or that’s the way they run their channel, they want to have fun instead of focusing of polishing the visuals.

https://bloggersrequired.com/blogging-assignment-review-new-youtube-cooking-channel/

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Thought Leader

I have been following Savoury Days since the first time I tried cooking. The blog is run by Trang, a young Vietnamese women living in Europe. Savoury Days is a combination of eastern and western food cultures with a focus on bakery. Trang has the sense of art, which makes the visual side of the blog really stand out. She puts a lot of effort on building a nice and organized website, making it easier for the audiences to search through it. Pictures included in each blog post are also a plus. Some people will want to try out the recipes just by looking at the pictures, like I do. 

Several comments left on the blog says the recipes are really detailed and easy to follow. Trang explained that working as a researcher in economics had influenced the way she learns to cook and bake and her blog’s writing style. 

Trang also has a section for her traveling experiences. And again, her nice pictures and stories are so intriguing that people want to book their flight ticket.

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Top 10 Vietnamese Food

1. Phở - Speaking about Vietnamese food, it’s impossible to start out without Pho. It is common not only in Vietnam, but also around the world. 

Phở in Hanoi

2. Bún Chả - A dish of thin rice noodle (different than noodle used in phở) with grilled pork dipping in sweet and sour sauce. 

3. Bánh Mì – Vietnamese sandwich with pickles and meat wrapped in a baguette. Common kinds of meat are ham, liver paste, eggs, and grilled lemon grass pork. 

4. Xôi – Sticky rice with toppings of your choice, such as eggs, sausage, braised pork, grilled chicken and shredded dried pork. 

5. Chả Cá Lã Vọng – Seasoned fish chunks and dill stir-fried in a pan right at your table, dipping in fine shrimp sauce or fish sauce. 

6. Bún Bò Huế - Thin rice noodle in spicy beef soup, originated in Hue city. 

7. Gà Tần – Chicken cooked in Chinese herbs. The special chicken used in this dish is called Black-Bone Silky Fowl. 

8. Bánh Cuốn – It’s like Vietnamese crepes. But the crepe is made from rice flour and super thin. Wrapped in side are chopped wood ear mushroom and minced pork, with a bit of dried onion sprinkled on top. 

9. Bún Ngan – Another kind of noodle soup, also known as Bún Măng Vịt in the U.S. It’s rice noodle, duck meat and bamboo in soup made from boiled duck meat. Simple as it sounds, but the flavor is hard to forget. 

10. Chè – Sweet desert soup. There are uncountable types of chè. It’s commonly choices of red beans, black beans, green beans, mung beans, corn, sweet potato, tapioca, jelly and tropical fruits, with ice, coconut milk and dried coconut flakes on top.

All pictures were taken by me.

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Restaurant of the Week

It’s hard to find a decent Vietnamese restaurant in Pullman. There are not many Vietnamese living here anyway. But if you don’t have any Vietnamese friends who can cook for you, or if you don’t want to cook, Golden Teriyaki is the place you might want to check out. Nothing in the name of the restaurant says that it has something to do with Vietnamese food. And even though it is more like a Chinese restaurant, they have a touch on the Vietnamese taste. Vietnamese food is influenced so much by Chinese anyway. 

Courtesy of WSU Vietnamese Student Association.

The first time I went to that place was for a Lunar New Year celebration with Vietnamese Student Association. I was impressed, not just because of the taste, but also because they actually have some Vietnamese dishes. 

Last semester, the Vietnamese Student Association ordered catering food from Golden Teriyaki for the annual cultural show, Footprint of Vietnam. I remember getting tons of compliment on the served food. 

I ended up coming to that place quite often. And instead of ordering from the menu, I usually asking the waitresses for the best dishes, or describing the delicious ones I had from the last time I visited. 

So, if you plan to go to Golden Teriyaki tonight, try out braised pork with eggs, sweet and sour fish soup, pork stuffed tofu and walnut prawns. Those are my favorite. You can also check out their menu on Yelp, https://www.yelp.com/biz/golden-teriyaki-pullman, or ask your waitress for recommendations.

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Favorite Product - Fish Sauce

The main key for the smell and flavor of a Vietnamese dish is fish sauce. I agree that fish sauce has a terrible smell and is not ideal for or closed space. But that is just for uncooked fish sauce. If you add just about the right amount of that smelly liquid to your boiling pot, the dish will come out with a yummy smell that everyone just wants to dig right in. 

I have seen many different brands of fish sauce on the U.S. markets, Squid Brand Fish Sauce, Viet Huong Fish Sauce, Flying Lion Fish Sauce, Thai Kitchen Fish Sauce, etc. Though, I recommend Flying Lion Fish Sauce. 

I think this brand carries the smelliest yet most flavorful fish sauce. From my experience, the more it smells, the tastier it is. Flying lion also gives me a real fishy smell, which means it is made from real fishes. 

However, if you are living with someone that cannot handle the smell of fish sauce, go for Thai Kitchen. Both the taste and smell of Thai Kitchen fish sauce are not as strong as Flying Lion. In fact, I can’t really tell if my roommates are cooking with fish sauce, unless they drop the whole bottle of Thai Kitchen into their pan.

If you are going out for grocery shopping for this weekend, take a look at the Asian section to see if your local stores carry Flying Lion or Thai Kitchen. Get a bottle and let's have Vietnamese food for dinner.

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What Thrills Me

I bet you know the feeling when you cook a meal for someone and they love it. That is my biggest motivation to cook.

I didn’t really cook anything properly until I was about 18 years old, when I was preparing for my new life oversea. Yeah, Mommy realized I would have to live by myself, I’d better learn how to cook. But I was not interested in cooking as much, I got too used to having my meals ready by Mommy. You know, things change when you have to do it or you die. Literally. If I don’t cook, I have to eat out, and my budget doesn’t allow me to do that. Then I don’t just cook for myself, I cook for my roommates and my friends. Surprisingly, they liked it. There I developed my interest.

But the fact that my friends love my food is not all. Daddy is a picky eater. He has been traveling all his life, eating the best and most authentic food from all the places. But when it comes to home cooking, he only likes Mommy’s food, because that is the taste that he got used to for longer than I’ve existed. All feedback I have ever got from him was, “This is burned,” “This needs more salt,” “This is too sweet.” Not a single compliment. One day, I made an Oreo cheesecake. I did not expect him to eat it, because he is not a big fan of cheese. He came home that day and the first thing he said was, “Something smells good.” He once yelled at me for making the house smell all buttery because I was baking some cookies, so you know how bizarre it was for him to like the smell of my cheesecake. He ended up having too big slices. The next time I baked it, he couldn’t even wait for it to cool down to eat it. I remember that feeling. The feeling when Daddy loves my food so much he says it.

I actually wanted to major in Culinary Art. But I realized it would be tiring to bury myself in the kitchen all day long and smell like food at the end of the day. I decided to cook only for myself and the ones I love. Though, I have a dream of opening my own bakery.

I still don’t call myself a foodie. I love cooking and want to explore new recipes, that’s all. And whenever I cook something new, I don’t just cook it, I try it on people. Friends and family are always the best critics.

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Tasty - Who I Admire

Tasty is my inspiration. Its recipe videos make everything look so tasty everyone wants to try it, or cook it. No wonder why they named the website that way.

Tasty is a section within Buzzfeed, a multimedia company. It focuses on food related content. And it doesn’t just share random food recipes, but also create its own content. The production team really makes it into art and I love it.

Beside BuzzFeed.com, Tasty’s main base is on Facebook. It was launched on Facebook in mid-2015. Over the past 2 years, Tasty now has almost 90 million followers on Facebook. There is also international series, such as Einfach Tasty for Germany, Tasty Japan for Japan and Tasty Miam for France. Each of those version produces videos in the language of the country it represents.

Tasty has done a good job in spreading the love for food and encouraging people to practice cooking. Videos usually end with a whispering sound, “Yassss,” as how people would do when they see something satisfying.

Chicken wings are my weakness, and Tasty got me by having a tutorial of 7 ways to make chicken wings. I has always had it saved on my browser for whenever I crave for something other than Vietnamese food.

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10 Things You Probably Didn't Know

1. Easy thing first. I was born and raised in Vietnam. My background and earlier life have nothing to do with where I am living now. I started to learn English in elementary school, because it was required. I swear, I only knew “Hello, how are you?” “I’m fine, thank you. And you?” Seriously, English was a nightmare until I was in 7th grade, when I actually started to care. I didn’t care about the language, I cared about my grade; I didn’t want my transcript to look bad just because of a language. So I studied. It was surprisingly easy. I was getting better everyday.

2. I never thought about leaving my city. I ended up being 7,000 miles away. I googled it, the distance between Hanoi, Vietnam and Pullman, Washington is 11,326 km or 7037.6501 miles.

3. I don’t have a U.S. citizenship, which means I’m studying abroad, I’m an international student. Yup, it’s just like people in the Murrow Backpack Journalism Program who went to Nepal, Guatemala or Greece last year. If you were on Terrell Mall last Wednesday for the Study Abroad Fair, you did the same thing I did four years ago.

4. I miss home a lots. I miss food and the vibes more than I miss my people. I chat with my friends and family almost daily. I video-call them almost weekly. But I can’t get to taste the taste of home. Vietnamese food in the U.S., especially in Pullman, is strange.

5. Moving to the U.S. was like, BOOM, everything changes. You probably understand the homesickness. Try escalate it to 7,000 miles, or 11-hour flight, 4-hour layover and 5-more-hour flight. I never lived apart from my family. I never washed my own clothes. I never lived in an English-speaking environment for more than 2 hours. And I never cooked anything except for instant noodle. Here I am today with cooking/baking being one of my hobbies, and having a food blog.

6. My other (and bigger) hobby is photography. I have a Canon 60D with just a kit and a fixed 50mm lenses. But I don’t use them so often anymore, because iPhone 7+ camera is amazing and light weighted. Right now, my phone has 5,916 pictures stored since 2012. I take graduation photos and have random photoshoot with my friends. Other than that, I take mostly landscape pictures. I use Instagram to showcase them, sometimes along with stories. Check out my feed, http://instagram.com/thisnoisymind.

This is a picture I took last year of Brittany Kreuger, a former student in Murrow College.

7. I went back to Vietnam every summer and had road trips with my family several times. I took so many pictures of every places I visit and along the way. I believe my photos are more realistic than most of them you can find on the internet. I will include them in my blog as much as possible. Gotta showcase the beauty of my home.

A picture I took on a road trip in Vietnam with my family last summer.

8. My home is a small country in the Southeast Asia. Vietnam is the international name. We spell it Việt Nam, with those accent marks and a space between two syllables. If you look at the map, find China, then look down south, then right next to the ocean, my home is there. Some people know China, but don’t know Vietnam, some never ever heard of Vietnam. That’s sad.

9. Vietnamese cuisine is the most popular in Washington state, according to HuffingtonPost. Vietnamese food is also well-known in California and Colorado. Pullman has a Vietnamese restaurant. Though it is not a good one, I'm still proud that Vietnamese food is popular enough to be in such a small town.

10. Popular as it is, but Vietnamese food in the U.S. is not what we actually eat in Vietnam. Our food smells like fish sauce almost all the time. We basically eat whatever provides nutritions, even snails, frogs or snakes, and we eat it to the guts. We don't throw away chicken gizzards, pig brains and fish heads; yes, we eat it all. Vietnamese food is sometimes too exotic that I can't even eat it. I usually joke that the world has two types of people, ones who love Vietnamese food and ones who love Americanized Vietnamese food.

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A Profile of Vietnamese Food and Culture

As you may have realized, my blog will focus on Vietnamese culture, especially the food culture. I don't call myself a foodie, because I'm too picky to be one. I'm in love with food and willing to try new dishes, as long as it's within my comfort zone. Just like when someone's Facebook profile says, "Interested in men," it doesn't mean she's interested in dating all kind of guys on earth. I love food but there are some preferences.

My preference is Vietnamese food. I was raised by Vietnamese culture. It, therefore, runs in my blood. There is nothing more familiar to me than Vietnam. However, there are still some weird things my people eat, but I will never do, such as dog meat, rabbit meat or cat meat. OMG. No, thanks.

Beside those exotic dishes, I'm sure almost all of you, my dear readers, has heard of Phở. But believe me, Phở just "scratches the surface" of the Vietnamese food culture, as mentioned in a post about Vietnamese street food by Alison Spiegel on Huffington Post. You should check that article out to know Spiegel's and her husband's amazing food trip.

Phở is only one of so many Vietnamese noodle soup. Saveur, a food and travel magazine, has an article about 10 essential Vietnamese noodle soups to know (beyond Phở) by Dan Q. Dao. His article will show you not just a list of our signature noodle soups, but also pictures that might trigger your salivary gland and information about different types of noodle. It will be a step for you to get to know Vietnamese food.

Let me tell you, Vietnamese food in the United States is not what we actually eat back home. If you are curious enough to travel to Vietnam and try out our food culture on our land, check out Tom's travel blog Vietnam Coracle. I intend to touch on the cultural aspect of Vietnam, to let you know the background that stays behind the dishes. Before going to a strange place, you might need some Dos and Don'ts, must visits and must try's. I would love to guide you to experience my beloved country.

I hope words from a native Vietnamese will help you better than any first-time explorer. And at the end of the day, don't forget, let's have Vietnamese food for dinner.

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Welcome to My Blog!

(Don't read this, you probably have read this post in my Home page already. Just posting it again here for the sake of COMSTRAT 383)

Hello readers,

Welcome to my blog!

My name is Nguyễn Thảo Quyên. I know, it is not easy for most of you to pronounce it right, so let me make it easier. My name is Quin Nguyen. Yes, Quin is the closest way to pronounce my first name, and yes, my last name is the most popular one in Vietnam, and also one among the most popular in this planet. If you are wondering why it is popular, stay tuned, because I will for sure explain everything soon in a post.

This is 2017 and I’m in my senior year at Washington State University, majoring in Communication, Public Relations specified. I am also a Vice President for the Vietnamese Student Association at WSU, and a peer mentor in the International Programs. So, basically, I get involved mostly with international students, because I am one as well.

I’m creating this blog for my COMSTRAT 383 and COMJOUR 333. Internet has become an essential part of the millennials, which puts digital platforms into focus of public relations. I’m glad that I can finally get a chance to have a blog to write about what I am passionate about, food, Vietnamese food, and everything I love about my homeland. However, it will be a bit more than just Vietnam in the COMJOUR 333 sections. By the end of this semester, I hope not only that I can improve my blogging skills, but my reader can also understand more about Vietnam. I also want to keep this blog going even after the semester.

If you love Vietnamese culture, this will be a place for your. If you don’t know much or anything about Vietnam, please follow me. At the end of the day, when someone asks you what you want for dinner, I hope your answer will be, “Vietnamese food.”

Your faithfully,

Quin Nguyen