Experimenting with Vietnamese Food

My husband and I like Asian food. We are slowly making our way through all the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai restaurants in our town. We have sampled 4, and have about 16 to go. We may never accomplish this goal because we are poor and eating out is a rare and special occasion. So when I got The Slanted Door, we were very excited to try out the recipes.

This was more then just a cookbook though. The Slanted Door is a famous Vietnamese restaurant in California, and the book chronicles the restaurant's origins to the present day. There is a lot of backstory on the dishes, what makes it special and how they came to first serve it. If you like history with your food, you'll really enjoy this book. We were more interested in the recipes themselves, and not in the exposition.

The most successful recipe we tried was the cashew chicken. It called for ingredients we could easily get and didn't have any special equipment to cook with. The combination of cashews and raisins with oyster and fish sauce made for a savory meal, and we've been repeating those flavors in our stir fry and rice dishes ever since. The least successful dish was the rice cake. They were suppose to be crispy bite sized rice and mung bean cakes with shrimp on the top. Ours turned out pasty and bland with not a ounce of crispiness anywhere. The rice cakes called for a special pan, the kind that you use to make escargot in, which we did not have. Instead, we tried it with a mini-muffin pan. This is the source of our epic fail. If you get this book and want to try the rice cakes, don't use a muffin pan. Either skip it, or buy (or borrow) the special pan. I'm certain the pan is the key to rice cake success.

A big factor in our recipe selection process was which ingredients we could get a hold of. The preface says that most ingredients can be found in any Asian market. This may be true if you live in a city, but if you're in a small town, you may be ordering special ingredients over the Internet to make some of these work.

Overall, this is a gorgeous book. It has a beautiful cover, and each recipe is accompanied by a full page glossy picture of the dish.


I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

Pop Culture Funnies

Letters, memos, text messages, diary entries, and online forums are just a few of the formats that the correspondences take in Dear Luke, We Need to Talk, Darth: and other pop culture correspondencs.  The pop culture references range far wider then I expected. From the titular Star Wars to Jaws and The Walking Dead to the Superbowl to The Eagles and Lenard Cohen, plus a lot more. There's reference for every genre (movie, music, tv) and decade, starting from the 1950s on. While I enjoyed this book, I'm not sure of its fit in my library. The other few pop culture books we have do not check out much, except for How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You, so there may be hope for it.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

3.5 Stars Because all humor is subjective and some things were just funnier then others.

Song of Ice and Fire

There haven't been many series that I've been able to keep up with since moving to Japan. Luckily, my Texas library has allowed me access to ebooks and downloadable audiobooks. If I didn't have these, I'd probably be reading more classics, since they are public domain and I get them at sites like Project Gutenberg. But because my library card is still good, I've been able to read George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, also known as A Game of Thrones. I'd been wanting to read the series before HBO adapted it. It was one of those things on the "to read" list that I could never quite get to. I'm not sure when it first aired on TV, but I started reading A Game of Thrones (book 1) shortly after Emma was born. I just finished A Dance with Dragons (book 5). This is a series that will surprise you. I've thought many times that I knew where the action was headed and how the plot would resolve itself, only to have all my expectations go awry by some new plot twist, usually in the form of a character death. If you don't like your protagonists to die, don't read this series. Like Joss Whedon, George R. R. Martin is not afraid to kill off popular characters. No one is safe from his pen. Martin has changed my mind about characters too. Those that I started off hating, I'm now liking. Some that I thought would be integral to plot have faded into the background. Maybe they'll come back later, maybe they'll stay scenery, I don't know. That's one of the things I'm loving about this series. I can't predict it. And its why when book 6 comes out next year (cross your fingers) I'm immediately going to get my name on the check out list. (If I bought #6, I'd have to buy all the rest, and right now baby food, clothes, and plane tickets are a higher priority.)

Reading Plan Complete

The last two books I read for my chick-lit reading plan were not really chick-lit. They had some similar appeal factors but were not mainstream chick-lit books, but were more like appendage's. The first was Bitter is the New Black: confessions of a condescending, egomaniacal, self-centered, smart-@$$ or, why you should never carry a Prada bag to the unemployment office: a memoir by Jen Lancaster. (Great title, eh?) The second was Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner.

Bitter is the new Black is non-fiction. A memoir to be precise, about a 30's something woman who is living the life. She's got a job that makes her oodles of money, a fabulous apartment, and has a committed boyfriend. There are things she would like to change, like she would like to move to New York, but otherwise, things are good. Until she looses her job. And then her boyfriend looses his job. And they have to move. And their car gets reposed. And you get the picture.

The author has a lot in common with many characters I see in, or associate with, chick-lit. She has the big-paying job, and all the latest fashions, the monthly hair appointment with the best stylist in the city. She is not currently looking for a man, because she already has one, but her mother does occasionally bug her about when she's going to marry the guy. The tone is light and snarky and fun, despite the huge life crisis she goes through. And it is a crisis. It takes two years before someone offers her a job. But despite the snarkiness, you can see how her attitude towards work and money and life change. She starts up as the stuck-up princess type and ends up as the funny, blunt, girl-to-hang-out with type.

I'm not sure which category to put Best Friends Forever. It could be women's fiction, or chick-lit, or mainstream fiction. Addie has always been shy, and lately, she's become something of a recluse. After high school, her father died suddenly from and aneurysm and it was left to her to care for her ill mother. Val is a mix of dare-devil and beauty queen. If you cross her, she'll get you back. Addie and Val have been best friends since they were nine. But an incident in high school caused a falling out between them. Now, the night of their high school reunion, Val is at Addie's door, asking for help.

There is a little bit of mystery in what actually happened at the reunion and back in high school, but it is the relationship between Addie and Val that really drives the novel. The mystery is actual a bit anti-climatic, but it does allow Addie to get together with the cute local sheriff, so I suppose it serves its purpose.

So that's it. My 2010 reading plan is complete. And I still have a whole month left over.

Reading plan update

So out of the 8 books that I've picked out to read for my chick lit reading plan, I've only managed to read 2 so far. All my reading time seems to have disappeared into wedding plans, my fiance, and facebook. Not that I'm complaining about the wedding plans or the fiance. Oh, and all the other books I'm suppose to read for work but can't read on work time. But never mind that.

The books I've managed to read are Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding and Bookends by Jane Green. Bridget Jones was what I expected from chick lit. A single 20-30 something looking for love and dealing with parents, jobs, and the single scene. There are a couple of possible love interests, one is a player and one is not, and you wonder if Bridget will get the right guy. But of course she does in the end.

Bookends was not so typical. Cath is a single in the city, but she's not looking for love. She has her best friend, Simon, and a group of other best friends that she's been with since college. What more does she need? James is an artist who doubles as a real estate agent and is obviously interested in her. They would have gotten together sooner if not for all the Drama happening in her friends' lives. This book started out as a fun light read, until the Drama happens. The abrupt change of tone was a bit jarring and completely unexpected. It tries to get back to being light and fun after, but it doesn't quit succeed. Considering the nature of the Drama, its possible it wasn't suppose to.

Overall I give both books 3 stars. No, I take that back, Bookends gets an extra 1/4 of a star for mentioning the TARDIS.