6th Day

Today was Vietnam's National Holiday, so we had something special in our program with the AIESECers (AIESEC is the name of our project's organization) : A cooking day !! We all gathered together in on of the member's house and went to the supermarket together, us three Europeans buying things for the european meals we were going to cook for them, and the Vietnamese buying things for the vietnamese meals. We were going to make some ratatouille, some mashed potatoes, and an apple crumble. But it was difficult to find all the ingredients, especially for the apple crumble ! We didn't find any flour ... And without flour, well it's hard to make a crumble ! So we transformed our apple crumble plan into a simple apple mousse !

After that we all went back to the house and started cutting, pealing, cooking, roasting, frying. The Vietnamese were very curious about our food ! And I have to say, the ratatouille and the mashed potatoes were really delicious, every body loved it ! Beside our dishes, we had some vietnamese spring rolls, and some vietnamese ravioli (like the chinese dim sums), and the main dish was a hot pot with seafood, four fish heads (which are considered a delicacy), a lot of different vegetables and some rice noodles (vermicelli). It was delicious ! For desert we had our apple mousse, which we ate with some chocolate ice cream, and they had made some vietnamese jelly (it's hard to describe, but basically there are three layers of jelly, one with coffee, one with milk and the third one is just transparent jelly). And we had some pomelo (similar to the grapefruits but less sour) and some rambutan (which look like litchis from the inside, and are red with little "hairs" or tentacles outside), which are one of the Vietnamese's favourite fruits !

I had to go home at around 5:30 pm because the mother of my host family said that she wanted to cook something special for this special day, and indeed it was especially good ! It was rice cakes made out of rice powder, with some shrimp and egg sauce on it (I didn't exactly understand what it was), normally it's with meat but they did it without it for me this time, and then they put some croutons on it, and some fish sauce. The thing about these rice cakes is, that it takes a lot of time to prepare them, as there is a very special way to prepare them. They said it took them more than three hours to make all these little cakes. Then we had some unripe mangoes and an other fruit which looks like a giant pear, and tastes a bit like melon, but not as juicy.

So yes, you must be thinking : the National Day is more of a national cooking day, but as every one has the day off, they seize this opportunity to do all the things they usually don't have the time to, and cooking special dishes is one of them. At night there were some fireworks, but I didn't go. Maybe some other year !!