Happy Lunar New Year!!! In Vietnamese, Tết is the name for New Year. This year is the year of the Goat. Tết celebrates the arrival of spring. It takes place from the first day of the first month of the Vietnamese calendar (around late January or early February) until at least the third day. Preparations for Tết is cooking special holiday foods and cleaning the house. These food includes bánh chưng, bánh dày, dried young bamboo soup (canh măng), giò and sticky rice. There are a lot of customs practiced during Tết, such as visiting a person’s house on the first day of the new year (xông nhà), ancestral worshipping, wishing New Year’s greetings, giving lucky money in lucky red envelopes to children and elderly people.
As I have stated in my earlier posts, moving to Sweden has made me more patriotic and really into my roots. In the states, I rarely celebrated Tết at all. It was just another day to me. But when it was approaching this year, I made it a mission for us to celebrate it. Daniel was on board because he thinks it’s nice that we keep some Vietnamese traditions. Food is a big part of this celebration and I never had a chance to learn how to make traditional Vietnamese food. It was also challenging to find all the ingredients needed to make this type of food.
A traditional Vietnamese dish is Thit Kho Heo Trung, which is a type of pork and egg stew. I found a recipe online that used the oven to make it instead of the stove top, so I decided to give it a try. The result came out perfect. The pork was so tender and the eggs were place right at the end of cooking so it wasn’t over boiled. You eat this over rice and the sauce is to die for. One dish down a few more to go.
I found another great recipe online to make our traditional Pho, beef noodle soup. The challenge of this was to find the right beef bones to make the broth. With pho, the broth is EVERYTHING. If you get this wrong, the whole dish is ruined. Typically this is soup is suppose to cook on low for 8 hours to build the appropriate flavors. Thank goodness for my slow cooker. It’s one of the best investments I’ve made. Daniel who always questions everything I buy with, “Are you sure you are going to use it”, agrees that this was a good buy!
Pho is a labor of love because of all the steps needed to create this broth. You have to first find the necessary bones, which was a challenge here in Sweden. Luckily, Daniel was able to track down a butcher. They were puzzled with him when he asked for only the bones and not the meat! LOL. So what you need is an oxtail, beef leg bones, knuckles and bone marrow. I know it sounds crazy but it is so delicious. You add this to a number of special roasted seasonings like star anise, cinnamon sticks, cloves, coriander pods and cardamom. Then you fill the pot with fresh water after you have removed all the scum from the boiled bones. You add it to the slow cooker on low with a roasted onion and some fish sauce and let it do it’s thing for 8 hours.
Lastly, I wanted to make some spring rolls, but I wanted to get everyone involved in making them. So I made a simple baked salmon and showed Daniel’s family how to roll one themselves. I was so happy to see them stepping outside of their comfort zone to try something new. These flavors are really different for people that are not accustomed to Asian food. They were great sports about it, but I am sure they are happy that I only make this once a year! Although it was an exhausting day, I was so happy that I could share my culture with my new family. I will definitely be celebrating this next year and years to come when we have children. I want them to feel that they are special and because their parents have such different heritages they will be the best of all things. Happy New Year everyone! Wishing you health, wealth and happiness!