For the last Sunday Dinner of 2012, Cyrus broke out a meal from one of his favorite genres: Vietnamese food. Not only that, but he used two of the four mini-Mark Bittman cookbooks that Uncle Clark and Aunt Diane got me for Christmas. The main course, Vietnamese lemon grass pork. The small, pork medallions they made took barely half an hour for them to make. The other dish Cy picked out, a pan fried noodle cake, was also very quick.
When we all sat down to eat, Dad and Cyrus had also prepared a wonderful salad, with a handful of frilly greens, and some of satsuma sections to liven the basic lettuce. The noodle cakes were hard to eat with a fork, but once you got them to your mouth they were quite good. The curly, relatively sweet noodles set off the soy sauce topping, which was flung about by the now-crunchy noodles. The pork was good, garlicky, with just a hint of the lemon grass underneath.
It would have been better, Dad speculated, if it had been prepared by a woman squatting over a small grill on the cracked, buckled sidewalk half a world away on the streets of Hanoi. Or we could have just grilled it ourselves. Though, at this time of year, our own grill also feels like it's half a world away.
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