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Boiled chicken may seem simple, but it's not easy to make it delicious and visually appealing. The chicken displayed on the offering tray must be beautifully golden, with the skin intact during boiling, and most importantly, the meat must still be fragrant and tender when eaten, dipped in a mixture of salt, pepper, lemon, and lime leaves.
Fried spring rolls served with sweet and sour fish sauce are known worldwide and are an indispensable dish during Tet (Vietnamese Lunar New Year). To make delicious fried spring rolls, the ingredients for the filling must be balanced, and they must be fried in hot oil over low heat to achieve a crispy outer layer.
The drizzling rain and slightly chilly weather make jellied meat even more appealing. If you're not too picky, simply simmer pork, chicken, or pork trotters with wood ear mushrooms and shiitake mushrooms overnight, then let the cool air solidify it for another day. You'll have a translucent jellied meat dish to enjoy with pickled mustard greens.
The color red symbolizes good fortune and prosperity, so gac fruit sticky rice is chosen to bring good luck for the new year. To utilize the fragrant, sweet, and rich broth from boiled chicken and the chicken offal, people in the past created a chicken offal noodle soup to offer to their ancestors, which also balances the feast with its many meats and sticky rice dishes.
The simple dish of banh chung (Vietnamese sticky rice cake) carries so much meaning and stories about tradition. In modern life, you can easily buy banh chung at supermarkets and markets. However, many families and clans still make and cook it themselves so that everyone can gather and share joys and sorrows after a busy year.Pickled onions, served as an accompaniment to sticky rice cakes (bánh chưng), have a slightly pungent, spicy, and sour taste that enhances the flavor of the dish.
Mixed stir-fry dishes typically include pork skin, beans, carrots carved into flower shapes, shiitake mushrooms, heart, kidneys, etc. The dish is fragrant, delicious, and visually appealing, with the fluffy, chewy pieces of pork skin adding a unique touch to the Tet feast.
Bamboo shoot soup is usually made with pork leg and dried bamboo shoots. It's a dish that truly showcases the meticulousness of the homemaker. When I was little, our kitchen utensils were simple, so to make a delicious bamboo shoot soup, my mother would prepare it a week in advance. She would soak the bamboo shoots in water, simmer them multiple times, changing the water each time to remove the bitterness, then stir-fry them before adding them to the pork leg broth. The bamboo shoots had to taste as good as a piece of lean meat to be considered a true example of my mother's cooking.
Text & Photos: Ngoc Tran - Food Stylist: Mom Carot
