I spent a few days in the Los Angeles area last week, and my best food adventure was lunch in the Little Saigon district, in the city of Westminster.

My parents, our friend Laura, and I crossed the bridge over the koi pond to enter Quan Hy Restaurant, which sits amid the jumbles of strip malls along Bolsa Avenue, housing herbalists, bakeries, groceries, and more restaurants than you could sample in a year.

Specializing in the cuisine of central Vietnam, Quan Hy serves up plenty of dishes that you don’t see in every pho joint.

Our appetizer (and featured mystery dish) was a good example. Banh beo were eight toothsome disks of steamed rice—almost like a chewy rice custard—topped with shrimp, scallions, and bits of crispy fried shallots. Chili-studded fish sauce added a bit of tang and heat.

The refreshing jackfruit salad balanced sweet and savory, mixing the pale yellow fruit with shrimp, cilantro, onions, and pork.

It’s hard to tell from this photo, but the colorful mi quang started with a bowl of lemon-yellow noodles (colored, I think, with turmeric), and topped with pork, lettuce, bean sprouts, herbs, peanuts, and shrimp chips. My mom chose a vegetarian version of this mild noodle dish, which substituted tofu for the pork.

My dad, who is not the world’s most adventurous eater, opted for the xoi ga, because the menu described it as a rather plain-sounding “chicken with sticky rice.”

The chicken was tasty if mild, but the highlight, even for Dad, were the fried rice sticks—crispy outside, smooth and creamy within—which looked like bar-snack spears of deep-fried mozzarella. We could easily have eaten a whole plate of these comforting little treats.

Who needs pho when you have so many other intriguing flavors?

If you go…
Quan Hy Restaurant is at 9727 Bolsa Avenue, Westminster, CA, 714-775-7179. It’s in the same complex as the massive T & K Food Market.

Sunset Magazine published a useful Guide to Little Saigon, with tips on grocery stores, bakeries, and snack shops.

Tasty Travels!

Carolyn

Stephanie Yuen holds up a square of wiry, black moss. It looks like a sponge that tumbled into a tub of jet-black paint.

Our group of eight is in the Guohua Herbalist Shop on Main Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Yuen, a food writer and Chinese food expert (her website is called Beyond Chopsticks), is leading us on a Chinatown foodie tour, organized by local culinary experiences company, Edible Canada. She’s taking us through the crowded neighborhood streets, introducing us to all manner of foods, herbs, and Chinese products, while dispensing culinary tips—and samples—along the way.

Blasts of steam swirl around us as we squeeze into the kitchen of the Sun Fresh Bakery on Keefer Street, where apron-clad counter staff press past us carrying tray after tray of pastries, from baked pumpkin pancakes to sesame-coated fried dough to steamed sponge cakes.

Fingers flying, arms wrapped wrist-to-elbow in cotton sleeve protectors, the two bun makers are rolling, pinching, and squeezing mounds of glossy white dough, stuffing them with gooey-looking spoonfuls of pork.

Yuen brings us big puffy steamed vegetable buns to taste. Filled with greens, they’re pillowy soft outside but still slightly crisp within. I’ve sampled similar steamed buns before, but hot from the steamers, these are among the freshest I’ve tried.

“Take a deep breath,” says Yuen, as we crowd into another brightly lit Chinatown shop. “What you’re smelling is some of the best stuff on earth.”

No, we haven’t taken a detour into a storefront selling the famous “BC bud.” We’re in the Ten Ren Tea shop, and what Yuen wants us to sniff is the earthy aroma of ginseng.

We sip mild, grassy ginseng tea, while Yuen extols the health benefits of the ginseng root, which is also commonly used in a Chinese “long-boiled” chicken soup. According to traditional Chinese medicine, Yuen explains, “ginseng will improve your immune system. We also believe that it will re-energize you.”

There’s no lack of energy in the bustling Chinatown Supermarket, where we wedge between the rows of fruits and vegetables, the aisles packed with shoppers preparing for the Chinese New Year.

The reds and oranges we’re seeing around Chinatown, from red banners to piles of fruit, are good luck colors, Yuen explains, signaling prosperity for the New Year. Oranges are particularly popular for the New Year’s holiday, because their seeds represent growth.

Yuen holds up an unfamiliar brown root. It’s a fresh bamboo shoot, nothing like the limp canned slices. Yuen advises slicing and quickly stir-frying it.

She gives us a quick primer on other vegetables. Daikon (used to make Korean kimchee and other pickles). Chinese celery (similar to, but more pungent than, the western variety). Taro (try slicing it and frying it like potato chips, she suggests). Kabocha squash (also called Japanese pumpkin, often used to make a dessert soup with a striking orange color).

Yuen identifies another nobby, brownish root as arrowroot. “You give it to newlyweds, so they’ll have a boy,” she smiles, noting a protuberance on the root that’s shaped something like “a little boy’s little thing.”

“Does anyone know what this is?” Yuen asks, gesturing toward a massive green-skinned vegetable. It looks like a zucchini left way too long in the garden, but it’s actually a winter melon, commonly added to soups.

We learn a sweeter use for winter melon when we stop into Maxim’s Bakery, where we sample a “wife cake.” Yuen recounts a legend about this oddly-named pastry, which has a custard-like interior inside a flaky baked crust.

Apparently, a Chinese chef kept making pastries, trying to decide which to offer in his shop. Tasting each one, his wife rejected one creation after another. Finally, he made her a winter melon cake, which she declared was delicious. The chef dubbed it “my wife’s cake,” exclaiming, “If she approves it, it will sell!”

Hanging in the window at the Dollar Meat Shop is a whole, roast pig, alongside chickens, ribs, sausages, and two kinds of ducks. Yuen calls one variety a “pipa duck,” because its flattened, oblong shape resembles the Chinese stringed instrument known as the pipa.

“The Chinese handle meat the same as Italians do,” Yuen notes, pointing to the sausages and cured hams dangling from the ceiling of the Pender Street shop. She suggests cooking a small amount of salty Chinese ham with rice, and in an east-west twist, slicing Chinese sausage into strips and adding them with lettuce and other vegetables to a wrap.

We can’t talk about meat without trying some, so Yuen brings out samples of the sausages—tasting faintly of lemon—and of the excellent barbecued ribs, sauced in a sweet-smoky marinade. I’d come back for those ribs in a second.

Back at the herbalist shop, Yuen holds a sponge-like substance, labeled “fungus,” and surprises us by suggesting that it makes an excellent dessert. Soak it in water, she says, then steam it, add canned fruits, and drizzle with chocolate. It sounds weird enough that it might even be good!

Yuen leads us around the shop, pointing out various products, from dried scallops (“a delicacy”) to birds’ nests, while we munch on sweet dried plums and another dried fruit called longan, or “dragon’s eye.” Similar to a plum, but with a smokier flavor, longan is used in soups, teas, and desserts.

As she waves what looks like a flattened lizard on a stick (it turns out to be a dried gecko), Yuen tells us more about traditional Chinese medicine, explaining how different herbs, roots, and even dried creatures are used to regulate the body’s humors and treat various conditions. “Western doctors cure the symptoms. Chinese doctors go right to the root of things,” she says. She cautioned us to consult a trained practitioner, rather than trying to give ourselves an herbal cure, although I don’t think any of us were planning to sample the gecko unsupervised…

Remember the hairy black square that Yuen was holding?

It’s called “hairy moss,” and it’s a crucial ingredient in Chinese New Year dishes, from vegetable hot pots to braised pork hocks. Its Chinese name—fa cai in Mandarin or fat choy in Cantonese—is a homonym for the words “to get rich,” the same expression that the Chinese use to wish each other a happy new year: Gong Xi Fa Cai! Gong Hay Fat Choy!

Our tasty tour wrapped up with a dim sum lunch. I’ll share the delicious details in my next post—stay tuned!

If you go…
Edible Canada offers tours of Chinatown most Saturdays, departing from the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Classical Chinese Garden. You can choose from a two-hour neighborhood tour ($40) or a tour plus a dim sum lunch ($65). For the next two Saturdays (January 28 and February 4, 2012), during the Dine Out Vancouver festival, you can take the basic Chinatown tour for only $30. A great deal! Reservations are required; book on the Edible Canada website.

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Tasty Travels!

Carolyn

Thanks to Edible Canada and Tourism Vancouver for arranging my Chinatown tour.

Did you know that olives grow in Arizona? California, yes. Greece, for sure. But Arizona?

I recently learned about Arizona’s olives when I visited the Queen Creek Olive Mill, an olive grower, olive oil producer, and agri-tourism destination just outside of Phoenix. They serve up lots of olive goodies, too.

While olives are not native to Arizona, Queen Creek General Manager Rob Holmes explained that olives have been growing in the region since the 1800s. The “mission” variety arrived with the 19th-century Spanish missionaries.

Queen Creek grows 16 varieties of olives on their more than 2,000 trees. Nine of those varieties are mature enough to harvest.

According to Holmes, Queen Creek makes its olive oils by blending the oils from several different varieties. They bottle fresh oils about every six weeks.

They infuse some of their oils with natural flavors, ranging from vanilla to lemon to chili (even chocolate!), which you can sample in their market. If you’re really keen on olives, take their 30-minute Olive Oil 101 tour, where you can learn more about olive growing and oil production, with samples of their products, of course.

In Queen Creek’s del Piero cafe, many of the dishes are made with olives or olive products, from bruschetta to sandwiches to baked goods. They use olive oil in their cakes, brownies, and their deservedly popular olive oil waffles. (Check out their website for tips on baking with olive oil).

If you’d like to try making these delicious olive oil waffles at home, here’s the Queen Creek recipe:

Olive Oil Waffles
Adapted from del Piero at the Mill

At Queen Creek Olive Mill’s del Piero restaurant, they make these waffles with their vanilla bean-infused olive oil. You could substitute a mild fruity olive oil and add a small amount of vanilla extract.

Ingredients:
2 eggs, separated
2 cups all-purpose flour
4 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. brown sugar
2 cups milk
1/2 cup vanilla bean olive oil (or 1/2 olive oil, plus 1 tsp. vanilla extract)

Method:

1. Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Set aside.


2. In a separate bowl, mix all dry ingredients. Add milk, olive oil, and egg yolks to dry ingredients and mix until smooth. Gently fold in the egg whites.


3. Preheat waffle iron. Oil lightly or spray with non-stick cooking spray.


4. Pour approximately 1/2 cup of waffle batter into iron and cook to desired crispness. Repeat with each additional waffle.

Yield: Six servings

If you go…
The Queen Creek Olive Mill (25062 S. Meridian Road, Queen Creek, AZ, 480-888-9290) is just east of Mesa, Arizona, in the Phoenix metropolitan area. You can get travel information about the region from the Greater Phoenix Convention & Visitors Bureau or from the Mesa Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Have you tried baking with olive oil? Do you have a favorite olive oil recipe? Please leave a comment and let us know. And if you have a food post – on any culinary topic – that you’d like to share, link to that post here, using the handy-dandy Mr. Linky widget below:

Tasty Travels!

Carolyn