HCM City in the top 10 of street food destinations

HCM City has been listed in the top 10 of world's best street food destinations. 

HCM City's most famous street foods include “pho” (rice noodles), “banh my kep pate” (sandwich with pate), and “banh xeo” (literary sizzling cake or fried pancakes made of rice flour, turmeric powder, and slivers of fatty pork, shrimp).

According to Food and Wine, street food has played an important role in the gastronomy of the world. The magazine sent readers to HCM City's Ben Thanh market where food-lovers can discover the beauty of Vietnamese cuisine and enjoy delicious dishes. It also suggested other destinations where tourists could enjoy street food, such as Bangkok (Thailand), Penang (Malaysia), Berlin (Germany), Austin (Texas, United States).

Food & Wine was founded in 1978 by Ariane and Michael Batterberry, American food writers. It features recipes, cooking tips, travel information, restaurant reviews, chefs, wine pairings and seasonal/holiday content.

  VNA

 

Misty Mountain

Relishing a trip to the cradle of Vietnamese Buddhism

It was a misty spring day and the winding road taking us up Tam Dao Mountain was made longer by the thick fog that blocked our view of the road. But still, the scenery pierced through the mist and soon we were driving through the remains of old French neighborhoods, dilapidated villas and estates now worn and torn after half a century of neglect.
We passed some of Tam Dao National Park’s famous sites – like Thac Bac (The Silver Fall) and Rung Rinh peak – and finally reached the slopes of Thach Ban Mountain, one of the Tam Dao range’s three greatest peaks.
There sits Tay Thien, a well-known complex that is home to a cornucopia of historical Buddhist relics and temples. The complex boasts splendid architecture, rich history and breathtaking natural scenery. We were visiting in hopes that we could pray for luck and happiness this year while it was still spring.
We arrived at Tay Thien after three hours on the 85-kilometer-road from Hanoi, which, according to our drivers, normally takes just roughly 2 hours on clear days. It was 10 a.m. and the sky was still covered with silver mist.
Although the annual Tay Thien Spring Festival – held from the 15th-17th of the second lunar month each year – has yet to come, the pagodas and temples here were still full of visitors.
There is now a cable car station at the mountain foot, next to Cau Temple. The ride just opened last month and gave us a wonderful view of the mountain and its surrounding forests, thick, lush and dense with vegetation and life. At the slow pace of the cable car, we admired the sites and took lots of pictures.
Tay Thien is believed to be the birthplace of Vietnamese Buddhism. According to our guide, a Buddhist monk from India traveling here in the 3rd century BC chose this mountain as the spot from which to propagate the religion.
We saw a number of temples, many of which have been mostly lost to time, and others that have been fairly well preserved or restored.
Our first stop was at Thuong Temple, one of the most important sites here. According to our guide, the temple worships the Goddess Tay Thien, named Lang Thi Tieu, queen of the 6th Hung King who lived around the year 2450 BC. She was born in this area and after becoming the queen, she helped the king defend the country against foreign invaders.
Situated 800 meters above sea level, Thuong Temple has undergone more than one renovation, the latest of which was in 2009, and the buildings actually look rather new. We spent some time admiring the sight and prayed to the Goddess there.
Another must-visit site in Tay Thien is the Truc Lam Tay Thien Zen Monastery, which together with a Zen Monastery in Da Lat and one at Quang Ninh Provinces’s Yen Tu Mountain, is one of the three largest monasteries in Vietnam.
Built in 2005 on the ruins of an ancient pagoda called Thien An Thien Tu, the Truc Lam Tay Thien Zen Monastery sits on the mountain’s peak and offers a stunning view of several other temples and pagodas scattered along the pine-decorated hills.
The site itself is at once tranquil and grandiose. The courtyards are large and spacious and the buildings tall and striking. The monastery is adorned with ornate carvings on its doors and embossed works on its walls, ceilings, and pillars.
The monastery boasts a library, a museum, a meditation house, guesthouses and a mess hall serving vegetarian food for visitors.
The Truc Lam Tay Thien Zen Monastery has become an increasingly popular training center for young students each summer. Students here spend those months essentially living like monks: they eat vegetarian, wear monks’ robes and give up many of their “worldly” possessions.
They attend classes each day, as well as maintain the monastery by doing housework and tasks that many of them have never done before.
We were served a fantastic lunch with the monks and other visitors at the monastery’s hall. We had plates full of vegetables, spring rolls, and fake fried shrimp, fish, and pork pie. It was hard to imagine that they were all made from soybeans. Everything was delicious!

Top 5 dishes in Hue

Com hen Song Huong
com hen“Com Hen Song Huong” is a dish served at room temperature, made with mussels and leftover rice. It is a complicated recipe that includes sweet, buttery, salty, sour, bitter and spicy flavors.
Com Hen Song Huong (or Com hen in short) is the very simple and low-priced specialty of Hue, the ancient citadel of Vietnam. Accordingly, the way of serving this special kind of food is of great ancience, simplicity and deliciousness.
Com Hen has a sweet-smelling flavor of rice, onion, and grease, as well as strange tastes of sweet, buttery, salty, sour, bitter, and peppery-hot. You have to arrive to Hen river-islet in the Perfume River to have the original Com hen. However, you can find out the dish on some streets in Hue City. It requires 15 different raw materials to prepare for the dish, including mussel, fried grease, watery grease, peanuts, white sesames, dry pancake, salted shredded meat, chili sauce, banana flower, banana trunk, sour parabola, spice vegetables, peppermint, salad, etc.
Com hen is always attractive to many customers since it is tasty and, at the same time, economical to anybody.
What makes this simple kind of food popular is revealed in the great endeavor to adopt and process its main ingredient – mussel. Mussels are sea species, which must be dipped in water for a long while before being processed. Accordingly, people often say that com hen somehow expresses the strenuous work of the maker.
Where to find it? Very easy as it is popular everywhere in Hue and these days, elsewhere in Hue restaurants in Vietnam. More favorably, it is a low-priced specially, thus you could eat it in luxurious restaurants in Hue or even in venturing mobile shops on the streets.
“Visiting Hue could not miss Com hen, or else you have not come to Hue ever!” is the most common remark of visitors elsewhere to Hue. So, please come and enjoy it yourself!
Bun Bo Huebun bo hue
If you're familiar with phở, bún bò Huế is another beef rice noodle soup. The beef soup dish originated in the city of Huế, the old imperial capital of Vietnam. Like traditional phở bò, the broth of bún bò Huế is simmered with beef bones and Asian spices such as ginger, but the similarities pretty much end there. The real difference is that the broth is finished with lemongrass and red chilies.
I made a very basic soup with thinly sliced beef shanks, but some people are more adventurous and add pig knuckles, congealed pig blood called huyết (which I do not like), and serve shrimp paste on the side as a condiment. I garnished the soup with the commonly used bean sprouts, lime wedges, cilantro and raw sliced white onions, thinly sliced purple cabbage and shredded iceberg lettuce. Purple cabbage makes sense because it most closely resembles the texture of banana flowers, which are traditionally included in bún bò Huế. The taste is obviously different though.
Once the dish is prepared, everyone should roll up their sleeves and commence slurping down the bowl of beef broth in front of them. This is not a subtle dish; your taste buds will be bombarded with sweet, savory and spicy flavors. My mouth waters just thinking about it!
Banh Beo
banh beo1Banh beo, oh how we love to slurp up your delicate rice cakes topped with minced shrimp and crispy pork rind bathed in a spicy nuoc mam cham…We smile with satisfaction as we pile empty banh beo bowls upon bowls, one on top of another, ten high on the table.  One of our absolute favorite appetizers, banh beo originates from the central regions of Vietnam and Hue and can be served in variety of ways including in a “chen,” a small condiment size bowl or loose, stacked on a “dia,” or plate.  There is even a variation where it’s served in a larger rice bowl, yielding a much larger rice cake with a big dimple in the center for the toppings. Also, in the mien bac (Northern Vietnam), mung bean paste is also swiped onto the cake before the other toppings.
For convenience, we just use the pre-packaged banh beo rice flour. But if you were to make it without any alterations you’ll find that it doesn’t have the right texture–rice flour by itself is rather soft and can be mushy. You need to add some tapioca flour/starch to this mix in order to get the right soft, yet slightly chewy consistency.
To make a large quantity, there are modes such as these that you can buy in the Vietnamese markets for about $2. However these are fairly large so make sure you have a big enough steamer and several of these trays so you can steam multiple trays at once. We have a 4 chambered steamer so we use multiple modes at once.  If you’re making less just halve the quantites below and pour them in the small condiment bowls–but you’ll need a lot so buy them at the Asian restaurant supply store if you can.
If you’re using the small condiment bowls, the same concepts apply except that you don’t need to grease these since it’s a onetime use.  We prefer a thin banh beo so we typically go light on the batter, but use as much batter as you like according to your taste.
When ready to serve, top each banh beo with minced shrimp, scallion oil, and small pieces of pork rinds. Serve with some spicy nuoc mam cham.  The banh beo (with out the toppings) can stay soft overnight un-refrigerated so you can make this in advance.  Any longer than that then we recommend refrigerating it and then warming in microwave.

Banh Khoai
Banh khoai (delicious pancake) is so much like Banh xeo (sizzling pancake) since they both are made from rice flour, water, turmeric powder, added slivers of fatty pork, shrimp, bean sprouts and then pan fried. Banh khoai and Banh xeo also are wrapped in mustard leaf, lettuce leaves or rice paper, and stuffed with variety of herb, like mint leaves, basil and served with a sweet and sour mixed sauce. In Hue, Banh khoai is placed open-face instead of being folded in half like Banh xeo. Moreover, Banh khoai always goes with a fermented soy bean sauce, and people consider it a winter food owing to its greasiness and spicy taste of the sauce. Therefore, most Hue citizens only make them when winter coming.

Mam tom chua
mam tom chuaThe central of Vietnam is reputable for its Mam tom chua (sour shrimp sauce) and Hue is the best place for this unique sauce. Unlike normal shrimp sauce (has brown color and smooth surface), Sour shrimp sauce has orange color while shrimps still keep its original shape. It is quite simple to make this sauce. First, shrimps are clean by salt water (do not use normal water to avoid bad smells) and "cook" by strong rice wine. The shrimps will turn red. After that, carefully mix the shrimps with sticky rice, sliced lesser galangal, garlic and chili. Slowly put all the mixture into a jar covered by guava leaves. Just need to wait for 5-7 days and we have the mouthwatering sour shrimp sauce of our own making. This is the best sauce for boiled pork with vermicelli.

Cambodia's Angkor Wat attracts 639,800 int'l visitors in Q1

The number of foreign tourists to Cambodia's Angkor Wat temples, one of the world heritage sites, had increased by 45 percent to 639,800 in the first quarter of this year, showed the statistics of Siem Reap provincial tourism department on Friday.

The top three countries visiting the temples are South Korea, Vietnam and China. During the period from January to March this year, some 132,750 South Koreans, 75,088 Vietnamese, and 49,231 Chinese had visited the temples, up 67 percent, 15 percent and 54 percent respectively.

"We see that the visitors from South Korea and China are on the sharp rise," Chhoeuy Chhorn, administration chief of Siem Reap provincial tourism department, told Xinhua over telephone, adding "this thanks to the broader promotion of the temples to the world in combination with increased flights and more direct flight connection between Asian countries and Siem Reap province."

Siem Reap's Angkor archeological park is the country's largest cultural tourism destination; it is located some 315 km northwest of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia.An entrance fee to visit the temples is 20 U.S. dollars a day for a foreign visitor, 40 U.S. dollars for a three-day visit and 60 U.S. dollars for a week-long visit.

Last year, the temples attracted 1.6 million foreign visitors, an increase of 23 percent.The tourism industry is one of the main four pillars supporting the Cambodian economy. The others are garment industry, agriculture and real estates.

Source - xinhuanet