Htamin Lethoke

The half-devoured bean sambal

Eating with your hands?

The overview pic about 75% of the way through the meal

 Before last week, I knew very very little about the country of Burma -- aka The Republic of the Union of Myanmar -- aside from their most famous export, shaving cream, of course. There are so many of these little foreign places to know about, and really one can't care about them all. After all, there are hockey playoffs this week.

One would expect that after preparing a meal in the traditional style, though, one would know more, especially about the cuisine.

One would be wrong.

I still know very, very little about the cuisine -- or the country -- of Burma. 

Despite my ignorance (and that could be my life's motto, by golly), I pulled off a meal last week that was somewhat tasty, marginally entertaining and whimsically surreal all at once.

Htamin Lethoke is a traditional Burmese dish. It translates out to "rice mixed with fingers" but perhaps a less-alarming translation would be "finger-mixed rice". It's akin to many non-Western meals wherein a starch -- or, in this case, three: rice, noodles and potatoes -- is the main ingredient in a meal and multiple tiny dishes of more expensive or intensely-flavoured dishes are eaten in little bites on the side. Indonesia has its sambals, India its thali. If you've ever had a rijsttafel you're halfway there. Except for the whole "eating with your fingers" bit, that is.

I prepared for four people -- EvO and myself plus two guests -- but as it turned out we only had one guest and so there was a hell load of food left over. I made ten little sambals (which, I realize, is probably NOT what the Burmese call them. Good, fine, I'm wrong; I don't care. Please don't bother to send me emails telling me the correct term. I. Don't. Care.) :

• coconut sambal (the orange-red thing; it's flavoured with chilie powder)
• shaved onion and chilie sambal
• roasted onion and garlic
• bean sprout sambal with red and green chilies
• preserved lemon sambal (using my preserved lemons)
• green bean sambal (pictured above)
• cucumbers in coconut milk
• tofu in black curry
• tamarind sambal
• vinegared chilie sambal

I also had two kinds of noodles -- wide rice noodles, like the kind in Pad Thai but bigger, and bean vermicelli like in salad rolls.

From what I've read and seen on the Internet, the more accurate way to eat it would be have a plate of rice and noodles per person onto which little bits of sambal-thingees would be placed and then mixed. Of course I read this AFTER we ate, so we just improvised. As you can see from the pics, we essentially placed a scoop of rice in the centre of the plate and then put little scoops of the sambal around it.

Eating with the fingers was initially a novelty but it soon became invisible and we all forgot that we were doing something so different for our culture. Near the end of the meal I suddenly realized that I had forgotten the cucumbers in the fridge. I pulled them out and gave everyone a scoop of them to try, and what I found very interesting was that we all just casually dug our fingers into a dish of sliced cucumbers in coconut milk without a second thought.

I thought of putting recipes with this post but I don't think you need them, really; it's more of a process than anything. The rice was special, though, and so here's a recipe for it.

Htamin Lethoke style rice

serves 3-6, I guess... normally we'd eat it all but there was lots left over

• 2 cups long grain white rice (I used Jasmine; you could use basmati)
• 4 cups of water
• 2 red Thai chilies, seeded and crushed in your mortar
• Oil and water, about 2 tbsp each
• Salt, to taste, afterwards

Cook rice in rice cooker. If you don't have one, you really should buy one.

Place the smooshed chilies into a small saute pan and add oil and water. Cook until it's all smooshy soft and add to cooked rice. Let rice sit for a while as you converse with your guest(s) or prepare more dishes.

Flip and fold the rice until the chile/oil mix has coated each grain of rice equally. Turn out onto a plate. Salt before you do this, of course -- and this will teach you to read a recipe to the end before starting it.

Pre-game intelligence

Though this may give away a bit more than I'm comfortable with, I'm posting a few pics from today's marathon cooking session.

 Green bean sambal with chilies and garlic. Yummy.

 Bean sprout sambal with red and green chilies. Weird but good.

Chilie sambal. Yummmm but very hot. I picked up these awesome little red Thai chilies at the grocery store today and the cashier was quite concerned that I was buying so many of them. "Most people only buy two or three at a time," she said. "I've never seen anyone buy 250gr before!" Yeah, well, I only bought so few because I already have habaneros and green chilies in my fridge at home.

So far I have ten dishes ready and three more on the back burner, as it were. Should be enough for four people, I hope. 

A little K & A

My favourite nudity-optional group activity -- aside from throwing rocks at children in playgrounds, of course -- is dining. Dining with friends, done properly and thus well, is a perfectly blended masala of personality, food, music and setting.

The reality, though, is that if a good dinner party is like a masterfully mixed curry, a bad one is like a re-heated TV dinner slathered with ketchup packets left over from breakfast. The minutiae of deciding whom to invite, and what to serve, and which wines to drink, and how many grams of hallucinogens per person, is simply exhausting. Add an unknown to the mix -- will Marc bring his new boyfriend? Is Stephanie still off yellow foods? -- and it's no wonder dinner parties are rare and frequently disappointing.

If logistics makes having an omnivorous dinner party difficult, having a vegan dinner party is even harder.

It's easy enough for the carnivorous. They just buy an obscenely large hunk of dead animal and cook it. Give the flabby-florid-faced-flesh-eaters enough medium-rare dead cow and they'll forgive over-cooked previously-frozen vegetables, uninspired starches and bottled salad dressings.

Vegans tend to be a snivelling and flatulent lot, and they're bitter to boot, so a bit more effort is needed just to break through the sullen shell of self-righteousness that protects most of us from reality. At least feeding vegans or vegetarians allows the host to touch base on tradition and ring the changes across the canonical dishes of our sub-culture.

"Oh, I just love what you've done to this Lima bean and cabbage casserole, Susan. And that braised tempeh is just perfect!"

Yawn.

The few whom I call my friends, though, would be most unimpressed by such lacklustre efforts whether the food was vegan or not.

It's simply stressful when one invites people into one's home and offers them food from one's own hands. My lovely wife will laugh and tell me that "normal" people don't think like this -- what do you mean, people don't care about the depth of their soup bowls? How can they not? -- but for me, cooking for my friends is performance writ small, a tiny theatre of the senses where every technique is judged, every choice critiqued and every bite assessed. It's intimate and yet frighteningly impersonal, like having sex in front of a panel of Olympic judges with those score card things. My lovely wife says this, also, is not how normal people think. She may be right.

I was a cook and a chef for many years. I have fed five course meals to groups of 300 people and 12 course meals to groups of 40. I have fed governor generals, movie stars, mobsters and tax accountants.

But when I'm feeding my friends, I stress. This might be because I have profound yet un-diagnosed mental health issues or -- or! -- it might be because my friends are sophisticated and amazing and generally high maintenance freaks who expect and deserve a culinary experience worthy of my love for them.

In addition, I am unwilling to entertain the idea that any of my friends might actually not care about what I feed them or -- quelle horreur! -- actually prefer a simpler dish. Such people would certainly never have made it past the background checks and interviews.

Case in point: whereas the ideal recipe for obese meat-eating sweaty-armpitted plebeians might include:

• three to five easily bought ingredients,
• five or six minutes of prep time,
• one pot or pan maximum, and,
• no more than 30 minutes of total effort,

dishes for my food-obsessed bons amis shall instead consist of

• many obscure and/or illegal ingredients,
• several days/weeks/months of prep time,
• two or more new cooking utensils and/or single-use gadgets (preferably purchased in situ), and,
• at least -- at least -- a working knowledge of Urdu, Mandarin, Thai or Hmong.

A demanding crowd, one might suggest.

Some of my friends might object to this characterization.

"No, no, not us... we're simple folk with simple tastes," they'll purr, manicured fingers knowingly caressing a fig.

Ha. Liars. One may not choose one's family, only one's friends, it is said. This is simply wrong, an inane aphorism coined by a moron. One's friends are not chosen but are instead an inescapable consequence of one's life. I'm thankful that my life choices have led me to the friends I have, and I treasure my friends, but simple they are not.

I am having two amazing and sophisticated women over for dinner this week -- which will simply add to, but not overshadow in any way the amazing and sophisticated babe-a-licious wife I am blessed with -- and I'm stressing about the menu. I want to serve something that will be absolutely perfect for the occasion and I vacillate between tried-and-true (that I know will be good but also runs the risk of being predictable) and never-before-tried (that might entirely flop BUT could also be a totally perfect orgasmic degustation).

Both are complex meals, of course, and both involve lots of prep work. Since I'm having them over on Friday, and today is Wednesday (okay, actually really early Thursday morning), I had better get on with it.

More afterwards...

Phaux

Well of course one could have called it Faux Pho, but really... too easy.

The lifestyle choice that we have made has downsides, of course, not least of which is enduring disapprobation from fleshy flesh eaters. We are forced to defend or explain our eating habits to persons for whom "balanced diet" means a side of coleslaw and who feel compelled (despite having virtually no understanding of the science behind it) to query our daily consumption of protein. We get the gamut from "Oh, my kids won't eat it," (to which I cheerfully suggest, "Well, put your kids up for adoption then! Or have them put to sleep!") to "I'd miss meat too much."

Strangest, perhaps, is when people try to justify to me why they aren't vegan.

"Oh yeah, like, I tried a vegan diet for like... three hours and man! My stomach was killing me, y'know, and so I, like, had to go back to meat, man. It was brutal, y'know? Yeah, I just don't think it's for me."

When all the arguments are said and done, though, there remains a great gulf between those who will and won't go vegan. Even if it was only one day a week, the health and environmental benefits would be astounding, and the scientific evidence of the benefits of a plant-dense diet is overwhelming. It leads me to the conclusion that those who refuse to go at least part-time vegan are socially irresponsible, morally lax and unworthy of voting privileges, health care and access to clean water. At the very least, they should be spit upon at every possible convenience.

That being ranted, though, there are some things that a vegan diet does not provide. Chief amongst these is excellent pho.

I have been a phan of pho forever. What's not to like, really? A huge bowl of rice noodles, bean sprouts, chilies, lime, cilantro, rare beef, beef tripe, beef balls... ooops. Yeah, that's the problem. In my mind, at least, the experience of pho is the experience of beef. The soup itself is always beef broth, anyway, so having it at a restaurant has never been an option.

But on a cold April evening, with the temperature dipping to a chilly 4 degrees (hey! for Kelowna, that's cold. We had to cancel the outdoor yoga), a steaming bowl of pho was calling to us. And so we (finally...) get to:

Vegan Pho Version 1.0

serves between 2 and 6, depending on level of piggishness. We ate it all with a bowl left over for Erika's lunch the next day, but then we eat massive amounts of food. Just sayin'.

For the soup:

• 6 cups lovingly hand made veggie stock*
• 1 yellow onion, peeled and cut into quarters
• 1 cup dried sliced mushrooms you bought during your Chinese phase
• 12 (yes, a full dozen, don't be a wimp) cloves garlic, whole
• 3-5 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 3" piece of ginger, peeled and grated (or ~3 tbsp ground ginger in a jar)
• 1 tbsp sugar
• good sploosh of rice vinegar
• 1 tbsp peppercorns
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 4 star anise (you have some in the cupboard behind the agar powder)
• a handful or two of cilantro stems

*or, 6c water and stock powder, stock cubes, or packaged stock. Don't suffer for this meal; just use what you have.

For the meal

• diced tofu (extra firm or soft only. You may not use medium tofu for this)*
• bean sprouts, blanched for 10 seconds in boiling water and then shocked
• 1 package 1/4"** rice noodles, soaked in boiling water until soft (about 20 minutes or more; start it when you begin this whole process or your noodles could be crunchy, and it's not like they'll get too mushy)
• diced green onion
• fresh cilantro leaves, shredded
• mini bird's eye chilies, or sambal oelek
• lime wedges (not lime juice from a little plastic bottle)
• fresh basil leaves, if you must

*Yes, you may. I. Don't. Care.
**I initially used the wider 1/2" noodles but really don't like them so I recommend the smaller ones -- about the width of fettuccine. Your call, but don't blame me if you don't follow my directions and thus make an utterly inedible mess of my beautiful recipe.

Method

In Mr. Food Processor, place onions, soy, ginger, sugar, and rice vinegar. Pulse, pulse, pulse. Put into stock pot to which you have, fittingly, added the stock. Add mushrooms, cinnamon sticks, star anise, garlic cloves and cilantro. Using your lovely mortar and pestle, crush the peppercorns into dust and add. You may also use that ridiculously long pepper grinder you received as a wedding gift. I won't tell.

Simmer until nice and, umm, simmered.

Meanwhile, soak rice noodles. Dice tofu, keeping at least some of it out of the clutches of your raw-tofu-mad wife. Prepare everything else in the usual manner by carefully plating it onto your finest Asian supermarket serving ware.

Once your noodles are well soaked and thus limp (ahem), prepare a bowl of pho in this fashion:

• Bring soup to a boil after straining solids.
  
• Boil a kettle of water and cover the drained noodles with it. This will heat up the noodles.
• Place a scoop of beansprouts in the bottom of a nice large bowl, preferably with fish decorated on the side of it
• Cover with a generous scoop of noodles, even if your wife complains that she only wants half that amount. She'll eat it, don't worry.
• Cover with boiling hot stock, just until the noodles are submerged
• Toss a few chilies and cubes of tofu onto the top of the stock
• Sprinkle with green onions, cilantro leaves, optional basil and a lime wedge

Yum.