Hello Home Cooking HOs! I apologize for dropping the ball on this - I meant to ask for nominations for the Summer quarter and get feedback on the previous quarter in late June, but life interfered. Anyway, are we up for another Cuisine of the Quarter thread? What are you in the mood to cook this summer? I am anticipating a garden full of herbs in the next two months, so I’d love to focus on a cuisine that will make good use of them, in addition to the rest of summer’s bounty. Nominate away! I’ll leave nominations open until Sunday evening and then create a voting thread. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Recent experience looking for ingredients: I don’t know why in France, we couldn’t find quality fish sauce in the shops (only 35º tasteless and salty ones, or inferior ones from Thailand). I wanted to smuggle some Nuoc Mam when I was still in Vietnam a week ago without success, fish sauce were forbidden on the airplane. We had asked the post office in Ho Chi Minh City, they freaked out with that and said France was on the no liquid mailing list. (We could lie when filling the mailing form, but they like to open packages to examine).
So our solution now is to mail surface from Hong Kong some bottles we bought here. LOL It wasn’t easy to find some 60º bottles from Phoc Quoc in Hong Kong though.
FYI We did succeed to mail by surface 9 bottles on 2012 from Hanoi back to France in 2012, but France wasn’t under the “état d’urgence” from terrorist threat. We did argue in the post office with them for an hour, the clerks refused instantly, and we insisted. They consulted their chief, and then another chief, and eventually was a “YES” but the bottles need to be packed by them. They used tons of toilet paper to roll around each bottle to prevent leaking and must have spent 2 hours for wrapping, they asked us to pay $10 USD for the service.
I prefer Vietnamese fish sauce. Less salty and more refined than Thai.
I did send boxes (10kg each) home from Vietnam and China but no fish sauces. There were other sauces and all kinds of foods and tea, even tailor made silk bedding goods. We brought the bags from the supermarket straight to the post office and they packed it for us, before inspecting everything of course.
Summer for me is all about ITALIAN or CALIFORNIA (e.g., Mozza, Gelina, A.O.C. cookbooks). I can’t stay away from the farmers markets this time of year.
