Eat Your Wedgies!

We are back on the mainland and hard at work eating our way through Ho Chi Minh City.  We can't get enough of the delectable offerings available for just a fraction of the price we would pay at home. Therefore, it follows that we owe it to all Americans to stuff ourselves full of every tasty treat that we can find. Consider it our patriotic gift to you.  Just let me know what you would like me to taste next!

We started our trip to Vietnam in Saigon's Central Market where we witnessed the reality of where all of this food comes from. Now we are working hard to forget as we gobble it down.  Yesterday my new discovery was the avocado smoothie.  Before you say, "Eeeew!" you should try it. It's like a meal in a glass.  We found a great lunch restaurant with shrimp curry, a seafood hot pot, and BLTs and chicken wings for the kids. Everyone was ecstatic.  That is just so rare that we were tempted to go back again for dinner. Everyone, that is, except for me - the slave-driver, tour guide, all-about-new-experiences master.  I held firm.  We're in a HUGE city with thousands of different restaurants.  There's no way I was going to go to the same place for lunch and dinner.

So, as we wound our way through rush hour scooters weaving our way back from an early evening water puppet show (think microscopic Bread and Puppet on a pond, and no simpler to understand the message given that the story was in Vietnamese), I was fighting against the tide.  "Pleeeease Mom. All of us want to go back to that place."  Naturally the more wheedling I endured, the more adamant I became about going somewhere (anywhere) else.  I could feel the steam beginning to seep out of my ears, when a sweet Vietnamese man stepped out of his restaurant, sucked me in with his convincing sales pitch, and saved us all from my "I can't believe how whiny and ungrateful you sound" lecture (fret not, I'll put it to use again really soon).

Obviously I was done with fighting, because I let our newfound restaurant friend suck us in, sit us down and suggest exactly what we needed to order.  I never do that. I'm too much a control freak.  But the next thing I knew we were being introduced to the wonders of the "smokeless" BBQ.  A pot of hot coals arrived in the center of the table.  Then came the grill, the tongs, the plates of raw meat, the pile of raw vegetables and the "very special" rice.  What could be better than a BBQ right in the middle of your table?  Perhaps someone to BBQ for you. The staff got us started and then pointed at the grill and the tongs, indicating that we should get down to business.  

These people obviously did not get the memo about my culinary skill set.  As much as I loved "Julie and Julia," there is a reason that this is not a cooking blog.  I'm guessing it's hard to sue a restaurant for food poisoning if you are doing the cooking yourself.  I looked inquisitively at John and then at all of the raw meat sitting on our personal grill.  "Any idea how to tell when it's done?" I asked.  He looked as lost as I did.  We decided to go with the "blackened and curling up" method for determining when to pull things off the grill.

We were so focused on overcooking our meat that we ignored the plate of raw vegetables sitting at the end of the table.  When our kind restaurant friend noticed that we had stranded the legumes, he scurried right over to our table with this wise advice: "Don't forget to grill your wedgies!"  Nolan nearly toppled out of his chair with giggles, "Mom!  He said we should grill our wedgies!"  I gave him the stare that I hoped said, "Yes, I heard.  Yes, that sounds very silly. Let's talk about it later, because this man has been very kind to us."  There may even have been a bit of an evil glare in there, because Nolan curbed his laughter fairly quickly.

We got through the rest of the meal (which was, as we've come to expect, outstanding) with our polite faces on, and I only asked John to pass the "wedgies" once.  After we left the restaurant, we allowed ourselves a few guffaws about the "w" and "v" transposition that Vietnamese speakers of English can struggle with.  We figured we had earned the right to a little laughter after all of the entertainment our attempts at Vietnamese have generated, and we filed it away in the "funny things people say in other countries" category (along with our guide in Mexico who repeatedly said "wieners" instead of "winners").  Then we had one more laugh about the BBQ possibilities if our international friends got together: grilled wieners and wedgies.  Bon Appétit!