visiting "Vietnam" in springvale

Instead of going for a holiday to vietnam, it's cheaper and more convenient to just go to springvale. You can experience all the same sights, sounds and tastes of vietnam. everyone walking by would be speaking vietnamese, all the shop signs are in vietnamese, and all manner of vietnamese food is available, and quite affordably too. Parking is a bit of a problem on weekends though. We started off with this sandwich, below.

the famous "banh mi" which is a french baguette filled with slices of processed meat, pate, soy sauce, butter, carrot, spring onion, chilli and coriander. tasty.
and below, the famous pho which is rice noodles in a meat broth with fresh bean sprouts put on top just before serving. it's really nice to have these steamy hot soup noodles on a cold day.

with lots of coriander on top

here's the interior of the restaurant. we knew it was gonna be good coz it was full of people.
the front of the shop.
the menu.

You have to decide what to order by reading this menu in front because once you're in, there's nothing in English. Anyway, there're heaps of Vietnamese noodle shops in Springvale, so as a rule of thumb, pick one that's relatively full of people, coz that means it's good, and secondly, the less "done up" the exterior, the better the food. We've found that when it comes to asian food, the appearance of the restaurant and the taste of the food have an inverse relationship.

kotaraya's hokkien me

I would highly recommend this dish at Kotaraya - it's only available at lunchtime, and for $8.90 you get a really big serving with chicken and some shrimp. Really tasty and satisfying. It doesn't look as dark as the hokkien mee you'd get in Malaysia but the flavour's all there. The only things missing for us were the hot chilli "sambal" on the side and the crispy bits of pork crackling.

Briyani at Anshumann Da Dhaba [Clayton Rd]

This time we were here to try the briyani! it's a meal of spicy flavoured rice, some sort of hearty spicy meat and pickles. Above, the lamb Saag which is sort of a stewed lamb in a creamy mashed spinach sauce. Really tender and tasty.
And above, the briyani rice with bits of meat peeking under. It doesn't look like a large serving but it was very very filling because basmati rice has more fibre and is hence more filling, and also there're quite a bit of meat in there.
the various pickles above. Clockwise from left: acahar, pickled onion, yoghurt, and some indistinct chilli sauce which wasn't as hot as it looks.
I ordered the makki di roti because i was curious about what it was. Well it was just a roti made with ground corn instead of wheat flour. It was a bit heavier than usual and quite a bright yellow. It went well with the lamb saag.

rasa chinta on Waiora Rd, Heidelberg Heights

We meant to go to jade kingdom for supposedly famous hokkien mee on Sunday but found that it was closed, but was pleasantly surprised that rasa chinta was open. gav had the roast duck rice, above. It was really really good! the skin was nice and crispy, and meat was tender. The only thing missing was the sauce that usually comes with it when we have it in malaysia...
I had this ham chim peng $1.50 each [chinese dooughnut?] which is a deep fried bun with a sweet mashed red bean paste filling and sesame seeds on top. forgive the bad photo, it was taken with my sony ericsson. It was really yummy, especially after crisping up in a toaster oven for a minute or two.
and I had the pineapple thai fried rice, above, which was excellent too. It had just the right amount of "almost burnt-ness" and great flavours with lots of bits of chicken, shrimp, egg and bean sprouts. Although fried rice is easy to make at home, it's not easy making a really good one like this! One would need a proper wok, with a really big flame. This definitely cannot be done on a hot plate!

I'd definitely come here again to try the other menu items.

kuih bingka, also known as Chiu Chu Kuih or in English, "cassava cake"

I got inspired to make kueh [or "kuih" in malay : the malaysian word for a certain class of snacks, most often starchy and steamed, but can also include baked goods and sweet pancakes, generally sweet rather than savoury, but there're some exceptions] all of a sudden. I never liked them as a child, and most of my adulthood, preferring western desserts over Asian ones. In fact, I hated most of them, including mooncake, red bean soup, tang yuan.

However, perhaps I've been away from it so long that I somehow missed it. I don't know. perhaps it's just a case of not knowing what you've got till it's gone. This is a starchy sweet baked snack made from grated tapioca that I had a few times as a child, it's often bought from the local pasar malam [market] and I remember my dad calling it "mok shi koh" [sounds like mopiko! haha] which I guess was its Cantonese name but till this day I don't know. It's not particularly a Cantonese food. It's more of a Malaysian/Malay thing. I remember how he tried to get me to eat it and I didn't want to coz I didn't like it at the time. But now, after seeing it being sold at $2.50 for 4 pieces, I thought I might try my hand at it.

It was really easy to make since I bought the tapioca frozen and peeled from Hong Kong grocery on Clayton Road, and used canned coconut milk.
You can either do this the hard way, by buying fresh tapioca then peeling and grating it yourself, and buying a coconut and opening it, scraping its flesh and squeezing its milk out, or the easy way which I will show you here. This is my adaptation of it from looking at several recipes from books and the internet.

First, thaw 1kg of the frozen tapioca/cassava by soaking it in some water, then cut it up into smallish pieces and put in a blender so it gets blended to mush. Not very pretty looking, but it's supposed to be like that. By now it would be a white messy pulp. Add 350mls of coconut milk, an egg, 1 1/2 cup sugar, a tsp of pandan essence and 40g melted butter and mix well. Pour into a greased baking tin and bake till golden brown on top, around 1 hour but that depends on how big your pan is.

When done, let cool completely before cutting into slices. As in, COMPLETELY [i tried cutting it a bit too early and it stuck to the bottom of the pan] In winter, you could leave it outside to cool down. I couldn't do that coz there were possums in my area.

I was too excited to cut and taste it before it was done and I was glad that it tasted exactly as I had remembered, fragrant, with a subtle coconut milk flavour and a hint of ... something sweet smelling. It had the right bouncy yet sticky texture, and just the right amount of sweetness. Unlike most western sweets, its flavours were very subtle. Funny, though I hadn't had it in at least...15 years, its taste was not forgotten.