Every time they come home and leave again, it seems like every child carries all the love their parents send with them. It’s nothing, it’s just a little warm gift for friends, a little familiar flavor for children when they feel weak and miss their homeland.
Crispy and delicious toasted coconut cake
My hometown is not a coconut land, but I don’t know when, grilled coconut cake became a specialty. Toasted coconut cake is a snack that I loved when I was a child, chewing it all day long. When I grew up far away from home, I often brought along childhood snacks for friends from all over to enjoy.
Có thể bạn thích
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| Grilled coconut cake – Photo: Le Hong Man |
The cake package has the eye-catching green color of coconut leaves. As soon as it is peeled off, the aroma of toasted coconut mixed with vanilla immediately awakens the aroma. The golden brown cake is quite simple but attractive. Biting into a piece of toasted coconut cake, we immediately feel the delicious crunchiness, sweetness, and fatty taste of coconut. The cake is moderately sweet, so even when you’re hungry, you won’t be bored when you’re hungry.
There are two famous brands of toasted coconut cake in Quang: Quy Thu and Thai Binh. The taste is not much different, perhaps because the way of making is similar. The countryside cake has evolved into a mass-produced product that still retains its rustic taste.
According to a veteran baker, initially, it is necessary to grate the coconut “rice” into small pieces and then dry or dry it. Beat eggs, condensed milk, white sugar and glutinous rice flour into a thick mixture. Then, add the dried coconut and mix together, add a little vanilla. Next, use a rolling pin to roll the mixture into a thin layer on a lined tray, cut the cake into rectangular pieces and cover tightly. When the cake is dry, put it in the oven.
In the past, there were no modern ovens like there are now, so mothers had to bend over and fan the charcoal fire to bake cakes. Today’s toasted coconut cakes no longer have the scent of fire but are still imbued with the taste of the workers’ hard work. Then, along each journey away from home, toasted coconut cake becomes a precious and famous gift from Quang land to loved ones.
Green bean cake filled with strange meat
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| Green bean cake filled with meat – Photo: Le Hong Man |
Imagine, on a leisurely weekend morning, sitting by the window listening to melodious music, sipping soothing jasmine tea, savoring each piece of grilled green bean cake, what could be better than life? The cake conquers everyone with the rich taste of green beans, the aromatic fat of fatty meat, both sweet and salty, crispy and melts in the mouth.
I still remember, every time it was dry, my mother and grandmother were often busy preparing ingredients to make all kinds of cakes and jams at home. To make green bean cake filled with meat, I choose small green beans, peeled eggplant and separate beautiful yellow seeds. Soak green beans for about 2 hours, then wash, boil, and pound into powder. The next step is extremely important: knead the dough with sugar water so that the sweetness is moderate, the dough has enough moisture to thicken, not too wet or too dry. After that, the dough will be covered and incubated overnight to increase adhesion and make it easier to shape.
The filling is made from fatty meat stir-fried with garlic, purple onions, salt, and sugar to create a fragrant and greasy flavor. Finally, my grandmother and mother worked together to print the cake into a round mold. Put the dough in the mold, scoop the meat filling into the middle, add another layer of dough, then cover tightly, turn the mold upside down on the tray and tap gently to remove the cake.
Around the 28th and 29th of the Lunar New Year, the sound of “knock knock” was heard throughout the kitchen as my mother printed the cake into the mold. Amid the chilly weather of the Central region leading up to Tet, my sister and I sat next to the blazing charcoal stove and cooked green bean cake soup. So many words of advice, crisp smiles, wishes for the coming new year… wrapped up in a few nights of warming our hands by the fire like that.
Now, that simple warm moment only remains in the children’s memories. Because my grandmother has passed away and my mother is old, I can buy whatever I want from the market. Even so, the hometown specialty meat-filled green bean cake still follows me every step of the way.
Sweet, sticky rice cake fragrant with sticky rice flavor
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| Roller wheel – Photo source: Internet |
The reason it is called banh cuon is because the cake is created by the skillful hands of Quang women, slowly rolling the dough into a cake. Banh rolling (also known as banh da) is a traditional cake that is displayed on the family altar every Tet holiday or served on trays for guests during festivals, death anniversaries, and weddings.
Grandmothers often save delicious sticky rice from the dry season, wait until December to roast it, then pound or grind it into fine powder. The cake is special thanks to the jam mixed with it. Chop some kumquat peel, squash, carrots, banana juice, pineapple, ginger, and peanuts and put them in a pan with white sugar over low heat until it becomes a thick jam.
The next step is to cook sugar water. You can use bowl sugar or brown sugar to get a natural cockroach yellow color. When the sugar water boils, sift in the glutinous rice flour, stir well, mix the flour and jam until it comes together to form a soft dough.
Spread a layer of dry glutinous rice flour on the tray as a layer, pour out the sticky dough mixed with jam, quickly compress the dough and roll it evenly into a tight round cylinder. The rolled cake has a yellow color, alternating with the yellow color of kumquat peel jam, the orange color of carrots… it looks quite beautiful. When eating, you have to cut it into thin slices to feel the soft, sweet and fragrant taste of cooked glutinous rice flour mixed with sugar, the nutty taste of peanuts, the sweet kumquat jam, the fragrant scent of ginger…
Delicious sticky rice cake that won’t spoil for a whole month is a hometown gift that my friends in town love. I still love the times when my mother lit incense sticks on the family altar, asked to lower the offering plate, and then carefully packed the rice cake so that her child away from home could take it with her to eat so she wouldn’t miss home. In the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city, when we’re hungry or bored, my friends and I chew a few slices of fragrant sticky rice cake, sharing our feelings in a foreign land.
Khoai dates miss the poor times
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| Sweet potatoes – Photo source: Internet |
In times of poverty, in the middle of barren white sand land, with the Laotian wind blowing the burning sun, people in my hometown could only rely on potatoes to get by. I still vividly remember the song my grandmother often recited: “The full moon has become full again. Sweet potatoes from sandy soil are delicious and fleshy.” No matter how delicious it is, it’s boring to eat, so people in the countryside make a lot of dishes from sweet potatoes. Potatoes for rice, boiled potatoes, baked potatoes, sweet potatoes, baked potato cakes… and the most memorable are fried potatoes.
Choose plump, undamaged sweet potatoes, peel them, wash them and boil them. When the potatoes are cooked, take them out, let them cool, pound them and rub them on a thin basket to let the potato powder fall onto the steamer below. Then, dry the potato flour in the sun. The weather in the Central region is sunny in the summer. It takes about 2 days for the potatoes to dry up. At that time, put it in a sealed bag to eat gradually all year round.
When eating sweet potatoes, just add a little warm water to let the dried potato seeds expand. If you like it sweeter, add a little sugar and crushed roasted peanuts. Sweet potatoes keep the sweet taste of sweet potatoes intact and can be eaten instead of rice. Especially on rainy and stormy winter days when people in the countryside cannot go to the fields to plant and harvest, date potatoes will be a food to fill their stomachs with hunger while waiting for spring.
In the past, date potatoes were a very familiar dish to every person in Quang. Nowadays, sweet potato is harder to find than before, you have to make it yourself or it’s very rare to find a place to buy it.
In the bag that my mother pushed into the children’s hands, there were countless “clean specialties” from the countryside. The hens that my mother has raised all year have already prepared, the dozens of fragrant fatty eggs with straw still stuck to the shell, the fresh green vegetables and fruits picked from the garden, the dried fish and squid that my father has carefully dried since last summer. some pots of pork soaked in fish sauce, pickled pickle sauce…
The little gifts we packed and brought with us in our luggage to make a living far away were not only gifts of cakes and food but also the boundless love of our parents. Large and small bundles filled the car, weighing heavily on both those who left and those who stayed. Well, I have to leave and come back someday. We just hope that after 360 days, our parents and loved ones will still be there waiting for us to return, planning a perfect reunion.
Moc Yen
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