Just Like Mama ...

I never realized how much work it takes to cook until Monday... Thanks Mama! So  I decided to try and make Banh Cuon which is a northern Vietnamese rice noodle dish. Now I fully understand the amount of work she would put in just to make this dish for a family of 7 (not including herself). I know I need to take more pictures of the process, but with this dish its kind of hard to stop in the middle of cooking and snap a photo.

So let's start. First you need to buy a package of Banh Cuon flour. I bought the pre-made bag because I didn't want to buy potato starch, tapioca starch, and rice flour. The back of the bag actually has instructions on how to make it. You add 4 1/2 cups of water and a tablespoon of oil. Then you pour a small amount in a pan with some oil in it. Cover it and let the noodles cook. This is where I had multiple problems because I put to much of the mixture in the pot and my noodles were not nice and thin. Another problem was getting the noodles out of the pan. You need to flip the pan on to a cutting board and then wrap up the meat filling. In the beginning every time I flipped the pan the noodles would fold on to itself and these are very sticky noodles. So once they are stuck together it is over. Here is the package I used for the rice noodles.

This is the filling. It is about 2 lbs of ground turkey, 1 onion, and a handful of cloud ears. I fried this up with some garlic powder for flavoring.

This is an on going process. As you make the noodle you are wrapping up the previous noodle that you have laid out on the board. These noodles cook fast too. After you cover the pan the noodles should turn clear in a couple of seconds the edges will start to peel off. In the end (after many failed attempts) you should get these:

Lastly you slice up some Vietnamese meat loaf, cucumbers, and mints. Oh DON'T FORGET THE FISH SAUCE! Let's take a bite!