Bun thit nuong with picked carrots and daikon

Vietnamese food was a revelation - fresh, flavourful, and enticing. This dish perfectly suits a hot, humid night. The freshness of the mint and cucumber, and the crunch of the peanuts, perfectly complement the light rice noodles, sweet and spicy dressing, and rich pork or aubergine. Add some pickled vegetables for a final zing, and you've got yourself one hell of a meal.

This version comes from Northern Vietnam, where minced pork patties are frequently served alongside (in which case it's called bun cha), but similar versions of this dish are also found throughout Vietnam. The aubergine is a less traditional step; I got the idea of including it from the book Fragrant Heart (a travel book that also includes recipes, although her versions are a bit more Westernised than mine, presumably to make them more accessible to those who don't live near good Asian markets).

Bahn mi

	I tried to make bahm mi bread (it's pretty much impossible to buy in my end of west-London, or at least I've certainly never found any place that sells it). I tried several different recipes from the internet over one, flour filled weekend. I failed. It was bread - it just wasn't bahm mi.
No matter how good a cook you are, there's always one recipe that just doesn't work. A good lesson for everyone.

London Vietnamese Open Festival

All it took was one tweet : "Enjoy Vietnamese food and entertainment on London's Southbank this weekend."

You had me at "food."

Choose your meat

A couple of dozen stalls are set-up, mostly food stalls (there are also a couple of handicraft stalls and tourism operators). The range of food was quite wide, although lacking the range of soups I associate most strongly with Vietnam (mostly I suspect as there was nowhere to sit down, so it had to all be stand-up food).

I'll have a one of those, and one of those, and a couple of those....

There was lots of barbecue pork (or beef) on noodles with salad. There were plenty of nem / spring rolls. Summer rolls too. Bahn mi (Vietnamese sandwiches). A little xoi (sweet sticky rice with flavourings). A dash of bahn cuon (stuffed rice film). You could also enjoy chao tom (prawns on sugarcane) or several different kinds of chè (a sweet soup topped with various bits, like longans, cubes of milk jelly, sweetened beans, or sweet potato).

There were a few non-Vietnamese items too (sate chicken skewers, Thai Green curry), presumably for those too cautious to try anything they hadn't seen before.

We spent an hour and a half eating our way along the length of the festival, eating until we could barely walk.

Get in my mouth

There was a large stage set up at one end of the festival, but it was empty the entire time I was there - possibly due to the weather (it was squally today, with high winds and the ever-present threat of rain).

The Vietnamese Open Festival is organised by the Vietnamese Culture and Arts Society. You can get more details on their facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/vietnamcas or the Society's website: http://vcas.org.uk/vof/

The festival is on again tomorrow from 10:00 - 21:00

Yes! Yes, I will take one of those bad boys....

My partners in face-stuffing

Unofficial goi cuon

I'm going slightly off-piste here. Goi cuon are small, Vietnamese rice paper rolls, often called summer rolls or salad rolls. They're most commonly served with a nuoc cham (fish sauce and vinegar) dipping sauce. Sometimes you find them with a salty peanut and hoisin dipping sauce instead. But over here at The Asian Street, we're wild and crazy gals, so when I make goi cuon, I add a spicy peanut sauce directly to the roll and serve with nuoc cham on the side.

I know, I know! That's not traditional. It's not even Vietnamese. But, y'know: live dangerously. Que sera sera. Living la vida loca. So here we are, scoffing these fresh rolls. And you know what? They taste pretty good! Here come the villagers with the pitchforks....

Stuffed tomatoes

I always think of stuffed tomatoes as a Mediterranean dish, something you'll find in Greece or Turkey. But the recipe seems to have traveled, and I stumbled across this Vietnamese version.

I've adapted this as a starter; for a main course, just add cooked rice or broken noodles to the filling, and increase the number of tomatoes per person.