Crawfish King

When I was asking my friends about American food, some of them told me about cajun food from Louisiana. But I never really had a chance to look into it. Then one day I went to eat crawfish with another Vietnamese friend in the International District. We went to a restaurant called Crawfish King. They had really spicy crawfish cooked with a ton of garlic, a lot of spice, and mixed with sausage, corn and potatoes.


This is my friend and her daughter, wearing a really big bib. And you need the bib because you will get dirty!


The food was really good. We had to peel the crawfish open ourselves, and suck out all the good parts. It was very spicy, and I always think that garlic makes seafood taste and smell better.

I thought it was an Asian restaurant, because I've never seen Americans eat whole shellfish before. But I brought some for my American friend, and when he saw it, he was very excited and shouted "that's cajun food!" I was surprised! The style of food seemed very familiar to me from my home town. How could this kind of food be American?

I found an article about the restaurant in Seattle Weekly. The author said that the style of food is cajun, but the owners are Vietnamese. He had a quote from one of the owners that shocked me:

"You have two cultures whose cuisines are based on rice, spicy food, seafood, and the French influence. The parallels between Louisiana and Vietnam are mind-boggling."

I found a connection between my food and American food! Cajun food is considered one of the most American foods there is, but it was like something from my own home!

Iron Chef

I told one of my friends that I have this blog for my writing class, and I asked her to tell me if she knew any good American food in Seattle. She suggested crawfish, and told me about a restaurant (which I will talk about next time). Then one day she called me and said "turn on the TV! They are cooking crawfish!"

Her voice sounded very excited, so I quickly turned it on and found the show. It is called Iron Chef America, and it is like a game show. They have five famous chefs, and a contestant picks one of them, and they compete to see who cooks best.

Every episode they have a special ingredient, and this time it was langoustine. My friend thought it was crawfish, but she was wrong. Langoustines come from the northeast Atlantic Ocean, and are sometimes called "Norway Lobsters." They are similar to crawfish, but they’re bigger and live in salt water.

Copyright 2006 Hans Hillewaert, licensed under Creative Commons CC-SA

When I started watching, I was surprised to see someone I recognized. The host of the show is Alton Brown, the same person who makes Good Eats, the show that taught me how to make corn bread pudding.

The show goes very fast, and I didn't understand some things they were saying. Each chef has some assistants who help him cook the food. They have one hour to make several dishes, and all of them must have the special ingredient in them. It was very exciting and stressful. Since they did not know the ingredient before they started, they had to design their dishes as they cooked. I can't imagine how they could create such beautiful things in so little time.

Even though it was so fast, I recognized many of the things they did from my own cooking. But they way they put everything together was beautiful, and made me hungry. I do not normally watch TV, but like Good Eats, it gave me many ideas. In the future I want to try to cook beautiful food like this. (But I will give myself more than one hour to do it!)

Clam Chowder in Seattle

My friend told me about a restaurant in Pike Place Market (which I've already talked about) that serves really good clam chowder. So we decided to go.


I really like Pike Place Market, because it reminds me of markets in my country. (Although the markets in my home are much smaller!) The restaurant is called Pike Place Chowder. It is a small shop hidden in a corner next to Pike Place Market.


There are many other interesting small restaurants there too. Maybe I can go back and try them someday.


Inside, the restaurant is very simple. There is a small counter in front, and some small tables to the side. While we were there, we saw some people take food with them; maybe a lot of their customers work in the buildings nearby.

When we got there, I was very hungry, and my mind had a picture of a big pile of clams, with the shell and everything. But when we got to the counter, all I could see were some small pots of soup. I thought maybe the clams were in the back. We looked at the menu, which was written on a blackboard above the counter.


I could see that they had several choices, but I wanted to try the original. I went to get a table while my friends ordered our lunch. When they brought the food to the table, I thought "where is mine?" I still didn't understand what clam chowder looks like.


My friends laughed, and told me that the clams were already in the soup. In Vietnam we always cook the seafood separately, and put all the parts together at the end. But this is not how you make clam chowder. Everything is cooked together. When I learned this, I was afraid that it would have a weak flavor and I would not like it.

But as soon as I tasted it, I stopped worrying. The first thing I noticed was how it felt in my mouth. It was soft and rich. The first thing I thought of was coconut milk. Sometimes we use that for sauces. But it tasted very different. I was surprised how much flavor it had. I ate a piece of potato and felt the flavor all the way through it. We usually use rice instead of potatoes in Vietnam, but I think potatoes are better for this dish, because they soak up the strong flavor. The clams didn't taste as strong as they do in Vietnam, but maybe they had given all their flavor to the soup.

My order also had a small piece of bread and some crackers. My friends told me that some people like to put the crackers in the chowder to give it a crunch. I tried it but I think I like it better by itself. The bread was very delicious. It had a sour taste that surprised me. My friends told me it was called "sourdough bread," and it came from San Francisco. (Maybe that will be a future blog post!)

Now I understand why my American friends always surprised when they see a big bowl of pho. Because the chowder was so rich that I couldn't eat as much as I do when I eat Vietnamese food. It is much richer and stronger, so I don't need to eat as much to feel full. When I finished my bowl I felt very satisfied, and I wanted to go to to sleep!

But before we left, I saw another interesting thing. Another customer had a big loaf of bread on the table, and I saw that it was filled with chowder!


My friends told me that it was called a "bread bowl", and people liked it because the bread soaked up the flavor of the chowder. It used sourdough bread like the piece I had eaten. It looked really good; maybe next time I will try that!

Clam Chowder

When I told my class that I was interested in American food, my teacher asked us to name some foods that they knew about. My classmate Ngoc said "clam chowder!" I have always loved clams in Vietnam, but I'd never heard the word "chowder" so I asked her what it is. She said it was "a thick soup like milk." We don't usually use milk in soup, so I decided to learn more about it.

I have a friend in San Francisco who is a chef, so I asked him. He told me all about it, and said it was very famous in San Francisco. Then another friend told me it was originally from Boston, and we also had some good restaurants right here in Seattle. All of my American friends seem to know about it and love it, so I decided that I had to try it!

Clam chowder is a very old dish. I learned a lot about it from this article. The word "chowder" comes from the word "chaudiere" (which means "cooking pot") in France in the 16th Century. When the fishing boats came home, the village would have a big pot for the fish, and they would have a big celebration. But the pilgrims who came to America in 1620 didn't like clams, so they fed them to their pigs! The first mention of using clams in chowder is from an American cookbook in 1832. According to this page, in 1851 the famous novel Moby-Dick the author spends a whole chapter describing a restaurant that served clam chowder.

My friend in San Francisco also sent me a recipe for clam chowder. It looks pretty simple to me. Maybe I will try to make it myself. But first, some of my Seattle friends have told me about a restaurant in Pike Place Market that has good clam chowder. I will tell you more about that next time.

Corn Bread Pudding

When I had my first Thanksgiving in America, my friend made a dish called corn bread pudding. I had never heard of corn bread, and he told me that this is not like "regular" corn bread. (Maybe I will make regular corn bread for a future post!) I know the words "corn" and "bread", but I had never heard of pudding. I researched on Wikipedia, which said "In the United States, pudding characteristically denotes a sweet milk-based dessert similar in consistency to egg-based custards." Now I was really confused. I know what custard is (I have made them myself), and this is nothing like that. So corn bread pudding is neither corn bread nor pudding!

But whatever it is, it is delicious. Here is a video of Alton Brown making it on Good Eats. As you can see, it is pretty easy to make.


Here is how you make it.

First, get a large frying pan that can go in the oven. Then here are the ingredients:

• 1 large onion
• 2 tbsp butter
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• 1/2 tsp rosemary
• 2 cans cream-style corn
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 cup cornmeal
• 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
• 1 tsp salt
• ground black pepper
• 4 slices French bread
  

First, finely dice your onion.

Then heat the butter in your frying pan.

and cook the onions, thyme and rosemary slowly until you can see through the onions.

Meanwhile, cut the French bread into small cubes. My friend told me he likes to remove the outside part too.

Then put the cream-style corn, baking powder, cornmeal, Parmesan cheese, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Add the cream and eggs, and stir them together. Finally, add the bread and mix again.

When the onions are done, make a layer in the bottom of the pan and pour the mix onto them.

Then put the pan into the oven and cook at 350° for 50 minutes.

Here is what it looks like when it is done!

Take a big slice and enjoy your meal!

It will be a little brown on the top, moist and soft in the middle. It is a salty dish, rather than sweet or sour, but with a little sweetness. It feels like a soft bread, but it is more delicate. It has a nice corn taste with small pieces of corn inside. The onions at the bottom are very soft and sweet, with a strong herb flavor. It goes very well with a piece of meat like pork, chicken, beef, and of course turkey.

Pike Place Market Old and New

I was going to tell you about corn bread pudding, but first I want to introduce a very exciting place. The Pike Place Market in Seattle is a popular antique place where people have gathered to buy and sell farmers' products for over 100 years. I went there for a future blog post, but now I have the assignment of comparing one of my pictures with an old picture from the University of Washington Libraries Digital Collection. I chose a picture from 1917, showing a group of vegetable sellers:



(For a bigger view of this picture, follow this link.)

I had taken this picture when I visited Pike Place Market:


I took this picture in a similar place as the one above. If you look at the old picture, you can see the sign "Sanitary Public Market" on a building across the street. If you look closely at my picture, you can see windows in the back. I remember seeing the Sanitary Public Market building across the street from where I took this picture. So I believe that I was very close to the same place.

The first thing you notice when looking at the two pictures is that they both have nicely organized piles of vegetables and fruits, with signs showing how wonderful their prices are. Behind the tables, the salesmen are looking bored. This kind of job hasn't changed very much! The old picture has more people behind the table. I wonder why this is? Maybe today the salesman buys the produce from the farmers, but in the past the farmers sold it themselves. The most interesting part is that my picture has many more kinds of produce. In the past, it was probably much harder to bring food from different places, so maybe they could not have as many choices.

It is very interesting to me to think that I was standing in almost the same place as the person who took the other picture almost 100 years ago. It is also very interesting to think that the same things are still happening in this place.

Good Eats

When I posted my last blog entry, it reminded me of how much I liked corn bread pudding. I decided I wanted to make it for this blog. I asked my friend where he'd gotten the recipe. He showed me the link, but he also told me about the TV show where he'd gotten the recipe. I decided to watch an episode.

The show is called Good Eats, starring Alton Brown. I had watched cooking shows in Vietnam but I thought they were boring. They just showed people standing at a counter putting ingredients together. Sometimes they showed how to do something interesting, but they never gave the reason. My friend told me I should watch Good Eats, but I didn't want to. But now I am glad I did.

Good Eats is different from regular cooking shows. First of all, it's funny. He tells little stories and jokes. When he made corn bread pudding, he covered his eyes to show how easy it was. He also gives you the history of the food. I watched the Thanksgiving episode and he talked about how the first Thanksgiving was very different from what we have now. He also uses fun illustrations to show the chemistry of food.

The show reminded me of my friend from France, who taught me how to brine a turkey. I was surprised to see Alton Brown do the same thing on his show. It makes me wonder how my friend would know about this, because turkey is American. I am very excited to watch more Good Eats, and now I will make my own corn bread pudding! I will tell you about it next time.