Thursday, July 07, 2011

You Ask, I Answer, Take 8

Today's question comes from Christianne again.  She asked:

What is your favorite food?

Hands down the answer to that is a Vietnamese dish that appears on the menus here as "bun".  There are good Vietnamese restaurants on almost every corner here in Calgary, and one of my favorites is about a 5 minute walk from my parent's place.  It's called Bow River Restaurant.  The variety of "bun" that I love is a bed of rice vermicelli, with lettuce, cucumber, shredded pickled carrots, bean sprouts, peanuts, grilled pork and spring rolls on top of it, and then doused with this "fish sauce" (more like a sweet tangy slighly spicy sauce with bits of chili and carrot in it) and a bit of hoisin sauce  It is SO good.  Best of all, a huge bowl, which will often feed me for two meals is usually prepared in about 10 minutes of waiting in a restaurant, and usually costs around $10.

In general, I like most ethnic food.  I draw the line at anything that at one point lived in water or swam.  I don't do fish or seafood.  I also don't do bugs.  If I eat out in Calgary and it's not fast food of some sort, it's almost always at an ethnic restaurant of some sort.  In the last several months I've had Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Korean, Italian and Mexican, and quite possibly a few others besides!

2 comments:

christianne said...

It's not good that I read this post while hungry. :)

The way you described the bun dish, I'm pretty sure there's a variation of that at the Vietnamese we recently found in our town and have settled on loving so much. I wish we could eat there all the time, but unfortunately it's a bit on the pricey end!

Anyway, they have several dishes with the vermicelli rice, but I haven't tried those. The first time we went, the manager recommended two dishes to us, and we now order them every time we go because they are SO GOOD -- we haven't tried anything else! :) One is a curry dish with chicken, pineapple, shrimp, rice, and cashews (YUM!!!!), and the other is a sizzling seafood dish that comes on a sizzling platter with shrimp, mussels, water chestnuts, scallops, broccoli, and white rice. Also very yum, though the curry dish is my fave. :)

I can't wait until Kirk gets home because I am very ready to eat dinner! Ha. :)

Lisa said...

I had to laugh that you read this hungry :) I hope you had a great dinner with Kirk!

I love rice vermicelli - it's just these really tasty rice noodles, and I love that Vietnamese is a super cheap and healthy option here. The dishes you order sound yummy too, though - well except maybe for the seafood one which definitely violates my standard policy of "if it ever lived in water I don't eat it"! :)