Mom and I enjoyed ourselves twice at her favorite restaurant, A Dong. This Vietnamese restaurant has become a Des Moines standard. The food is great and the service is extremely gracious. For our first visit, I wanted something light. This noodle soup hit the spot. The broth, clearly homemade, was rich but not overpowering.
For our second visit, I ordered this chicken curry with noodles. The curry was made with coconut milk, giving a rich creaminess to the spice. The noodles came on a separate plate for me to add in myself.
I enjoyed my curry with this wonderful Vietnamese/French coffee. The thick sweetened condensed milk was a great treat. Ice cooled everything down for the warm day. And the condensed milk/coffee combination matched perfectly with the curry.
I made candied ginger a few years ago. It's not something I would do every day but I had a lot of fun doing it. I recently acquired a pressure cooker and it inspired an interesting idea to me: why not make candied ginger in the pressure cooker? It should be very soft and flavorful. Here is the result. I peeled two large ginger roots, cut them into small cubes, and put them in the pressure cooker with heavily sugared water. The traditional method first boils the ginger in plain water to soften it and then again in sugar water to candy it. The resulting candy was very tender but still with the characteristic ginger texture. It was also sweet without being overpowering. The traditional method leaves a lot of sugar crystallized around the ginger. The pressure cooker gives a much more subtle result. The ginger stays moist even after it cools but you can dry it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. That inspired me to dip it in chocolate. While I was in the b...



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