Last night I was feeling sooo punk and exhausted, it was all I could do to pull out the leftovers.
We had steamed white rice and teriyaki beef that I heated in the microwave. The other accompaniments were tsukemono - salty/sweet cabbage pickles homemade by my mother's friend, and leftover cucumber pickles made by me. Also, furikake rice topping and do chua made by me. Add hot treen tea poured over the topping and rice and eat with the teri beef and pickles - comfort food heaven!
The hot tea and rice is called ochazuke, and it is THE food I want to eat when I return from a trip where I've eaten too much because I didn't know when I'd get to eat it again. Like achingly fresh salmon in the Pacific NW. Or lobster in New England. Or Brie and Muenster cheese from the NE of France.
As we sat and ate our chazuke, my mind wandered - as it often does - and I wondered about other food iterations. What about a teri-beef banh mi!
What is banh mi? It's a Vietnamese sandwich with French influence. The baguette and mayonnaise are the obviously French, as is the pate you will sometimes find as filling. The other ingredients are cilantro, cucumbers and do chua, the daikon (radish) and carrot pickle. I thought I'd written about making this pickle here, but I looked back and hadn't. I had a lot more time to make such things when I wasn't working! These are yummy pickles that stay crispy - try them, you'll like them!
The beauty of the banh mi is that almost any protein can be the main filling - from marinated and fried tofu to deli turkey or roast beef. So, why not teri beef? The Euro ingredients of crusty baguette and mayo combined with the Asian cilantro, the sweet-tartness and crunch of the pickles - the sum of all of these parts create flavors beyond the individual ones to a new and interesting whole.
"Trus' me," as an in-law says. Try it. And Soos wanders off to dream of new or more likely, repurposed food creations...
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