Eating better than ever

I have to say I think here I'm eating better than ever, sorry mom. The meals are very simple but balanced. Breakfast is the only meal that doesn't routinely include all four of meat, vegetables, fruit and some starch.

mmm... breakfast - phở bò (beef soup)

Meals nearly always include rice in one form or another, plain, noodles, a cake or paste. Then fresh meat, as in never frozen or refrigerated, most often pork followed by fish, beef and chicken. Then any of a variety of dark green vegetables. The vegetables are often boiled or softened by simmering in a hot pan with vegetable oil and then served alone or they are combined with carrots and potato or tarot and some meat in a soup. Greens are also served uncooked on a plate to pick from. If the green has a large leaf then it may b,e used as a wrapper for the other items on the table.

lunch - spiciest meal I've had, curry in this one

After the main meal some fruits are cut up and served. Mango, guava, papaya are the mainstays. There's nhan, also called longan, and rambutan. Both are very sweet with soft juicy flesh no fiber and a large single or multi-segment pit in the middle. The skin is easily removed and the flesh separates easily from the pit when you pop it in your mouth. You end up with a nice tender morsel to eat and a seed to spit out, kind of like eating a cherry.

I like pretty much everything I've had every trip here. This is the first repeated exposure to home cooking and it's very good.

Sweet desserts or cakes are not served very often. And they aren't laying around on the shelves at home to pick up and snack on. The sweet desserts I've had are mostly some variety of che dau trang. Sweet, sticky (glutinous) rice, cooked with coconut milk and various kinds of beans. Several different individual sized servings are presented and you pick the one you want to eat. Of course I've been offered a taste of all the ones I didn't pick and they have all been very good.

Dinner itself is put on the table with each dish in an individual bowl or plate. Each diner gets a small bowl, maybe 3/4 of a cup, that's filled with white rice. Then you pick a bit of food from one of the common serving bowls, move it to your bowl of rice or just hover it over your bowl and then bring to your mouth. There is no portioning of servings to each diner. Basically each mouthful goes from common plate to your rice bowl to your mouth.

dinner - fish, beet leaves, cucumber, scallop spring rolls, soup

I've read that one way to reduce what you eat is to use small dinner plates. It seems to me the small bowl for rice and single mouthfuls carried over from serving dish to rice bowl to mouth have the same effect. At least I find I feel full and am not stuffing myself and believe I'm eating less than I would normally or at least fewer calories. We're not eating any processed foods.