A shopping trip ... our version of Bun Bo Xao

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Lorenza and I have been a bit house bound of late, so this morning we decided to get and do something other than stick around home. We made a quick list of the ingredients for a Vietnamese dish we wanted to try cooking called "Bun Bo Xao" ... wok fried beef salad with vermicelli noodles, plus Nuoc Cham sauce (fish sauce, chilli, garlic and lemon juice).

With our shopping list in hand we took the one hour drive to Vietnam (well the nearest thing to it - the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta). Our first stop was Pho 54 for some lunch. We enjoyed a Saigon style beef pho and watched the sky outside turning very black. Once our meal was done the sky opened up and dumped a torrent of rain down. It was such a humid day a storm was inevitable; this just helped to make us think we had actually visited Vietnam for the day.

We stood in a door way with a bunch of other folks all hoping the storm would pass. It eventually did and our next stop was the "New Good Luck" butchery to purchase our beef. They kindly sliced some eye fillet for us and we were on our way to find some herbs for our salad.

We purchased the herbs from some street venders. We had a list of the herbs we wanted and showed it to them, they thrust some bunches of greenery into our arms and we hastily negotiated a price. The produce looked like it was home grown and smelled very fresh; we were just not sure exactly what herbs we had bought.

Then we had to get some items from the grocery store and were helped by a very friendly guy who was stacking the shelves. He helped us find the right noodles, fish sauce, etc. Next we had to find ourselves a decent wok. We looked at various versions of woks, ranging in price from $600 down to $10. We decided on an $18 version. For $600 you would hope that version cooks the food for you!

Once we had ticked off all the items on our shopping list we headed back home and got cooking ... yum!

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Photos

Grocery store
weird lighting!

The cook
plus the new wok