New Year, New Food

I kicked off 2008 by taking a stroll around Silver Lake Reservoir and feasting on Vietnamese snacks with my new favorite person Miguelito. This is a bird's eye view of our New Year's Day dinner.

The spinach and feta cheese salad is as remote from Vietnamese cuisine as California is from Antarctica. But I needed to serve some sort of fresh greens with the steamed rice bun filled with a hard-boiled egg, sweet sausage and ground pork.

This is gio (pron. zaw). It's a rice flour dumpling filled with a savory center of ground meat. The banana leaves impart a subtle flavor during the steaming. I didn't have any fish sauce to season the gio, so instead I offered Miguelito some soy sauce spiced with chili flakes. He liked it!

Sweet sticky rice sticks to your ribs. The one on the left is stuffed with peanuts and coconut and the other on the right is packed with hominy and ground yellow beans.

A few days after my New Year's Viet feast, I met my former star intern Mengly in Little India for some gabbing and snacking. This is the dessert counter.

Mengly ordered naan with paneer tiki masala.

My masala dosa is as long as my arm.

If you think I'm little, check out plucky girl reporter Mengly.

There's nothing sweeter than having someone cook breakfast for you. One weekend, Miguelito treated me to a breakfast of basted eggs, sausage, toasted English muffins and a satsuma mandarin. I felt treasured, and Miguelito's mom would have been proud of him.