The Korean countryside, where I live, is nothing like Australia. Firstly, as in all of South Korea, there are seasons. Desolate winter, fecund summer as opposed to the lush year-round greenness that I’m used to. Secondly, I live surrounded by rice paddies, fruit trees and vegetable gardens planted on any and all available patches of land, but peaceful it isn’t. A busy road runs in front of my 14 story high rise, which is just one of a group of 5 residential buildings.

Over the last few months I’ve charted the progress of the various peach orchards I pass on my way to work. From bare branches to a flurry of flowers to verdant leaves shielding tender fruit from the elements. When things were rocky at work and I was considering jumping ship, I had one goal, to stay until the peaches were ready.

And am I ever glad I did. The trees are now dripping with fruit, ready to be picked then packed and sold at makeshift tents set up along the roads all over the area. Unfortunately, this little piece of South Korea seems to be planted with my least favourite variety of stone fruit: white peaches. But in this land of limited fruit, I take anything I can get. This year has been very wet causing intense flooding and terrifying landslides (did you all see these pictures). A less dangerous outcome of the rain is bland fruit and it’s everywhere.

Recently I tried to buy some peaches. I told the lady how much money I wanted to spend and she reached for an enormous black plastic bag. The price had dropped considerably, and I walked away with a mountain of peaches. Tough skinned, bland, white peaches. Every third piece is great eating, the rest are destined for the bin. So I took those less then perfect beasts, skinned them then roasted them with honey to enhance their flavour and made this parfait. I suggest you do, too.

White peach and honey parfait

Recipe adapted from Honey peach and yogurt parfait on Australian Gourmet Traveller
Makes about 2L.

350g honey
½ lemon, juice only
½ orange, juice only
6 white peaches
4 egg yolks
600g thick natural yoghurt

- Preheat oven to 200C.

- Combine 200g honey and citrus juice in a saucepan and stir over low heat to combine.

- Score peaches, blanch until skins split, about 30 seconds, then refresh in iced water. Peel immediately and place in a oven-proof pan that is large enough to hold the peaches snugly. Pour warmed honey mixture over the peaches and roast, basting regularly, for about 1 – 1.5 hours until they are very tender. Remove from oven and allow peaches to cool in their liquid.

- When peaches are cool enough to handle, remove the stones and roughly chop the flesh. Process three-quarters of the peach flesh with 50ml of the pan juices until very smooth. (I don’t have a blender so I pushed the flesh through a seive).

- Whisk egg yolks, 100ml pan juices and the remaining 150g of honey in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water until thick and pale (4-5 mins), remove from heat and beat with an electric mixer until cold (4-5 mins).

- Mix yogurt and peach puree in a bowl until well combined. Fold through the egg yolk mixture until just combined. Pour into moulds and freeze until firm. Serve with fresh fruit.

When I arrived in Hanoi last year I was beaten. Exhausted by some recent hard travelling and more broken than I realised from the unpleasantness that came before. Life was clouded with uncertainty and nothing felt new. Everything was a challenge. As much fun as you can have visiting a city it is a totally different experience to actually live there and making that necessary nest for yourself is tough even under the best of circumstances.

A makeshift nước mía đá stand on Yen Phu street, Hanoi.

I’ve now spent almost 6 months in Hanoi I’ve settled (both in and down) and am feeling that boredom that comes along with feeling comfortable. I’m looking ahead while still trying to live in the present, perfection in theory but a little more difficult to put into practice. So when Fouad decided that he would set me a Hanoi challenge, wrenching me out of comfortable diffidence I accepted happily.

The Challenge: create something interesting made out of sugar cane juice.

Actually, I lie. This was a side bar to the original challenge which I declined to participate it. It wasn’t that it was a bad challenge I just didn’t feel I could fulfill it adequately. Why? I’m going to tell you an embarrassing secret now.

I’ve been in Hanoi for almost 6 months, and I have yet to eat a filled banh mi. I know, SHUT UP! I know!! There is always tomorrow, right?

Procurement.
As soon as the weather heats up torturous looking sugar cane presses start appearing on street corners city-wide. Peeled sugar cane stalks are sent through the presses time and again to relieve them of their juice. The resulting pale green liquid served over ice, called nước mía đá, is pure refreshment. It isn’t as sweet as you’d expect, being pure sugar juice, has pleasant vegetal notes and an interesting nuttiness.

Last weekend Pmum and I went on a little adventure. It started with pho cuon, continued with Vietnamese coffees and the planned finish was at the best ice cream/second hand clothes shop I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting where I intended to purchase some nước mía. To my dismay the ice cream and sugar cane press had disappeared and the waist-high clothes piles had been replaced with racks. Boring! If this is the price of modernity then I’m not interested.

Instead I bought two iceless sugar cane juices from this tea stall, poured into plastic bags for takeaway. I waited, took some photos and ignored the shirtless men drinking tea and smoking bongs. Total cost: 12 000 vnd (~70c AU).

The dish.

I decided against cooking anything with the juice, fearing that all vitality would be lost. I considered savoury, but the ingredients required were a continent out of reach, so sweet it would be. Unfortunately my first idea melted in to a puddle that tasted of failure and broken hearts, then came an epiphany.

Despite what I wrote here, I do drink more alcohol here than when I was in Sydney, and when I go out my order is often a mojito. Towards the end of the night I’m sure they substitute rum for locally produced rice spirits, but ever present is a stirring stalk of sugar cane. I think Fouad would fail me if I just made a drink, plus, how boring is that!

So I took a mojito and tweaked it into a dessert: Sugarcane and rum granita, lime and sugarcane jelly, lime cream.

This granita is fairly alcoholic, but the subtle super-fresh sugar cane flavour shines through. Paired with the lime scented cream, sour and sweet cubes of jelly and mint leaves this dessert has everything: refreshment, interest and alcohol while managing to bypass cloying. My favourite part is where the cream gets frozen by the granita, instant ice-cream.

So, Fouad, what do you think?

Sugarcane granita

500ml sugarcane juice
1/4 cup white rum
sugar syrup to taste (the more sugar syrup the softer this will freeze. Err on the side of a bit more if you want to keep this for more than a few days)
juice of 2 limes.

Mix all ingredients together and freeze. Just before serving, fork the ice-block to produce light flakes of frozen goodness.

Lime jelly
This recipe makes much more jelly than is necessary, and because it uses agar agar it sets very firmly. Halve or quarter the recipe if you don’t love jelly.

250ml water
50ml lime juice
3T sugar
1/2 packet agar agar.

Heat the water, sugar and agar agar powder in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir to dissolve the sugar and bring to the boil. Once boiled, remove from heat and cool as much as you can before starts to set. Stir in the lime juice (I do this because I want to heat the lime juice as little as possible to ensure it retains its sharpness and freshness). Pour into a container and set in the fridge.

Do the same thing for the sugarcane jelly, but use 100ml water and 200ml sugarcane juice.

Lime cream
I had planned to make this recipe, but forgot that the under-par cream (UHT, erk) available here doesn’t whip. So, I added two yolks, and cooked it to form a crazy anglaise, omitting the lime juice.

Julienne mint leaves to serve. Assemble as per photos, eat immediately!

The view from my roof top where I take these food photos. Stormy skies.

Tomatoes, coriander, tortillas, a return to the com binh dan-style school lunch. Raging out at the injustice of work, teetering on the edge of saying too much of what I feel. Alone, but only marginally lonely. Tied to my computer (it was a very happy reunion). That is what my week looked like.

Friday afternoon I was a riot of restlessness and boredom. Then I had my first Vietnamese coffee in months and I met the most intense caffeine/sugar high since high school. Memories of this had me in tears of uncontrollable laughter, a perfect end to a horrid working week. Friday evening was a reunion, peaches and gifts (hello pigsy!), going out dancing and talking to real life English speakers (after a week of grading my language for the littlies it is divine to be able to slang, slur and swear as much as I like!).

As I walked to the market this morning the bit that stayed with me the most, as well as the speaking English, was the peaches. And they aren’t even that great, these peaches here. Mostly they go from tart and hard as rocks to rotting with no in-between, so to avert tooth-cracking sour face, I poached them. In prosecco. Oh yes. The whole process enhances their otherwise insipid flavour and adds an extra dimension as they bathe in the poaching liquor.  Serve cold with a glaze of the reduced liquor and a dollop of double cream for a perfect summer dessert. For a chilled out and simple end to a great weekend. For an easy and joyful return to the kitchen.

Peaches poached in Prosecco

600ml Prosecco (You could use the whole bottle, but come on, you need something to drink while the peaches are poaching)
1 cup white sugar
1 orange
1 vanilla bean, split and seeds scraped
20g ginger, peeled and finely sliced
6 ripe peaches

double cream (45% milk fat) to serve.

- Choose a large pan that will fit all the peaches in one layer snugly.
- Add the prosecco, 1 cup of water, sugar, ginger, orange juice and zest and vanilla bean to the pan and bring to the boil to dissolve the sugar.
- Add the peaches to the liquid. If they aren’t covered then add more water ensuring that the fruit is submerged. Cover the whole lot with a cartouche and weigh the bobbing fruit down with a plate. Cover with a lid and reduce heat to low.
- The peaches are ready when the flesh has softened, the timing will vary dependent on the size and ripeness of your fruit. When they are cooked sufficiently, take the peaches out and allow them to cool in a bit of the poaching liquid.
- Turn up the heat on the rest of the poaching liquid up. Boil until it has reduced to a thick glaze.
- Serve cold peaches with the glaze and a dollop of double cream.

“You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way”. Bob Dylan, Mississippi.

Well, I came back. Back to a Hanoi that I was only too happy to leave 2 months ago. Much changed here in my absence, this city is speeding towards something like modernity, but my opinion of it remains unchanged. Dylan is right though, I haven’t come back all the way because these last two months have changed me.

For starters, I seem to have lost any cooking ability that I may once have had. These last few days have been a kitchen disaster: weirdly textured too-tart gazpacho, bland bread and a revolting cocktail. It may be the ridiculous humidity here that is throwing everything off, but I’ve also certainly lost interest in cooking for one.

Secondly while living whole heartedly in the present, I’m furiously contemplating the future. What the hell am I going to do next? Every so often the uncertainty of this ‘next’ hits me like a fist in the guts and I scramble to assemble plans, always lacklustre and full of holes, but plans nonetheless. If someone would like to push me in a certain direction, I’m open to it. A bunch of years ago, while working in a restaurant I mentioned to a colleague that he might like to write me a ‘life plan’. Much to my surprise he returned from his break with a step-by-step guide to getting my life on track. I still have it  in a box somewhere, but I’ll never forget step 1: “Go and eat a banana in the park”. I wonder what would have happened if I’d followed through.

Thirdly, I just feel different now.

So here I am, unsure of the future, living in Hanoi in a kind of limbo for the next little while and eating the only thing I have managed to cobble together without fail: desserts from Hong Kong.

My friend Alex (who doesn’t read this) always jokes that I should have been born Chinese. I got a thing for China, it’s true, but I’m scared that I hold the place in too-high esteem. So for now China isn’t on the cards, but I’m still all about it’s food.

I remember hanging out in Hong Kong a few years ago, visiting dessert houses at any opportunity. We would normally order something totally out there as well as an old reliable option with mango, having left Australia just before the season started. This combination was one of my favourites: mango, pomelo and sago. Simple, easy and delicious. Now, thanks to the kindness of a friend I have a blender (thank you Karen, it is fabulous. Best blender ever!), and most of the ingredients I can recreate this little patch of Hong Kong in my Hanoi kitchen.

Most of the ingredients: A little while ago I got back from the local Vietnamese supermarket with what I thought were sago pearls. As soon as I unpacked them I smelt that my little hard white balls of gelatinous love were in fact strange perfect spheres of white pepper. Ugh. Lucky I didn’t try and cook them. So instead of sago I used a thick tapoica starch noodle, but take my advice and use sago if you can get it.

I don’t have a proper recipe for you, just cook your sago as per the packet instructions. When cooked, cool it down in cold water and set aside. Meanwhile blend your mango up with some milk (you can use coconut milk if you want), as much sugar syrup as you need, and some ice cubes if necessary. To assemble, mix sago and mango together, place in serving bowls and top with peeled and separated pomelo jewels. Eat immediately,

So while I’m looking forward to new places, new flavours and experiences I’m going to have some fun in Hanoi and hoping to get my kitchen mojo back. I’m thinking about Korea, the UK and Europe. I’m looking forward to going back to Australia, hanging out with my friends and eating all the things you can’t get here. And I’m trying to remember that you just can’t come back all the way.

It appears that alongside oppressive heat comes a wider range of fruit at the onset of an Hanoi summer. Ladies selling pineapples, mangoes and oranges from baskets attached to bicycles park along busy streets or cycle slowly around until someone stops them to buy. The fruit is piled up, and can be quickly peeled and sliced for you should you so desire. Recently more exotic fruits have been making appearances, small spiky durians, misshapen soursops and pretty piles of rambutans are available from these travelling saleswomen.

I usually take the scenic route to and from work, for fear of dying if I go the short way on the real road with the scary traffic and drivers who aren’t able to turn their heads (stiff necks seem to be a real problem with Hanoi drivers). My desire for survival means that I miss all the fruit ladies on the main road, so my first indication of the change in fruit season was in the rubbish. Discarded durian shells, all the sweet stinky flesh removed, and mangosteen detritus littering my alley. Imagine that, a fruit so exotic, rare and expensive in Australia being consumed in the street, like a common apple or banana.

Mangosteens, the queen of fruit, are juicy, fragrant and sweet with a very subtle perfume and flavour. Their purple red shell will bleed colour that stains, which is why they are not allowed in hotel rooms in Malaysia. The season corresponds with that of the durian and these fruits are often eaten in combination, the ‘cooling’ aspects of the mangosteen offsetting the hot nature of the durian.

This recipe pairs the delicate watery fruit with yoghurt and cream, the fat seems to carry the mangosteens whimsical flavour further, and backs it up with a tartness that evens out the sweet. The original recipe called for lime zest in the pannacotta, but I removed it, mixed it with some mango and made a salsa topping. Mango and mangosteen, see what I did there? I halved the recipe, but wish I hadn’t. Even pMum loved it.

This recipe is listed in a new section: Ingredients (check the navigation menu at the top of the page!). Here you will be able to find information about the strange and wonderful ingredients featured here on Pikelet and Pie.
Another new section brings together all the posts about Vietnamese food in one handy spot.

Mangosteen Yoghurt Pannacotta
Adapted from Eunice Lee, pastry chef at Straits in San Francisco.
Serves 4

To open a mangosteen: The inedible exterior of the fruit starts out fibrous and firm, but softens during the ripening process. Score around the centre of the fruit with a sharp knife taking care not to cut into the soft flesh underneath. Pull the shell gently to release the white flesh inside.

100ml mangosteen puree
200ml yogurt (i used sweet vinamilk yoghurt, which I think is made from condensed milk)
200ml cream
1/2 cup caster sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 sheets gelatine

For mango lime salsa:
Mango
lime juice
sugar
lime zest

For pannacotta:
- Soak the gelatine in cold water.
- Whisk yoghurt, cream, mangosteen puree and vanilla together.
- In a small pan heat the sugar with a few tablespoons of water to dissolve the crystals. I had to heat this mixture until boiling because the sugar here in Hanoi is really crystallised and I didn’t have any caster sugar. When the sugar has dissolved remove from heat and stir the gelatine through. Pour into a bowl, cool slightly then mix few tablespoons of the cream mixture through to cool it.
- Mix the gelatine mixture through the rest of the cream, pour into 4 moulds and refrigerate until set, about 4 hours.

For Mango topping:
- finely dice the mango, sprinkle with some granulated sugar and a squeeze of lime juice and set aside.
- Meanwhile prepare lime zest. Peel the zest from a lime with a vegetable peeler. Remove any white pith with a sharp knife and julienne the green zest. Place zest in a small pan and cover with cold water. Heat until boiling, then drain and refresh the zest. Repeat one more time. This removes the bitterness from the zest.
-stir prepared zest through mango mixture, put it two tablespoons on top of each set pannacotta and serve immediately.