Seafood 'hot pot', Mui Ne

This is a seafood hot pot I ate on the beach in Mui Ne (a small beach town in the South of Vietnam).

I'm normally a bit suspicious of something with a name like 'Seafood hot pot': can mean anything really...perhaps there's no recipe but the kitchen just boil up some seafood odds 'n' ends with a token vegetable or two.

Not so this one!

It was a perfect seaside bowl of food: a very tasty broth sweetened by the chunks of juicy pineapple, soured with fresh tamarind (the seeds from the pods were in the bottom of the bowl once I’d slurped it dry). Floating temptingly about in it were big pieces of v.fresh veg: tomato, okra and spongy-juicy taro stem – a perfect soup vegetable, and one which I’ve only come across in Vietnam.

Plus of course seafood: squid, chunks of white fish and prawns (the Vietnamese tend to eat the small ones shell and all, which works for me). I think the recipe was based on a soup which comes from the Mekong region called 'Canh chua cá'.

Delicious. Plus the kind of dish that you can feel doing you good; swim in the sea everyday and eat this...you'd live past 100. Guaranteed.