Viet sweet stand, Hanoi

My selection: eating my way to the bottom was quite an experience!

I know I said the Hanoi fish with turmeric & dill 'cha ca' would be my next post, but here's a quick sweet themed entry in the meantime...

Again location is Hanoi, but this time a dessert.  Actually 'sweet snack' would probably be more accurate (as I believe the Vietnamese, like the Thais, don't do desserts really - they eat sweet stuff as a snack preferring to have just a little fruit after a meal).

The snaps below are of a little street stall, where you sit on the bench opposite and choose want sweet madness you want concocted. If, like me, you don't speak any Vietnamese beyond 'thanks', 'hello' and 'delicious' then this means smiling, bobbing your head, pointing and generally just fairly philosphical about what you end up with.

In the case what I ended up with included beans, tapioca pearls, palm seeds, taro, banana all in some form of syrup and the whole lot topped off with some sweet coconut cream and banana chips.  There were probably serval other things in there too.

I've eaten this kind of thing a few times in Thailand, the key difference here seemed to be that more of the items were not just in syrup but in a kind of gelatinous syrupy gloop (sp?) which was so stretchy and viscous that the lady serving it was having a hard time getting it off the spoon and in to the glass!

Along with frogsspawn like tapioca pearls and other unusuals each spoonful is textural insanity.

But I ate the entire contents of my glass, and, I think, quite enjoyed it.

There were also some nice looking rice flour dumplings which I didn't have room for, I think sesame seed paste or suchlike would have been found inside.
 

Nice looking riceflour dumplings. 

Ok so next post definitely is now cha ca, and it will be the last of my Vietnamese themed ones.  After that: back to Thailand, where I have been for the last month or so.

Andy