Becoming a Celebrity During ISP - Almost

Becoming a celebrity in Vietnam is goal that my friends and I have been joking about accomplishing since our arrival.  We all stick out as foreigners and Vietnamese people are really interested, and not shy, about coming up to us, asking about the U.S. and asking to take a photo.  Back when Eliza and I did our dance routine with members of the English Club from Hoa Sen University (that feels like a very long time ago), we experienced what it must feel like to be a celebrity when we were bombarded by students asking to take photos with us.  We kidded that we were all over facebook in Vietnam.  A week later, my friends and I were walking to dinner when we came upon a film crew and a group of dancers in a park.  We asked around and figured out they were filming a commercial for some milk or yogurt product and dancing Gangnam Style. Long story short, we asked if we could be in it and took our places in the middle.  They filmed us once (I think just to get us to leave).  I'm pretty sure they didn't use that take, but we laughed about how funny it would be if we ended up on Vietnamese TV.  Ironically, it actually ended up happening.

During the second week when I was in Hue, my ISP advisor, Ms. Huy, told me to come to her home on Sunday.  She told me we would be filmed cooking together for an upcoming TV documentary about her career as a chef and how she is preserving the Hue traditional cuisine.  Ms. Huy use to be a teacher, but then decided to come back to Hue and pursue a career in cooking.  She has trained in France and is an honor member of the French National Academy of Cuisine.  She's an incredible woman and currently has three full-time jobs: teaching culinary school students, cooking, and writing books and poems.  Ms. Huy also is a judge for important cooking competitions.

The day of the filming I really did not know what to expect.  I took a cab from my hotel and arrived at Ms. Huy's door at 8:00 a.m.  The film crew, consisting of two camera men and one woman, who conducted the interviews, arrived around 8:15.  First, they filmed Ms. Huy and I walking through the outdoor market near  her house.  She talked about the products, describing where they came from and what they could be used to make.  We bought some ingredients like carrots, green figs, and ground pork and walked back to her house to prepare two dishes: warm fig salad and spring rolls.

Around this time, some of her culinary students, who were all in their early to mid twenties, started arriving.    It was clear that they regarded Ms. Huy as a culinary god.  One of the students told me that Ms. Huy was their idol and that they really enjoyed learning from her.  The students helped us chop the vegetables and prepare the dishes.  To make the fig salad, the green figs first had to be boiled and then peeled.  The figs here do not really resemble the ones sold in the US.  In Vietnam, they are bigger and have less seeds.  Once boiled, they have a grayish color and almost remind me of an artichoke heart.  The figs were then chopped and cooked with sesame seeds, shallots, and a little bit of oil over the stove.

Once the fig dish was moved to a serving bowl and garnished with a bright red flower-shaped chili, we started to make spring rolls.  The ground pork was mixed with sliced carrots, turnips, garlic, cut up glass noodles, green onions, shallots, chili, sugar, salt, pepper, and a few other spices.  Ms. Huy then showed me how to use mung bean paper to wrap the spring rolls.  After they were wrapped, we fried the spring rolls two times; the first time to cook the meat and the second time to brown the outside.

The TV crew filmed the cooking demonstration then asked me to answer a few questions about what I thought of Hue food and Ms. Huy.  After the interview, the crew drove Ms. Huy and I to a park near the Perfume River where we were instructed to walk around arm and arm and engage in conversation.  I really wonder what all the people in the park were thinking when they saw Ms. Huy strolling along with a very blond foreigner trailed by a film crew.  When they got a sufficient amount of footage, the crew drove us back to her home where they interviewed some of her students before packing up their equipment.

Ms. Huy, her students, and me.

Back at Ms. Huy's we finally got to eat the food we had prepared with her students, which was delicious.

Here is the documentary video clip about Ms. Huy, which aired on November 28 in Vietnam.  http://vtvhue.vn/chuyen-muc/hue-tinh-yeu-cua-toi/201211/Hue-tinh-yeu-cua-toi-ngay-28112012-154613 / I'm interviewed around the six minute mark.  I'm dubbed over in Vietnamese, but I'm saying something like, "I love Hue food.  It is really different from food where I am from in New York.  In Hue, all of the ingredients are fresh and the chefs focus a lot on taste, flavor, and texture of the dishes. Ms. Huy is a very accomplished chef and I am honored to be able to learn from her."  I hope this makes you laugh : )