One of the things I like best about Vietnam is the café culture. And by café, I mean any collection of plastic stools on the sidewalk, set up by an entrepreneurial local who mixes drinks for her neighbors. At any time of the day, along the streets of Saigon, Hanoi, Hoi An, etc., the Vietnamese just crouch around wobbly pastel tables and sip their drink of choice. Whether it's cafe sua da, sugarcane juice, aloe vera shake, or passionfruit juice, the icy beverages are practically lifesavers in a sweltering climate. 

If a fruit grows in abundance in Vietnam, you can be sure it is pulsed into a shake. And avocados are everywhere. I grew up associating avocados with salty foods: mashed into guacamole, fanned on chicken sandwiches, sprinkled with sea salt and eaten straight. So a sweet shake was something of a novelty. 

But it makes sense. Because avocado flesh is naturally neither sweet nor salty, it's a tabula rasa for any creamy concoction you want to make.

Since the shake comes out rather thick, and contains both avocados and sweetened condensed milk (not exactly diet foods), I consider it more of a dessert than a light drink. But you can always thin it out with a little more milk and crushed ice.

The first pomelo I bought this season was the size of a bowling ball. The other person in my house does not eat pomelo, and it took me 2 weeks to finish. 

Winter is pomelo season, and sure enough, these big fat babies are everywhere. It's the grapefruit for people who don't like grapefruit. The taste is less tart, and the big meaty segments make it healthy for day-long snackage. Pomelo is also loaded with vitamin C, making it excellent for warding off seasonal cold and flu.

This pomelo I bought yesterday was the smallest in the bin. Still, it took me about half an hour to fully dissect.

Pomelo hackage requires patience and finger muscles. But just set aside 30 to 60 minutes, crank up the música, and you'll be in the zone in no time. With a chef's knife, slice through the rind and go around with the knife until you can pull the two sides apart. Then just pull away the pith and white skin surrounding the flesh. In the end you'll have a tupperware of pomelo chunks to last for weeks. Or days, if you're lucky and have a housemate who will share in the joy.

This winter has been brutal in China, and no part of the country has been spared. Even in Zhongshan in the south, about the same latitude as Florida, it has been so cold that I have to wear a down coat. The same down coat I wear up in Beijing. According to my father, last year it was so warm during Spring Festival he could wear a t-shirt out. Not so this year (and we have global warming to thank) Although it's about 15 degrees Celsius warmer here, the dampness creates a bone-chilling type of cold, the same type of cold you get in London, Paris, and Shanghai.

Cold weather makes me long for piping hot dishes, like clay pot braises. Last night I decided to make clay pot chicken, and adapted a Vietnamese-style braise from Chef Charles Phan of San Francisco's Slanted Door. One of the major changes I made was the amount of fish sauce. The original recipe called for 3 tablespoons, which I would not recommend to anyone hoping to keep a decent-smelling kitchen. (See Vietnamese Caramelized Pork.) I reduced the amount to 1 teaspoon or a few drops, which is plenty for enhancing the flavors of the dish.

You can also make this dish both mild or spicy. I tossed in seeded Thai chilli, which added a mild tinge; for more spice, just leave the seeds in.

Clay Pot Chicken
Adapted from Chef Charles Phan, via Epicurious

Serves 4

I never thought I would have trouble finding fish sauce in China. Growing up, many of the Cantonese dishes my mother cooked contained fish sauce. In New York's and Boston's Chinatowns, Squid Sauce and other varieties of nam pla were staples in every market.

Even though fish sauce is hardly used in northern Chinese cooking, I didn't think it would be hard to find in Beijing. Even if Thai, Vietnamese, and other Southeast Asian cuisines aren't too popular here, various Cantonese dishes aren't hard to find. But of the 3 supermarkets in my neighborhood, none carried it. I then scoured the Lotus Center in Wudaokou, thinking that with the neighborhood's large Korean population the supermarket must carry all sorts of fish sauce.

Well, I did find it, but not in the sauce aisle. Rather, there was just one kind, amongst imported goods like mirin and shochu. Guangdong province really is like another country.

With fish sauce in hand, I was able to try the Vietnamese Caramelized Pork recipe I found in the NYTimes. It's a good recipe except that it calls for 1/4 cup of fish sauce. That is madness. The point of fish sauce is to use just enough to bring out the dish's other flavors. The first time around I lessened the amount and still my apartment reeked for hours.