Pork pies

By on Sunday, April 13, 2014 in Hanoi | 0 comments

In a quest to find a hobby — the desire exacerbated by Paul starting guitar lessons –, I arranged a short course of private cookery classes with Cameron, a Canadian chef based in Hanoi who we met when setting up a blog website for him. Myself and two friends, Laura and Urshi, spent three very enjoyable Wednesday evenings at Cameron’s house cooking a range of delicious dishes while imbibing good wine and chatting about food and general gossip. Each week we prepared and cooked snacks, salads, vegetables, meat and desserts, learning to joint a chicken, cook duck to perfection, make crumbly pastry and bake a chocolate souffle, among other things. At the end of the evening we ate the results of our efforts and returned home full, learned and a bit tipsy. Needless to say, when the course finished we missed our Wednesday night adventure, so Laura and I arranged to spend an evening cooking pork pies: something we both wanted to have a go at (as you can’t buy them here). Laura bought all the ingredients and prepared the jelly — which involved boiling pigs’ trotters with vegetables for hours — during the day and I turned up after work. Neither of us was prepared for just how long finely chopping over 2kg of pork and streaky bacon would take but neither had we really calculated that the length of cooking time meant we’d need to wait up until 11.30pm to remove the pies from the oven and pour in the jelly. Not the end of the world of course, but bear in mind Laura gets up at the crack of dawn with baby Aubin and I just like my sleep! Were the results worth it? Well, we learnt that making two pies was excessive, that the smaller pie dish was a better size, that duck fat is a better replacement for lard than shortening (but we’ll use butter next time) and that we should have used a lot more salt, but having initially declared we would never make them again, we agreed to give it another go in our quest for the perfect pork pie....

Staff and green walls

By on Sunday, April 13, 2014 in Crunchy Frog stuff | 0 comments

A month ago Huong, who’d been working for us for two years, handed in her resignation. It was not unexpected and, although we were sad to see her go, it pushed us into making a decision on staffing. I’ve been a bit overwhelmed with office admin and day to day account management, and it’s been getting in the way of me pursuing the sort of work I want to be doing, so we agreed to take on a full time Exec Assistant / Account Manager, and Hang joined us a couple of weeks ago. Fingers crossed that over time she’ll be able to take on more of the work I’ve been doing. On the design side of things, having been burnt by our first experience of taking on a designer, we’d been putting off trying again, but in January we realised we could wait no longer and started the recruitment process. We found a couple of suitable candidates and made an offer which was accepted. Unfortunately, the candidate decided not to show up last Monday and also decided not to bother to let us know he’d changed his mind. I was so angry and completely at a loss to understand how someone could be so lacking in consideration for others. I am still constantly amazed by the cultural differences we encounter here and quite demoralised about having to start recruiting again, but if we are to grow we need more staff, so…back to the drawing board! On a more positive note, with the change of staff came a change in office layout and decor. We re-organised the layout and had one wall painted Crunchy Frog green. It’s amazing how much difference the changes have made – it’s given the place a new lease of life and feels much more spacious....

April’s weather update

By on Sunday, April 13, 2014 in Weather | 0 comments

I apologise for posting about the weather but every year I intend to keep a record for future reference and forget. My blog seems a sensible place to store the information but feel free to ignore it entirely. Winter in Hanoi is not generally a pleasant time of year to be here. As I wrote in my Travelfish wire a few years ago, it really does get cold in Hanoi. Or maybe I should re-phrase that: it really does feel cold in Hanoi. The temperature rarely drops below 10C — not cold in the English sense of the word — but the damp air, lack of insulation in buildings and windchill, especially when on a motorbike, makes it feel a lot colder than the thermometer may suggest. This winter, however, we thought we’d got off lightly. We were still seeing blue skies and reasonably mild weather in early December, and during Tet, at the end of January, the weather was glorious: blue skies, dry air, a bit chilly but who cares when it’s sunny! Unfortunately it then went downhill: it started raining. For the end of February and most of March we had grey skies and drizzle…every day. It was miserable. So miserable that I had to run away to the beach in Hoi An to get some sunshine. Thankfully I brought the sunshine with me back to Hanoi, and we had a week or so of good weather before it got a bit wet again. Fortunately it’s not been raining too much in the day, but it’s pretty damp. Very warm though — with the damp and humidity it’s starting to get uncomfortable to walk in. And there’s mould everywhere! Now we just need the rain to stop and the blue skies to appear and we may still manage a brief spell of spring before summer kicks...