Just Desserts

A wonderful bowl of Wor Won Ton soup reminded me that the Chinese don't do dessert. A fortune cookie is but a token, it's more for the piece of paper telling you your fate "between the sheets", and these days lottery numbers, and in today's case a "let's learn Chinese" where they wrote "happy birthday" in English and then in Chinese. That didn't help me much.

Vietnam hasn't any native desserts, but all those years under French rule gave them some great pastries. I can't think of a country in Europe (Western or Eastern) which doesn't do dessert. The Middle East has halvah, India has tons of sweets, kheer and gulab. Thai restaurants in the US usually only offer boring fried bananas and coconut ice cream, and sometimes to die for mango with sticky rice, but in-country there are more "k'nomes" than you can shake a stick at. Many are made with sweetened coconut milk and sticky rice. Malaysia and Indonesia have lots of jellied stuff. I'm not sure about Africa - feel free to enlighten me.

Basically this post is to justify stopping off at the donut place next to Chef Lee's this afternoon. :-)