Food is Fun

Some of my fondest childhood memories are from eating foods that my mother and sister cooked when we were in Vietnam.  We were poor, so we didn't buy a lot of our foods from the market.  Living in the country side, we raised our own animals for meat, trees for fruits, and herbs and vegetables.  We used to always eat as a family.  Lunch and dinner was always at the same time of the day when my father comes home from work in the rice fields.  We knew how to tell time without having a clock in the house ;)  We looked at the position of the sun in the sky and that was our clock.  Talk about solar energy ;)    I am quite adventurous when it comes to trying new foods.  I remembered my father always brought home something for my mother to cook for dinner.  It may sounds scary but these are the times I will always treasure and remember my father by.  Sometimes he brought home lizards, snakes, frogs....whatever he could catch while in the farms.  My sister and I always tried to guess what he'd bring home that day.  My mother had her ways of mixing her special herbs to make these "scary" recipe into delicious dinner.  While eating dinner together, my dad always had incredible, heroic stories of how he spotted, chased, and tackled the big lizards out of his hidings and bring it home to us...My sisters and I used to listen with our mouth wide open and asked my father if we could come along one day.  He never let us go to the farms with him though.  Growing up as a poor little girl in Vietnam was the times when I tasted the best foods in my life!