"What do you like?

If you've been wondering at all what we've been eating, well here you are. We have the greatest cook in all of Viet Nam, I swear. Jo's goodbye dinner was at her request (and what's on the menu for tomorrow night-woohoo!): com ga. Chicken, vegetables and rice; simple, but so delicious. Mrs. Hanh cooks the rice with onion, garlic and some spice that makes it yellow. The vegetables are carrots and "green vegetable" (the name for everything it seems). I think it might be a squash of some sort, though I've seen her use green beans and figure I could probably substitute chopped broccoli stems for the "green vegetable." They are cooked to crisp-tender perfection. The chicken is cooked with onion and some other leafy "green vegetable," something like spinach this time. We stir the vegetables and the chicken mixture in with the rice and eat it like it'll never hit the table again. So delicious! Oh, and the cucumbers. I eat them, but no one else really likes them. Except Yen, who eats them with chili sauce. Ew. :)

So we are definitely not starving to death and I'm surprised I haven't put all the weight back on and more, given the way she feeds us. This is lunch on Monday. Chicken, fried potatoes, shrimp crackers, Vietnamese cole slaw and rice. Technically, we were supposed to dish the cole slaw up onto the crackers to eat it, but it was a lot of work to keep it together. The potatoes are a huge hit with the kids and our new volunteer, Hannah. I couldn't eat much of the meat with the bones still attached, but there's always plenty of everything. You couldn't possibly leave the table less than full. Mrs. Hanh wouldn't let us even if we tried.

And that's her phrase in the subject line-"What do you like?" Really it means: Do you like it? It's quite cute though, as is her use of any English. All verbs are gerunds. There are no filler words. "Mrs Hanh talking Mrs Hanh friend, coming later, talking clothes." That's the way all conversations go. And if you apologize, she answers "You're welcome." I guess it's because the Vietnamese translation: Khong co chi means something like "It's not a problem." A suitable answer to an apology, but it still makes me smile when I do something wrong and she says "You're welcome!"