Pho is a vietnamese beef and rice noodle soup. I always order mine with "rare steak". Basically, they have a bowl of piping hot beef or chicken broth, with some onions and sometimes other stuff as well They add in the rice noodles and some thinly sliced beef, and bring it to your table, along with a plate of condiments (cilantro, thai basil, heaping mounds of bean sprouts, jalapeno slices, and some lime wedges). They also put hot chili sauce and plum sauce on the table. The beef cooks itself to a perfect med-rare in the hot broth while they bring it to the table.

Now the fun starts - you combine the stuff on the condiment plate to get your pho just how you like it. For me, this is a heaping handful of bean sprouts, a squeeze of lime juice, just a drop of chili sauce. Sarah likes hers with so much chili sauce that the broth turns red (which is how most Vietnamese people eat it) and some cilantro.

You have to be careful with portion sizes, but if you eat a reasonable amount of the noodles, its actually pretty lean. Sodium is through the roof, though. But MAN is it good. You also have to be careful that you don't order some strange pho variety that has tons of random meats in it...like tripe. Rare steak, though, is AMAZING.

That sounds so wonderful! Thanks for explaining it to me, I'd love to try that sometime.

What restaurant do you and Sarah go to? I don't believe I've ever even seen a Vietnamese restaurant in our area.

I adore Indian food, too - what I've been doing lately to get my "fix" is picking up an order of tikka masala from my favorite place, and then chopping it up at home and making a filling for whole wheat pitas. Mix the tikka, a little chutney, some cilantro and lemon, and you're good to go - AMAZING flavor, and light on the calories. It totally satisfies my craving, and is pretty cheap, too. Yum!

Pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup. It's broth-based, usually has some beef (although I've seen chicken, shellfish, tofu, you name it). It's really comforting and delicious - I especially love it topped with a lot bean sprouts and lime. It can actually be a pretty healthy and light dish, depending on where you get it.

Oops...mandalinn and I were posting at the same time!

She's totally right about avoiding the mystery meats unless you're into that sort of thing - I once had some pho that had cubes of jellied pork blood in it. The pho itself was delicious, but I couldn't bring myself to eat one of those jellies!

I have taught myself to make Indian and Korean food at home. There are no restaurants for either in the town I'm in.

I love to make split pea or red lentil dahl and I serve it with long grain brown rice and a bit of plain yogurt. It's so yummy and it really isn't too heavy on the calories as long as you go easy on the rice. I also love Naan, but that is an occasional treat because it is really high on the calories.

I make my own Kim Chi about every two months (I make a big batch.) My DH loves Kim Chi soup, so I make it almost every week. It's great because a bowl of Kim Chi soup is between 75 - 150 calories depending on what you put in it.

I'm with zenor - I've started making my own Indian and Chinese food at home. It's been a lot of trial and error with spices and amounts, but I get my fix and keep things healthy!
Cindy

I've experimented with my own Indian food and I've done pretty well but still it just doesn't taste the same.

As for Pho, I really like it but I rarely go because I'm messy When I lived in CO, my work friends and I would go all the time, nearly every week. And I've had a Pho "with everything" which is things like tendon and tripe and what not. I don't care for tendon but I do like tripe. DH likes tendon. It is nice hearty soup and its super cheap.

Pho is definitely yummy and comparably healthy (I, too, couldn't stand the non-steak meats that is served in pho so I usually order the "pho tai" (rare steak, which gets cooked in the piping hot broth) -- though if I feel indulgent I might add some wontons).

But, to bring it back somewhat on-topic -- in any type of cuisine there are dishes that are healthful and dishes that aren't -- and seeing how it's prepared and what ingredients went in it should give anyone a pretty good idea of how nutritious it is (or not).

Gross!

I *love* Vietnamese vermicelli (can't think of the word for it). It's definitely a weakness of mine. I don't eat it often, but I'm worried about there not being a Vietnamese restaurant in the town/city I move to in the fall. I guess if there isn't one I'll have to join some Vietnamese student association so that I can befriend a member and maybe get invited over for dinner once in a while... haha. Only mostly kidding...

As for the Chinese food, P.F. Chang's, which is just about the only Chinese I eat considering I never go out for it myself (always with my parents), has excellent brown rice that they don't charge extra for. I also like that their website has the nutritional facts for every single dish they have there. A lot of it isn't that bad calorie wise as far as restaurant food goes, but it is high in sodium. I wish more chain restaurants would make their nutritional information available. For me, anyway, it puts that restaurant on my "go to" list when I eat out, because at least I'll know however many calories I'm eating, instead of just guessing.

On a funnier note, I had a friend once that said her uncle (not the nutritionally brightest crayon in the box) observed that Chinese people were skinny, so he was going on a "Chinese diet" where he'd eat nothing but Chinese for a month. This of course was filled with General Tso's Chicken, Mongolian Beef, etc. etc. He ended up gaining 20 lbs... haha.

My husband and I love oriental soups, and we often order them as our main dish and maybe split an appetizer or if the soup doesn't have tons of noodles in it a small bowl of rice on the side. Apparently this is how most asians eat themselves, or so we've been told by more than one asian restaurant owner or wait staff. Once a chinese (mandarin, I believe) owner was so impressed that we were eating the "right" way, that she showed us the special menu that they gave to the chinese diners. As it was written in chinese, she translated and explained how the dishes differed from the "americanized" versions, and told us if we wanted to order from the chinese menu we could ask for it, and ask the waiter to translate for us.

The vietnamese restaurant we loved went out of business, and where we're living now has a large Hmong (southeast asian) population, but restaurants are just starting to crop up. One deli has a wonderful beefsteak Pho they will serve with or without the tripe and meatballs. The meatballs have a slightly odd texture ("too smooth") and have some innard in them (probably a little bit of liver, I think). I like them, but hubby doesn't, so we usually order without. I don't mind the tripe, but there's just too much of it. The deli calls it the "super bowl," as the owner decided one super bowl weekend to offer it as a special, $7.95 a bowl or if you could finish it (no time limit, one guy finished it in 3 hours), you'd get it free and your picture and your time on the bulletin board. Most of the "winners," were tiny asian men (and a few women). We split the bowl and didn't quite finish it (Mind you, we're both well over 300 lbs each).

Mmmmm. This conversation is making me hungry. I haven't ever met an Asian cuisine I didn't like (although I've seen some stuff in pho I wouldn't dream of eating... something about a blood cube, I recall). There are *NO* asian restaurants where I currently live, so I've learned to make my own stuff. I particularly love Madhur Jaffrey's Indian cookbooks. It's not the same as eating in an Indian restaurant (which isn't an option here anyway), but this is because the recipes are more 'authentic.' I love spending 5 hours in the kitchen whipping up a feast of 5 or 6 different dishes (just go easier on the oil and rice) and then we eat the leftovers for the rest of the week, usually with a nightly addition of a different vegetable dish. I love the variety of a spicy meat dish, a lentil dish, spicey rice and a couple of different vegetable dishes. Yum!

It's 9:30 and we haven't had dinner yet. I'm starting to get fetishistic about my food...