Oh those tipsy nights…

Lately I’ve had more than a couple of tipsy nights. I will share with you some pictures of a night I remembered to have some photos for blogging, and tonight is one night that I am high enough to swing my mood into writing about it:

It was a night of random little joy. I had my first paycheck at the new job and went out to celebrate with my friends. We continued the night with a fashion show at my designer friend’s studio, it was fascinating. Later when we left it was raining and I started singing all along the way in the rain, maybe it was a rainy summer night effect, maybe it was a couple glasses of white wine I had at the event, I was upbeat and feeling good. I craved for ice cream and my friends took me back to the place we knew where ice cream was. We found our way back to the Highway 4 – House of Son Tinh. Thought I had to have some of their apricot ice cream!

Have you seen this kind of Vietnamese apricot? They are very sour and the way we do it is to put them in a jar with sugar, with a 1:1 ratio of apricot and sugar (1kg apricot : 1kg sugar) and let it sit for a very long time, but before that you have to clean the apricot and make sure they are completely drain and dry, as any drops of water remaining on the apricot would definitely ruin the whole batch. So after being put in a jar with sugar, the apricots extract lots of juice and the sugar starts melting, so there you have apricot juice, the longer you keep it the deeper the apricot juice infuses, normally we keep it to use for the next season, but if you keep it longer for a couple of years, the juice gets darker, condensed and can mostly become wine with very strong aroma. Highway 4 has been very famous for their apricot and plum wine using the infusing juice and the remaining of the fruit is used to make ice cream. At this point, the fruits get very sweet and almost are like jam.

We were not hungry and just wanted ice cream, but when we entered the restaurant, I couldn’t help but thinking of their signature fried fish rolls so I quickly made my order: it was actually fried fish with dill wrapped in rice paper dipped with a mixture of oyster sauce and mustard, and 2 boxes of plum and apricot ice cream of the House. And then one of my friends wanted this beautiful beef salad with bamboo root so we had that!

And of course, more wine was involved.

Oh those nights…

— Anyways, planning to be in Hanoi soon? Note down the Highway 4, great wine, great food, and great homemade ice cream. And I may not be that great of a company, but high chance I’ll join you for the ice cream!

Cheers !

Now my idea of an ice cream company excites you, doesn’t it?

H.
—
*Food photos by a friend of mine.

*Photos of the apricots from the web.

*Awkward-I-Scream-Moment picture from “Very Clean Funny Pics”