The starfruit season in the garden

Snakehead fish cooked with starfruit has a refreshing, tangy flavor.

Once upon a time, there was a sour starfruit tree right next to my house. I don't know when our neighbor, Mrs. Cong, planted it, but the fruit hung down so heavily over the fence.

Perhaps due to the difficult living conditions and the lack of readily available spices like today, with various herbs and spices grown in bulk and readily available at the market, starfruit was always a key ingredient in my mother's cooking.
From cooking soups and stews to making salads, starfruit is an indispensable ingredient. So much so that, in my memory, starfruit slices, shaped like stars, seem to float across dreamy skies, under the summer sun or in the winter rain.

In the summer, starfruit was a refreshing and cooling addition to every meal, thanks to my mother's efforts. Whenever my father caught a snakehead fish, there would always be a pot of fish soup with starfruit. My mother would clean the fish, cut it into pieces, and marinate it with fish sauce and familiar spices from the kitchen corner.

My mother told me that to reduce the fishy smell of freshwater fish, you have to remove all the blood vessels, rub it with coarse salt and lemon. Grab a basket, pick a few sour starfruit, gather some basil, and break off a green, unripe banana – that's enough flavor for the soup.

My mother put a pot on the stove, sautéed peanut oil with crushed shallots until fragrant, then added the fish and stir-fried it briefly. She added boiling water to firm up the fish meat. She kept the heat on medium, and when the fish boiled again, she seasoned it with a little coarse salt, sour starfruit, unripe bananas, and other spices to taste. Before taking the pot off the heat, she added a few cinnamon leaves and a few crisp green chilies for extra aroma, then ladled it into a bowl. In the summer, a bowl of snakehead fish soup with starfruit is a very appetizing meal.

In the old days, my mother used to season soup with coarse salt, but strangely, it wasn't too salty; instead, it had a subtly sweet flavor. My father always planted a small cinnamon tree in the garden; its leaves weren't large and lush, but rather small and fragrant. My mother would add a few cinnamon leaves to every soup she made.

Bitter melon soup, zucchini soup, fish soup... absolutely must have basil leaves. Even now, every time I go to the vegetable stall to buy a piece of zucchini, instead of adding scallions and cilantro, I choose basil leaves. Many vegetable vendors grumble about how strange basil leaves are. Try zucchini soup with basil leaves; maybe my father's story about planting a basil tree in his garden was true.

Starfruit is associated with dishes my mother used to cook in my hometown.

These days, the winter rains begin to fall in the streets. The small starfruit tree in the garden is also rustling, shedding its fruit with each gust of wind. I remember the day my father cast his nets in the deep fields. The rainwater was a white blur, and my father, hunched over, untangled the nets in the biting October cold.

The fish caught in the nets during the rainy season are plump and fatty, like perch and crucian carp... Cooking crucian carp with Vietnamese coriander all the time gets boring, so my mother braises it with starfruit. She says crucian carp during the rainy season is very clean; you just need to wash them whole with salt water before braising them. Her intestines have medicinal properties that help with sleep; they taste slightly bitter at first, but once you get used to them, they're very delicious.

After washing the fish, my mother arranged them in a pot and marinated them with fish sauce, pepper, chili powder, and MSG. She washed and sliced ​​starfruit and placed them on top. She also didn't forget to go to the garden, pick some fresh turmeric, wash it, and grind it into a paste to add to the pot, giving the fish an attractive color and aroma.

The marinated fish, having absorbed the flavors, was placed on the stove, a little boiling water was added to cover it, and it was simmered over low heat. In the winter, the kitchen smoked so intensely it stung the eyes. My mother scooped some rice husks around the stove stand to help the firewood burn longer. The crucian carp stewed with starfruit had a very special flavor – rich, fragrant, and with soft bones. Each bite of the fish with hot rice melted on the tongue in the winter heat.

Besides soups and stews, on days when we sold the vegetables from the garden, my mother would buy some beef to make a salad with starfruit. I can't remember the taste of the beef, but the sliced ​​starfruit, squeezed to remove excess sour juice, the crushed roasted peanuts, the coriander, the cinnamon leaves, and the sweet and sour chili fish sauce still linger in my memories.

The starfruit tree nestled in the small city garden seemed to transport me back to my childhood. In the hurried rush of work, the clusters of starfruit blossoms peeking out from the leaves made me pause. My mother, her hair graying, couldn't cook a delicious meal for me. Only the starfruit tree continued to regularly bloom, bearing fruit that fell into my memories: “ On a rainy Saturday afternoon, I came home late / The starfruit tree on the hill had finished blooming ” (Pham Cong Thien)...

Source: https://baoquangnam.vn/mua-khe-rung-trong-vuon-3145124.html