Aloha from the island of Kauai! The dramatic weather (rain, breeze, and sunshine can be experienced within 15 minutes) here hasn’t deterred us from going out and enjoying nature. We’ve harvested most of the produce we’ve eaten at our friend’s home. Today, I used a meat cleaver to chop a banana tree to get at a bunch of fruit! It’s what you have to do to encourage the plant to regrow, my friend Chan said. Who knew??? Aside from the food, Kauai has plenty of laid back charm as well as humor.

I’m still in vacation mode but still wanted to wish a very happy 2026. Before moving forward, let’s take a look back at some of the best PTFS dispatches of the year. I learned a lot from your engagement with the articles and recipes.

When I started out with this newsletter, I didn’t know how much enthusiasm there would be for lite food history. This year, I leaned in a little more to provide extra tidbits of knowledge so that you can piece together how flavors, techniques, and culture evolved over time. There were three noodle stories, because who doesn’t enjoy noodles? And untangling their history is both fun and interesting!

I had no idea how the longish geeky articles would sit with you but you liked them! Modern life unfolds so fast nowadays that it’s easy to overlook the textures and nuances that make food extra tasty. One of the most fascinating dishes I researched last year was Japanese carrot-ginger salad dressing. I wanted something easy, healthy and delicious to add to your salad repertoire and in the process, reported on its fascinating background.

I wrote a mini series about the Vietnamese diaspora and the article that captivated people most was a story about my family’s departure. When we got to America, one of the foods that was on rotation in my mother’s kitchen was char siu (Chinese barbecue pork). She relied on a marinade mix but I’ve long mixed up the marinade from scratch, which overtime, enabled me to push the envelope a bit to char siu many things.

In 2025, my goal was to help you char siu on a weeknight so that you may quickly get at the salty-sweet-rich flavors of iconic Cantonese barbecue. In the process, I came up with a new vegan take plus two meaty options. Go forth to char siu in 2026. It’s evergreen and year-round favorite.

Long ago, I wrote a proposal for a Vietnamese American museum that included an exhibit of the items that refugees escaped with, after the fall of Saigon in 1975. That proposal went unrealized but I do hope that my story inspires other people to record their journeys.

Vegetables drive my food and dining choices now more than ever. I’m thrilled that you’re on board for this, too. It doesn’t mean an all-or-nothing approach. I love my meat but less often and in smallish quantities nowadays. The trick is to slide in veggies without wiping out the true flavors that define the soul of a dish. At the same time, I wanted to craft versatile recipes that you can easily tweak to satisfy your tastes and needs. The tamarind deep dive included one of my favorite southern Vietnamese dishes, done with seafood and veggies or tofu and veggies.

And, there’s a time and place for project cooking but weeknights is not one of them. In 2025, I offered you two of my favorite hacks.

Finally, you PTFS subscribers seed many ideas for content. For instance, John asked about prop 65 warnings, and that led to this article about the California legislation that impacts so many ingredients we reach for on a regular basis.

My resolutions for 2026 are to cook up more fun and engaging things for you. After Cooking Thai goes to print, I’m hoping to do more online classes too!

I always welcome your suggestions so please don’t hesitate to email or DM me with an idea (or two!). Thank you.

Hello there!

Happy Holidays and then some. I hope you’ve not had to spend too much time returning gifts to the store. I’m skipping the upcoming Midweek Gems because we’ll be traveling. Happy early 2026!

But folks, we’re still in 2025, which marks the 50th anniversary of when my family left Vietnam. For that reason, certain foods are top of mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about pâté chaud, a puff pastry snack that has a long history in Vietnam and with my family.

In Vietnamese, we call these treats bánh patê sô — not too far off from the French pâté chaud. I’d like to close out the year with the iconic favorite because it’s a great lens for viewing the modern Vietnamese experience.

I’ve been researching their history and working on new recipes for them. However, I am not yet satisfied with what I’ve got, despite having baked through three boxes of pastry dough! And the history of the pastries themselves turns out to be more interesting than I had initially thought.

So, I’m going to share what I’ve found out about pâté chaud in this dispatch plus where to buy them. In a couple weeks, when we’re back from vacation and I’ve had a chance to do another round of testing, I’ll share the recipes so you can make your own versions.

January 11, 2026 UPDATE » My Pate Chaud recipe is now available!

My family fled Saigon in April 1975 with few material possessions, but we did bring many food memories with us. One of them was of patê chaud, savory puff pastry hand pies filled with a country-style pâté or meatloaflike mixture. Involving culinary skill plus butter and wheat flour, bánh patê sô were considered a luxe breakfast item in Vietnam, to be enjoyed hot to showcase their crispy pastry shell. The literal meaning of pâté chaud is “hot pastry pie”.

Typical Saigon residents went out for them at fancy French-style bakeries, like Givral, which made all-butter puff pastry. Lesser versions relied upon margarine, my mom recalls. Founded by Frenchman Alain Portier, the bakery called Givral opened in 1950 across the way from the Continental Hotel made famous in the Graham Greene novel, The Quiet American. However, bánh patê sô had been in Saigon since around 1930, prepared by clever cooks and entrepreneurs such as Mrs. Pham Thi Truoc, who had a shop specializing in the pastries.

By the time my mother migrated to Saigon from northern Vietnam in 1954, a result of the Geneva Accords that split the country into two, Givral was the place to purchase French pastries and baked goods like patê chaud, cream puffs, eclairs and yule logs. Vietnamese people who opted to go southward felt that North Vietnam was conservative and limiting. South Vietnam was freewheeling, liberal and full of new ideas and foods.

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Pâté chaud is mostly a Saigon specialty. I’ve never spotted it in the northern city of Hanoi or central city of Hue when I visited there. In the early 1960s, Mom, her girlfriends and even my cousin, Bich Tu (who was a teenager then), were rolling out puff pastry dough at home. Butter was expensive and you had to source good wheat flour with enough gluten, my mom said.

Puff pastry needs a relatively cold environment for the dough to behave and develop the hundreds of layers of laminated dough. I have no idea how cooks in tropical Saigon, where the weather is either hot or hotter with humidity, could patiently make pate feuilletée (puff pastry in French). But they were able to do so because they were curious, determined cooks.

Our family arrived at Camp Pendelton Marine Base in Southern California in May 1975 and the temperature was likely in the low 70s. Mom said that the dry, moderate climate was dreamy; she missed her father and sisters but didn’t miss the weather. She had her notebook of recipes, one of her prized possessions that came with us when we left Vietnam. But it didn’t contain a recipe for bánh patê sô.

Soon after we settled into our new home in San Clemente, my mom began to make puff pastry from scratch and baking up dome-shaped bánh patê sô. She knew the recipe by heart and relied upon Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking for technical guidance.

As a result, as an elementary school kid, I ate pa tê sô for breakfast, reheated in a toaster oven until the exterior was crisp and the interior was blazing hot! There was liquor in her beef and pork filling so the first bite often gave me a whiff of alcohol. I’d gobble it up and go off to school, oblivious to how different that breakfast was to what my peers had eaten. I also didn’t realize how unusual it was for a home cook like my mom to make puff pastry over and over again.

But that’s what Vietnamese people are like – obsessively working to polish a skill, to mimic and master a foreign notion, and to make it their own.

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I hope you are enjoying a wonderful day wherever you are, however you are celebrating life and all its blessings. Thank you for being here.

My 2025 e-card contains snapshots of scenes from this week, including my mom’s welcome home dinner for Rory and me. She served us stuffed whelk (ốc nhồi) with lemongrass and ginger sauce and fried imperial rolls (chả giò). It was wonderful to enjoy such a relaxing feast after a day of driving and negotiating holiday traffic.

I took over from there to give Mom a rest, though she’s always willing to be my sous chef. Cooking together is very special for my mother and me.

What was on our Christmas Eve menu? Roast chicken with porcini butter, sticky rice and chestnut dressing, buttery chestnuts, roasted Okinawa sweet potato, stir-fried blooming cauliflower, chanterelle gravy, and of course, my homemade fruitcake (which has been marinating in liquor for over a month now!).

Things kicked off with my mini pâté chaud which is featured in the last photo on the bottom right. It’s my modern take on an iconic Viet-Franco snack. I’ve been playing around with it for years and my family and friends have been taste testing the latest vegetarian and meaty versions. Someone has to do it, or else I’d be as big as a house. Details coming on Sunday!