Do you know how to clean a fish and use a cleaver?

I do!

Turns out this requires a good knife, possibly a cleaver and a whole lot more muscle than I anticipated. This will come in handy when I decide to make my Bouillabaisse, goal #1 for 2011.

What were we making? My parents originate from Northern Vietnam or as some Viets call it, the communist part. But let me make myself clear, my family is not Vietnamese, we are Chinese. And we are not communist...except for my dad. Sort of. But let's not get into the historical details. Having parents who were born and raised in Vietnam results in a lot of Viet food in my house. The most popular of which is noodle soup.

The soup we made today is a fish soup with vermicelli noodles. Fish soup is more commonly eaten in N. Vietnam, or so my mom says. Viet noodles are primarily made with rice flour and come in various thicknesses and consistencies. The vermicelli noodle we used is called 'bún' in Vietnamese.

And the fish, we used perch. It's about the size of salmon, spiny, and scaly.

I was instructed to wear rubber gloves to do the cleaning and I would also advise anyone else to do the same. You get a better grip on the fish, your hand is protected from any bones or spines, and you save your skin from smelling like the seafood section at T&T Supermarket.

Using a chef knife we scrape the scales against the grain of the fish until it's completely scale-free. Using a cleaver we hack off the fins and tail. To remove the entrails we cut along the underbelly of the fish from head to tail and remove everything inside.We cut the head off from the gills then chop the head down the middle to remove the gills. Then we chop the fish width-wise in 2" sections ready for frying.

My dad supervised and taught me a little trick to using a cleaver. If your accuracy sucks like mine and you don't have the muscle to get the cleaver all the way through in one swing, you can use a chef knife to guide the cleaver. With your non-chopping hand, stab the chef knife vertically as possible to the food you want to chop, where you want to chop and then swing the cleaver down parallel with the flat side of the chef knife blade. The chef knife acts as a guide and you end up with a 100% accurate, clean chop! Another tip - turn the sharp edge of the chef blade away from you so you don't end up slicing your chopping hand in the process. Safety first!

When frying the fish, heat up the oil and remove half. Add the fish, then pour the rest of the hot oil on top to reduce the amount of hot oil that can pop out of the pan. We cook the fish all the way through and is added to the soup at the end.

For the soup base, we are using broth from last night's chicken we cooked. Everything I learn from my parents, I learn how to cook from scratch. Everything I ever ate growing up was made from scratch.

After removing the oil from the top of the broth we bring it to a boil and add tomato, bamboo shoots, and white onion, then salt and pepper to season, lemon juice and some vinegar to take away the fishy smell and gives it a really nice savory slightly sour taste to it. We use vinegar in place of tamarind that can also be used and still gives the same type of flavor.

Let me tell you something about bamboo shoots. The only humanly-edible part of bamboo is the shoot that comes out from the tip of a bamboo stalk. It's about the length of your hand and is covered with layers of husk covered in fine, silky fur-like hairs. This is what it looks like right off the stalk.

And this is what it looks like after removing the husks.

It is a fraction of the size of the original shoot. There is so much husk on these! Shoots are not cheap either, ranging from $2-$5/lb. The reason we like bamboo is for it's distinct flavor, the scent of which I recognized immediately after removing the husks. These are chopped and boiled for the soup.

After combining all ingredients to the soup, we boil the noodles til tender, strain and serve it alongside the soup, not in it. Although it's perfectly acceptable to just combine them right away, vermicelli is rather thin and would break up in the soup and is a pain to fish out with chopsticks so we leave them in their sticky texture separate from the soup and eat with a spoon and chopsticks. Fresh chopped green onion on top and we have a traditional Northern Vietnamese fish soup.