Best of 2013 - Top Eats

With new places always come encounters with new, unusual flavors. Travelers are rewarded with tasty experiences that cannot be found elsewhere. Som tum (papaya salad) eaten while sitting on the sidewalk of a busy Bangkok soi is not the same as som tum eaten in your neighborhood Thai restaurant (it's probably a fair bit spicier too!). So my top eats from 2013 are not so much about the tastiest things I've eaten, or the fanciest restaurants I've been to, but more about my best food-related memories. 

1) Crunching into a freshly baked banh mi (above), after we stumbled upon a bakery while roaming Hoi An's old city. Nothing can compare with this light-as-air baguette, still warm from the oven - and it cost about 10 cents.  

2) After a full day of touring Fes, nursing warm, fragrant mint tea and nibbling on buttery almond biscuits on the rooftop of our riad and hearing the calls to prayer from the medina's one hundred mosques build and blend until there is no other sound in the evening sky.

3) Tucking into a steaming plate of stir-fried noodles with crunchy spring onions and tofu, sitting amidst rice paddies and soaking in the sweeping scenes of the verdant Sapa valley below. 

4) Sharing a gigantic paper dosa (nearly two feet tall!) and fragrant, richly flavored curries with Pem and my parents at Hanoi's best Indian restaurant, Namaste, whose veg-friendly food we enjoyed at least once a week! 

5) Savouring a slice of my mum's incredible bourbon pecan pumpkin pie after a family lunch once I returned home from a challenging and draining work assignment. 

Now that this trip down memory lane has my mouth watering and my mind wandering, I'll leave it at that. Up next are some of the top drinks I've downed in 2013!