lobal Warming Christmas

y Christmas! It's a mild winter in the nation's capital, where I've arrived from Los Angeles with thin sweaters, a knit hat, cashmere scarf, fingerless gloves and a waterproof car coat to spend Christmas with the Viet clan. I arrived on Christmas Eve to be met at the airport by one auntie and immediately whisked away to my cousin's new house in Loudon County, also known as Silicon Valley East, for a 19-person feast. (And not all of the relatives showed up!) At the request of my out-of-town cousins who missed their mother's Thanksgiving dinner last month, we had turkey and all the ancillary dishes. The only hint that we were Asian was the big bowl of fried rice sitting on the buffet table. The secret to my aunt's turkey was that she essentially braised the big bird. She poured chicken broth into the bottom of the roasting pan and periodically poured the hot liquid over the buttered breasts. She also shortened the cooking time to three hours from four. It was delish!

Before we opened our presents, we asked 5-year-old Dylan to demonstrate the moves he learned in kung-fu class. Dylan is an orange belt, so he showed us his orange form. For an encore, we asked him to go through his yellow form, which is the level under orange. But he refused. "I'm no longer a yellow belt," he protested. Yeah, he's so over it.

Coming home for the holidays is a time for reunions. This is my brother's dog, Mikey, who turned 11 this year. That's 77 in dog years. He's always been a sweet pooch, but the years have mellowed his Labrador-Rottweiler demeanor even more.

Here's the Baby Buddha puppet that I got for my parents so many years ago from Nara, Japan. As good Buddhists, we have to treat every single image of Buddha as a holy relic. This puppet is hanging from the doorknob to the room housing our ancestral shrine. My grandmom actually put the Baby Buddha puppet I gave her on the shrine at her house.

This was Christmas dinner with my parents and brother. We had salmon roasted in a ginger sauce, shrimp stir-fried with broccoli and tamarind soup with a spongey green vegetable called bac ha, shrimp and tomatoes. Viet cooks rarely use salmon. We prefer the fresh water catfish or white-meat poisson such as cod and bass. I think I've had salmon fewer than five times for dinner at my parents' house. That's why it was OK for my mother to use a Taiwanese seasoning for the salmon. It's funny how ethnocentric Asians can get. My mother had to point out that, yes, it's a foreign fish and, yes, she's using a foreign sauce on it.

My dad took me out for lunch on Tuesday at Huong Que, the famed Vietnamese restaurant in the bustling Eden Center. Huong Que is owned by a junior-high classmate of my mom's from Vietnam. The patriarch often greets us when we arrive. Today, he even took our order and offered us fresh springrolls on the house. These are the pickled jalopeno peppers and papaya slices that presaged the preparation of my egg noodle soup with a braised duck leg.

The Chinese broccoli countered the duck's smokiness with a bit of bitter crunch.

Later that night I had dinner at my grandmother's. This is the meal that my grandmother's caretaker made for us. The chicken was stir-fried boneless with broccoli, green beans and carrots or caramelized bone-in with shiitake and button mushrooms. The homemade pickled bok choy was light, cold and crisp, in a refreshing contrast to the boiled pork dipped in fish sauce seasoned with lime juice and red peppers.

I had a pick of desserts: fresh pineapple with a salt-and-chili dip, sweet banana porridge, sweet black bean porridge or sticky rice with hominy and ground yellow beans.