Receta Bánh Cam / Bánh Rán Recipe (Vietnamese Fried Sesame Balls)

My grandmother is a child raising machine. As if raising nine of her own kids wasn’t enough of a challenge, she had her hands in raising almost all of the grand-kids too. Between cleaning up our messes and playing referee to our disputes, it seemed like she never skipped a beat in the kitchen.

In the very rare cases something wasn’t bubbling on the stove, grandma sometimes fed us a pulverized mix of roasted sesame seeds and salt (muối mè) over rice. Sounds like peasant food, right? Tasty peasant food. This is when I probably had my first taste of sesame seeds. It’s kind of funny that to this day, I don’t really know where sesame seeds come from (Any Mitch Hedberg fans?). These crunchy little teardrop-shaped seeds cover the snack…