Nem Heo (from Lee's Sandwiches)

Yum yum food place!

Tonight I was at a a loss for dinner ideas so like I occasionally do, I texted several friends for suggestions.

One friend suggested Taco Bell which I'd only been to once since they added their breakfast menu.  Another friend suggested KFC.  Then as my tastebuds leaned toward a taco salad of some sort, a friend suggested a Vietnamese sandwich.  When I texted her back with a "Where am I supposed to get one of those?", she reminded me of a food place called Lee's Sandwiches.  I hadn't been there in a while so I started to think... Yeah... a sandwich would be good.

Thanks to my handy-dandy iPhone, I found the closest location and headed on over.  I got the BBQ sandwich on baguette (a #6, I think) which was yummy tasty as well as a pork meatball skewer from the hot case.  While waiting for my order (which included an iced coffee), I went over to the cold case to check some stuff out and found some pre-packaged items next to the cans and bottles of drinks.

The item up for discussion?: Nem Heo

Little pork rolls of joy!!!

They had ones that looked like the picture to the left or like little squares.  I chose the rolls since they were more aesthetically pleasing to me.

According to the tag/label, it said the ingredients were: pork skin, nam seasoning (sugar salt), garlic, pepper.

There were no "cooking instructions" so I've been eating them as is.

OMFG!!!  They are good!!!  But let me warn you right off the bat, they're a little spicy.  I'm assuming the big white bits in the picture I took are the garlic (yay garlic!) and of course the meat stuff is the pork (yay pork!), but when they say pepper, they mean peppercorns which make the rolls just a tad bit spicy... at least for me.  I prefer my peppercorns ground.

I popped the first roll in my mouth and was happy but then tasted the spice and lived (thanks for caring... now you can go along with your day).  The next roll, I took a bite and looked inside and saw some little seeds which leads me to think they're jalapeno seeds...or bell pepper seeds.  In either case, they might have just accidentally gotten into the batch of eight I bought so no harm, no foul.

Though whole peppercorns???  Whole?  Really?

But damn, the rolls are good.

When looking up "nem heo" on the internet, I came up with "nem" meaning "eggroll" and "heo" meaning "pork"?  At least that's the best I came up with.  One post online I found with something that looked similar to what I ate referred to it as "pickled pork" which I can taste so that sounds like an adequate description.

In all the stuff I found online, there wasn't a listing for just "nem heo" though there were listings for things with those two words in the name for the food which resembled what I ate so I'm assuming it's more of a general term like adobo in Filipino food that I've had.  (A friend of mine had sworn that if he was on Death Row, he wanted his final meal to be my mom's adobo, and I had to ask him - since I'm nice - which adobo he meant since there's chicken, beef, pork, squid...)

my friend: (making a face hearing my other adobo options) What's the kind your mom makes?
me: Chicken.
my friend: (hurriedly) Yeah.  Chicken.  That's the one I want.  Chicken.

It pays to be specific.  *grin*

And to comment on the rest of my meal, the BBQ pork sandwich was great and hit the spot as did the pork meatballs and the iced coffee was yummers!!!

Would I try it again? Yuppers!  They were quite tasty.  Now I'm wondering what else they have.  Also wondering where else I can find nem heo aside from Lee's.  

http://leesandwiches.com/2008/