Along with being Valentine's Day, this year Lunar New Year falls on the 14th of February. If you're Vietnamese or in Vietnam, this means Tết. If you mashed together any combination of the secular and religious holidays that you happen to celebrate into a three day mix of piety and party, it would be a little similar to the chaos that goes on over the Vietnamese celebration of Lunar New Year.

In Vietnam, everyone travels to wherever they grew up in a frenzy of transmigration, and eating is central to it. Food prices at the local markets spike as a result of both increased consumption and the virtual closure of the whole economy for three days of holiday. If you're not prepared for it, you'll be stuck with overpriced or just plain terrible food for the best part of a week.

The two foods that are synonymous with the holiday are banh chung and banh tet. Both are glutinous rice cakes covered in leaves; the former formed into doorstop-sized square bricks, the latter into fat cylinders. Banh chung tend to be more popular in the north and banh tet in the south. There is surely a historical reason or at least, a mythic basis for this.

To make banh chung, sticky rice, a slice of fatty pork and mung beans are packed into a square mold that is neatly lined with phrynium leaves (although banana leaves with bamboo leaves are often substituted). Over at the blog Serious Eats, Tam Ngo steps through the long process with ample pictures. For a simple recipe with few ingredients, the amount of preparation required is a little daunting.

It's very much a family affair - it rewards the sort of ordered production line that can only be achieved in a committed group. Much of the skill in making these hefty cakes is in the filling of the mold - Andrea Nguyen released a supplement available for download to step through the process of packing banh chung for the recipe in her book, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen.

This package is then bound with twine and boiled for ten hours. Banh tet follows the same process but the rice, meat and mung beans are formed into a cylinder rather than a square mold.

The payoff is that the subtle flavours from the leaves infuse the rice with a slight tea-like flavour and scent; the mung beans and rice absorb a little pork fat. The cakes will keep (allegedly) for months but I would not be willing to hazard the chance of them going bad. They also freeze surprisingly well.

If you're not keen on making them yourself, you'll see the cakes stacked at the front of good Vietnamese grocers during this week. To pick a good one, the cakes should feel weighty, smell slightly of tea (and not anything rotting or untoward) and the leaves wrapping the cakes should not be dry.

To serve, unwrap the leaves and discard, then cut the cake into wedges and eat. Alternately, the cakes can be unwrapped then shallow fried or grilled.