The KunMing lake was all frozen.

The main gate to enter the Summer Place

Roads outside leading to the main gate.

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We were absent from our blog for the last 10 days as we went on our honey moon trip to China. It was a very wonderful trip with lots of interesting stories to tell.

China, for so long, has been mentioned with many world’s largest or longest or greatest heritages. This was the first time we traveled to China and also the first time we traveled with a tourist agency as we were so busy with the preparations of our wedding and unable to prepare for a free and easy trip, as we often did before.

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This has been my very very new experience: pears cooked in red wine and flavored with spices. Though I don’t drink much and very often, but I like wine. I feel excited whenever I try a glass of wine and it tastes good. I’ve never read much about wine and I criticize the quality of wine based solely on my taste and liking. But I do hope when conditions allow, I will learn more about wine and wish to experience the varieties of wine more deeply and widely.

Normally I don’t like eating pears, maybe because the taste is not to my liking. Even when I make cakes with pears, I often don’t feel very interested in eating. When I see pears look so good at markets, I will buy some as my husband loves them. This time I bought some small pears then I decided to try this dessert, which I’ve observed in many websites on the Internet. I followed the recipe in one of my cookbooks titled "Guilt-free desserts" – a collection of low-fat desserts. Then, what I liked most was not the pears but the syrup made from red wine which was enhanced with brandy and other spices.

I toasted some pistachios for decoration purpose and for adding texture to the dish. The pear was very tender and the flavor of wine was very deep, it was absorbed a lot into the pears, which made the pears very special in taste.

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I first heard of saffron when I watched TV shows on cooking competitions, seeing great chefs using saffron as special spice in their dish. I was so curious about these tiny red threads and I searched for more information about them. Then I decided to buy a box of saffron threads. It was rather expensive for a small box of around 50g, but each time only a small number of threads are used, so I think it is quite reasonable and that I will not finish a box like this too soon.

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It’s been quite a time I haven’t cooked or baked anything to update this blog. I was too busy preparing my wedding and I just cooked simple dishes for meals.

In Vietnam, it is a tradition that the wife follows the husband when she gets married to him and the new couples stay in the same roof with the husband’s parents. This is usually a must if the husband is the oldest child as he does the responsibility of looking after the parents when they get older. Nowadays, unlike in the past, each family has only one or two children, and after years of working, parents are able to build or buy a house which is large enough to be lived by two or three generations. It is also a fact that young couples prefer living on their own so that they have more freedom. Some are well-off and they can buy a new house to live there right after their marriage, some are willing to rent a place. Either way has pros and cons. My parents-in-law wish to have us stay with them for the beginning so that we have a chance to know one another more, and to strengthen the family bonds.

In the first place I wanted to rent a house and we would live and work on our own. Then my husband persuaded me into living together with his family, who is also my family now, so that everyone gets to understand the others more. His biggest wish is that I can get along with his family and that I can feel like home when I stay here. So now, his family is my family. Everyday I cook in my mother-in-law’s kitchen and things are going on very fine.

Those are some words about my new life. My new family are very open about my baking. My parents and brother-in-law love my baking products in many ways, and they are often eager to my new baked goods. Now there are more people to try my baked stuffs, to give me more comments and feedback, to give me more reasons to be in the kitchen making something good.

I love lemon the very first time I made lemon tart. These lemon bars resemble lemon tart for the most part. This time I followed a new recipe in the Taste of Home magazine, with some changes to the ingredients.

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Dear friends who have been visiting our Little House blog so far,

You might have wondered what have happened to us recently that caused us unable to update our blog regularly as we used to. Yes, the reason was we were busy preparing our Wedding. The wedding party took placed last Monday, 7 December, right here in Hanoi, Vietnam.

We are happy to announce that my fiance and I are husband and wife now. In preparation for this wedding, we had a lot of work to do. Instead of using all services, we tried to do ourselves as much as we could as we understood the values and meanings of things that altogether made a memorable wedding.

We had our friends take pre-wedding photos of us and my husband did the editing and designing the album, and we brought them to the album-making service.

You can view our two pre-wedding albums from these links:

http://kokotaru.com/photo/NTU_Wedding_Album/

http://kokotaru.com/photo/HN_Wedding_Album/

Photos of our wedding day can be viewed on my Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/linhihi?ref=profile#/album.php?aid=2042163&id=1066881516&ref=mf

We delay our honeymoon until Christmas. During this time, we still have lots of post-wedding stuffs to do. Of course I will return to my new kitchen, at my parents-in-law’ home, and make good dishes, then share them in my blog, as usual.

We thank you for all the supports we have been receiving from you all so far.

Ripe tomatoes are so easy to be made into simple yet delicious soup. I followed the recipe in my cookbook of Party Food and Appertizers. In fact the recipe calls for sun-dried tomato paste so that the soup has intense flavor. However, I didn’t have that kind of tomato paste so I went ahead using normal tomato paste. The soup was still tasty though I wondered how the authentic taste would be like.

We can choose to cook with either chicken stock or vegetable stock, and I picked vegetable stock to get a real fresh and vegetarian soup. I made the toasted cheese croûte with baguette slices and grated Parmesan cheese.

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I felt in love with red velvet cake the first time I made it, which was more than a year ago. So far I’ve re-made it several times, following the recipe on Joy of Baking website, for my home parties. Most my friends loved it as I did.

This time, I used the same recipe for making red velvet cake, but I made them into cake balls dipped into melted chocolate, and I seemed to get double joyfulness from eating these cake balls. They are delicious as the same red velvet cake plus the bitter-sweetness of chocolate. The chocolate coating, after being chilled in the fridge, became hard and they made cracking sound in the mouth. I love that experience when eating these cute cake balls. I just thought they were now more perfect to invite friends who visit our home, offering some interesting surprise with these cake balls.

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