My attempt to make baguette finally came to a good result that satisfied me. I made these baguette under the circumstance of lacking some tools. I didn’t have a pastry knife to score the bread and I used a razor blade to score my baguettes. I didn’t have a spraying tool to spray water over the bread during the first baking procedure, so I used a brush to spread water over the bread surface.

Kneading the dough by hands, withstanding a small convention oven that drops temperature each time I opened the door and each time I re-positioned the tray, I felt even happier that my baguettes came out similar to – at least to some degree – ones at bakeries. The crust was hard and sounded beautifully when I broke the bread into halves. I so loved having baguette with soup for dinner.

Sweet potato chips – it’s hard to stop eating these once you start. There’s only one way to set limit to the amount of chips I eat is to cook just one or two sweet potatoes. Normally two sweet potatoes makes enough chips for two persons.

I do not often make deep-fried foods. But on these days, the temperature in Hanoi drops and people are feeling the early winter, we suddenly crave for some snack like these chips.

It is very simple to make sweet potato chips. Just peel the sweet potatoes, wash and cut into very thin slices, the thinner the slices, the crunchier the chips and the faster they are cooked. The hard work of cutting into paper-thin slices is reduced if you have a good mandoline that can adjust the thickness of the slices. In my case, I had to rely completely on my hands, it took longer time to cut. Luckily, my fiance helped me to fry them immediately after I finished cutting the batches. This way, they didn’t have time to get brown and they still kept the bright yellow color.

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I seldom eat fast food at fast food restaurants. The only one that I go to more often than the others is Subway, where the meals are supposed to be healthier and that I can choose what I want to add to the sandwich. I remember I’ve eaten burgers just only a few times at McDonald and Burger King. They were not so fancy to mel. 

Until I watched Kitchen Nightmare hosted by chef Gordon Ramsay and seeing him making beef burger, I was so inspired to make a real homemade burger. What I like is that I can substitute part of the beef with breadcrumbs, and I can control the amount of onion I want to put in the patty, just that the amount is reasonable to be equally distributed in the ground beef.

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Potato chips are not new or something very fancy. Just that this time I made them in waffle shapes. Normally I often cut potatoes into plain sticks, sometimes I cut with a zigzag knife to make french-fries, but today I wanted to try making chips with this pattern.

It was very funny when I sliced the potatoes and these slices kept falling down from the mandoline slicer, using the fluted blade. They looked so fragile that I touched very gently. Frying them in hot oil took just a few minutes to get them golden brown and crispy. In this shape, they are not as crispy as the normal potato chips, but I think making these potato wafers to decorate other foods is not a bad idea.

Just sprinkle some salt (it’s great to have freshly crushed sea salt), we’ll have a classic but never out-of-fashioned food.

This pasta is very simple to cook. I was curious about it in the first place for the presence of breadcrumbs. I’ve never known about this kind of pasta before. When I was browsing my book on Italian cuisine, I came across the recipe and, realizing it was so simple to cook this, i decided to make it right away. 

This recipe is rather classic. The original one cooks with only onion, garlic and toasted breadcrumbs. However, there are other varieties originated from the basic recipe. So I cooked the variety with tomatoes as I preferred the pasta with some sauce (this is the influence of enjoying a meal with soup in a typical Vietnamese meal). There’s nothing to regret that I cooked this pasta. It was really good and we had a wonderful dinner.

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Baby clams, like other kinds of seafood such as crabs, shrimps, razor clams, etc, can be cooked with tamarind water (made from tamarind pulp stirred in water) into palatable dishes.

Tamarind pods, or pulps, are used quite popularly in many Vietnamese food. They add sour taste to sour soups, and add sweet-sour taste to stir-fried foods. Other sour fruits can be used to bring in the sourness to the food too, but tamarinds are always preferred in sweet-sour dishes.

This particular dish is easy to cook. Just a small notice that we cook the whole live baby clams, so make sure we wash them very well before cooking.

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This specialty of autumn food is subject to those foreigners being in Hanoi who love cooking and want to try making a well-known food among Hanoians, as I believe that outside Hanoi, it is difficult to get fresh green rice flakes. Vietnamese people who like this dish living in other cities or countries often have to use dried green rice flake. So if you happen to be staying in Hanoi for work or business, you should try this great seasonal dish before autumn ends and we have to say goodbye with fresh green rice flakes, commonly called "com".

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 What is most special about this sticky rice dish? It is the corn – not the sweetcorn that most of you may already know, but the glutinous corn which is chewy, just like the glutinous rice. This kind of corn is much loved by Vietnamese people. Just boil the corn cobs with water until they are tender and chewy, then you’ll have a simple breakfast which keeps you full till noon. 

This sticky rice dish is one of the favorite choices by students for breakfast. Especially on cold winter days, holding a small pack of this corn sticky rice in your hands and feeling the heat that warms up your hands, it’s great to think about the moment when your close friends gather around and share the bites of this yummy thing. 

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