This is one of the dishes with glutinous rice I like the most. Not only it has a lovely green color which reminds us of green growing rice-fields, it offers a gentle refreshing flavor of pandan leaves as well. 

In the past, pandan leaves used to play an important part to increase the quality of meals of Vietnamese common people. During that hard time, people had only poor-quality rice to eat. The rice was not fragrant at all, not mentioning many had to eat rice with bad smell. In order to make the rice more palatable to eat, people added some pandan leaves when they cooked rice. The fragrance of the leaves would distract the undesirable smell. 

Nowadays people no longer use pandan leaves when cooking rice. But their use value is still useful in many other dishes. 

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There is a kind of leaf, which you see in the photos, that can dye the rice grains into red or purple color though the leaves are totally green. It is called "purple leaf", and I was told that the color the leaves produce varies from trees to trees they grow in. 

The leaves have no taste, no smell, they only produce color when you boil them with water. The less water and more leaves you use, the darker the color you will get. Use this water to soak the glutinous rice for 8-10 hours, you’ll get the rice dyed. 

Outside Vietnam, I wonder if you can get these leaves. This dish was named according to the name of the leaf – "purple leaf sticky rice". Even if there is not, beetroot is a very good choice to dye other ingredients when you want create something more interesting to the normal foods. 

I served this red sticky rice with grilled ground pork. 

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Hanoi, my city, is experiencing the best time of autumn now. Persimmon is also a sign of Hanoi’s autumn, along with green sticky rice – as I mentioned in the previous posts, big chrysanthemum, and the smell of "milk flower" trees (hoa sua) filled up the streets at night. 

Persimmons are in season now. There are many different kinds of persimmons, some are crunchy, some are tender and juicy. Some are green, some are greeny yellow, some are red. Some are really big, some are so tiny. For me, what I like the best is the green tiny crunchy ones, however, nowadays they are getting more scarce when the big kinds become more popular. 

I thought what if I use the persimmons to make into some dishes as I’ve never eaten such a food. After searching on the Internet and I found that persimmons certainly can be made into good foods. So I imagined how to combine some ingredients including persimmon to make a simple salad. Finally, I came up with this salad. I told my mom what I was gonna do, and she suggested that I use green apple in the salad to balance the taste and add good flavor to the salad. Thanks for that, the salad I created this time was really perfect. It made me surprised for the first time I tried to come up with a totally new dish. 

These persimmons I used were crunchy and gently sweet, though they are not the ones I like most. 

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This year I can spend the mid-autumn festival with my family. I didn’t have a true meaning of mid-autumn fest for four years when I was studying abroad. 

A month before mid-autumn, mooncakes are already available out there in the market. However, once you like baking, you will want to make your own mooncakes for your family, relatives and friends. I’ve just returned home for neary two years. With many other things I need to take care of, I tried as best as I could to make some mooncakes (for me, they were quite a lot, I made about 40 mooncakes and they all have been finished, so I am going to make some more). 

There are some stories to share with the mooncakes I made this year. As the manufactured mooncakes are too sweet, most adults don’t like them, but they still have to buy home at least a pair for the pass-away ancesters as a tradition. I don’t like manufactured mooncakes either, though I like the flavor of mooncakes. So, one reason I made mooncakes was to make them less sweet, less oily, and so healthier. 

…with taro and sesame seeds filling 

…with mungbeans and sesame seeds filling

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This bamboo is not of a long shape but big and round at one end and conical at the other end. It is a solid and therefore we can slice it into paper-thin round sheets, which wrap the filling inside to make neat bamboo rolls. However, it requires skillful hands to cut the bamboo into thin slices, of course unless you have a good slicer tool. 

It is quite complicated to make this dish so I do not often cook it. This time I made after being requested to prepare recipes with bamboo shoots by the local food magazine. The filling is a mixture of ground chicken breast, egg and herbs. It is a palatable dish to make chicken breast more enjoyableto eat. 

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 This is another good dish with seafood. If you’ve read my post on fish cakes, you will find that the way of cooking these two dishes has many things in common. In fact, there are several ways of making fried squid cakes. This time I made the simplest one, I guess. It desn’t take much time to make these fried squid cakes. Some people just process the squids into fine paste. But I prefer chopping the squids with a cleaver to get a chunky paste. Doing this way, you will still feel the true texture of the squids while chewing the squid cakes in your mouth. 

I also like making the squid cakes this way as I don’t have to deep-fry them. So I can save some oil and the food is healthier, less oily. 

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It’s autumn in Hanoi now, and green rice flakes reach their best taste and aroma. The color is greener, the texture is tenderer and more chewy, the taste is deeper. 

It’s been four years I had no autumn or winter, and now I won’t miss the opportunities to make good dishes with these green rice flakes – the speciatly of Hanoi autumn. 

I got this recipe from my cookbook "Culina Mundi". The book features selected dishes among the most popular dishes of world’s cuisines. This salad is originated in Cuba. Finding the recipe is easy to follow, and that I like having pineapple in the food I eat, so I made up my mind to make this salad for dinner. 

With salads that use mayonnaise to combine the ingredients, I often prefer to chill the salad before serving. I find having a cool salad more palatable. This salad, in particular, introduced to me a new taste and new experience about the world of salads. It was not so amazing to say "wow", but I liked it. 

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