Long gourd is a kind of cheap vegetables that most common families can afford for daily meals in Vietnam. It’s mostly used in cooking soups. There are various soups using long gourd that base on meat stock of some kinds. Pork ribs make good stock too and many Vietnamese housewives like using pork ribs in soups.

What make this soup even more flavorful and tastier are the presence of fresh ginger and mui tau, a kind of veggie-herb well-known to Vietnamese cooking.

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We do not often eat spicy food, but this spicy mackerel still helped me easily and quickly finish two bowls of steamed rice. If you like it very spicy, you can use tiny (Thai) chilies, which are often very hot. If you like it even hotter, I think tabasco pepper sauce or cayenne pepper also go well with this Vietnamese dish. (Though most Vietnamese people don’t know of tabasco pepper and cayenne).

King mackerel is very lean and, if not cooked into a good dish, it is not so palatable to eat. In general, I like fish more than meat, so I am always eager to try more new dishes with fish. This is one of the recipes with king mackerel that I love.

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It’s great to have this stewed beef soup on winter days. The soup is served hot right from the stove and warms us up by its deep taste and fragrant flavor. I like this kind of soup with both meat and vegetables. In the lack of time when I cannot cook more than one dishes, this stewed soup still provides me enough substances. During the cooking process, I still can do other things and just need to attend to the soup several times until all are tenderly cooked.

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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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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.

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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