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.

I strongly recommend that you try making this dessert when you have time and gather enough ingredients, though there are only several items. This is one of my all time favourite desserts as it is simple to make and the taste is always wonderful.  It is very healthy as well and I don’t have to worry about its fat or sugar content. 

It is a kind of sweet soup with the combination of black glutinous rice with yogurt, and when you mix them together, you will have a purple sweet soup. I can have a cup of this soup at anytime of the day. The taste is a well-balanced sourness and sweetness. It’s interesting to chew the rice grains between your teeth. If you are good at recognizing tastes and flavors, you will feel the appearence of pandan essence in the soup as pandan leaves are added to the soup during cooking. 

When cooking the rice, I like to let the sticky substances of the rice itself to slightly thicken the soup. Some people use either cornstarch or tapioca starch as thickening agent. I often prefer using tapioca starch. 

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So far, I have introduced some Vietnamese dishes with glutinous rice, all of which are "white" glutinous rice. Here I introduce another dish with BLACK glutinous rice. Black one is not used as popularly as the white one, however, it is used in several very special dishes. We have black glutinous rice cooked and fermented to have alcoholic taste and flavor. We cook black glutinous rice into sweet soup to serve with yogurt, which is a really really well-liked street food among teenagers. 

Visitting Vietnam, and walking along the streets, in almost every large city, you will see pedlers with their small trolleys walking or standing at the street corners, piles of smoke are rising from their trolleys, or more exactly, from piles of hot glutinous rice dishes which are still being steamed. They appear in several colors, representing different kinds of glutinous rice dishes that the sellers offer. Yellow is glutinous rice with mungbean and turmeric, green is pandan glutinous rice, white is glutinous rice with whole mungbeans or peanut or Chinese lapcheong, etc, and black is the one I am writing about in this post. 

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It is still summer here in Hanoi and having a bowl of this sweet soup on these hot days is just so great. As I have mentioned earlier in the other related posts, sweet soups are often cooked by Vietnamese housewives during summer time because you can eat them anytime when you feel hot and thirsty, and crave for something to reduce the heat inside your body. 

Rock sugar is always my choice when cooking sweet soups due to its good effect to our health as compared with the other kinds of sweetening agents. Rock sugar also gives the soups a gentle sweetness, which makes them more pleasant to consume on hot days. 

This sweet soup cooked with pumpkin and green beans (those that have been blanched) is quite easy to cook. It doesn’t take long time as green beans and pumpkin are both very fast to cook until tender. I used one small pumpkin as a bowl to hold the soup, just for decoration. When I finished the soup, of course this raw pumpkin would be used to cook other yummy dishes. 

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These beans look so lovely, especially due to the bright color, that I couldn’t resist the temptation to take a lot of pictures of them. 

I actually don’t know the exact name of these beans in my native language. In China, people call these "Pearl beans" (zhen zhu dou). 

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I made this pumpkin cream by accident. I had a small pumpkin which I intended to make a popular Thai custard with pumpkin. However, I didn’t have enough eggs and I only had a little coconut milk left. Not bothering going to the super market to shop for just a few ingredients, I decided to go ahead with making the custard and I didn’t expect the custard to really set inside the pumpkin because I knew the mixture would be quite thin. 

I still wanted to try. Not only the eggs and the coconut milk were reduced, the coconut milk was also thinner and the sugar was reduced as well. After I steamed the pumpkin, I removed the skin and place everything in the blender to make a very smooth and thick cream. Then after being chilled in the fridge, the creamed pumpkin turned out a very pleasant dessert. It was very creamy in the mouth with gentle sweetness plus distinctive flavor of the palm sugar. Less coconut milk was used also made this creamed pumpkin healthier and more suitable to our liking. 

I was so delighted at this trial and the outcome really pleased me. 

Ingredients: 

- 1 small pumpkin (about 200g)

- 3 eggs

- 135ml coconut milk

- 50g palm sugar, grated

- 1 bunch of pandan leaves (optional), rinsed well

Methods:

- Clean the pumpkin well. Use a knife to cut off around the stem to make a lid. Scoop out the seeds and membrane. Clean both inside and outside thorougly and drain. 

- Add eggs, coconut milk, palm sugar in a large bowl. Crumple the mixture with pandan leaves until sugar is dissolved. (If you don’t use pandan leaves, just whisk the mixture until well combined). Remove the leaves and set the mixture aside. 

- Place the pumpkin in a bowl or deep plate, fill with the egg mixture and cover with the lid. Place the pumpkin in a large steamer with boiling water over medium heat. Cook for about 25-30 minutes or until the pumpkin flesh is very softened. 

- Let the pumpkin cool completely. 

- Remove the skin of the pumpkin and transfer all the pumpkin to a blender. Process until the mixture is very smooth. Refridgerate the pumpkin cream until it is chilled thoroughly. 

If you’ve ever travelled to the Middle Vietnam, visiting the places such as Hue, Da Nang, Hoi An, etc. you may have come across these steamed rice cakes. The name in Vietnamese is "banh beo". They used to be the street food of ordinary people, but nowadays, they are served in the restaurants as well as a kind of regional specialities. 

In Vietnam, there are a large variety of steamed cakes, most of which are made from rice flour, glutinous rice flour, or tapioca flour. They are either wrapped in green leaves such as banana leaves or steamed uncovered. These steamed cakes in particular have many versions, depending on which provinces they are originated from. 

I made a trip to visit some Southern cities of Vietnam last December, and I got to eat these cakes twice, and of course they are different kinds. Mostly the toppings and dipping sauce make the difference. Instead of dried shrimps, fresh shrimps are used and made into sponge dried shrimp meat. The dipping sauce is either thin or thick, using either pure water or water from boiling the shrimps. 

There are two common things. Firstly, these cakes are steamed in small shallow dishes and served in the dishes themselves. Unlike what you are seeing in my photos, because I removed the cakes from the dishes that I poured the batter in to steam. Why? It’s because I had only two such dishes, they are not exactly the type of dishes used for these cakes but somehow quite similar. So, each batch I could steam only two cakes. After that I had to remove the cakes from the dishes and started another batch. Secondly, the cakes are sometimes oily. The green onions are cooked in oil or ghee, then topped on the cakes. I tried to make a healthy version of the cake, so I didn’t fry the spring onion with oil but sprinkle them over the cakes only. 

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