It takes time to prepare the squid, but takes only a few minutes to cook. We like eating squids but only when squids look fresh, I will buy some and they often take me longer time to wash them thoroughly, inside and outside, removing all the membrance and dirties, until the squid’s body is very white and clean. 

Stir-frying is a fast way of cooking squid and you’ll get a flavorful dish. Try this dish with pineapple, green ones preferred, and you will se how pineapples can go well with seafoods and reduce the fishiness smell of them. 

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If you like Vietnamese food and want to explore Vietnamese cuisine to every corner, you should not miss out the varieties of dishes with glutinous rice. You’ll almost find glutinous rice dishes anywhere, anytime. Even on solemn occasions such as Lunar New Year, full-moons, weddings or funerals, etc. They are also popular as breakfasts. As street foods, or as an indispensable dish at many parties in restaurants, they always hold their important role in Vietnamese cuisine and home cooking. 

This dish with glutinous rice is simple, but I love its simplicity. It is its simplicity that makes it attractive. The taste of coconut milk blends with the fragrance of sesame seeds. Black and white in a simple presentation comprise a fine taste. 

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Coconut juice – the clear water inside a coconut – is not just a perfect drink on summer days but also a favorite ingredient that is used in many Vietnamese traditional foods. I like cooking with coconut juice as meat, or fish, when cooked in it, becomes very tender yet retains a special flavour inside. Not only during cooking, even you marinate the meat in coconut juice, it also tenderizes the meat. 

I like all the dishes with pork ribs, and this is one of the recipes that cooks pork ribs in coconut juice that I like the most. It is simple, and doesn’t take long time as compared with other stewing dishes. I think it worths your time trying cooking this dish

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The left-over bell peppers after I cooked the stir-fried prawns and peppers were used to make this vegetarian dish. Now I like peppers so much that whenever I see fresh and firm new peppers at supermarkets I will buy some and preserve them in my fridge. Luckily, bell peppers can be preserved for a quite a long time in the fridge, they do not get stale very quickly. 

This is a vegetarian food which is fresh and colorful. Whenever I cook bell peppers using all three colors, I love the dish as it looks lively and bright. 

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The more I eat bell peppers, the more I like their flavor and juiciness. Previously I didn’t know how to cook bell peppers properly. Since I started discovering various pasta dishes, where many delicious recipes call for bell peppers, I’ve been used to cooking bell peppers not only in pasta but in other dishes too. 

These peppers are very rich in Vitamins, and their juiciness and crispiness always remind me of freshness and healthiness. When used in some stewed sauces for pasta, the taste and flavor created by bell peppers are great and deep. These colorful peppers are used quite popularly in Vietnamese cooking but mostly, as far as I know, in stir-fried dishes. 

And this is one of the quick and easy-to-eat stir-fried dishes made with bell peppers. 

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It’s quick and simple to cook this dish. Stir-fried foods are popular in Vietnamese cuisine in particular and Oriental cuisines in general. In Vietnam, it is still a strong tradition that family members eat together at meal times, including breakfast, lunch and dinner. Everyday the mother or daughter prepare the meal and every family members return home after work or school to have fun time around the dining table. 

A normal and typical meal often contains three dishes (we don’t have such definition of a meal with several courses as we eat all the dishes at the same time and everyone serves himself). So, with two main meals a day, I can say that stir-fried dish appear almost everyday on dining table in a family. 

Therefore, a simple yet delicious, and more importantly, time-saving stir-fried food is always welcomed by most housewives (as they are working and busy too). This is one of the stir-fried dishes many Vietnamese housewives know and like to cook for their families. 

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This dish has such a name due to its presentation to resemble the chrysanthemum. Actually, the dish is simply a dish of stuffed eggs. The filling is quite typical and popular in the other dishes I’ve introduced in my blog so far. In fact, fillings for stuffed food are not just boring as such. However, as I am constrained by other circumstances, the availability of ingredients for instance, I only could make pork mixture as fillings for most of the stuffed dishes I’ve cooked up to now. 

Talking about this dish in particular, it is not very complicated. What caused me more time and troubles was the eggs. The eggs were not so good and the yolk was not at the centre of the egg, so when I boiled them and cut into halves, the edges of the halved egg whites were not equally thick, which made it more difficult to cut serrated pattern. So, one suggestion is to use fresh eggs. (I often had to buy 30 eggs at a time and stock them in my pantry, so the eggs might not be fresh). 

After all, we like the dish and, I rarely eat more than one hard-boiled egg at a time, but I did. 

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Some deep-fried foods are always so pleasant to eat even though they are not very healthy. I am  not a fan of deep-fried foods. I can eat them but not much at a time, especially when the deep-fried ingredients are fatty and meaty. 

However, this time I didn’t refuse these inviting fried pumpkin cakes as I know what ingredients were used to make them. I used a lot more pumpkin than meat in these pumpkin cakes, so when I ate, I almost didn’t feel the meat at all but I merely tasted the pumpkin, which made the fried cakes not "hot" and greasy as they seemed to be. I felt the cakes very easy to eat, and surprisingly I did eat many of them. 

Anyway, this is still a deep-fried dish. I dare not eat them frequently. But sometimes I feel changing the appetite a bit is quite interesting. 

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