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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Summer has entered its harshest months in tropical countries. Everyday it is so so hot with dazzling sunshine from early morning till late evening. A bowl of salad like this is just wonderful to reduce the heat inside everyone’s body, because it is so refreshing.
I like to make this salad when it’s hot for another reason that it is very fast to make. When it is so hot in the kitchen, you don’t want to be in there cooking for a long time, or you don’t want to prep a lot of ingredients and make something complicated.
Just simple, palatable and refreshing! Those are the most important points in Vietnamese people’s meals during summer.
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The prawns today are so fresh that I decided to make two dishes with prawns. After having a rich pasta dish, I want to have something lighter and fresh for dinner. So I made this salad to use up those fresh prawns I’ve just bought.
This salad is not very typical in Vietnamese cuisine. It is also not a popular dish in a family’s daily meal. However, the dressing for this salad is 100% a typical Vietnamese salad dressing. Craving for more vegetables to end up my day, I chose this salad which uses three kinds of vegetable plus some herbs. It was a good decision because I really felt awake to continue with my stuffs through this evening.
In Vietname, it is very easy to buy deep yellow fresh bamboo shoots, which will add a beautiful yellow color to this dish. However, I couldn’t get that kind of bamboo shoot here, so I used the Japanese kind of bamboo shoot, which is quite pale yellow. So the color of the bamboo shoot didn’t turn so obvious. Actually, it was "dyed" by the strong purple color of the red cabbage.
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I hardly can resist the temptation of buying live prawns right after they are taken out of the water tank and they are still jumping as much as they can. Immediately I will think of a salad dish made with fresh prawns, when their ‘meat’ is still at the freshest and sweetest point. Or a kind of steamed fresh prawns is also very good.
However, such jumping prawns are not often cheap. So only when the price looks attractive, I will definitely buy some. Among other kinds of seafood, I may be most familiar with prawns, just because price of prawns is often more affordable to me.
This salad is refreshing as expected. The peeled prawns are firm in the texture. The carrot and white radish strips are still crunchy. And the spinach base is tender. The dressing does offer the distinctive Asian flavor with the combination of soy sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar and honey. I like vegetables, so a dish of salad like this is always welcomed at my dining table.
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There are so many ways to enjoy chicken. Salad is often good to our health. So when I find a new salad recipe, I get enthusiastic and decide to try making it right away.
However, this is not a new dish. This salad has typical flavour of Vietnamese cuisine. I like the crunchiness of the dish when I put one bite into my mouth and chewed it. The sound made me feel refreshed by the freshness of the vegetables.
The traditional Vietnamese salad dish often comes a little bit more sour than sweet. It uses lime juice to make it sour because lime juice also add special flavour to the dish. Quite often, rice vinegar is also used, however, it doesn’t add typical flavour but it reduces some undesirable smell from the raw vegetable, if there is any.
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