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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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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This is a sour fish soup which is also very popular in Vietnamese cooking. Only one point is that more people prefer fresh water fish than salt water fish.  Of course people from coastal provinces often use seafood to cook into sour soups, and their sour fish soups are also great. 

It doesn’t matter for me where the fish come from. Of course some fish cannot be cooked into soups like this one, while some are really perfect to make sour soup with. This time I cooked with king mackerel. 

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In fact, I don’t know whether there are these cranberry beans in Vietnam or what they are called in Vietnamese name. They just resemble another kind of bean which is used popularly among Vietnamese people. This bean can be made into sweet soups or sticky rice dishes. 

This is my first experience with cranberry beans. I immediately thought of make some sweet soup with them. Using beans in making sweet soups is a popular habit. Sweet soups are not only favorite street foods by teenagers but a lot of young adults love eating them too. Sweet soups can be cooked very fast and easily at home. Especially during hot summer, sweet soups are consumed as desserts or at anytime of the day to reduce the heat inside the bodies. During winter, sweet soups are added hot spices, mostly fresh ginger root, to warm up the bodies. Therefore, a lot of youngs and olds like sweet bean soups. 

I cooked this sweet soup with cranberry beans in the same way Vietnamese people cook that similar kind of bean. I was amazed at the taste of the soup. It was so special with gentle sweetness of rock sugar and mild fragrance of pandan leaves. Cranberry beans offer a distinctive and very attractive flavor to the soup. 

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I cooked this porridge for a light meal. This porridge is nearly a vegetarian dish. Except for the cooking granules with meat essence and flavor, this porridge contains no other meat at all. 

The porridge is a combination of different textures: the softness of silken tofu, the crispiness of straw mushrooms and the crunchiness of fresh green onions and cilantro. Sometimes a simple and mild porridge like this one really pleases my stomach and palate. It doesn’t take much time to cook a porridge dish. Once you toast the rice before cooking, you can save a lot of time and energy. I prefer toasting the rice for porridge as it will release a deeper taste. 

Also, if you cook porridge in clan pot, you also can shorten the cooking time as round clan pot concentrates the heat better and is always recommended for stewed dish. 

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Bitter gourd is my favorite choice for summer soup. Though the name indicates bitterness, when you are familiar with the taste and like that bitterness, you don’t feel it bitter at all because what you feel is a sweet bitterness. 

The soup made with bitter gourd is often very mild and fresh. Small ones are our preference. I do not often cook with the large bitter gourd. The prawns in these soup not only add flavor to the soup but also the firm crisp texture as well. I do not use any fat in this soup, so the broth is very clear and gentle. During hot summer days eating too greasy food is not so pleasant to the mouths. Actually, I can have this soup several times a week without getting bored. 

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This soup is undeniably simple. The stock has the flavor of the beef and tomatoes. It is suitable to serve this soup in any season and it goes well with steamed rice. Or even you want to make this soup as a broth base to a kind of noodle, it is also fine. 

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This is the other half of the pig heart I reserved. I cooked the pig heart in advance for safety, and keep them in the fridge until the porridge got ready. At that time I only needed to re-heat the pig heart before adding them to the porridge. 

When I was small, my Mom often cooked this porridge for her childen when they fell sick. In Vietnam there are other kinds of fresh herbs that are good for our health and can be added to this porridge, especially for sick people, however, here I could have only two basic ones, which are fresh cilantro and green onion. Still, the taste of the porridge was still good. 

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