This pasta soup is easy to make. In fact, this is the first time I made pasta soup. At first I wanted to make something with butternut squash and I came across this recipe. It was just perfect as I like both pasta and soup. 

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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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I do not often cook this dish because it takes me long time to prepare the paper-thin sheets cut out from a daikon radish. I don’t warrantee that this time I cut them perfectly thin but this was the best I could do with my clumsy knife. Having a good set of knifes is still my dream now. However, I have never tried peeling the paper-thin sheets from a slicer or mandoline. (The one I have now is very basic and not so goot either). Anyway, sometimes I watched the chefs peeling the sheets from vegetable roots into very thin long sheets, so I tried as far as I could to make these radish sheets to wrap the rolls. 

About the ingredients for this dish, there are just a few and they are always easy to get from the market. It’s just the time and effort that you need to invest in preparing it. Anyway, I like these rolls since they have the most sweetness from the meat and vegetables. By steaming, most of the substances are not lost but stay in the rolls themselves and some come out as a sweet broth which you can also eat. Enjoying these rolls with chili sauce is always my preference. 

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This soup is one of my favorites. It contains a very tender pork, which is slowly stewed for a long time and a lot of vegetables. These veggies are almost available all time and, as compared with other kinds of veggies, they are much more affordable.

Stewing requires cooking for hours, however, sometimes it is actually not time consuming as it sounds. I mean, while placing a pot for stewing,  we can always do other things and return to the kitchen occasionally to check the food. In the process we don’t have to stay in the kitchen all the time. Prep for this soup is quite fast too. Putting the veggies together is quite flexible as well. We can alter the quantity of each item according to our favor and what we have on hand. 

So, what I normally put into this soup is pork ribs or the meat around the ribs, potato, carrot, celery, snow peas. To finish the soup, I add some cilantro leaves to enhance the flavor of the soup. 

Each veggie has a different time of cooking welldone. So during the cooking progress, each goes to the pot at different moment. Snow peas are added last and of course, the cilantro leaves are sprinkled over the soup when it is ready and removed from the heat. 

My family can have this soup in any season, but we most prefer it in winter. 

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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I got the inspiration from the website www.joyofbaking.com to bake this cake. My only problem was that I had only one spring-form pan, and because this recipe required dividing the batter into two pans and baked them at the same time, this is how the two layers of the cake could be done, therefore, I had to bake two times with half of the recipe each time. 

I didn’t have enough walnuts in my pantry, so I used both walnuts and hazelnuts in this cake. And again, as usual, I reduced the sugar almost by 1/3 of the original amount. I took more time, however, the cake turned out perfectly to our taste. I gave one serving of the cake to my Indonesian flat-mate, and at first glance, she could tell that was the carrot cake. I also invited the two Chinese guys who also share the flat with us to enjoy this cake, and after a short time, they finished the cake and I heard them washing the dishes in the pantry. 

After three days, we finished the whole cake and the quality stayed the same. I felt so happy with this cake. 

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I was first introduced to this chicken dish by my fiance. Before we knew each other, he sometimes cooked and chicken was one of his most frequently used ingredients. For him in particular, chicken was not easy to cook but also a most affordable source of meat protein. 

After i knew him and when I started to cook with him frequently, he taught me to cook this chicken dish, which he was very "skillful" at and proud of. That’s how I knew about the dish. 

The simmered chicken I presented today is not exaclty what I was taught. After cooking the dish for several times, I started to change the dish a little bit. The original simmered chicken was without carrot and cilantro. The dish was plain in grey color, which did not look so appealing. I tried adding the carrot so that I would have more … veggie to eat at the same time with the meat. I also believed that the carrot not only adds the texture and color but also the essence from the carrot would make the dish a little sweeter in taste. Finally, I used some cilantro not only to garnish but also to realize that fresh cilantro does promote the dish to a higher level, which makes the dish more complete. 

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Since I knew the ‘secrets’ to make a good pasta dish, I have tried quite a number of pasta recipes to gain more experience with one of the most typical themes of Italian cuisine. I am an easy eater and open to new dishes and new tastes. So I do not hesitate to try new things.

Since I understood some principles of preparing a pasta dish, I am always motivated to read more about pasta and possible ingredients to go with it. This time, this vegeroni pasta with baked veggies has been included in my favorite list. If you have some familiarity with the food I share in this blog, you will see that I really like veggies and I will not be happy to finish a meal without something ‘veggie’. I am not a vegetarian, but that has been a habit for a long time. Maybe it was due to my family’s tradition since the old time. When I was with my parents, there was hardly a meal without a vegetable dish of some kind, though it might be very simple as a boiled vegetable or boiled tofu dish.

That’s the reason why I fell in love with this pasta dish for the first time trying it. Baked vegetables always show their special fragrance and outstanding taste to me. I knew that I followed the recipe on the package of the vegeroni pasta. However, I cannot recall where I put away the recipe, or I mistakenly lost it. So, the recipe I wrote below was based on what I remember. I could not tell exactly how many teaspoons or tablespoons of the salt, pepper or herbs, but you know your taste, and with your experience in the kitchen, you may know how much is enough.

Hope you will like the pasta, as I did.

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