"Dynamic Korean" is one of my favorite TV shows on food and travel. Almost every weekend, I preserve half an hour sitting in front of the TV eagerly watching this show. The show really inspires me to learn more about Korean cuisine and searching for practical dishes to cook at home.

I find most of the Korean dishes that I had chances to eat and cook are really to my liking. From the show, I got the feeling that Korean people are very eager at cooking and eating, especially they show "big" appreciation for street foods and those foods for ordinary people. They always show their "big and noisy" happiness when eating yummy meals.

This time I made glazed chicken wings in Korean style. Once again, I love the chicken cooked in this way. It is just easy to make. Just one problem remains with my small oven. I reduced the recipe by two-third to cook for only two people. In order to save energy, I used the small one with the spoilt timer, so I couldn’t keep track of the time and the chickens got burn a bit. So unfortunate! Still, we finished them all within a wink!!!

Let’s have some taste for another Korean dish.

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Five-spice powder is one of the most favorite seasonings by Vietnamese people. It has the origin from China, but I am not sure when it came to Vietnamese food. However, when I grew up and started to learn cooking from my mom, I already realized that this powder was always present in our home’s kitchen. 

I also heard that many Vietnamese students who study abroad never forget to bring along several or many small sachets of five-spice powder to add homely flavor to their food. This powder is widely used in marinating meats, especially poultry and pork. Five-spice marinated dish appear very popularly in family daily meal due to its easy applicability to the meat.

As my experience, there are two secrets in marinating to bring out the distinctive flavor of the dish. Firstly, rice cooking wine should be used to dissolve the powder. Rice wine not only adds more flavor to the meat but also has some effect on tendering the meat. Secondly, it is the usage of fish sauce in marinating instead of using salt or other kind of salty granules. Fish sauce adds flavor to the meat and makes the meat "deeper" in the taste. This is the way I often cook my five-spice flavored chicken.

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If you are hunger for something simple and mild in the taste, still good for your health, then you may consider this soup made with chicken and white fungus.

This dish is another application of mine in using Chinese herbs in cooking, so as to make a dish not only tastes good but also provides other health benefits. Consuming this kind of dishes doesn’t mean to see immediate effect, but in the long run, they have curing effects that help prevent us from illnesses.

So let’s try this very simple dish and do something good to your health.

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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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