My first time making savory tart – however, i wished I had baked them a bit longer so that they got more brown, which would have offered better flavor. Anyway, I could say it was a success for the first time as these tartlets not only looked cute but also tasted flavorful.
I got the recipe in the cookbook of party food collection, one of my reliable cookbooks from which I’ve followed many good recipes.
This pasta is very simple to cook. I was curious about it in the first place for the presence of breadcrumbs. I’ve never known about this kind of pasta before. When I was browsing my book on Italian cuisine, I came across the recipe and, realizing it was so simple to cook this, i decided to make it right away.
This recipe is rather classic. The original one cooks with only onion, garlic and toasted breadcrumbs. However, there are other varieties originated from the basic recipe. So I cooked the variety with tomatoes as I preferred the pasta with some sauce (this is the influence of enjoying a meal with soup in a typical Vietnamese meal). There’s nothing to regret that I cooked this pasta. It was really good and we had a wonderful dinner.
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 
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.
I do not often cook with salted eggs, but some I’ve cooked so far all impressed me. This is to introduce a Vietnamese food made with salted eggs. Salted eggs can be found easily at Asian supermarkets, however I wonder whether they are easy to get from other Western countries.
Salted eggs are not my frequently used ingredients, so I have little information about them. Just know how to cook them in certain dishes. This dish has a mild flavor, not very salty as I didn’t use extra salt to season. The only saltiness was of the salted eggs. I could enjoy the dish just like this, but of course you can season more salt to your taste. Or you can prepare a small dish containing a little salt mixed with a few drops of lime juice to serve with the prawns.
The dish is best to serve while hot.
July 29, 2009 by Kokotaru
Filed under Salad & Vegetable
This is a totally new experience to me. I’ve never known about a dish called "medley" before. It is just that when I searched for a recipe to use up the sweetcorn I stocked in my fridge last week, I came across this recipes from my "Taste of Home" magazine collection. "Corn medley" is the name to this dish. Realizing that it is very simple to cook this medley, so I decided to make the dish without much understanding about the word "medley" and why the dish is called that way.
The medley offerred me a new experience of taste and flavor. Eating them alone is satisfying enough. But now I still have no idea what kind of dishes they can pair with to serve together. Since when we ate them with rice (yes, Asian people eat steamed rice almost everyday), they didn’t seem to go so well together. So we finished the corn medley alone and of course, served rice with a meat dish.
Anyway, now I knew another recipe to cook sweetcorns. I also had a mere idea about what a medley dish is like when I realized that there are some more medley recipes in my cookbooks. The dominant texture of the dish is the juiciness and crisp-tenderness of the sweetcorns, combining with the softness of green pepper and tomatoes. The flavor is strengthened with ground cumin. The medley is a little sweet as the corns themselves are already sweet and sugar is also used in cooking.
July 28, 2009 by Kokotaru
Filed under Salad & Vegetable
Hey, this is the first "salsa" I’ve ever made. It is similar to a salad, but this is the one with the actual "salsa" in its name that I made. I didn’t often eat salad with fruits, except for green mango or green papaya which has pure sour taste or plain taste and offers mostly the texture to the salad. This salsa has a distinctive sweet and sour taste of the mango plus its fragrance.
When I read the recipe in my book and saw the picture, the mango is yellow-orange like this. There is no remark about which kind of mango should be used. So I just used the kind I often buy to make this salsa.
The first impression of this salsa is its refreshing effect. As the salsa is chilled in the fridge until it is cold enough to serve, at the very first bite, I could feel the heat in my body reduced, especially on these hot days. Both the mango and tomato flesh are still firm yet juicy. Coriander leaves add more flavor to the salsa.
It is a new and interesting taste to me. It is advised to serve this salsa with tortilla chips. But no way I could buy or make them. So I had the idea of baking some wonton cups, at least I had something crispy to enjoy the salsa too.
I learned this dish from one of my Japanese cookbook. This stewed pork is applicable but it is quite troublesome. I actually didn’t understand the cooking process and the purpose of some required techniques applied in making this dish.
The result was quite pleasant to the taste but I didn’t see much outstanding taste or flavor after all those cooking procedures. Maybe I didn’t cook well enough to get the best from this dish.
