This is one of the dishes with glutinous rice I like the most. Not only it has a lovely green color which reminds us of green growing rice-fields, it offers a gentle refreshing flavor of pandan leaves as well.
In the past, pandan leaves used to play an important part to increase the quality of meals of Vietnamese common people. During that hard time, people had only poor-quality rice to eat. The rice was not fragrant at all, not mentioning many had to eat rice with bad smell. In order to make the rice more palatable to eat, people added some pandan leaves when they cooked rice. The fragrance of the leaves would distract the undesirable smell.
Nowadays people no longer use pandan leaves when cooking rice. But their use value is still useful in many other dishes.
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This year I can spend the mid-autumn festival with my family. I didn’t have a true meaning of mid-autumn fest for four years when I was studying abroad.
A month before mid-autumn, mooncakes are already available out there in the market. However, once you like baking, you will want to make your own mooncakes for your family, relatives and friends. I’ve just returned home for neary two years. With many other things I need to take care of, I tried as best as I could to make some mooncakes (for me, they were quite a lot, I made about 40 mooncakes and they all have been finished, so I am going to make some more).
There are some stories to share with the mooncakes I made this year. As the manufactured mooncakes are too sweet, most adults don’t like them, but they still have to buy home at least a pair for the pass-away ancesters as a tradition. I don’t like manufactured mooncakes either, though I like the flavor of mooncakes. So, one reason I made mooncakes was to make them less sweet, less oily, and so healthier.
…with taro and sesame seeds filling
…with mungbeans and sesame seeds filling
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When I looked into my end-of-week fridge, I found that I still had a pair of chicken breast left and a pack of pandan leaves, which were getting dried very soon. So I immediately remembered a simple way of cooking chicken with these just two main ingredients.
Of course pandan leaves are not edible even after frying, however, the fragrance from the leaves will be released during the cooking time and the chicken will absorb this fragrance. Also, being wrapped in the leaves, the chicken is still tender and juicy. Just notice that do not over-cook the chicken since overcooked chicken breats are not so pleasant to eat.
Remove the pandan leaves from the chicken piece before enjoying the chicken of special flavor.
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