This specialty of autumn food is subject to those foreigners being in Hanoi who love cooking and want to try making a well-known food among Hanoians, as I believe that outside Hanoi, it is difficult to get fresh green rice flakes. Vietnamese people who like this dish living in other cities or countries often have to use dried green rice flake. So if you happen to be staying in Hanoi for work or business, you should try this great seasonal dish before autumn ends and we have to say goodbye with fresh green rice flakes, commonly called "com".
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This is another good dish with seafood. If you’ve read my post on fish cakes, you will find that the way of cooking these two dishes has many things in common. In fact, there are several ways of making fried squid cakes. This time I made the simplest one, I guess. It desn’t take much time to make these fried squid cakes. Some people just process the squids into fine paste. But I prefer chopping the squids with a cleaver to get a chunky paste. Doing this way, you will still feel the true texture of the squids while chewing the squid cakes in your mouth.
I also like making the squid cakes this way as I don’t have to deep-fry them. So I can save some oil and the food is healthier, less oily.
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Simple as it is, this dish is never out of fashion. I cook it when I need a quick meal with enough proteins to provide me more energy. I cook it when, at the end of the week, I nearly run out of ingredients in my fridge and this is a good choice as there are only two main ingredients. But now, it is not the story because I have come back and start my new life again in Vietnam, where I can shop for fresh ingredients everyday.
In the early morning, I go to the wet market near my house, buying things I need for lunch. Sometimes I buy stuffs for dinner as well, but this market opens in the afternoon too and new fresh foods are brought to sell. So, almost anytime I can buy new and fresh ingredients, which is really a big privilege for me as compared with before when I had to shop at weekend for the whole week.
This dish is best to be served with steamed rice.
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This dish has such a name due to its presentation to resemble the chrysanthemum. Actually, the dish is simply a dish of stuffed eggs. The filling is quite typical and popular in the other dishes I’ve introduced in my blog so far. In fact, fillings for stuffed food are not just boring as such. However, as I am constrained by other circumstances, the availability of ingredients for instance, I only could make pork mixture as fillings for most of the stuffed dishes I’ve cooked up to now.
Talking about this dish in particular, it is not very complicated. What caused me more time and troubles was the eggs. The eggs were not so good and the yolk was not at the centre of the egg, so when I boiled them and cut into halves, the edges of the halved egg whites were not equally thick, which made it more difficult to cut serrated pattern. So, one suggestion is to use fresh eggs. (I often had to buy 30 eggs at a time and stock them in my pantry, so the eggs might not be fresh).
After all, we like the dish and, I rarely eat more than one hard-boiled egg at a time, but I did.
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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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Tomatoes are my forever-loved veggie. Each week I always have to buy a large pack of tomatoes. In Vietnamese cuisine, tomatoes are used frequently in daily cooking, especially during hot summer, tomatoes are often indispensable in sour soups, which help relieve the heat of the summer.
However, I find tomatoes are best in winter when tomatoes are not only cheap but firm and red. The flesh of the tomatoes then is so "sweet" with less seeds. Here, I often see only two kinds of tomatoes. One kind is the normal tomatoes. The other is baby tomatoes such as grape tomatoes – which are called cherry tomatoes here in Singapore. The vine-ripen tomatoes are available at some specialty stores or some big supermarkets, however, they are not cheap and so not affordable for me.
To make this stuffed tomatoes, I used tomatoes of medium size and chose the ripe but firm ones. The soft tomatoes are vulnerable to break apart while braising. And the small ones like these also look lovelier than the large ones.
Ingredients (serves 2)
- 150g minced pork
- 10 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked to soften
- 2-3 black fungus (wood-ear), soaked to soften
- 1 egg
- 1 tbs fish sauce
- 1/4 tsp ground pepper
- 1 shallot, finely chopped
- several medium-sized ripe and firm tomatoes
- vegetable oil, as needed
- cilantro, to serve
Cooking:
- Rinse the mushrooms well. Reserve the soaking water. Chop the mushrooms finely.
- Rinse the black fungus well, then chop finely.
- Combine the pork, mushrooms, black fungus, egg, fish sauce, pepper and shallot.
- Cut out the top of the tomatoes and remove the seeds inside. Stuff the tomatoes with the pork mixture until all the fillings are used.
- Heat the oil in a large frying pan. Fry the tomatoes, concentrate on frying the tops where the pork mixture is present. Fry until the skins start to dry.
- Transfer the fried tomatoes into a saucepan. Add the reserved mushroom-soaking water. If you like, you may add some dried mushrooms and cilantro roots into the saucepan. Braise the tomatoes over medium-low heat for about 12-15 minutes.
- Serve hot or warm with cilantro.
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.
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.
