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.
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It is still summer here in Hanoi and having a bowl of this sweet soup on these hot days is just so great. As I have mentioned earlier in the other related posts, sweet soups are often cooked by Vietnamese housewives during summer time because you can eat them anytime when you feel hot and thirsty, and crave for something to reduce the heat inside your body.
Rock sugar is always my choice when cooking sweet soups due to its good effect to our health as compared with the other kinds of sweetening agents. Rock sugar also gives the soups a gentle sweetness, which makes them more pleasant to consume on hot days.
This sweet soup cooked with pumpkin and green beans (those that have been blanched) is quite easy to cook. It doesn’t take long time as green beans and pumpkin are both very fast to cook until tender. I used one small pumpkin as a bowl to hold the soup, just for decoration. When I finished the soup, of course this raw pumpkin would be used to cook other yummy dishes.
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Some deep-fried foods are always so pleasant to eat even though they are not very healthy. I am not a fan of deep-fried foods. I can eat them but not much at a time, especially when the deep-fried ingredients are fatty and meaty.
However, this time I didn’t refuse these inviting fried pumpkin cakes as I know what ingredients were used to make them. I used a lot more pumpkin than meat in these pumpkin cakes, so when I ate, I almost didn’t feel the meat at all but I merely tasted the pumpkin, which made the fried cakes not "hot" and greasy as they seemed to be. I felt the cakes very easy to eat, and surprisingly I did eat many of them.
Anyway, this is still a deep-fried dish. I dare not eat them frequently. But sometimes I feel changing the appetite a bit is quite interesting.
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I made this pumpkin cream by accident. I had a small pumpkin which I intended to make a popular Thai custard with pumpkin. However, I didn’t have enough eggs and I only had a little coconut milk left. Not bothering going to the super market to shop for just a few ingredients, I decided to go ahead with making the custard and I didn’t expect the custard to really set inside the pumpkin because I knew the mixture would be quite thin.
I still wanted to try. Not only the eggs and the coconut milk were reduced, the coconut milk was also thinner and the sugar was reduced as well. After I steamed the pumpkin, I removed the skin and place everything in the blender to make a very smooth and thick cream. Then after being chilled in the fridge, the creamed pumpkin turned out a very pleasant dessert. It was very creamy in the mouth with gentle sweetness plus distinctive flavor of the palm sugar. Less coconut milk was used also made this creamed pumpkin healthier and more suitable to our liking.
I was so delighted at this trial and the outcome really pleased me.
Ingredients:
- 1 small pumpkin (about 200g)
- 3 eggs
- 135ml coconut milk
- 50g palm sugar, grated
- 1 bunch of pandan leaves (optional), rinsed well
Methods:
- Clean the pumpkin well. Use a knife to cut off around the stem to make a lid. Scoop out the seeds and membrane. Clean both inside and outside thorougly and drain.
- Add eggs, coconut milk, palm sugar in a large bowl. Crumple the mixture with pandan leaves until sugar is dissolved. (If you don’t use pandan leaves, just whisk the mixture until well combined). Remove the leaves and set the mixture aside.
- Place the pumpkin in a bowl or deep plate, fill with the egg mixture and cover with the lid. Place the pumpkin in a large steamer with boiling water over medium heat. Cook for about 25-30 minutes or until the pumpkin flesh is very softened.
- Let the pumpkin cool completely.
- Remove the skin of the pumpkin and transfer all the pumpkin to a blender. Process until the mixture is very smooth. Refridgerate the pumpkin cream until it is chilled thoroughly.
Cheesecake is always my favorite. I will make cheesecake whenever I buy a new 2kg package of creamcheese. Since buying a large package like this, it it cheaper. However, I will always have to figure out how to use up the cream cheese shortly after opening so that the cream cheese is still in good condition and retains good quality. It is always a good idea to make a cheesecake that uses a large quantity of cream cheese.
I wish I could afford buying separate packages of creamcheese which are higher in quality and more flexible in usage. However, I realize that, baking or cooking with limited budget doesn’t mean we cannot make a delicious dish. Only if we have enough passion for cooking and put our heart into cooking, we always can make good food for our loved ones.
I made the pumpkin puree myself by steaming the pumpkin. Then I had to let the water evaporate, otherwise the puree would be very moist. It is better to bake the pumpkin until soft with the oven, however, it takes longer time and consumes more energy, meaning more money. So I chose steaming the pumpkin instead. The final cheesecake is still very tasty.
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