It’s pasta again. But this time, the recipe I chose to cook is very simple. Just a basic tomato sauce, to serve with angel hair pasta, which is also to shorten cooking time as angel hair pasta takes only a few minutes to be cooked al dente. 

I like this pasta because I can actually distinguish the real taste of each element in pasta dish. I can evaluate whether I cooked the pasta perfectly al dente, whether they were sticky together, whether the sauce was well seasoned to bring about the diversed flavors of all ingredients. I like simplicity in refinement. 

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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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Pineapple is our favorite fruit for dessert. Pineapple is not only cheap but is believed to have many good health benefits. Ripe pineapples are rich and deep in flavor, we can enjoy the fruits plain as they are. 

When we want to make something different and more interesting into pineapple pieces, doing flambe is a frequent choice. The taste of the pineappes is enhanced to be more flavorful and fragrant by the use of good quality butter, brown sugar and rum. Doing flambe makes a simple and plain fruit become really more elegant and up-standard. 

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This is another recipe with chicken legs from my German cookbook – a gift from my friend. Though the recipe calls for whole chicken legs, I only had the frozen chicken thighs in my freezer. But it’s still okay, just a small difference in presentation. 

These roasted chicken legs are very simple to make. Although it is not necessary to marinate the chicken for long hours, I still prefer to let the chicken in marinating mixture for some time. Still, if you don’t have time, you can go ahead with roasting the chicken right after you finish rubbing them with the mixture. 

Ingredients: (serves 4)

- 4 chicken legs (about 250g/ piece) 

- 1/2 tsp salt

- 1/4 tsp ground pepper

- 1 tsp paprika

- 1 tbs vegetable or sunflower oil

Cooking:

- For fan oven, preheat to 350F (180C). Without-fan oven, preheat to 400F (200C). 

- Wash the chicken legs and pat dry with kitchen towels. 

- Mix salt, pepper, paprika and oil. Rub the chicken legs evenly with this mixture. You can let to marinate for up to 2 hours. 

- Place the chicken on the roasting tin and insert to the centre of the oven. Bake for about 45 minutes.  

I’ve never made pan pizza before. The reason is I often prepare generous amount of the toppings for my pizza, so with two people, having pan pizza with a lot of toppings are really large servings. So in order to reduce the amount of food, I prefer thin pizza crust with more toppings, which always make my pizzas more prosperous.

However, this very simple garlic and olive pizza made me curious to know how the taste would be like. Since the toppings are nothing but garlic and olive oil, I decided to make pan pizza so that we could have enough to eat for our meal. Far from my expectation, the pizza was really really nice. The thick crust was still very crispy. The toppings, though simple as they were, the taste was definitely not boring at all. It did surprise us a lot. 

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My high-school classmate, who is studying in Germany, visited me with a present – a cookbook of German cuisine. I was so excited with this book. I like books, and cookbooks are always what I wish to have more and more. 

Having spent several months in Germany, I didn’t have many chances to try German food. So with this book in my hands, I feel so free to start my adventure into this cuisine. I browsed the book to get the most easily applicable recipes. And I stopped at the poultry chapter with four different baked chicken recipes. All are easy to follow. But I firstly was attracted by this baked chicken with herbs, simply because I like herbs a lot. Herbs and spices play an important part in most of my cooking. So I decided to try making this baked chicken first. 

I didn’t have the whole chicken legs in my freezer, I only had the thighs. So I went ahead with these. The crispy skin was wonderful with breadcrumbs mixed with herbs, which were very flavorful. I only regretted that I could use dried herbs only. There was no way I could get fresh herbs here. After baking, the excess fat from the chicken ran out onto the baking dish, so the chicken became less fat, which made me very happy too. 

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This is one of the very popular dishes that frequently appeared on dining tables of Vietnamese people. Some mothers prefer frying the potatoes before stir-frying them with beef, some just go straight with the raw potatoes. 

In my family, my mom went for the second method. By cooking this way, the potatoes should be braised so that there is enough steam for the potatoes to be cooked through. By frying the potatoes first, there is no need to braised the potatoes. Two cooking methods offer different texture and flavor to the dish. 

This time I cooked in the fist method by firstly frying the potatoes. The fried potatoes will change from hard and cripy outside to chewy texture after being stir-fried. The starch in the potatoes also has no way to get out of the chunks themselves. In contrast, cooking this dish without frying the potatoes first makes the dish more creamy and less oily. 

So, you may choose either way to cook this dish. For me, I like both. 

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I just have two words to describe this salad: simple and refreshing. After a long day, I only expected something simple yet impressive for my dinner, so that I can enjoy the weekend soon.  

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