Bitter gourd is my favorite choice for summer soup. Though the name indicates bitterness, when you are familiar with the taste and like that bitterness, you don’t feel it bitter at all because what you feel is a sweet bitterness. 

The soup made with bitter gourd is often very mild and fresh. Small ones are our preference. I do not often cook with the large bitter gourd. The prawns in these soup not only add flavor to the soup but also the firm crisp texture as well. I do not use any fat in this soup, so the broth is very clear and gentle. During hot summer days eating too greasy food is not so pleasant to the mouths. Actually, I can have this soup several times a week without getting bored. 

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I used the fish stock from the head and bone of the sea bass I made last time to cook this soup with bitter gourd and fish balls. The home-made fish stock was always much better. Especially in this dish when I needed the flavor of the fish to be dominant, the fish stock was really wonderful. 

Small bitter gourds are my family’s favorite. These ones offer many nutritional and remedying benefits to the health. I heard many people saying the more bitter the taste is, the better. What great is that this is a kind of pleasant bitterness. Once people can eat and like bitter gourd, they often prefer the more bitter ones. 

This soup is very simple to make and the taste is wonderful. I felt really comfortable when enjoying the soup. A typical Vietnamese meal sometimes is served very simply with just steamed rice and a bowl of soup. Fish balls can be bought easily from Asian supermarkets in small packs. I prefer the home-made fish balls which I make with the fish fillet and spices. These super-market fish balls are far different from the home-made ones, so a good-quality fish balls can be fine with this soup when making fish balls myself is much more expensive. Anyway, these fish balls still add another texture to the dish. 

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I was lucky to have someone testing this dish. My flat-mate’s mother from Indonesia visited her for a few days . The mother is a dedicated housewife. She loves cooking and taking care of her husband and children. However, her daughter – my flatmate, doesn’t like cooking so much. I remembered each time her mother visited her, she stayed with us and cooked a lot of food for her daughter. She even cooked more than enough and preserved them in the boxes so that my flatmate still had good food to eat after she flew back to Indonesia. 

When she cooked in the kitchen, or when I cooked, we exchanged a lot of interesting talks about our interest in cooking and baking. This was the meal I cooked and invited her to share with us. She was with me in the kitchen all the time, watching me preparing this pasta dish and asking me about what she didn’t know about this particular pasta. She loves eating spaghetti too, and when I told her this pasta would be a little spicy, she showed no hesistance since Indonesian food is often spicy too. For me, in order to enjoy this dish to the fullist, I needed to reduce the spicy ingredients. 

I was  happy that she enjoyed this pasta. And we did have a really happy time talking about life in the two countries, about parents and children while having the meal together. This is a very memorable occasion. 

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The dish has authentic flavor of Sichuan-style food, which uses chili bean sauce frequently in cooking. However, following the original recipe turned out too spicy for the taste of my family. So I reduced the chili and chili bean paste used in this dish.

Though I do not feel completely comfortable to eat spicy food on hot days. However, in Singapore it is hot all the year round. So, in order to bring in some new and strange flavor to our meals, particularly with spicy foods, I often choose to cook them on cool days, normally after the a long chain of days with heavy rain. The weather does have some effects on what kind of food I feel like eating for the day.

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This is one of my favorite dishes with the combination of vegetables and tofu. Bell peppers are rich in vitamins and very juicy, while tofu provides protein. There is a saying in Vietnamese which means that tofu is the meat in the garden. Therefore, tofu to vegetarians is as important as meat to non-vegetarians.

I am not a vegetarian, but I like eating veggie. I don’t like the type of vegetarian dishes that use tofu or veggie to do some ‘mock’ meat dishes. I just like having the veggie and tofu as they way they are physically, not something like ‘mock’ chicken thighs made with tofu, etc. 

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Normally I go shopping for fresh food ingredients once a week at weekend. So when it comes near to the weekend, I often run out of main ingredients in large quantity. What still left over after I have cooked other dishes during the week are often few in quantity. So I play around thinking how I can make use of those left-over ingredients so that I can buy all fresh food in my next shopping. I don’t feel comfortabe with leaving fresh food in the fridge week over week.

So this time I cooked this stir-fried dish with vegetables. When I was still living with my mom, she often added lean pork to this dish, which brought in the sweetness from the meat to the dish. However, the dish I cooked here was totally vegetarian.

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If you love vegetables, and if you like to eat something light yet full of flavor and texture, then this vegetable ramen is a wise choice. Just as it is named, this noodle soup is served full of vegetables of several kinds, which combine altogether to bring about different senses of the texture for the whole dish.

Ramen is the name of a popular kind of noodle in Japan. You can buy ramen as fresh or dried. I only could get the dried ramen, which required boiling until al dente before serving. 

Not only giving diversed textures, the vegetables also add the sweet substances to the broth. If you are on a diet, or if you are a vegetarian, this noodle soup will satisfy your need. This is another favorite recipe of mine that i found from my book ‘Bowl food’.

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