November 10, 2009 by Kokotaru
Filed under Soup, Noodle, Porridge
Long gourd is a kind of cheap vegetables that most common families can afford for daily meals in Vietnam. It’s mostly used in cooking soups. There are various soups using long gourd that base on meat stock of some kinds. Pork ribs make good stock too and many Vietnamese housewives like using pork ribs in soups.
What make this soup even more flavorful and tastier are the presence of fresh ginger and mui tau, a kind of veggie-herb well-known to Vietnamese cooking.
October 28, 2009 by Kokotaru
Filed under Featured Content, Main dish
We do not often eat spicy food, but this spicy mackerel still helped me easily and quickly finish two bowls of steamed rice. If you like it very spicy, you can use tiny (Thai) chilies, which are often very hot. If you like it even hotter, I think tabasco pepper sauce or cayenne pepper also go well with this Vietnamese dish. (Though most Vietnamese people don’t know of tabasco pepper and cayenne).
King mackerel is very lean and, if not cooked into a good dish, it is not so palatable to eat. In general, I like fish more than meat, so I am always eager to try more new dishes with fish. This is one of the recipes with king mackerel that I love.
October 21, 2009 by Kokotaru
Filed under Main dish, Soup, Noodle, Porridge
It’s great to have this stewed beef soup on winter days. The soup is served hot right from the stove and warms us up by its deep taste and fragrant flavor. I like this kind of soup with both meat and vegetables. In the lack of time when I cannot cook more than one dishes, this stewed soup still provides me enough substances. During the cooking process, I still can do other things and just need to attend to the soup several times until all are tenderly cooked.
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".
What is most special about this sticky rice dish? It is the corn – not the sweetcorn that most of you may already know, but the glutinous corn which is chewy, just like the glutinous rice. This kind of corn is much loved by Vietnamese people. Just boil the corn cobs with water until they are tender and chewy, then you’ll have a simple breakfast which keeps you full till noon.
This sticky rice dish is one of the favorite choices by students for breakfast. Especially on cold winter days, holding a small pack of this corn sticky rice in your hands and feeling the heat that warms up your hands, it’s great to think about the moment when your close friends gather around and share the bites of this yummy thing.
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.
There is a kind of leaf, which you see in the photos, that can dye the rice grains into red or purple color though the leaves are totally green. It is called "purple leaf", and I was told that the color the leaves produce varies from trees to trees they grow in.
The leaves have no taste, no smell, they only produce color when you boil them with water. The less water and more leaves you use, the darker the color you will get. Use this water to soak the glutinous rice for 8-10 hours, you’ll get the rice dyed.
Outside Vietnam, I wonder if you can get these leaves. This dish was named according to the name of the leaf – "purple leaf sticky rice". Even if there is not, beetroot is a very good choice to dye other ingredients when you want create something more interesting to the normal foods.
I served this red sticky rice with grilled ground pork.
Hanoi, my city, is experiencing the best time of autumn now. Persimmon is also a sign of Hanoi’s autumn, along with green sticky rice – as I mentioned in the previous posts, big chrysanthemum, and the smell of "milk flower" trees (hoa sua) filled up the streets at night.
Persimmons are in season now. There are many different kinds of persimmons, some are crunchy, some are tender and juicy. Some are green, some are greeny yellow, some are red. Some are really big, some are so tiny. For me, what I like the best is the green tiny crunchy ones, however, nowadays they are getting more scarce when the big kinds become more popular.
I thought what if I use the persimmons to make into some dishes as I’ve never eaten such a food. After searching on the Internet and I found that persimmons certainly can be made into good foods. So I imagined how to combine some ingredients including persimmon to make a simple salad. Finally, I came up with this salad. I told my mom what I was gonna do, and she suggested that I use green apple in the salad to balance the taste and add good flavor to the salad. Thanks for that, the salad I created this time was really perfect. It made me surprised for the first time I tried to come up with a totally new dish.
These persimmons I used were crunchy and gently sweet, though they are not the ones I like most.
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