It can be said that chicken is the most frequently used ingredients in my cooking. Simply because chicken is the most affordable of all kinds of meat. Almost every week, chicken is included in my shopping list. I often buy a whole chicken, breaking it into separate parts to use in different dishes.

Sometimes getting tired of the old flavor and the familiar way of preparing a chicken dish, I would read my books or searching about on the Internet to find a new flavor for my chicken dish. And this is a recipe I found from my book ‘Bowl Food’. This dish is full of Asian flavor. I often cook braised chicken with ginger and fish sauce. However, this time there are some changes in the ingredients, which makes the dish totally different in flavor. The flavors are richer and there are more to experience: the fragrance of ginger and especially the typical smell of star anise, the sweetness of honey, the tender saltiness of soy sauce. All bring in great taste to this simple chicken dish.

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Five-spice powder is one of the most favorite seasonings by Vietnamese people. It has the origin from China, but I am not sure when it came to Vietnamese food. However, when I grew up and started to learn cooking from my mom, I already realized that this powder was always present in our home’s kitchen. 

I also heard that many Vietnamese students who study abroad never forget to bring along several or many small sachets of five-spice powder to add homely flavor to their food. This powder is widely used in marinating meats, especially poultry and pork. Five-spice marinated dish appear very popularly in family daily meal due to its easy applicability to the meat.

As my experience, there are two secrets in marinating to bring out the distinctive flavor of the dish. Firstly, rice cooking wine should be used to dissolve the powder. Rice wine not only adds more flavor to the meat but also has some effect on tendering the meat. Secondly, it is the usage of fish sauce in marinating instead of using salt or other kind of salty granules. Fish sauce adds flavor to the meat and makes the meat "deeper" in the taste. This is the way I often cook my five-spice flavored chicken.

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I am not sure if you are suprised to see a bowl full of duck bone pieces like this one. For Vietnamese people, it is very comment to cut the whole duck into medium chunks and stewed them until the meat an the bones become very tender, even to be able to chew the bone. After long time of simmering over low heat, the good substances from the bones and the duck meat will be extracted and released to the broth, while the meats become very tasty as the fish sauce and ginger flavor have been absorbed inside.

Yes, it is very simple. The secret here is fish sauce and ginger. This dish is a good way of using up the left-over bone parts of the duck such as the wings, the neck, the feet, and the bones after you fillet the ducks. This dish offers a very inviting flavor. More importantly, it is very easy to make.

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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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There are so many ways to enjoy chicken. Salad is often good to our health. So when I find a new salad recipe, I get enthusiastic and decide to try making it right away.

However, this is not a new dish. This salad has typical flavour of Vietnamese cuisine. I like the crunchiness of the dish when I put one bite into my mouth and chewed it. The sound made me feel refreshed by the freshness of the vegetables.

The traditional Vietnamese salad dish often comes a little bit more sour than sweet. It uses lime juice to make it sour because lime juice also add special flavour to the dish. Quite often, rice vinegar is also used, however, it doesn’t add typical flavour but it reduces some undesirable smell from the raw vegetable, if there is any.

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If you travel to Vietnam, you may want to try this cheap street finger food. Especially when you visit Hanoi during winter time, the cold weather is the best friend of this little sweet thing. Because these rice cakes are deep-fried, so it is more pleasant to eat in cold days and you will not feel it is any oily. Instead, you will feel warmer if enjoying these simple things with your friends while trembling in Hanoi’s severely cold weather.

There are some variations of this rice cake, which are mainly the ways of coating the cake. What I made this time is sesame coated rice cake. The cake can be coated with caramelized sugar which "dresses" the cake with a dark brown skin. Another way is to shake the hot rice cakes in a wok of powder sugar so that the sugar coats all over the cake, makes it look like a snow ball. The two ways using sugar add more sweetness to the cake, which I don’t like so much because they are too sweet to me. I always prefer having rice cake coated with sesame seeds. The sesames make the crust more crispy and fragrant.

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