Pows or Pork Steamed Buns or Banh Bao - Whatever you want to call it!

I've been looking for Banh Bao from every single Vietnamese restaurant I've been to. However, I was not lucky enough to find exactly the one we had back home. All of them were a kind of Chinese dim sums or dumplings. I wanted our Banh Bao so badly. I missed our Banh Bao, and thus I made it. 

(Image Source: from the Internet, found by Google Image Search)

Homemade: Candied Ginger or Crystallized Ginger

For an introduction, I would honestly say that I have a sweet tooth but I always try to avoid confectionery. I think everyone knows the reason, just to make it clear in my case, it's to thwart the waist protest! However, with candied ginger, I still enjoy it anyway. In Vietnam, it's likely no TET (Lunar New Year) without candied ginger. Therefore, I would give myself a special treat to not thinking much when eating some slices of candied ginger in the biggest holiday of year. Ginger root is very well known to be good for health, but it's not easy to eat the raw one.  And if you're a ginger lover, you can tell me what you shall do with a pound of raw ginger root? I've been recently offered that amount of ginger and I need a way to "spend" them, LOL. Well, let me tell you my solution right now. I sugar coated them, yay yay! I don't want to sound so excited but this is truly my first time to crystallize ginger root! 

Impromptu Homemade Dishes

Today I tried out a new feature on Photoshop CS6 called Irish Blur. Actually, I watched a demo on Youtube about this feature for a couple of months ago and loved it right away. The reason was simple. With an old PnS camera, full macro pictures were just in my dream. Flowers and food, however, macro style is always the best choice. There is also awhile I didn't share any food images. I guess now is the moment to combine two of them into one shot. This entry will be the least verbose one ever on my blog too [with brief text and the rest is photo!]

Black Sticky Rice by Microwave

In my food culture, rice is the most important component for all kinds of appetites. Needless to say, there are also plenty of rice variations on the market. Hence, when it comes to the table, there is tremendous selection of dishes to go with rice. Also, talking about the rice family, it will be a big mistake if I don’t mention about sticky and glutinous rice. They contribute to enrich our breakfast with many ways of cooking and garnishing.

Mentioning about sticky rice, my memories are flooding back about difficult days on the family farm when we all rushed out of the house in very early mornings with empty tummies and nothing else, except tiny packages of sticky rice. Sticky rice also followed me most of morning during my years at high school.  Later on when I started working, sticky rice was always the best solution for hurry mornings to the office. To sum up, I can say sticky rice is the most simple, compact and comfortable food to start a day, especially tough and busy days.

Do I sound like I love sticky rice? Honestly, I didn’t love sticky rice as much as my memory about it. The reason was simple - it was pretty dry and tedious. It is a perfect saver for a quick day kickoff, but not a choice for everyday. I don’t remember exactly the last time I had sticky rice. I would say more than 2 years ago. Back home, whenever feeling like eating sticky rice, I always bought from small vendors on the way to school or work. I had never thought about cooking sticky rice myself. On my mind, it’s too cumbersome to deal with sticky rice in the kitchen. Moreover, when things were always available and too easy to get, like most of people, I didn’t bother to do it myself.

Now, it’s different. I’ve been out of the country for more than 2 years. Some simple food that I never missed or thought about before, they’ve been touring back in my mind times to times. Sticky rice is one of them. I always thought that I might just be able to eat sticky rice again if and only if I backed home to visit my family. Maybe my thought would never change if there was not a day, a day I found ways to cook sticky rice by microwave, the day that many ideas of sticky rice dishes blossoming in my mind. If you are a great cook, you can tell right away – how dare you compare sticky rice made by microwave with the traditional way? The answer is you’re right. I’m not going to put those two methods on scale. Just imagine me as being drowned and found a life buoy.

I love black sticky rice the most, thus of course it will be my first try too. I know if I don’t post an entry of cooking recipe now, there will be no entry later. The first time is always the one uplifting me the most. So, let’s go through the simple recipe and I hope you can do it yourself one day (if you've never done before). 

(black sticky rice dish from black glutinous rice)

All about corn

I intended to write an entry for corn long long time ago, but just can settle down today. Corn is the wonderful food that we eat everyday in many food products but under different forms, mostly as powders. Sometimes we just forget to eat corn at the art of origin. I always have to eat corn on the cob or plain popped corn at least once in a month (except in the winter). Now, when I find many simple ways to cook corn, I can enjoy them anytime as long as I have 5 minutes for preparation. I will introduce those cooking methods here and hope to get you back to original corn in case you also forget them in a long time. 

(Picture source: http://blog.foodservicewarehouse.com)

Homemade: Bean Sprout

Started from last year when I first concerned about bean sprout hygiene on the market, I googled around to learn and tried growing them myself. Actually, food in Canada is pretty safe comparing with my home country. However, bean sprout is very easily contaminated and I usually have to buy it from Chinese stores which is I don't really love to do so. Plus, I also want to spout the beans and enjoy seeing them growing everyday myself. 

How joyful is it when you can make this yourself? 

Homemade, dough from breadmaker: Lemon Cheese Braid

Today I challenged myself a little bit with filled bread. I said "challenge," but you'll see it's nothing challenging though. Just try to sound it louder, LOL. Since my kitchen is very narrow, a bread maker is my saver always whenever it comes to make a dough. 

OMG I love this bread so much and, it turns out perfect for the first attempt. Let me introduce you to my little cuties now. Here come the slices: 

Frozen grapes - Ice Cream Alternatives?

I read somewhere before mentioning some sort of info like this: feeling ice cream fantastic your tongue but upset your weight? It's time for frozen fruits. 

I've been tried frozen blueberries and grapes since then. More than a good choice, frozen fruits absolutely surprise my tongue as much as their fatty friend ice cream. Of course, I won't eliminate ice cream completely as well as I won't recommend you doing that; it's still very enjoyable sometimes, especially the homemade one 

Frozen grapes

Homemade Lemon Almond Cookies

When the weather is warming up but not yet hot, it's perfect time for cookies. Especially just imagine the fresh cookie aroma in the oven at the weekend when family members are chilling around. It's sweet, isn't it? This smell will follow us everywhere until our end of life. And on our way to struggle for life, whenever we smell it again, it just simply reminds us to return home. I love lemon and almond, that's why lemon almond cookies are my best matches!

Just salad!

Salad is the most beautiful dish in over the world. You can create as many colors as you want. You also can mix as many kinds of veggies as you love. It's extremely simple and flexible. Beside the beauty, salad is also the most healthy food if you don't abuse salad dressing. And finally, if you're on a strict diet, you properly cannot miss salad.

                               

Carrot soup with miso and sesame

Feeling like eating miso soup? If so, you're not alone. Recently I also feel missing that soup so much. I don't know why, maybe because I haven't had that soup for so long. And yeah, it was also randomly I read a post from smittenkitchen.com about carrot soup with miso and sesame 1 week ago. I felt like big idea coming together from two strangers 

(source: smittenkitchen.com)

Panna Cotta - first try

Panna Cotta was the competition topic of December from food and photography facebook group that I'm joining. Even I've never tried this food before, I thought it was just like fruit jelly I usually watched my grandma made. Thus, on my mind, it's kind of easy, LOL. Plus the event hosts also said the recipe was not hard at all, simple, easy, just make and succeed. Yeah, I heard it clearly, just make and succeed!

Homemade Hot Pepper Sauce

Winter is officially coming here in Toronto now. As my last post in November about my little garden, I had to harvest all the peppers even though they were still green. Just a couple of them were ripe. The bad news is that I’m not very good at eating spicy food and all people I know couldn’t even eat as spicy as I do, LOL. That’s why two big bags of green hot peppers have been in my fridge all the time. I guess they should weigh around 5 pounds (or say 6 pounds at maximum). A month has passed by and I don’t think they can stay there in the fridge forever. Well, I have to do something with them. I thought about pickling them but still too much. Finally, I came up with the idea to storing them as sauce; require less space and easier eating in a long time. And the good news is that it was not too hard to do homemade hot pepper sauce at I thought.

Food ideas for napa cabbages - Let's roll them!

Usually, cabbages can be boiled, stirred, pickled (famous Korean Kimchi) or used for soup. To make the recipe less boring, I rolled them this time. Napa cabbage leaves are perfect for food wrapping.

na·pa cab·bage/ˈnapə/

(From Internet)

Noun:

A cabbagelike Chinese plant whose long, white leaves are used in salads and cooking.

Cooking: Non-greasy omelet for a healthy breakfast

This is my breakfast for today, super fast, super easy.

- one egg

- 2 or 3 bread slices

- veggies

- soy sauce

Roasted Chestnut and Stuffed Bitter Melon Soup

Today I made roasted chestnut and another kind Vietnamese soup. Just share them here as my hobby. 

Roasted Chestnut

Very easy. Just buy raw chestnut from grocery, wash them out and cut 2 lines on top of them to make X sign. Be carefully not to cut on your fingers or palm since chestnut shell is pretty hard.

Put chestnuts all on a foil tray or baking pan. Turn on the oven around 425F and bake for 30 to 45 minutes. Remember to mix the nut once or twice during the time so they’re well cooked all sides.

You should peel the shell as soon as the nuts are warm enough to hold by hands. Don’t let them cool completely. The skin will stick with the shell and hard to peel when the nuts are cool.

Roasted chestnut

Fried simmered eggs

Simmered food is very familiar and popular in Vietnam. That kind of food has some good benefits such as non-greasy and perfectly seasoned. My grandmom and dad usually cooked fried simmered eggs for family parties when I was still at home. Actually they always cooked the eggs with pork (bacon). It's such a long time I'm away from home and my eating habit has been being changed more or less. I don't really eat pork for the whole year round.

For those who didn't know how simmered food looks like, this is a short description for simmered fish: http://www.vietnamfood.org/entry/ca-kho-simmered-fish.html

Some days ago, just suddenly I needed some Vietnamese food badly. I was like feeling fried simmered eggs on my tongue. I was missing its pattern in my mouth as well as its well-seasoned taste. What came had come, I ran into the kitchen and began cooking even though it was too late at night . I just cooked eggs alone, no pork (bacon).

Image source: http://www.camnanggiadinh.com.vn

All free recipes you can find for beef

More than 30 beef recipes were shared by beefinfo website. Hope that cooking with beef is more enjoyable now. 

Roast Beef Cooking Lessons - Perfect Oven Roasts Everything you need to know about cooking roast beef with step-by-step lessons. (152184) Download: English (PDF)

Click on more to get the rest of recipes.

Halloween dinner

Here comes my cooking for Halloween. Happy Halloween everyone!

Grilled cali flower, carrot, sweet pepper and purple onion

Taco - Mexican dish

Today, I treat Worm family my first Mexican Taco dish for dinner. I knew the dish the first time when eating out with some former co-workers. Since I don’t have much time today, I bought Taco shells from store. I don’t really like those shells since they’re too hard and crispy. I love the soft shells better. I’ll make my own shells next time or at least buy the soft ones.