I cook, save where I can, and try to live life to the fullest. Along the way, I hope to share some information that I hope others find helpful or at least, entertaining.
Prepared fish sauce is the Vietnamese equivalent of ketchup. We use fish sauce for many Vietnamese dishes: Vietnamese crepe, spring roll, egg roll, vermicelli with grilled pork, and so on.
It’s a simple sauce to make. However, I can never get the right ratio of ingredients. Too much of one ingredient can throw the flavor [...]
It’s that time of year again! No, not the holidays. It’s crab season! I have searched high and low for the best price for live crab in the Bay Area, and the cheapest has been $2.99/lb this year. That means I’ll be eating crab for some time until that price starts etching upward again.
Here’s my [...]
Making a delicious meal doesn’t have to be difficult and time-consuming. Now with two kids in tow, I don’t have much time to slave away in the kitchen, but with a little planning, I was able to get this delicious dinner on the table in minutes.
Burger Meat:
Ground beef with a dash of steak seasoning, [...]
Today we are making Dragon Rolls! Why is it called a Dragon Roll? Well, because it looks like a dragon! The sliced avocado and barbecued eel on the outside of the role resemble the scales of a dragon. Place some red flying fish roe on top and you got yourself a fiery dragon. If you [...]
Are you invited to a BBQ this weekend and not sure what to bring? Well, here’s a very simple recipe for pasta shells with grilled sweet corn, roasted bell peppers and my all-time-favorite-go-to-meal-when-I-don’t-feel-like-cooking, Spam!
No fuss. No refrigeration. Best of all, sweet corn is in season so it’s super cheap to make. I got my [...]
When I met my husband in our early dating days, I tried to impress him with my baking skills…or lack thereof. My first baking project was chocolate chip cookies…from scratch! I figured since everything will be going in the batter, why not just skip reading the recipe, go down the list of ingredients and toss [...]
One of my fondest memories of childhood is running around in our backyard garden. My mom used to grow what we call in Vietnamese Bac Ha, a taro steam leafy vegetable that grew as tall as me. It was incredibly fun walking through a patch of Bach Ha and pretending it was a forest…and undoubtedly, [...]
I bought a jar of capers from Costco. I will be eating capers for the next 10 years. So here’s a simple dish that involves capers that my sister and I made the other night: Chicken Piccata.
What You Will Need:
2 large lemons
6 boneless skinless chicken breasts; pounded thin
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
2 large minced [...]
My son, husband and I decided to make Eggs Benedict after drooling over it on an episode of MasterChef. I knew it was a simple dish, but thought the hollandaise sauce might be bit tricky, but surprisingly, everything came together quite easily.
Eggs benedict consists of half of a English muffin topped with bacon or [...]
I have wrote about making your own frappuccino at home to save money without totally sacrificing the same great taste of barista-made coffee. Check out Starbuck Drinks for Half the Price. This post uses the Caffe D’Vita Mocha Cappuccino instant mix. Recently, I came up with another awesome version for a mocha frap using Vietnamese [...]