Vietnamese Home Cooking

I love cooking simply and with lots of veggies. Even though most people know me as a meat lover, I love vegetables more and eat my veggies first - not because my parents told me to. My love of veggies stemmed from having a fresh vegetable garden growing up. My mom would have us pick the veggies just before dinner so they were amazingly fresh and sweet. We had corn, potatoes, zuchini, tomatoes, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, green beans, sweat peas and even brussel sprouts. We also had two huge apples trees, a plum tree and 5 blueberry bushes. I reminsce still of waking up in the summer, running outside barefoot to pick fresh blueberries for breakfast. I'd love to have a fruit and vegetable garden some day.... sigh

So lately I've been cooking and introducing AG to Vietnamese home style cooking. You can't order these dishes in restaurants. I'm self-conscious about what I like - thinking that few will like them - so I don't often cook these dishes for anyone but myself. However, AG loves my cooking and it's inspired me to cook more often. For lunch today, I stir fried baby bokchoy in oyster sauce; sauted chicken breast in oyster sauce, sweet onions and jalepenos peppers. Vietnamese home style cooking requires one soup dish. The broth should be sweet (not sugar sweet but soupy sweet) with greens to balance the fiery peppers and or salty dishes. Today, I made OnChoy (dark leafy veggies) with shrimp in chicken broth and bean thread vermicilli (made with bean curds and not rice ergo less starch and carbs more protien).

The only missing ingredient to my traditional home style meal is rice, but as Sion puts it, I have green rice.

The problem with Vietnamese Style home cooking is that no one writes down the recipes. I'm making these dishes from memory and from tinkering with the ingredients to adjust the flavors for my likes. That's the point of learning to cook right? To take a dish you like and tailor it even more to your liking.