Making Foods at Home

Nowadays, we all are too busy to work and forget how to live. One of the good way to enjoy life is to eat foods, and no restaurant can prepare foods as good as you can at home. It takes a little learning(to cook), but you would get there if you put your heart in it. I found cooking to be a good hobby to have. The sky is the limit for your creativity, and yet you do not trash your house, because you consume and enjoy your creativity to the belly.

People do not know how much they miss when they do not cook at home. First, during a hard economy like we are having right now, one can save a lot of money preparing foods at home. Just think, a restaurant would charge you $5.00 for a bowl of "Polenta", you can make a bowl of "Grits" for less than 25c, same ingredients. We consider ourselves very fortunate to have time to prepare our meals everyday. When we craved for something, we made it. We saw something good on the food shows on TV, we made it. We eat 4 stars, 5 stars restaurant foods just about everyday at the fraction of the costs. Secondly, cooking at home put one in total control of what he/she would consume, in quality as well as quantity. When you ate out in a restaurant, if you noticed, they always gave you a bigger portion than you could or wanted to eat. It was not because they were nice to you, but because they forced you to buy more than you really intended. Unless you paid an arm and a leg at a high price "upscale" restaurant, most of the foods you ate usually came out of different cans that were mixed together at the premise.

We have been baking breads at home for a while now. Besides the costs saving factor, the smell and the taste of a loaf of freshly baked bread was truly the smell of heaven. We also started to grow our own herbs and vegetable indoor, thanks to the Aerogarden system. We eat a lot of different kinds of herbs as salad and they are hard to find at local grocery store. Now we have them.

All in all, we really have a kick out of making foods at home. We let our creativity run wild, we have fun, and best of all, we can really enjoy our craft to the heart,

Chicken w/Herbes de Provence

Weekly Menu

Every week we make a weekly menu. It serves two purposes, one is that it helps the shopping list and two is that we don't have to worry about what to eat for the day. For a while, we had problems with buying foods and they went bad in the refrigerator, especially vegetables. Thanks to the weekly menu, we just bought the vegetables that we would use for the week.

Our weekly menu varied week to week. We could go Chinese one week, then Vietnamese in another week, American, Mexican and so on. The weekly menu could also be sandwich week, pasta week, stew week, "bad" week(fast food type foods), etc...

This week, we decided that we would go French:

Tues: Chicken breast in Herbes de Provence.

Weds: Pot au feu

Thurs: Coq au Vin

Fri: Salmon w/ Mustard_Herb Butter

Sat: Roast pork tenderloin

Every country has certain generic ingredients that would be used in most of its dishes. For Vienamese, they are salt, pepper, onion, garlic, fish sauce. For Chinese, soy sauce, ginger, onion, garlic, sesame oil. For Mexican, chili, onion, garlic, oregano, cumin, salt, pepper.For French, carrots, celery, onion, garlic, thyme, parsley, wine, butter(don't dare to ignore it).

Today, We chopped up bunch of carrots, celery, onion, garlic and divided them into two bowls. In one of the bowl, we added fish sauce, white wine, herbes de provence to marinate some chicken breasts that we will cook tonight. In the other bowl, we added red wine, oregano, thyme, again, fish sauce, to marinade a cut-up chicken for coq au vin which we would cook the next day.

People tend to be intimidated by French cooking. But if you sit back, take a deep breath and look at the whole picture, you will find that the French cooks do not use any cooking methods that are different from what we are using everyday. Ooo!La!La!, you have to make the sauce! No big deal. Sometime, they just simply added some butter then cook down the cooking liquid to few tablespoons, the sauce would thicken somewhat. It's not necessary that all sauces have to be thick. If you want to make a thick sauce, you always first make a "roux, cook a roughly equal part of butter and flour in a sauce pan for few minutes, then add the liquid a little bit at a time to achieve your thickness preference. The amount of time that you cook the flour/butter mixture, depends on the color of the roux you want( the darker the color, the longer the time). The liquid that you add to the roux could be wine, stock or just plain water.

The procedure for the chicken in Herbes de Provence is pretty straight forward. First, we take the chicken pieces out of the marinate and brown them in all sides. Remove the chicken,

then add the vegetables(and mushroom, optional) and the marinade liquid into the pan and cook down the liquid somewhat. Drain the liquid through a sieve. Start a roux with about one tablespoon of butter and equal part of flour. We only want to cook the roux for a minute or two, because this is a light color sauce, then add the marinate liquid, a little butter and taste for seasoning. If needed, ad some salt and pepper. Put the chicken pieces, mushrooms back into the pan, cook for about 10/15 minutes until they are tender.

GOOD FOODS DON'T HAVE TO BE COMPLICATED

My concept of a good dish is that the ingredients have to compliment each other in taste. In some occasions, contrasting flavors work well together, but it is rare. More than often, good foods can be created in a most simple way, with just few ingredients. I also believe that our ancestors were always right. Why change something that has worked for thousands of years? We can create new dishes, change them to suit our tastes, but we have to respect those that are called "classic" and leave them alone.

One nice thing about Vietnamese foods is that they rarely require a lot of spices. If you have salt, pepper, onions, garlic, fish sauce in your pantry, you are ready to cook a lot of Vietnamese dishes. Another plus about Vietnamese foods is that you do not have to worry about whether you have seasoned your foods enough. People can add fish sauce at the table to suit their taste. As a reason, when you cook Vietnamese foods, or foods of any cuisine, you rather under season than over season. You can add, but you cannot subtract.

There is a Vietnamese stew that can't be simpler in anyway to prepare, but it's delicious. All you need is a stock pot, pork meat cut into chunks, potatoes. Cover the ingredients with water, season with fish sauce, pepper, onion, garlic. Cover the pot and cook until the meats and potatoes are tender. You can adjust the taste with more salt or fish sauce before serving. You can save time by cooking this dish in a pressure cooker, or using a slow cooker overnight. It's a one pot dish with everything thrown in at the same time. It can't be simpler than that!

From this dish as a starter, you can add galanger, turmeric, lemon grass, yogurt and maybe a little bit of vinegar to give it a mild sour taste, you have a classic North Vietnamese stew. Otherwise, a little curry powder, some coconut milk, few bay leaves can be added to the dish to make a perfect curry.