Update coming soon, but in the meantime: Stay true to yourself

I would like to thank all the people who have been visiting my blog from 2011 (the year I created this blog) until today. I have not posted anything on my blog for more than 3 years, for several reasons. One of the reasons is that I have found a new job which is my first job in Canada. Although I had more than 11 + years of extensive work experience in my field in Europe, the job market in Canada is very different....If you do not have a degree from a Canadian University or work experience in Canada, it is very difficult to get a job in the field you used to work back in your country (with similar level) because Canadian job market is so different and the skill or knowledge you have gained from your country may not be applicable; And even if it is applicable, sadly what I found out is it is usually not based on your skill or knowledge but landing a job is really based on networking and connection.
Many people I have met in Canada gave me a lot of advices in order to get a job...I have heard from creating a LinkedIn account, changing my name into a more Canadian name, to taking an entry level job or applying for a position in a totally different industry. I have considered those advices and whenever I thought to follow one of those advices, the one thing that prevented me to do was this 4 words: "stay true to yourself".
So I did not change my name, I still have a very difficult name to pronounce, I did not settle for an entry job, nor a position in a totally different industry...but yes, I did create my LinkedIn account, which I thought I would never do when I was in Europe. I recall whenever my colleagues in Europe told me to create a LinkedIn account, I would reply them "over my death body"....Again this experience reminds me the proverb "never say never". I found a job in the same industry I used to work in Europe, a position that can be seen as equivalent to the one I used to have in Europe (so horizontal move) and I really enjoy doing my job.

As you may understand, with a new job (first one in Canada), I had to show a stellar performance and this means putting more time at work and less time at home, and no time for updating my blog.
OK...this blog is not about me finding a job in a new country but it is about recipes, so what I want to say is I apologize to any followers or people visiting my blog, for not having any new post since 2011. Now that I have settled down and have a bit more time, I will try my best to update my blog regularly, so just be a bit patient and come back often to my blog. I promise I will put really nice, rare as well as creative recipes.
In the meantime, I put below few pictures of the dishes that my mother has been recently cooked. Her cooking is really the authentic Vietnamese cuisine and she also stays true to herself and her roots.
It is funny because whenever we are traveling with my mom, or whenever she visits me in Canada and I bring her to a Vietnamese restaurant, she will have a lot of comments or critics and will say how she will cook better. Sometimes she will even tell me how to cook the Vietnamese meal that we are eating at the restaurant. Of course we (I and my friends) all know she cooks better than the Vietnamese restaurants that have adjusted their cuisine slightly to accommodate to the local flavor, but we try to tell my mom that it is normal as those are restaurants who are trying to make profit and most owner are not really Vietnamese. We also try to make her understand that it is sometimes nice, just to go to eat without needing to cook and wash dishes. But OK, although I may not agree with most of the things my mom say, I do agree that her cooking is much better than the best rated Vietnamese restaurant.  I think if you taste my mom's dishes, you would probably also complain about the Vietnamese meal you are eating even at the highest rated restaurants. I think the reason why my mom's cooking is really good is also because of those 4 words: stay true to herself.
She did not want to compromise to loose the identity of her dishes, she did not accommodate to any local flavor. She cooks as if she is still in Vietnam.
Long story short, I think you get the point of this post: stay true to yourself no matter what you want to undertake, then you will be successful.
OK, here below are the dishes my mom has recently cooked and she often cooks those dishes more as appetizer than  main courses.
If you are interested in the recipe of any of those dishes, you are welcome to contact me; otherwise just be a bit patient and I will post the recipe in the next few coming posts.
Enjoy it!
 

Tau Fu, Eggplant, Chili filled with shrimp

Banh Beo

Banh Beo with sauce

Sea Cucumber with veggies

Today has been an extremely busy day for me, with unforecasted events and some problems to deal from long distance. With this busy schedule, I did not have a chance to cook much nor take cooking picture. So my mother told me to write about her cooking for today's blog. Since my mom knew about my blog, she has started to take picture of every of her cooking, making my brother to tease her. One of her latest dish is to stir fry "Hoi Sam" with Chinese mushroom and garden pea. If you are not Chinese or if you are not familiar to my phonetic writing style, you would wonder what is "Hoi Sam". "Hoi Sam" is the cantonese word for Sea Cucumber.
The recipe of my mother is very simple. I have not tasted this dish using her recipe but I believe it should be tasty and decent according to the list of ingredients. So here is the recipe for "Stir Fry Sea Cucumber With Veggies".

Ingredients:
300 gram Sea Cucumber
5 Chinese mushroom
10 garden peas (Some people would call it "Holland peas")
1 tablespoon of chopped ginger
a bit of oil


Seasoning:
1 red chili
1 tablespoon of chicken stock
1 teaspoon of Hoi Sin sauce
1 teaspoon of salt

Procedure:
1) Boil the Chinese mushrooms until cooked and parboil the garden pea. When it is done, take it out and set aside.

2) Heat a wok to medium high heat. When the wok is warm, add the oil and the chopped gingers. Stir few seconds then add the Hoi Sam into the wok. Stir fry for 2 to 3 minutes then add the mushrooms and garden pea into the wok. Stir fry for 2 minutes.

3) Add the seasoning into the wok and stir fry for 1 minute then switch off the heat.

As you can see, this recipe in itself quite simple. However, it takes quite some time to prepare and clean the dried Hoi Sam. That is why I usually prefer to eat Hoi Sam at Chinese restaurants. There are several steps to prepare and clean the dried Hoi Sam. An other alternative is to buy the prepared frozen Hoi Sam, however the quality of the frozen ones are usually lower. So if you have to cook Hoi Sam, I would advise you to buy the dried ones.

Enjoy it !

Pho

After having eaten some Chinese and Japanese meal these past days, I wanted to eat a Vietnamese dish. As the weather forecasted some drop in temperature and rain for today, I thought to cook Pho for tonight's dinner since I usually like to eat Pho when the weather is a bit colder. So in the morning, I took various beef meats out of my freezer as I planned to cook it in the afternoon. However, there was no rain nor any drop of temperature today. Since all the various beef meats were already all unfrozen, this leaves me no choice but to cook the Pho dish today.

For people, who do not know what is Pho, here is a brief explanation:
Pho is a famous Vietnamese beef noodle soup, served in a bowl with a specific cut of white rice noodles in clear beef broth, with slim cuts of beef (steak, fatty flank, lean flank, brisket, meatball and even tendon).

To cook Pho, I use the top secret recipe that my mom taught me couple years ago. She always told me that her recipe for Pho is the authentic Vietnamese way to cook and not much people know about it. While I will not take everything my mom says for granted, I have no doubt in her words regarding this authentic recipe. Having travelled a lot around the world, I have had the occasion to eat Pho at several Vietnamese restaurants in Europe (Brussels, The Hague, Paris, Antibes, Cannes, Monaco), North America (Toronto, Houston, Pittsburgh, New York, Madison, Chicago, few island of Hawaii and few cities in New Jersey) and Asia.
I have also seen several recipe for this dish throughout the internet. Personally I think the majority of the Pho recipes on internet do not taste the authentic Pho, and at times, I even wonder why some people post those mediocre recipes. Of course, there are exception but even those exceptions do not meet my standard. I have seen some Pho recipes on internet where the quality of the recipes is OK to eat but I personally would not eat those "OK" Pho. One of my friends used to say that I am picky and having too high standard, but after tasting the Pho I made, he always judges the Pho from any Vietnamese restaurant using my Pho as the benchmark ! It is quite funny to see.

Although the Pho my mom taught me is already the best one I have ever tasted, I still wanted to make it even better. So last year, I have improved her authentic recipe by adding just one simple ingredient, which I could only find in The Netherlands so far. My friend says that my Pho tastes slightly better than the one my mother makes as it is a bit more tasty than the one from my mom. If my dad would be still alive and hear this, he would laugh and says "of course, the student should always become better than the master otherwise there is no improvement in our society."
It is pity that my dad would never be able to taste my Pho cooking. I believe he would love it and say something funny to tease back my mom, which will make me laugh.

So the above picture is a bowl of Pho that I have cooked today from 2 pm to 8 pm. With this amount of cooking time, you can imagine how tasteful is the soup base as the flavor of all the ingredients has been slowly cooked and well dispersed into the soup.
Although the weather was still as warm as yesterday, I still savored every bite of the Pho. I particularly enjoyed this dish with a light breeze coming through my patio door.
Every time my friends eat Pho at my house, they would ask me this top secret recipe. I usually feel sorry to tell them that I cannot give it to them since my mother has passed this on to me and I would only pass this top secret recipe only on to very close friends that I consider as my family. So far, I have passed it on to a very limited amount of close friends who have unconditionally supported me throughout all these years.
Although I cannot disclose my top secret Pho recipe, I would like to recommend you the following two best places to eat Pho:
1) Restaurant Tau Bay in Houston
(8150 SW Fwy, Ste T, Houston, TX 77074. Neighborhoods: Sharpstown, Westwood)

2) Pho 14 in Paris
(129 Avenue de Choisy 75013 Paris 13)

Pho at those restaurants taste good, almost as good as the one my mother or I make. If I have to choose between Tau Bay and Pho 14, I think I prefer to the Pho from Tau Bay as it tastes slightly superior. Furthermore Tau Bay restaurant is more clean than Pho 14 restaurant and the waiters at Tau Bay are much more pleasant.

One thing to note, throughout this post, I have written Pho in a simplified version without any accent as all my friends know the name of this dish by "Pho". However the correct way to write this dish is Phở. 
If you are not living in Houston or Paris, then I would really encourage you to find a good Vietnamese restaurant nearby your area and just give it a try !

Pâtés chauds

Some days ago, I told my mother that I had started to write a blog regarding delicious food around the world. My mother immediately asked me if I had already written about the famous Vietnamese appetizer, called "Pâtés Chauds", that she and my brother usually make whenever they host guests at home or whenever they need to bring some dishes at parties or important events. If you have read and followed my blog, you already know the answer is "no".
So when I told her "no", she immediately started to tell me the stories behind this dish and the outside look of this dish, as if I have never eaten her famous appetizer. Although I have been living in The Netherlands, every time that I would visit her, I always saw my brother making this dish. So of course, I know about this dish but I thought that it was from French cuisine, as my brother can cook quite well French and Italian dishes. Actually, few years ago, before my brother even started to cook this dish, I have eaten this very similar appetizer when I was on vacation in Antibes (South of France).
When my mother realized that I was surprized about the origin of this dish, she started to tell me the stories about the Pâtés Chauds and all the events she and my brother attended and had to make this appetizer.
The next day, I received an e-mail from my brother attaching few pictures of the Pâtés Chauds they have made. My brother also took his time to write me the full recipe.
Although Pâtés Chauds is not in my top 20 favorite appetizers, I have decided to introduce to you this dish, as my mother loves it so much that she kept advertizing it. I am sure she must have nagged my brother to e-mail me the recipe. Actually one of my friend will be quite happy when he sees the below recipe as I know that he enjoyed eating those pâtés chauds at my mother's house.
So for my mother's marketing campaign about this dish, my brother's time, and my friend, here below is the recipe for the pâtés chauds. I have copied and pasted the original recipe (in French). But don't worry, I will put the English translation in pink color.

Pâtés chauds (20 pièces) = Warm Meat Pie (20 pieces)

Ingredients:

A

****

1 oignon haché = 1 chopped onion

1 échalote hachée = 1 chopped shallot

3 gousses d'ail hachées = 3 cloved of garlic

250g de spiringue de porc hachée ou viande hachée porc/veau = As I am not fan of pork, I rarely even buy pork or order pork dish in English speaking countries. Unfortunately, this word is even not in my Robert & Collins dictionary. So I don't know the English translation for "spiringue". It is some parts of the porc that you need to mince/grind in order to obtain ground meat. "Viande hachée porc/veau" means "ground meat pork/veal".

For those who really want to find "spiringue de porc", here is a picture of spiringue de porc:

3/4 teaspoon sel = 3/4 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons poivre = 2 teaspoons peppers

1 teaspoon sucre = 1 teaspoon sugar

1 blanc d'oeuf à mélanger à la viande = 1 egg white to mix with the meat

B

****

de la pâte feuillée = puff pastry (an other name for this pastry is flaky pastry)

2 jaunes d'oeuf pour dorer la pâte = 2 egg yolk to brown the pastry

Procedure:

1. mélanger les ingrédients A = Mix the ingredients under A

2. prendre la pâte feuillée et couper des rectangles de 10x5cm = Take the puff pastry and cut into rectangles of size 10x5 centimeter.

3. déposer sur la première moitié du rectangle de la viande = Lay the meat on the first half of the rectangle

4. rabattre le rectangle en deux pour faire un carré = Close/fold the rectangle to make it a square

5. fermer en pressant les 4 côtés = Close well by squeezing the 4 sides

6. à l'aide d'une fourchette, faire des traits sur les 4 côtés = with the help of a fork, draw some lines on the 4 sides

7. préchauffer le four à 180°C = preheat the oven at 180 degree celsus

8. déposer les pâtés chauds sur une plaque sur du papier de cuisson (papier sulfurisé) et badigeonner les pâtés chauds de jaune d'oeuf pour dorer = lay a greaseproof paper on a medium cooking sheet. In North America, greaseproof paper is known as parchment paper. Then lay the pâtés chauds on top of the greaseproof paper/parchment paper (which is now on top of the cooking sheet). Then brush some egg yolk on the pâtés chauds to brown it

9. enfourner dans le four et cuire pendant 25 min = put these in the oven and cook for 25 minutes

10. sortir les pâtés chauds du four, les retirer de la plaque et les mettre sur une grille = Remove the pâtés chauds out of the cooking sheet and put them on a grill rack.

I hope that my translation skill is enough good for you to understand how to make these pâtés chauds. Although my mother insisted that it is a Vietnamese dish, I still have some doubts as I have seen those pâtés chauds served in South of France and even in North America where they call it "meat pie". I let you judge whether it should be a Vietnamese dish.

Enjoy it !

Suông Noodle Soup

Most people who go to Vietnam or Vietnamese restaurants in Paris often tell me that they love to eat Pho - a special vietnamese beef noodle soup.
Although I also like to eat Pho a lot, for my first blog, I would like to introduce to you an other vietnamese noodle soup that is as much tasteful and delicious as Pho but that is unfortunately less known to people, as it is usually not offered in Vietnamese restaurants in Europe or North America.
This other Vietnamese noodle soup is called Suông - a special noodle soup cooked with a whole chicken and garnished with schrimp mixtures and Vietnamese herbs.
The original recipe is to cook with porc but I have switched it with a whole chicken which makes it taste even better.
The noodle to accompany with Suông soup is a special "Rice Vermicelli"called "Bún bò Huế". There are several brand for this type of noodle, depending on the country where you live. My favorite brand is "Vermicelle de Hue" that can be found in Brussels (Belgium) and Paris (France). I could not find them in Netherlands, New York nor Toronto.

If you cannot find this brand, you may buy another brand for this type of noodle. One of my chinese friend called this type of noodle "Lai Fan".

If you have never eaten Suông, I really advise you to give a try !