Rosemary Almonds

I know, I know. It's been awhile since I've posted. It's been a busy couple months so I haven't had time to sit down and write some entries. The good news is that I already have some ideas in mind. My new year's resolution is to be more active with this blog.

With the holiday season in full gear upon us, this recipe is good for snacking while watching your favorite holiday movie, treats at a holiday party, or giving as small presents to friends and family. It can also be enjoyed throughout the year since it's a very simple and fast recipe.

I apologize for not having a picture at this time but will try to take a picture later and add it.

3-4 Tablespoons olive oil

2 cups almonds (blanched or unblanched, does not matter)

2 Tablespoons fresh rosemary, coarsely chopped

2 Tablespoons dried rosemary

1 Tablespoon coarse/kosher/sea salt

Heat oil in large skillet over medium high heat for a minute. Add the almonds, fresh and dried rosemary. Stir and toss almonds for about 5 minutes, while seasoning with the salt; remove from heat. Let cool in the pan a few minutes.

The almonds can serve immediately, but almonds will keep about a week in sealed containers - enough time to mail them to friends and family!

As most of you know I like experimenting with different flavors and combinations, so I used olive oil infused with herbes de Provence; toasted onion salt, roasted garlic salt, and rosemary salt. We had just gotten a sampler pack of  sea salt from around the world so I just had to try it! 

From my kitchen to yours, please have a safe and Merry Christmas! Thank you for reading and supporting my blog this year, and it can only get better from here. Look forward to more exciting recipes and stories next year!

Second Try

 This is part two of the previous post. I got some feedback from some friends on the last posting. They pointed out that since I don't know what surface I'll be presenting on, the clear plate might distract the judges away from the colors of the food. Also the round plate wasn't as successful with the bowl of fish sauce.

One thing about being a good chef is being able to adapt to make your dish or presentation better so I was open to changing it. I decided on a square plate instead and also a smaller sauce plate so it can fit on the main plate. I think it looks more organized that way.

I tried my mom's technique of pushing the shrimp chips down but they only worked for some of them. Most of them still curled up, especially the colored ones. I found the six best ones for the audition but this batch is the second best six. If I remember correctly, there's two red ones, a green one, and three white ones so it should be colorful.

I'm content with the dish the way it is now. Kelvin suggesting adding lines of Sriricha sauce on the bottom sides of the plate so that the red color makes it pop. Also it can be added to the fish sauce for some extra heat. I'm still contemplating on that part, or maybe little dots. It's going to be a last minute decision for me.

There Can Be Only One...Dish That Makes the Difference, That is

As most of my friends know, I am auditioning for Season 4 of MasterChef this Saturday. I have been quite nervous about it since food is really my passion and I would love to get onto the show. For the audition, I have to bring a dish to the site and then there's 3-5 minutes to plate it. They will be judging on presentation and taste. Since there's no cooking on-site(we have to bring all food, plates, utensils, etc), I figured I have to make something that will taste good when it's not heated up.

To showcase my Asian based cooking skills, I decided to do something Vietnamese because some of the flavor blends are intense, the colors are bright, and it's MC-worthy. One of my favorite dishes to make and eat is a cabbage salad. It contains cabbage with a sweet onion vinaigrette, pickled daikon radish and carrots, pork belly, shrimp, fresh Asian herbs, peanuts, and topped with nuoc mam cham(a Vietnamese fish sauce mixture). It is served with multi-colored shrimp chips on the side. I love the sound of the shrimp chips sizzling when you put the salad and the sauce on top of it. I will post the recipe of it next week since I'm taking this week to focus on the audition.

I already have most of the ingredients prepped, so I made the dish last night to practice putting it together on Saturday. My mom, unfortunately,  hasn't really been supportive of my cooking venture, only that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I sent a picture  of the finished dished to her and she actually said it looked good, but told me that I don't know how to fry the shrimp chips. Apparently to keep them from curling up(like the pink ones), I need to push them down into the oil when they're frying. That's how they stay flat when they plump up. I will keep that in mind when I do the batch for the auditions. Since they will be flatter, I'm considering arranging them "interlocking" as an arch on half of the plate. 

The taste, however, was perfect and I think I'm ready to WOW them with my skills! I will keep you posted on what happens next. Stay tuned next week for two recipes: this dish and one for my lemongrass pork with rice noodles and fresh vegetables.

Swiss Chard and Eggplant Recipe

A couple of weeks ago, my boyfriend had a healthy cooking in-service day at work. The chef (Cooking With Chef Kate) that was there taught the people how to cook with fresher and healthier ingredients. She brought some Swiss chard from her kitchen to give out for people to go home and cook. John was one of the lucky recipients of the gorgeous rainbow Swiss chard. I had never made it before but had eaten it many times so I know what it tasted like. As we were grocery shopping for that night's dinner(shepherd's pie), I was trying to figure out what tastes would compliment the meal and also be a great color with Swiss chard. Funny enough, we were walking down the aisles of produce and suggesting different vegetables to add and all of it sudden it clicked in my brain: eggplant. I love the purplish skin and the color it turns when you fry it up. We went back and found a big fat Italian eggplant to add to the dish. We ended up using only half of it and stored the remaining half for another meal. Remember, when storing it in a air tight container, you can add salt to it or brush it with lemon juice to prevent it from discoloring too much.

One thing with my recipes is that I try to use whatever is in the house so you don't have to go out to specifically get everything in the recipe. Just substitute it for something similar to it in your house and I'm sure it will still taste great!

Start off by slicing the eggplant into cube sized pieces. Use about the same amount as how much Swiss chard you have. Heat and oil a saute pan over medium heat with porcini oil. Add the eggplant and fry until lightly brown. While the eggplant is frying, strip the leaves from the stems of the Swiss chard, and separate the colorful stems from the green leaves. Chop the stems and and shred the leaves, and place in two separate piles. Also mince half a small yellow onion and slice the other half. Chop two cloves of garlic as well. The eggplant should be ready by now -  set the eggplant aside in a bowl and keep it in a place where it stays warm. Next, oil the same pan with some lightly toasted sesame oil. Add the garlic and minced onions into the oil and stir-fry until they are softened and translucent. Next, add the chard stems into the pan. Stir fry them for 3-4 minutes so they soften. Then add the chard into the pan. It should wilt and emit some liquid. If not enough liquid comes out, add about 1/4 cup of water(or accordingly) to make sure it doesn't get too dry. Add the sliced onions at this point. Stir and toss the vegetables in the pan until they soften up, but still leaving a crunchy texture. Add the eggplant into the pan and add salt and pepper to season. I like a little spice in my vegetables so I added some (whole) Apache peppers from our container garden
 at the end for taste. If you add hot peppers, take them out right before serving.

If you try this recipe, please send pictures and let me know how it turns out for you! Bon appetit!

Pick the ugly ones!

This week, I am in Detroit visiting family and friends so I won't be cooking anything. So instead, I will bring you a story about two of my favorite seafood selections: oysters and crab legs.

One of my family's favorite pastimes is going to buffets. Ever since I was a little kid and discovered a Chinese buffet in St. Louis, I always enjoyed going to buffets just because I can taste so many different things without ordering just one dish. If I didn't like it, then I would just leave it on the plate and get something else. I know, think of the starving people out there, but trust me, some of this stuff you wouldn't wish your worst enemy to eat! My family would always go to Chinese/Asian buffets just because of the selection and my dad also preferred to eat the crab legs there. This man can go through many platefuls of crab legs. Sometimes we would be sitting there for hours and waiting for him to finish. The running joke was that the restaurant was losing more money the longer my family was in there. So yes, I got my love of seafood from my dad.

Two of the casino buffets in Detroit have seafood night. As I was craving crab legs, I asked if we could go tonight to appease my craving for those delicious sea creatures. While waiting in line, my parents were recounting the last few times they were at this place eating crab legs. They described it as plump and meaty, sweet and tasty, and very bountiful because there wasn't many people around, unlike tonight. Then my dad said he's been doing an experiment the last few times and told us to "Pick the ugly ones!" Apparently he thinks that the ones that aren't as bright in color or darker with a few spots or imperfections on the shell have the meat more intact so it's easier(and meatier) to eat. I told him that he was crazy and I don't like looking at the ugly ones. It's that bright red-orange color that I love to see. The brighter, the more odds that I'm going to pick them! I told him that I would try his test tonight and see if it's true.(My dad thinks he knows everything.)  Even though I tried it and some of the "ugly" ones did have meatier claws and they were easier to get the meat out in one pull, I don't think that rule really applies. What do other people think?

I'm still sticking with the whole presentation part of it and the prettier the crab claws are, the more likely I'm going to like the presentation of the food. That picture is my first plate of crab legs and oysters with some lemon to squeeze on top and also drawn butter for the crab legs. That indeed is a great color scheme and a delicious meal! Thanks mom and dad!

I will give tips on how to break crab legs to make them easier to eat in a later blog entry. Maybe I'll even post a video showing you how I do it!

Welcome to my colorful culinary world!

Ever since I was a little kid, I have always enjoyed cooking for people, even if it was just simple stuff like fried eggs for my parents' friends during poker night. I always told them that one day I would grow up and have my own food stand or restaurant like a lot of people did back in my native Vietnam. I was very fortunate to have my parents expose me to many different flavors and ingredients in the culture that I left there to come to America and pursue my dreams. As I grew up, I realized that not only do I enjoy eating many types of cuisines, but my passion for food and cooking is boundless.

With my origins in Vietnamese and Asian cooking, I started venturing out and discovering new wonderful tastes and infused them into my background. Being a fan of chemistry, I experimented with combining different flavors and found a lot of combinations that worked and some that didn't! From then on, my cooking became very eclectic in tastes, flavors, ingredients, and presentations.

The name of this blog is called Cooking Chromatically because I love to make my food very colorful. Sometimes I have used colors as well as flavors to decide what to add to a dish. I have always believed that food should always be appealing to the eye as well as your taste buds. Whenever I post pictures of my food on my Facebook page, my goal is to make my friends drool from seeing them. I have done my job if that is the case. That goes into the other reason for the name: chromatically could be interpreted as "with hue", and with my name being Hieu, it's a play on words!

In this blog, you will find many facets of food. Of course, there will be recipes and pictures of my food, but there will also be stories of how a dish developed and evolved, kitchen disasters, and people and things that influence my meals.  As I'm not much of a measuring kind of guy, I will try to give a formal recipe but I will also walk you through the cooking process until it becomes an amazing colorful dish on your table. I will also talk about ingredients, give background on them, and give tips on where to find them. I will also give insight into how I present my food for the greatest impact. I will post about places I visit and dishes of others that I enjoy as well. Who knows, it might lead to a dish in my own kitchen someday!

As you can tell by now, food really excites me! I hope you enjoy reading my blog as much as I will enjoy writing about it and welcoming you into my culinary world. I'm always open to questions, suggestions, and requests. You can email me at cookingchromatically@gmail.com.