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.