Should Girls Learn How to Cook?

Should Girls Learn How to Cook?

I am an Asian girl, and by learning everything from my mom’s life, I know that every Asian girl when she grows up has to know how to cook to serve her own family. To me, that is my happiness and pleasure, but some girls complain that cooking is a job for a maid, and it takes their time. They think that after a long day at work, ladies need some time to relax and take care of themselves by going shopping, hanging out with friends, and by going to do their nails. Thus, studying about how to cook is an unnecessary part of their lives. However, I do not agree with them because I find many positive values in learning how to cook. Cooking is relaxing, it connects people and builds relationships, it helps to save money, a homemade food is healthier than restaurant food, and cooking demonstrates that a cook is a grown up person.

            First of all, I agree that we ladies need time to do something for ourselves. We deserve to be treated well after a long day at work because men do not know how stressed ladies can be at work, and maybe men cannot know what ladies think and feel. We ladies are totally different than men. Men are often simple; they just need to wear neat clothes to go to work, finish everything on time, and then they go home, but women are pickier and more thorough than men. We want to have a good-looking appearance whenever we step out the door. Furthermore, we do not just want to finish our work on time, but we also want it done perfectly, so no one can find any faults. Thus, to relieve our stress, we need time to go to a spa to massage our body to have perfect skin on which to wear our lovely clothes. We need time to go to a nail shop to paint our nails, so any one looking at us will think that we are perfect ladies. We also need time to go shopping to buy some more new dresses or shirts to wear to work or hang out with friends. Thinking about having time to relax and make ourselves look good makes us ladies feel so happy and want to live longer to enjoy our lives. However, cooking is also one method of relaxing, too.

            Cooking is a good way to reduce stress. To me, when I am cooking, that is the most peaceful moment because I can be who I am. I turn my favorite song on as loud as my stereo allows, take off my beautiful dress which is so uncomfortable, and I put on baggy clothes, which are so comfortable because cooking time is a period to be myself, and I do not care about simulating a perfect lady with a ton of make up on my face or awkward high heels on my feet. I always have to act like a professional at work with a super clean and neat table, and now it is time to let things be free. Who cares about a dirty table filled with power, sugar, salt, and eggs! I will clean it after I finish cooking everything. Cooking is a way to relieve stress from work. Today at work, my old co-worker who I really hate wore the exact dress I just bought yesterday, and I had to be nice to her. When I got home, I could not keep my feelings inside anymore, and I needed to throw them out. I chopped carrots, and I imagined the carrots were her. Now she is under my control. By the time I have finished the dishes, every stress has gone. Additionally, cooking is also a way to connect people and build relationships, too. For example, I can invite my new co-worker to my house. While cooking, I can learn more about her by asking questions about her life, and we can have fun together. After all of this, I will have a new friend.

            Additionally, I think that knowing how to cook is so helpful for everyone. Cooks can save some money by not going out to eat and by starting to cook at home. They can make sure that they will stay healthy. As you know, the food customers eat in any restaurant is never guaranteed one hundred percent to be good for them. To have a lot of profit, restaurant owners often make their chefs re-use oil when they make any fried dish, and the chefs use imitation powders to make food taste good. For example, chefs put beef powder in broth to make a Pho taste because the powder costs less than the cost of buying the bones needed to cook Pho and to pay for the gas to cook it. Of course, that is not good for people’s health. Thus, to me, I would like to buy ingredients and go home and cook what I like. Furthermore, I can eat those foods for a week, and I know I am still healthy. I also can save some money for my piggy bank to buy some more new clothes for myself.

            A person who knows how to cook can take good care of herself and the people around her. Almost every teenager wants to move out when she is eighteen, and she thinks that she is old enough to live her life without her parents. However, I wonder how she can live if she cannot cook. In the United States, a person has so many fast foods to choose from, such as cookies, chips, cup cakes. She can eat these for a meal or whenever she is hungry, but they are not good. For example, for breakfast, she has a cup cake. For lunch, she has a double meat hamburger, and for dinner, she has a cookie. Those are not meals. What a person needs to eat after a long day at work or school is food including every vitamin. Food such as fish, vegetables, rice, and milk include many vitamins, such as vitamins A, B, and C. Eat like a human! Thus, a person who wants to tell her parents that she is a grown girl and who desires her parents’ permission to move out needs to show them that she can cook. She can cook a good meal for herself everyday. Moreover, knowing how to cook is really helpful when someone around her gets sick. Instead of running to buy soup from a restaurant which may not be open at midnight, she can cook at home. By the time she finishes, she can feed her patient.

            Cooking is hard work, but a person can find many positive values from cooking if she tries,for example, cooking is one way to relax and connect with people, the cook will stay healthy, she can save money by not going out to eat, and the cook can take good care of herself and others. I can find much happiness and many positive aspects when I cook, so I think you can, too. If girls decide to cook, they just need to keep in their minds that they should not make themselves feel forced to cook. Girls need to make cooking feel like a pleasure because food is the best gift a person can give to others.

                                                                                                 

MSG

MSG

I heard somewhere that “ Good taste is never good for you.” I know that to make food have a good taste, chefs always put something inside it like magic to create a delicious taste, but what they put in is not always good for humans’ health. Usually, delicious food is never good for people, and bland foods are always good for us. However, most people like to eat foods with a better taste, and they ignore the harm of food additives. Do these people know the effects of eating the food additives? It is really simple. You eat the food additives, and later, it will affect your brain and your skin.

            Asian people have a special spice, called MSG sodium. The full name is Monosodium Glutamate. It was first produced in Japan in 1908. Every time Asian people cook a meal for their families, they never forget to put some MSG in their soup, fried chicken, or fried vegetables. This spice makes people feel like eating that food. For example, every time when my dad wants to have a good sauce to eat with any dish, he always adds one spoonful of MSG to the sauce. MSG will reduce the salty taste of the sauce. However, those who eat MSG will get some side effects, and depending on who they are, it will affect them in different ways; for example, eaters who have an allergy to MSG will feel numb around their mouths. If eaters often suffer from headaches, then they will get a headache or dizziness. MSG also will make eaters feel hot at your throat, arm, or chin, and hurt your chest. Some people may have a problem with nausea. Moreover, in some serious cases, people who have asthma will have trouble breathing, and they may need emergency medical help. No matter how much MSG a person puts in her food, it still causes her to have side effects. If she puts on too much in her food, such as two or three spoonfuls, the effects will come really quickly. However, if she puts only one spoonful into her food, the effects still come, but later.

            I think when you just read my blog, you will not believe the effects of MSG, and you may need to see obvious evidence. Thus, I will be your evidence. After eating MSG, I feel exactly what I have written above. Last month, I went to a Chinese buffet restaurant with my boyfriend. It is called Hot And Cold Buffet Restaurant. I really like fried frog legs, and I ate two of them. After I finished my second frog leg, I saw some little white things on it. I checked it, and I think you know what I found. Those were pieces of MSG. That night, my head felt so dizzy that I wanted to vomit, and I was busy running between my room and the restroom all night. I promised my boyfriend that I will never go back there again. However, one thing I also want to stress is that if chefs do not put MSG in the foods, I think nobody will want to eat them. 

 

While writing this essay, I surfed the Internet, and I found some more consequences of eating MSG, which I had never thought about. http://tintuccaonien.com/docs/docs_4/4_1_204.htm. What I mentioned earlier about side effects happens immediately when you eat MSG, and now I will give you complex symptoms and side effects which will happen later. MSG causes Alzheimers and health issues. Because MSG contains chemicals called excitotoxins, it will cause brain damage and wound the central nervous system. The excitotoxins tend to damage the hypothalamus of a brain, which controls important functions like growth, sleep, age of puberty, and appetite. After a long time, when you have consumed a ton of MSG in your stomach and it has penetrated to your brain, you will start forgetting everything, you cannot have a good sleep, and you will lose control of your eating habits. Thus, when MSG inhibits functions of the hypothalamus, it can cause long term negative impacts like obesity, sleep disorders, and other reproductive issues.

How to solve this problem? Do we have any way to use MSG without having side effects, and can we still have a good meal to eat? Can we guarantee that no one who eats it will not get sick? The answer is really easy: people need to check the ingredient information before they decide to buy any material to cook for their family, or stop the habit of eating at some restaurants and start to cook at home. Homemade food is the best. We have many kinds of spices to choose from, and MSG is not the only spice to make foods taste good. If you still do not trust those seasonings, you can make spices by yourself, such as a vegetarian seasoning which is made from vegetables or meat seasoning which is made from meat. It absolutely will take a long time to do, but you can guarantee that it is good for those who eat your food. Otherwise, if you abuse MSG like my dad, he always add one spoonful of MSG in whatever he eats, you need a trick to deal with MSG. You can use MSG to cook, but you have to know exactly the method of how to use it without causing side effects later, such as how high of a temperature to cook foods at, and trying to put as little on as you can, just enough to treat the person eating your food.

Spring Rolls and Kimbap

Spring Rolls And Kimbap

Do you like Asian food, and what kind of a food is your favorite? Before I moved to the United States, I thought nobody knew about my country’s food. However, I was so wrong. After I had been here for five months, and when I could speak English to people here, I figured out that many Americans and other foreigners also know Pho and spring rolls, which are two popular dishes from my country. And I also found out one dish from Korea can even compare to the spring rolls. That is Kimbap. Spring rolls and Kimbap are two popular dishes from Asia. Even though these are two kinds of dishes, they have some aspects which are familiar, but some are different. I promise that no one, who after trying Kimbap and spring roll, will say, “ no, I do not like them.”

First, I want to describe what Kimbap and spring roll are, so you will know what I am writing about. Most people who have traveled to Korea are addicted to K-pop, or Korea drama, and they will know what Kimbap is. By watching Korean movies or listening to Korean music, people will see that the characters always eat one dish, or they will see how after school, teenage girls will stop at some fast food stores, which are next to the school, and eat things which are wrapped in a green paper and have a lot of color inside, like yellow, orange, green, and white. That is Kimbap. Can you image how it looks in your mind now? And people who have traveled to Sai Gon in South Viet Nam, have to know what spring rolls are. It is one of the dishes which cannot be absent from Vietnamese traditional food. Like Korean Kimbap, spring rolls are also the best dish for teen-ages to eat after school. I can remember a time when I was in Viet Nam. Every afternoon after class, when my friend asked me, “ Where do you want to go today, Nica?” The spring roll house was always the number one answer in my mind. By the way, the Vietnamese name for spring rolls is Goi Cuon.

The similarities between Kimbap and Goi Cuon are the following these are made from fresh materials, mostly contain vegetables, are rolled like a cylinder, and these are nonfat foods. Kimbap is made with yellow radishes, spinach, cucumbers, carrots, and rice for customers who are vegetarians. And the chef will add crab meat, egg, and ham to serve non-vegetarians. Then the chef will wrap those materials in seaweed. Spring rolls are also made with almost the same materials, but different kinds of vegetables. The kinds of vegetables Vietnamese use to make spring rolls are lettuce, basil, and Vietnamese perilla. Beside that, people who are non-vegetarians like to add pork belly, fried eggs, and baby shrimp in too. Instead of using rice like in the core of Kimbap, Vietnamese chefs use other kinds of ingredients, which are also made from rice, but in a different form. That is the Vietnamese rice noodle. After that, everything will be rolled in rice paper. A reason why people like these dishes is because people can eat spring rolls in to ways. What I wrote earlier is for people who like meat, and the other way is for vegetarians. Instead of pork, baby shrimp, egg, or crabmeat, we can use fake meat, vegetables, or a tofu for the core. Thus, both of them are healthy foods for everybody and ladies who are on a diet. Furthermore, they are two popular dishes for teen-ages. If you go to Korea and Vietnam, you will easily see these foods on the streets, or in any snack store. These are so cheap, so most consumers are students.

However, kimbaps and spring rolls also have some different aspects. First, Kimbap is from Korea, which some people call Kimchi country, and spring rolls are from Vietnam, where Pho comes from. More than that, Kimbap is wrapped in seaweed, and spring rolls are wrapped in rice paper. The seaweed is made by a plant under the sea. After picking it, it will be washed, cut, and pressed it into paper, then dried. In comparison, rice paper comes from a hot pot of rice flour and water, and it is steamed on a flat cloth. Then it is dried under the hot sun for at least 2 hours.  Rice paper has a round shape like a moon, but the seaweed has a rectangular shape . Because they come from two different locations, one from under water, and one from land, each has a different taste. Seaweed has the smell of salt, and the ocean, but it has a bland taste. Rice paper has no smell, but it has a slightly salty taste. The best way to eat seaweed is with hot steamed rice. The rice will make the seaweed softer, and you can smell the strong aroma of the seaweed. The best way to enjoy rice paper is to dip it in hot water, and eat it with hot steamed rice or with Vietnamese noodles, these ingredients will make the rice paper soft and tender. You only can smell what the food is by eating it because no word can describe how the food tastes. You should try it by using your nose to smell it and your mouth to taste it. Moreover, these food also have a different color. Seaweed is a green color of the plant, and rice paper is the white color of rice. Beside that, those dishes are served with the special sauces. The sauce to go with Kimbap is soy sauce or a sticky rice cake – dukbokki sauce. Spring rolls come with a soy bean sauce, small fibers of carrots, white radishes, and crushed fried peanuts. If you like it spicy, you can add some chili pepper in too.
 

Foods always have magic. We can create a new dish from the original one. Kimbap and spring rolls are great examples. They come from different countries, but they are the same kind of food. If you are a gourmet, you love to travel and try new foods. You will easily compare all of the foods in the world. When you read a comparison article or essay about foods, the food critic just writes about his/her opinion. Do not follow his/her advice. Instead, you should try both dishes because the food critic might be wrong. What he/she likes may not exactly be what you like. This is just a subjective idea. Thus, articles comparing foods are very useful for people who love to eat, but do not want to order a dish that they cannot eat. I hope after you read my comparison essay between Kimbap and spring roll, you will know more about them, and give your love to Asian food.

Do You Kow How to Make Banh Tet ?

                Do You Know How to Make Banh Tet ?

           

            Banh Tet is a special Vietnamese dish  to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which called Tet. According to tradition, everybody gathers at the house of the oldest person in the family on the last day of the old year to clean up the house and get ready for the first day of the New Year together. Of course, people will make Banh Tet on that day. Because of tradition, on New Year's Eve, everybody in the family will also pray to the Vietnamese deity to bless the land, house, and the family, and people offer a plate with five kinds of fruit and Banh Tet. Those are things which cannot be absent in the first three days of the New Year. Usually, people will make Banh Tet at home, so every family member will sit together, talk about their past year, and wait until it is ready. The eldest person will teach the youngest family member how to make Banh Tet. In this way, everybody in the family will know how to make it. Banh Tet will be easy to make for people who know how to make it, but it will be much challenge for those who cannot cook. There are three parts to cook Banh Tet: prepare the materials, fold the Banh Tet, and cook it. If you miss any of these steps, your Banh Tet will not come out delicious. Thus, you also need to be patient.   

            The first part is to prepare the materials. Banh Tet is made with sticky rice, mung beans and  pork, wrapped in a banana leaf and tied by a cord. Thus, what you need to get ready is the banana leaf, sticky rice, meat, mung beans, and the cord. In Vietnam, my family always used a banana leaf from my back yard, so we could save some money. If you do not have a banana leaf at home, you can buy one at a market. When you use a home grown banana leaf, you need to spend a lot of time cleaning and drying it. If you buy the banana leaf, you just need to clean it a little bit. I will give you a tip about how to know which is a good banana leaf. The tip is to choose a big and dark green leaf, so when you fold your Banh Tet, you will have more room for everything that goes inside. A second thing that is also important ingredients to make your Banh Tet good or not, which is the core. For those who are vegetarian, you can skip this step, and to who like meat, you have to remember to use a special cut of pork to make this dish, which is the belly. After you have washed it, cut it the same length of the Banh Tet you want to make. Next, put as much salt, sugar, and onion as you wish, and mix it with the pork belly. Do not put in too much salt or sugar, and then let it sit there as long as you can. I recommend you let it sit overnight. The third thing needed is the sticky rice. You soak it in water at least overnight. To make the coloring for it, you need the green color of a polium sauropi or a pandan, which are vegetables. You can buy one of them at the Asian market. You need to wash it good, pound it, and then wring it to get the green color from it. The sticky rice that has sat in water over night should be dry. And you should blend it together with the green color you just made. For the mung beans, you can choose a kind without a skin. After washing them, put them in a pot with a little bit of water. Boil them until the mung beans turn tender. Then, you need to cool them down on a large plate. Then, knead them into a cylinder, and put the pork you already made inside it. Finally, you finished the first part. I know it took a long time to prepare everything, but think about when it is done. You will feel happy and want to try what you have put a lot of work into. So be patient!

   

              Before you start the next part, which is folding the Banh Tet, you need to ready the water that you will use to boil the Banh Tet later. Normally, people cook it only once, so use the biggest pot you have. Fill the pot with water to three fourths full, and turn the heat to low. In Viet Nam, when making Banh Tet, almost everyone uses wood to cook because it is cheap and traditional. By the time you finish folding your Banh Tet, your water will be ready. Before you start folding, you should know that you need to be really meticulous, and your Banh Tet will be pretty or not depends on how meticulous you are. First you need to choose a comfortable position because this step also takes a long time. Where you want to do the folding, spread out a big blanket. You need this because you do not want to mess up your pretty house. Then, put the core, sticky rice, banana leaves that you had made on the blanket, and let's start. In a banana leaf, put 1 cup of sticky rice. Put a cylinder of mung bean and pork on top of the sticky rice and fold the rest of the banana leaf into a cylinder. To finish this step, you have to follow every step I mentioned earlier. If not, your Banh Tet will not be Banh Tet. Use a cord to tie what you just folded, and use your strength to tie it as tightly as you can. This step is really important. If the cord is not tight enough, your Banh Tet will fall apart.

           The last part is the easiest, but you also need to be careful. When you see the water is boiling, carefully put each Banh Tet, one by one, inside the pot. Otherwise, the boiling water could burn you. If you are cooking two kinds of Banh Tet, vegetarian and non-vegetarian, you need two pots to cook them separately. After you put them inside, close the lid, and keep the heat on medium. While waiting for it to be ready, you can do something instead like clean your house, or cook another thing for the New Year. However, you have to go check it every ten minutes. Make sure the heat is still on. If you use an electronic cooker, you do not have to check the heat, but you need to refill the pot with water when you see it is dry. Usually, it takes nine to twelve hours to cook. Thus, patience is an important thing for a chef to have to make this dish. With my experience, if you put your Banh Tet in a pot at 10 in the morning, by 9 at night, it will be ready to take out. When you take them out, take them out one by one, and put them in cool water for a few minutes to cool them down. This way, your Banh Tet will be soft and tender.

            Even though I am not in Vietnam anymore, and my family and I cannot follow every Tet tradition, but we always try to cook Banh Tet at home to keep some air of Tet here. As an elder Vietnamese said, “ It's not important where you are now, just know that you are Vietnamese. You need Banh Tet, leopard flower, and a plate with five kinds of fruit on your table for Lunar New Year.” We made fake leopard flowers, have some fruits, and Banh Tet. We just wait for the count down in Viet Nam. At one o'clock A.M, we say “ Happy Lunar New Year”. I hope that you can make a delicious Banh Tet the way I have showed you. Good luck and Happy Lunar New Year!
   

I Love To Cook, Do You ?

As humans, we have a mouth to eat, to survive, to know what is the best food, and eat to learn more about a food. The best way to learn about a food is to try to cook it. For me , eating is also a way to enjoy my life, and of course, my life will not be perfect if I do not try to learn how to cook . I love using my hand to feel a tomato's shape, and using my tongue to feel how my chicken soup will be different if I put too much sugar or salt in it. Thus, the reason why I picked a recipe blog is : cooking is my life.

 You may like to design clothes, and you may also like to sing. I do too, but my love for cooking is more than these. I cook when I have trouble, when I do not want to face a bad truth, when I am in a bad mood, or when I need to think about a dilemma. I stay in my kitchen, chop ahead of a garlic, or wash a cucumber, and think about what happened . That way, I can face the truth in an indirect way. I also can solve my problem, or make a hard choice that I will not regret, and when I feel lonely, like Laurie Colwin said on Goodreaders website , “No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, and the wisdom of cookbook writers.” I will not be alone when tomatoes peppers, onions, and carrots are around me.

I love to cook because this is a way to show my love. “There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves”, said Thomas Wolfe. The shortest way to a man's heart is through his belly. I love to cook for my love. I want to give the best in the world to him, and make sure that he will not get sick by what he eats. Also, I love to cook for my family, and this is the sweetest action to show my love and my respect to my parents. My brother likes my chicken baked with onion, ginger ,and lemongrass. My boyfriend likes everything I cook. My best friend loves my rice paper mix. Nothing makes me happier than seeing people around me eat my food and say “ t is so delicious , Nica.”

Cooking helps me to learn . Learning how to cook taught me how to become a good wife, how to be a good boss of my kitchen, about differences in food between countries, and about English too. When I first started, I felt so scared and nervous . I could not fry an egg with hot oil, the most easy recipe in the world, but I could not do it because I worried the hot oil would burn my hand. But after a time, I learned more, and could control everything. I made it work for me. I learned , “ turn the gas low when you put a chicken in, and make sure that everything is dried before you put in a hot oil.” Beyond that , I also learned about "kimpap and sushi". These are spring rolls in my country, but Kimpap comes from Korea and " sushi" comes from Japan. Cooking could improve my English skills, I know more vocabulary about food, like lemongrass , ginger, chive, tofu , and gold fish, seaweed.

Cooking develops my creativity. By not following every step or recipe to cook a soup, I can create a new soup , and rename it by my name , or make it suitable to my family's taste. The rule is, there is not only one way to cook a dish. People can take a short cut to get to a destination . As when you follow a recipe to bake a chicken,you need one hour to bake it, but when it is done , the chicken will be firm as a rock. However, if you boil a chicken first, and then bake it, the chicken will be tender ,more delicious, and cook faster .A chef will not be successful if the food he or she cooks does not fit with a diner's taste. I can make a delicious spaghetti by following a formula, but my family will not eat it. I can use my creativeness to add some salt or draw out some cheese to make a food fit with my family's taste.    

I love to cook, and my love for cooking will never fade. I never want to stay where I am and be left behind. I want to learn more and more about food. I do not know how many foods we have in the world, or how they taste, and a good chef is always learning and finding a new recipe, to be timely with the world. I want to make my life more spiritual and colorful by bringing more food to my world. Those are all reasons I want to write a blog about cooking and food.