There's no Pun about it.

In Laos there's a dish called "Pun" it means--lettuce wraps. This is a fun, light, and cool dish to eat on a warm day. You can put just about any vegetables and herbs on your Pun. The trick is you need to have these main ingredients. Lettuce of course, a sweet dipping sauce, and vermicelli rice noodles. Then you can mix those main ingredients with just about any varieties of herbs, vegetables, and a protein dish (meat, tofu, fish..etc.). Today I've made stir-fry beef and eggrolls. I've also made a vegetarian Pun as well with stir-fry Tofu.

For the stir-fry beef you'd want:
1/2 lb. beef
1 TBS Mirin
1 TBS Oystersuace
2 Garlic

1. Thinly slice the beef and marinate it with Mirin, oyster sauce, and garlic.
(If you don't have Mirin you can use 1/2 TBS sugar)
2. Then on a hot frying pan fry the beef. On high heat until done.
For the vegetarian version replace the meat with tofu. Also replace the oyster sauce with either vegetarian oyster flavored sauce or dark soy sauce.

This Pun has sweet dipping sauce called "Nam Jeem" with grounded roast peanuts, I will post recipe at a later date. The sauce is surrounded with stir-fry beefs, eggrolls (I'll post recipe later), Vietnamese cilantro, regular cilantros, mints, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, and cooked rice vermicelli noodles. Of course this dish is called Pun so it won't be complete without lettuce to wrap up all the ingredients!
**Herbs and lettuces are from our backyard garden**

The proper way to eat it is to take a bite size piece of lettuce leaf. Pile in small bits of all the ingredients on top of it. Then wrap it up and dip it into the sauce and Enjoy!


For those who are lazy like my Husband. You could mix them all together and pour the sauce over the dish. This would be something similar to the Vietnamese version of Bun (pounced: boon).

For those vegetarian we have stir-fried tofu that we've marinated in our mirin, garlic, and dark soy sauce. My son does not like the sweet sauce that I made for this dish, because its got fish sauce in it. So he just eat it like it is now with no sauce. Still yummy!

Macho Nacho & Hamburger.

Don't we all have those days when we just crave for a certain food? Well today was that day for me. I had a huge craving for some Nachos salads, my husband didn't want any and neither did my kids. But I want it!! And I wasn't about make two separate meals without an excuse. What to do? What to do?

In desperation I stuck my head into the refrigerator and pulled everything that looked edible out. Searching for left overs or simple meals I could just heat up for the family and then have the excuse that there's not enough food and that...Oopse I guess I'll have to make myself a Nachos salad.

Ah..ha! I found some beef patties that needs to get eaten, and only enough for two people! I searched the freezer to see if I had any buns...and yes I do. This is what I made.

Grilled beef patties with salt and pepper as seasoning. Melted cheese, lettuce, cucumber slices (my kids don't like pickles), onion slices, tomatoes, and smother the burger with lots of curry ketchup . Served with carrot strips.

Oh yes! Nachos salad! Nachos topped with lettuce, tomatoes, onions, black beans, cheese, thinly sliced carrots, sour cream, and pickled jalapenos!

My six year old vegetarian son did not want to eat Nachos...so he ended up just eating: Carrots, cucumbers, cheese, lettuce, and sour cream salad?

I'm not a Hobbit.

I'm assuming most of us had read the book by J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Hobbit"...either in high school or in middle school. I fell asleep a few times while reading it, because of the authors long narration of simple events. Maybe I should re-visit the book and see if my view now differs?

Anyhow, I brought this up because today I went out foraging for some wild lemon balms. Every time I go out to gather herbs to dry for tea I think about the first few chapters from the book "The Hobbit". I run the sequence of when Bilbo Baggins is in his kitchen making tea for Gandalf. Of how he takes the lose tea and puts them in a tea bag and pour hot water over them to steep them. Why? I only wish I knew! The memory of these scenes just pops up every time!

I've picked a small lunch bag full of Lemon Blams and I'm going to dry them along with some of my garden mints. Then I'll store them for later use. Also I will brew up a cup of Lemon Blam-mint tea and have a nice cold ice-tea, that would be lovely on this hot day.

Behind our backyard is a very nice park away from the street with a small trail. Lots of wild edible plants grow along the trail.

Oh yeah! A large batch of Lemon Blam plants growing under a tall tree.

Please take note that before you ever go out to forage for edible greens. Make sure you can 100% identify the plant in question.

I dry them on the Food Dehydrator tray, but I won't use the machine. Since it's nice out I'll let them dry naturally. Saves energy and money! Very important!

Here's how you make Lemon Blam-mint ice tea.
1. Bruise the leaves by rubbing them together.
2. Boil hot water and steep the leaves for a few minutes.
(or you can use 1/2 TBS of dried mixed leaves.)
3. I use Agava as sweetener, but you can use sugar or honey.
4. Let the tea cool for a bit then pour over ice.

Ahhhh! A Refreshing afternoon tea!!

First Blog.

Hello everyone! This is my first blog and I don't really know what to write about. I've been bombarding my friends and families on facebook with my gardening activities and cooking postings. Then I figured I don't want to annoy them anymore. Thus I've created this blogspot and those who are interested can come here to read all about it. This also gives me the opportunity to go into extensive details about my many frugal projects. This will also give me more room to post recipes and step by step instructions, from my many food dishes that people's been wanting. Yes I have MANY things going on in my life. :-)

I love cooking, eating, and trying out different ethnics food. My favorites are Korean, Laos/Thai, Vietnamese, and Indians. Note they are all spicy foods. :-) We also have picky eater in our house my husband and 2 year old son...and one 6 year old who had decided to be vegetarian. Our vegetarian son decided a few weeks before he turned six that he don't want to eat meat anymore...and so far he's been a vegetarian for over 4 months. I'm proud of him and his decision especially at how responsible he is about it too...he has no problem with refusing foods with meat in it. So this makes my cooking a little bit more interesting. I also like to have colors in my dishes and I've been experimenting with different type of edible flowers. i.e. flowers from these plants...radish, broccoli, mustards, violas, pansys, apple blosom, cherry blosoms, arugula, various rose varieties.

In this picture we have one of my dinner dishes. Spinach Quiche (spinach from the garden) topped with my fast growing radishes (these guys matured in only 1 month!). Freshly picked salads sprinkled with some daikon flowers, arugula flowers, and mustard flowers. Yumm! Add my famous sesame dressing and you're in heaven. :-P

I'm new to gardening and I absolutely LOVE it! Every time I talked about gardening I get really excited and can go on about it forever. I also love listening to people as they talk about how they grow their own foods. I believe people are starting to see the light and are taking a step back in time. How did people survive without a grocery store back 200 years ago? I think everyone should have the knowledge to live with the land, even if we don't need to use it. It'll make us more secure to know that if we do need to, we can do it. I'm also an advocate for organic gardening and had been studying Masanobu Fukuoka style of farming. As a mom I am very concerened about what goes on my family's dinner table. And at the same time we are a single income family and it's not very frugal to buy all things organic and greens.

I have lots of pictures of my garden..from late February to now. I don't know if I should blog about how the garden began or my past food postings from Facebook? It might be too repetitive for some, but if you guys are interested I could post pictures of them and talk about it a little? Or we can just start it all fresh and new now...:-)

So....here we go...ENJOY!