.....I just love the smell of the house when dinner is cooking. Don't you?
My next door neighbors, who are Vietnamese, have their stove and oven in their garage, and they cook out there instead of in the kitchen. I asked my neighbor why. She said, "Vietnamese food tastes delicious. But it stinks like crazy. We don't want our whole house smelling like that all evening!"
Now, I've never had Vietnamese food, I don't think, certainly not anywhere but at a restaurant, where I wouldn't necessarily smell it cooking. Does it smell that bad?
Anyway, I'm smelling cheddar, ham and bell pepper quiche, and I think it smells GREAT. Off to see if it's done!
I have made a few Vietnamese meals (3 to be precise) but didn't notice any bad smell. Unless she's talking about fish sauce which I LOVE when it is mixed with something or cooked but GAG if I smell right out of the bottle. So I hold my breath ... but it doesn't smell up the house ...
yeah.. two word "Kim Chee" (or is that one and don't get me for spelling..) Phew!
Kimchee is Korean, not Vietnamese. But the fish sauce does smell, heaven knows. Cabbage and garlic and so on don't smell all that great either, at least when they're cooking.
It's funny you should mention this, MamaT, because I cook a lot of Asian food, and we've often talked about putting a wok burner in the garage with a big ole fan to suck out the smells. It would also keep the heat out of the house in the summertime.
I've heard of other people who prepare Asian cuisine doing this. I think there is another problem besides the smell: the act of cooking many of these things is messy. Either you are frying in a wok, which splatters oil all over, or you are steaming or boiling something, which produces clouds of steam. Doing it outside the house makes sense. But the results are delicious.
Actually I feel that way about the splatter and mess of a LOT of things I cook, Asian or not. I don't know how I feel about cooking outside the house ... other than the smell being somewhere else you still have the mess to clean up and then the food would get cold on the way to the table ... which actually wouldn't be a problem in deep summer.
Right. THe worst thing about fried chicken or country fried steak is the halo of grease around the pot. It looks like something you'd see on CSI, for pete's sake, and you need a hazmat team to clean it up.
And for the record, I've seen kimchee as one word and two. At the local Korean grocery store they spell it as two words, but I suspect it doesn't matter what the English is as long as the Korean characters are drawn correctly.