Welcome to My Cooking Blog!

Welcome to my personal cooking blog!  I love to cook for the people I love and I want to help you do the same regardless if you're a stay-at-home or a working mom. 

Although Asian cuisine is my specialty you'll also see Indian, Italian, Mediterranean, Mexican, American and a lot of fusion dishes. I didn't always love to cook. But as I got older I've found that cooking has been another form to express my love to those I love. (By the way, Ai ("I") means love in Mandarin/Cantonese as well--a nice little coincidence.)

My husband Dave and I have been together since 1998. We have two beautiful boys-Liem (11 yrs old) and Mason who's just 5 months old.  I love them all so much. Dave is an amazing father and husband. However, I didn't always appreciate him and our marriage wasn't always peachy. But we weathered the storm and are both better and stronger as individuals and as a team. He's an IT Manager and also in the Virginia National Guard. Now that I've learned to appreciate my husband and seeing how hard he works to support our family, a once trivial task like cooking dinner has become an opportunity for me to create a culinary masterpiece to express my love and gratitude for the man who has always loved me despite my flaws and mistakes. I can't verbalize the joy I feel to hear my boys tell me a dish I made is the best they've ever eaten. I live for that!

If you love to eat all kinds of food and share the same desire to prepare quality meals for your family, then this is your home!

My objective is to help you:

Try new dishes.

Running out of ideas for dinner?  Tired of the same old pizza, spaghetti, casserole or baked chicken? I can show you how to make new fancy and exotic dishes from the same ingredients you are already using plus introduce you to new ones you will love.  Sometimes all we need is a few ideas to get us started. 

Increase your efficiency in the kitchen.

Many families don't eat at home because they think it takes too much time to cook a home meal. But it actually takes the same amount of time, if not less, to prepare a healthy, well-rounded gourmet meal at home. You just need to learn how to overlap a couple of tasks. For example, you can roast the veggies in the oven while you boil the pasta. Both take 10 minutes. Add another 10-15 minutes for the meat and voila! Dinner is served in 30 minutes or less without the stress!

Save money.

It can cost a family of four $50-75 to go out to eat nowadays. That's not including tip either! I know families who eat out almost every night. The majority of them are also hurting financially. Well, no wonder! Do the math. $50 x 5 days = $250/week. That's $1,000 per month! You can cook dinner for your family for way less than half of that and use that few hundred dollars to pay off debt, invest or save!

Enjoy life with those you love.

An ideal night for our family is to eat outside on our deck with the kids and talk and goof off. After the kids go to bed it's date night. Dave and I break out the pinot grigio with some cheese, crackers and mango and just enjoy each other. When I visit my family in Northern Virginia, it's the same concept only on a much larger scale. And much louder too! But isn't that what life is all about? Building and maintaining relationships? And guess what? Food is the electricity for it all! So let's get cookin!

Dinner at my mom's. 
  What happens when a bunch of Asians get together? FOOD!