Last week, my brother, Trung, left me a message saying that he didn't see asparagus crab soup (sup mang tay cua) on the site. In Vietnamese, asparagus is mang tay and literally translates to "bamboo French". Anyway, I think it's one of his favorite soups.

So, I asked my mom for her recipe and she gave me the steps to making the soup. It's amazing the amount of recipes she keeps in her head. I have a hard enough time remembering just one of them. That's one of the reasons why we started documenting everything on SND.

Over the last two months, we've seen a lot fava beans at the farmers' markets. We both like fava beans, but for some reason (too much peeling) we haven't bought any. It wasn't until last week that we finally picked some up. Hungry Bear wanted to make a healthy pasta dish and created this shrimp, fava bean and zucchini pasta on a whim.

It was a simple pasta to prepare and required only sautéing the fava beans, zucchini and shrimp in a little olive oil and garlic. Since we both love angel hair pasta, we used it in our dish. In hindsight, we would have picked a tubular or shaped pasta, because it would have been easier to mix with the vegetables.

Last week, I planned on making a tomato based penne. But as we were grocery shopping, I saw a cheap can of crab meat (1 pound for $7.99). Since we are on a recession budget, I decided to give the canned crab a try. And the penne dish morphed into an asparagus crab pasta with leeks and mushrooms.

I tried to keep the pasta simple and make it a one pot dish... well two pots, you need another one to cook the pasta, but you get my point. After I sautéed the garlic, leek, asparagus and mushroom mixture, I gave it a taste and it was great by itself. I opened the can of crab and finally realized it was all claw meat... damn it! No wonder it was so cheap.

Sometimes the simplest food is the best food. It doesn't get any easier than fried eggs and shrimp (trung chien tom). Throughout my childhood, my mom made this dish, serving it with steamed rice. It was so simple, yet so satisfying.

This past Sunday night, I made fried eggs and shrimp for the SNDsters and Hungry Bear baked a carrot cake. We'll share the carrot cake recipe next time. In my family, we served trung chien tom on a bed of greens and tomatoes. Then we dunked it all in Vietnamese dipping sauce (nuoc cham) and ate it with jasmine rice. I'm not sure how normal it is to eat it this way, but it's ingrained in me and I'm sticking with it. Does anyone else eat it like this?

Crab or lobster? Which crustacean do you prefer? I'm a crab person, without a doubt. Yes, it's more work to eat crabs, but crab meat to me is more flavorful and sweeter. Each summer, when I lived in Delaware, we would get a bushel of Old Bay seasoned Maryland blue crabs and a keg of beer and have a crab eating fest. Hungry Bear is sick and tired of hearing this story every time someone brings up blue crabs, so I'll stop reminiscing now.

Through the years, I've looked for a good crab cake recipe and tried out many of them. I've tried recipes with fillers of white bread, saltines and breadcrumbs. I've tried ones with eggs, mustard, mayonnaise, Worcestershire, Old Bay and many other ingredients. In the end, my favorite recipes were the ones with simple ingredients that didn't overpower the taste of the wonderful crab meat.