You know what? I’m growing to love this Beauty Kitchen feature more by the days. I had initially thought I might just cover it like once or twice a month but it just looks like it might be more regular than I’ve anticipated because it’s actually helping me to rediscover cooking all over again! Like making this dish for example. I’m more of a Chinese food lover so western style of cooking hardly appeals to me. Yet, I managed to whip up this simple roasted tomato salad and I love it!

Following some of the feedback I’ve received, I’ve decided to introduce “Beauty Kitchen” on this blog. This will not be a weekly feature, but it should be fairly regular, and will cover some of the dishes I cook that uses food ingredient with beauty benefits. So to kick off this series, let me introduce my first dish that uses dried black fungus – known as 黑木耳 and is pronounced as Hei Mu Er in Chinese. Interestingly, I found out that this ingredient has various other names such as Auricularia Polytricha, wood ear, cloud ear, Judas ear or tree ear. It is actually a mushroom that is dark brown to black and native to Asia and some Pacific islands with humid climates. My Chinese readers should be very familiar with them.