Cooking Class: Hoi An

After a week of shopping, lounging on the beach, eating our way through the riverfront restaurants and the open air market, getting massages vietnamese-style (a cross between a thai-massage and straight up beatings; wouldn't call it a relaxing massage that you would fall asleep to, but thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless) and riding bikes to and from town and the beach; we decided to take a cooking class.

There is no shortage of classes offered by the many restaurants in town and we decided on a restaurant where we were given the option to decided on how many dishes we wanted to learn and what dishes. A good indication the classes were good was the fact we had to actually book in advance because they were full for several days with up to 8 people per class; we wanted the instructor all to ourselves, so we selected a morning class.

We decided to learn 5 dishes:

Hot and Sour Soup

Our favorite dish - light, refreshing and how the simple ingredients created the delicious flavors.

Tuna grilled in banana leaf

We were fascinated with the charcoal grilling style used, we are grill fanatics and have recently incorporated the use of banana and bamboo leaves in our cooking at home.

Papaya Salad

The dressing for the papaya salad was not tart enough for our tastebuds, but we did learn a few new ways to add some punch to the dish, which we will be incorporating into other dishes.

Vegetarian Curry

The vegetarian curry was delicious and something we will definately recreate at home, again with our added Buddha Bellies twist.

Sesame Grilled Pork

Again the instructor was impressed by Mike's cooking skills and we got to eat everything we made. We really enjoyed the way our cooking instructor sang in rhythm to her chopping, something we found a lot of the Vietnamese cooks do, maybe to break the repeatitiveness of the large amount of chopping needed for Vietnamese cuisine. Another great cooking class and additional techniques to add to our cooking skills.