Vietnamese Cooking for Dummies

After talking about it since before we left for Vietnam, we finally took a cooking class last Saturday. It was at a place called Hidden Hanoi, which apparently also does language lessons, walking tours, and dance classes (our cooking teacher, Linh, is also a belly-dancer). It ended up being just Alison and I in the class, which was great, since we both got to do a ton of actual cooking for all the different dishes. You can pick one of five different menus, all of which looked delicious, and we ended up with the street food menu of bun cha (rice vermicelli with grilled ground pork patties and sliced pork), nuoc mam cham (fish sauce soup with green papaya and carrot slices), and nem cua be (fried spring rolls). Here's the final product (and yes, we even made the little rose decorations out of tomato skins):

Everything was way more involved than expected, with tons of very thinly sliced ingredients, but we managed to muddle our way through pretty successfully and it ended up being really delicious. The spring rolls in particular had an absurd number of ingredients, and the rolling took a lot of time since they were so tiny (only a couple of inches long) and we had so much filling. After eating all of our creations, we had a dessert of mango, grapefruit dipped in chili salt, and green tea, and then got our little gift bags of long cooking chopsticks and copies of all the recipes so we can make everything once we get back home. And don't worry, we're already planning multiple Vietnamese food feasts for all the loyal readers of the blog.