We had booked a cooking class with the Saigon Cooking School for today. We walked to the Ben Than Markets and met with a guide, Hua, to show us around the fresh produce. There is all sorts of interesting things available. The salads fruits and herbs are beautiful and fresh. Hua explained what each one was and how it is used in Vietnamese cooking. He also showed us some more obscure things, such as a bag of chicken penises. There were frogs and snails, lots of seafood, tofu, duck, chicken, beef and pork. He quizzed us at the offal table. Linda named them all correctly, but was stumped when it came to the bowl of steamed blood, a large black congealed mass. Hua bought some of the ingredients we needed for our class, including rice paper and chillies. We then got a taxi to the cooking school. It is in The Refinery above the restaurant we ate at the night before.
Once at the school we met up with the rest of the class, there were 14 of us. We had one long table set for us to eat and then another where we would do our cooking.
We freshened up and were given iced tea before we put on our aprons and began working.
Chef Khang got us started by making our fish dipping sauce and then we began our first dish, Saigon Fried Spring Rolls. We chopped and mixed and rolled before going out onto the verandah and deep frying the spring rolls. Once we had done that we went back to the eating table and wrapped the spring rolls in herbs and lettuce, before dipping in our sauce. They were really good.
The next dish was a lotus stem salad. Khang explained the lotus plant and how each part of it is used. The lotus plant is symbolic in Vietnam. We slice and julienned carrots, the lotus and herbs and added them to pork and prawns and made a sauce to stir through. We served this with a garnish peanuts and fried shallots. Then ate with prawn crackers. Fresh, crunchy and very tasty.
The final dish was chargrilled beef in a betel leaf with lemongrass. We made our beef mix and rolled them into betel leaves and put them on skewers. We went back to the verandah and cooked them over hot coals.
We had to fan the coals and keep the smoke away. Jude and I thought she was doing a great job with the fanning, but Khang told her she had weird hands and corrected her technique. The rolls were eaten with noodles, wrapped in rice paper and lettuce with herbs, then dipped in our sauce. Really good.
They then gave us a sweet dish, a passionfruit whip mousse. It was sweet and a perfect finish to our meal.
The class went for about 5 hours and was really great value. We met a couple who had done the course the day before as well and came back. The menu changes each day. Our chef was helpful and entertaining.
We headed towards home and detoured at the bank to change money, the post office to post Linda's cards and the cathedral to pray. Well to have look anyway. It had been closed when we came through this way on Monday. We were there just as it opened for the afternoon viewing. Most of the cathedral is closed off. You can only get to the very back, before the seating starts, so tourists shuffle in one door and out the next.
There was a very young couple all dressed up having their wedding photos taken.
Once we had finished we decided we would go to the War Museum. the other big grounds with helicopters and tanks displayed. This must be it? No, we were once again in the wrong place. This was the Reunification Palace. It is a large building, still as it was in 1966, during the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese army stormed the gates of this building in 1975 at the end of the war. The displays are set up well and this was worth seeing. On the way home we found the real War Museum. The map we have been using is from the hotel and the big logo of the hotel is covering the location of the museum. But now we know where we are going. It is still on the list.
Back to the hotel, we cooled off and got ready to go out again. We got into the hotel shuttle to go to the Ben Tanh markets. We had a bit of trouble trying to work out what our driver was trying to tell us, but he would not take us near the markets. In retrospect he was telling us the shuttle didn't go near the markets and he couldn't go off his route. He dropped us in Ha Bai Trang street and we walked along there, before going into Parksons and the Vincom Building. We spent a lot of time waking around but didn't find a lot to buy. We went to Dong Khoi Street and found an Italian Restaurant, The Pomodoro. It was about 9.30 and they didn't have many people in, but they made us welcome. We ate pizza and pasta. The owner has been in Vietnam for years. He was very friendly and chatty and was happy for us to stay as long as we liked, even though most of his staff had left for the night. We were all tired and tomorrow is an early start so we got a taxi home.
2025-02-06