Last day in Hanoi

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It's the last full day in Hanoi and indeed in Vietnam as tomorrow I head for Laos and there is one last thing on my list to be ticked off, a Vietnamese cooking class. We went to a restaurant called Madame Yen about a week ago and thought the food was great, also noticed that they hold cooking classes so that's where we headed. Nancy, the assistant restaurant manager, met us at the hotel and we walked down to the local wet market, where she explained all of the many local herbs and spices along with the various kinds of noodles and rice used in Vietnamese cooking. Then it was back to the restaurant to get into it. The menu for our efforts consisted of:

Green papaya with dried beef salad

Grilled Aubergine

Grilled duck on grapefruit leaves

Sticky rice and banana in syrup

Plenty there to make a mess of but under the patient guidance of our chef Nguyen Van Hai we diced and peeled carrot and papaya, prepared sauces, grilled Aubergine and beef and duck and made our sticky rice syrup. We even got a crash course is making the decorations for the dishes from carrots and tomatoes. In the end everything came together perfectly and we sat in the restaurant with an ice cold beer and we're served each of the dishes we had prepared much to the envy of many of the lunchtime diners.

After that massive lunch we walked down to a bookstore for a browse getting lost in the twisting streets, but no problem, I had Google maps, or at least I thought I did until I tried to use them only to discover I'd used my data allocation about 12 hours too early. Not to worry, a few turns later the lake came into view and I was able to navigate from there. A little bit of last minute shopping and packing consumed the remainder of the day.

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Comments

[Lisa]

Green Papaya Salad
Can I order one green papaya salad please! Looks great!