10 years ago, we did a cooking class with Van at Green Bamboo Hoi An and really enjoyed our experience. Although there are many cooking-class other options available in Hoi An, we wanted Dom’s mom to have the same experience that we had before, so we booked with Green Bamboo again. To our delight, we had even more fun this time because we lucked out and had a very small group of only 5 people.
Van picked us up at our hotel and gave us a tour of the market while purchasing all of the fresh ingredients for the dishes that we would be cooking. She introduced us to various foods that you can buy at the vendors, explained how to identify which meats are fresh, and described the different ingredients that she was purchasing for our dishes. We stopped for a quick snack and coffee break before driving to her house to start cooking.
The dishes we chose to learn this time were:
- Vegetarian Curry with Coconut Milk - Charlotte
- Vietnamese Pancakes (Bàn Xéo) - Dom
- Grilled Pork with Noodles (Bún chả) - Jen
The 2 other students chose to make:
- Fish in Clay Pot (cá kho tộ), and
- Egg plant in clay pot with Stir fry tofu, pineapple and tomato.
We started by prepping the ingredients for all of our dishes, together.
One thing that differed from our first experience was that we cooked and ate one dish at a time, instead of everyone cooking their dishes and eating everything at the end. We really liked this because it allowed us to enjoy each dish while it was hot and also gave us time to digest a bit before stuffing ourselves even more!
Since we only had 5 students, Van added some extra dishes to the list including: Vietnamese Sweet Potato Leaf Soup, Green Papaya Salad with Tofu Skin, and Egg Coffee for dessert.
We were super full and a little tired by the end, but we all really enjoyed the wonderful day spending time with Van and eating so much delicious food.
