Lanterns Cooking Class

One of my Christmas presents from James was to do a cooking class at Lanterns restaurant in Nha Trang. Lanterns is Western owned but supports people in the local area and charities as well.

We started with a trip to the Market to buy the ingredients. We traveled there on cyclos, which are like bicycle taxis, and it was pretty fun and not as scary as I expected.

The Market itself was super! I knew it would be because our instructor told us "you can buy anything except souvenirs here". She took us around and showed us all kinds of foods and told us about them.

We also saw a lady with huge tubs of live frogs and eels and such. One of the eels escaped and start wriggling about on the pavement until she captured it! An adventurous foodie in our group opted to try a frog and the lady grabbed one from the tub, smacked it's head on the pavement to kill it, turned it's skin inside out to remove it (like when you take your shirt off by the hem) then gutted it with a pair of scissors, all in about fifteen seconds. It was fairly horrifying.

When we went back to the restaurant we made three dishes. The entree was rice paper rolls, which were really yummy and easier than you'd think. We had to decorate our plates too. The instructor showed us a beautiful flower and sun but I was creative and attempted a butterfly. The adventurous foodie did a boat.

The main was fish in a clay pot and it was the easiest thing ever and very tasty. James's was better than mine.

For dessert we did banana flambé. I don't like bananas so I picked pineapple. James did too, even though he loves bananas, because he wanted to make the same thing so he could copy me. It was a really easy and delicious dish but I was too scared to flambé mine, the instructor did it for me. James did his very successfully. Perhaps I'm not the chef of the relationship anymore.

The whole class was really fun and interesting, I highly recommend it to anyone travelling in Vietnam.