What do you do when you have 11 hours to kill?

So our Mekong delta tour returned us to our hotel at noon. Our flight leaves at 11:55pm. What to do?

Take another cooking class!

And oh my goodness were we spoiled! I found HCM cooking class which is on a farm outside in the country & not only did they have an opening for this evening, Chef Tan was able to accommodate our special request of staying until 9pm and dropping us off at the airport!

Chef Tan’s HCM cooking school is not just a cooking school, it is an active organice 15 acre farm with just about everything you can think of. They grow their own mushrooms, 3 types of mint, at least 2 types of basil, radishes, lettuce, mustard, tapioca, melons, the list goes on. Then they have chickens, cows and pigs! One of the pigs just gave birth a day ago, so we got to see a whole lot of little piglets chowing down! Jackson got to milk his first cow!

We flew kites as the sun went down with an amazing sunset.

I am not making this up. I would have had a great time just visiting the farm & talking vegetables & livestock, but we got to pick 6 different meals to cook from! To say the least, Chef Tan and his crew were so awesome & accommodating to our special request, I’m still just in shock for how well the evening went!

We started out with stuffing pork & shrimp around a sugar cane, deep frying it & then wrapping it in mustard, lettuce, mint, basil and then dipping it in some great sauce. Wow.

Then we proceeded to make a eggplant chicken salad. We learned a new recipe for eggplant that was really good!

Then we cooked some oyster mushrooms in eggwhite & tapioca deep fried that tasted just like calamari & exploded a wad of rice noodles that literally popped from raw noodles to hard nest of noodles almost instantly.

We then took a small break, visiting the farm, milking the cow, visiting the new piglets, and then returned, few some kites for an hour and then returned to the kitchen to make….BANH MI!

We learned out to make Banh Mi! Can you believe it?

Then we learned how to make Bun Thit Nuong Tom, Michelle’s favorite dish, a cold noodle with hot shrimp & sautéed veggies with a sweet sour fish sauce.

Then for dessert we made banana coconut cream deep fried spring rolls!

 

And now we’re in the business class lounge waiting for our flight that takes off in an hour.

PS: We brought our leftover banh mi from the class! It will be a great snack!

See you all soon!

Day 2: Mekong Delta

We got up at 5am.

Walked to the boat & had a 20 minute ride mostly in the predawn light. It was a little chilly which was actually refreshing. The floating market is a lot of big boats trying to sell things with a few customers (I’m guessing mostly distributors), with quite a few tourist boats and other vendors servicing the bigger boats … for ice, food, and coffee.

Pineapple anyone?

 

We did three passes and then the noodle lady shows up in her boat & we do get 3 bowls of noodles / pork / veggies for breakfast. It was good, but I’ve had better Pho / Bun Bo Hue that I would prefer.

We then motored back, and went to a live fish market and walked back to our hotel and then did a 3hr drive back to HCM. We’re now waiting in our old hotel for the cooking class to pick us up at 1pm.

 

So you get another post! Yeah! I bet you’re excited!

 

In less than 12 hours we’ll be on a plane.

Day 1: Mekong Delta

Ok, so mea culpa. I screwed up on the date. We all got up at 6:15, packed our bags, had breakfast & then waited for the guide to show up. He didn’t and when I called, I had the date wrong. So we spent an uneventful day in Saigon, walking around. Ate lunch at a Pho place on corner about a km from our hotel. Had yet another banh mi for dinner, which wasn’t as good as we’d had in Hoi An or Hanoi, but serviceable.

So we made it down to Can Tho today, we stopped for a bit on the river outside HCM, went for a quick little river tour which included stopping by a lady who had a lot of fruit. We tried a few new ones we had yet to try – this milk fruit where you punch a hole in it with your finger & suck it out. Interesting. Then we had Jack Fruit, which is a huge fruit and it has all these small petals which kind of taste like Cotton Candy – Michelle agreed with  me, but Jackson didn’t.

 

Then we piled back into the car, saw an old Pagoda, and then we went to a local market where we got see all sorts of interesting things, including this huge shrimp that bit Michelle!

 

 

 

 

I’ll never get tired of seeing live fish. I swear that is why all the food here is so good!

 

 

 

The weirdest thing we saw: Live rats in a cage and frogs that were still alive but had their skin removed. They somehow have figured out how to skin a frog alive. wierd!

We ate lunch at our guide’s aunties house. Wow. What a meal. We got to help a bit making wontons and some egg drop soup.

The best part was they had this fish pond out off their back porch, and we had a steamed fish which was excellent!

It was a fabulous meal. Then we find out guide has made a DVD with our trip so far, including music & scene dissolves that lasted about 15 minutes! Pretty impressive. Then we conked out in the nice warm weather & took a 90 minute nap on their bed. It was really peaceful. We felt like Goldilocks even though we didn’t break the bed!

Then we drove down to Can Tho, and we have a really nice room, and enjoyed a rooftop beer looking down on the city.

Tomorrow, we get up at 5am to go to the real floating market here in Can Tho (it’s 1 km long!) and then leave back to HCM for a cooking class from 1pm-8pm and they’ll drop us off at the airport.

Hard to believe in a little more than 24hrs we’ll be starting our journey back. It’s been a quick 5 weeks!

Back in Saigon – eating at Quan An Ngon again

One of the best things about coming back to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City or HCM) is that we’ve already been here before. We got a different hotel about 4 blocks down from where we were at previously – so we know the area.

We went back to Quan An Ngon – a great restaurant just down from the Imperial Palace grounds. Vietnamese pancakes, pork skewers, spring rolls, and vermicelli noodles with shrimp and fried calamari. Yummy.

Tommorrow starts a 2 day adventure in the Mekong Delta – likely without Internet access so you won’t hear from us for a few days.

Shhh Don’t tell anyone

For over 10 years, whenever we were out & about and passed by any type of shop that sold anything resembling purses, Michelle had been trying to find a purse similar to one she got at Nike almost 20 years ago. It’s a small compact purse with quite a few compartments. It’s been showing its age.

When I was reading about Hoi An, it’s famous for its lanterns and its sewing shops. We didn’t have enough room in our luggage to get any lanterns, and with their sewing shops, they are famous for duplicating things. You bring a pair of trousers, a special shirt, what have you. They will duplicate it.

So I had this romantic idea, I would bring that purse with us, have it duplicated, and give it to Michelle for christmas. About a week before we left, I scoured our house looking for that purse and couldn’t find it. So I off-handily asked Michelle one day, “Hey babe, what did you ever do with that old Nike purse?” and she said “I”m bringing it with me as my travel purse”.

So surprise christmas present is out of the picture, so I let her know about duplicating and had plans upon reaching Hoi An, we’d try to do it.

We found a leather shop and showed them the purse. With technology advancements, the pouch to hold phones needed to be enlarged and as she’d been carrying a new ipad-mini courtesy of her father on this trip (he lent it to her), she has fallen in love with it & almost fit in the Nike one. Almost.

So we asked them to duplicate it but making it just a few centimeters wider for the phone & ipad-mini. They told us to come back the next day. It wasn’t ready. They asked us to come back the following day.

So we show up & darn if they didn’t duplicate it. In leather no less (with nylon inside). They did such a nice job, we commissioned another one in brown.

Pretty cool. Pictures aren’t the best, you can ask to see them when we return!

And she’s officially switched over to the new one because the Ipad-mini fits so well.

Baby Mustard cooking class

We had lunch here the other day & was so impressed with the food, we spontaneously booked a cooking class for today. It was the cheapest class we’d been to at $20/each. Most classes have been $40 each.

They have this huge community garden surrounding the restaurant / cooking class, and got a long tour and got to sample many of the vegetables & how to harvest them. For example, they harvest coriander, cilantro, mint & basil when it’s only a few inches high. They can do this anywhere between 4-10 times before they let it get big & harvest the seeds. The baby mustard greens that is their namesake is planted & harvested every 7 days.

We cooked some spring rolls – this time we put raw pork & shrimp in the roll & cooked it longer. I thought they were OK, but the sauce we made to dip them in, really was the best.

We then cooked a sweet n sour pork using diced tomatoes as the base and pineapple again, and was really excellent.

We topped  it off cooking some fresh squid with a ton of spices in a banana leaf, roasted over a charcoal fire. These were the best we’ve had. Amazing. The key when we get home will be finding fresh squid.

We ate dinner at Streets, a restaurant where disadvantage youth learn how to have a real job. It was very good.

Tomorrow is a travel day back to Ho Chi Minh CIty where we’ll be boarding a boat for 2 days to visit the Mekong Delta. This trip is rapidly coming to a close. It’s hard to believe we’ve been gone for over 4 weeks so far!

Snorkeling on Cham Island

This is a day late. Apologies to our readers, but I ate some ice cream & my stomach went haywire for a few hours. Felt alright when I awoke the next morning so all is well. So you get two posts!

Snorkeling on Cham Island was nice. It was a bit of a trip out there – 90 minutes one-way and Michelle’s seasick patch hadn’t quite kicked in. I saw 4 women all sick as dogs. Michelle was fine once she hit the water. The cruise out there sure had some nice views:

 

They have a lot of nice coral of many, many different varieties. They offered us shorty wetsuits and we’re glad we took them as the water was a bit on the chilly side. We had two snorkeling outings. Besides the coral & fish, I did spy one of these nasty things called a crown of thorns starfish – venomous from what the guide told us.

After the 2 snorkeling outings around an Island next to Cham Island, we went to a secluded beach for lunch & some R&R. It was really nice!

The beach was so nice, I’d really recommend trying to find out how you can spend a few days here if you ever come here yourself.

Bamboo Cooking School

We’ve now had 5 cooking classes and they’ve all been excellent. This was different in that we each picked a meal to cook and then while we all prepped individually, each student cooked their meal in front of the others and then we ate what they cooked.

We had 10 students. That’s 10 meals. You had to roll us out of there we had so much food! And such a nice variety. We started at 8:15am with a market tour, then proceeded over to her house where we cooked & ate until about 3:30pm.

Jack cooked the local Hoi An noodle dish, which I had assigned to him thinking it would be one of the easier ones, and it turned out to be move involved and require more steps than any other dish!

Michelle cooked a pumpkin soup which also contained shrimp and was divine. We’re going to have to find this pumpkin so we can grow it in our garden.

I cooked a pork clay pot dish. I learned that you want the fat and how to braise / brown it in an oil/sugar mixture & then combine it with green papaya which was awesome.

(no pics boo hoo)

We had so many spring rolls, I helped cook them and they were amazing. They were made with two wrappers instead of one. You took the completed roll, wrapped it in lettuce & herbs and then dip it into your sauce. WOW.

Guess who’s sauce is whose! (red = more heat)

Tomorrow we go snorkeling @ Cham Island. Should be fun!

Hoi An Cultural and food tour

It’s a quaint town and they have about 18 or 20 different cultural sites. You purchase a “ticket” with 5 different stubs on it & you are supposed to pick 5 different things to see. We start by going across the bridge into old town Hoi An:

When you see them, they cut off one of the stubs. There are several chinese assembly halls – what looked to me like chinese temples, old houses & several museums. We opted for one assembly hall & all the museums. The chinese assembly hall had these really cool dragons:

It had this claw on that tried to grab Jackson!

Michelle spied this nondescript long hallway and we decided to see what lay beyond the blue door. It was a really nice courtyard with an even awesomer set of dragons!

 

For future attendees, we both thought the attractions ranked as such:

1. Museum of Folk Culture

2. Quang Trieu Assembly Hall (didn’t see the others)

3. Ceramic Museum

4. Japanese Covered bridge

5. Museum of Hoi An History & Culture

6. Hoi an Art Craft  Manufacturing workshop – This was just a tourist trap with shops inside.

A few takeaways? All the old writing looked like chinese. The French invented the phonetic alphabet they have today. I don’t speak / read chinese, but the old stuff sure looked like it. Hoi An was a central hub for trading up until the 17th century at which point, it wasn’t anymore. No warmongering evidence anywhere. That was interesting.

Despite the fact that it was a pleasant 80 degree day, and despite the fact that we started pretty early, we still had a “whinybutt 12yr old” who we proceeded to buy a banh mi for and dump him back at the hotel at noon.

Michelle and I then got on a few old bikes & went about10k to a restaurant called “Baby Mustard” which was so awesome, I booked a cooking class with them in two days hence. It was nice not having whinybutt with us since we can eat spicy food and leisurely visit the beach afterwards, which was only another 1-2K down the road.

We arranged a snorkeling trip out to Cham Island for day after tomorrow as we have another cooking class tomorrow from 9-3 – for a total of two cooking classes while we’re here!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hoi An sure is a charming little town

We had a great travel day today. It all started with having a great Pho breakfast, packing, and then Jackson and I headed over to our favorite Banh Mi shop to get some sandwiches to go. I wasn’t sure they’d be open at 9:30am, but I shouldn’t have worried. While waiting for the sandwiches, we chatted the owner up & told him we were going to Hoi An and he grinned and said I must try these two other Banh Mi shops in Hoi An and gave us the names! I love getting tips like this. The 3 sandwiches were 75,000 dong or almost $4 total ;-).

To-go box in hand, we made it to the Hanoi airport with time to spare – I sure do miss the self-check kiosks that litter the US airports. Standing in line is not my favorite pastime.

We made it to our homestay – yet another charming little boutique hotel Michelle has managed to research & book. These are so much cheaper than normal hotels, and being in a room in a house has a nice appeal. We were spoiled in Hanoi where the shower was completely separate from the toilet. I’m not sure I’m going to get used to that, but oh well, small price to pay for a small price.

Hoi An is surrounded by rivers and it’s a bunch of small shops / restaurants that are all so colorful – and they limit traffic to a single road, so it’s nice just to wander without having to constantly hear horns or dodge scooters. Tons of shops & restaurants.

We made it over to one of the Banh Mi shops we were recommended for a late lunch and it was Awesome. Even better than Hanoi. Fresh veggies. A little bit of mint can really add a special touch.

We had a rather pedestrian dinner on a recommendation from our hotel staff – won’t be asking her again. Resting & tomorrow we’re just going to loiter about Hoi An, take in a few museums and sites.