Vietnamese Cooking Any Day

"I love Andrea. She’s a great teacher and that really comes across in this book. Vietnamese food is not something that has made a lot of headway into home cooking in America. We go out to Vietnamese restaurants, but it’s not a cuisine that a lot of people make at home. And I think that alone makes this book worth paying attention to. Like Hetal Vasavada, Andrea is a first generation American. Her family fled Vietnam and moved to California. She grew up without much access to the ingredients that her family had had in Vietnam and sometimes they would travel several hours to get what they needed, shopping at a lot of the local grocery stores. A major premise of the book is that these are all ingredients that can be found at mainstream supermarkets today. Thankfully, mainstream supermarkets are now a lot better than when Andrea was young. So it’s easy to find fish sauce and sesame oil and even rice paper and rice noodles. There’s a lot of fried shallots in Vietnamese cuisine, but she uses French’s fried onions , which is a perfect stand-in. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . She talks about trying to make recipes that are streamlined but not dumbed down and she redoes classic dishes with some non-traditional ingredients. So the recipes are things that you feel like you could probably accomplish on a weeknight. She has advice on everything from how to boil rice, to how to roll rice paper, or bruise-versus-smash ingredients. For someone who’s lacking a bit of confidence in the kitchen, she can really teach you a lot."