VIETNAMESE

Background

In 1995, Meera's first cookbook, "The Vietnamese Cookbook", was published by Viking Books. For five years, already, she had been teaching Thai cooking and shopping for ingredients in the Vietnamese enclave of Victoria Street, Richmond, not far from her home.
With the help of the traders in the shopping strip, she began to learn the Vietnamese names of the products she was using in her Thai cooking classes.
As the Vietnamese community became more established, more and more products began to appear on the shelves and a great number of Vietnamese soup kitchens featuring the now famous pho began to spring up.

Gastronomic Tours

In 1992, Meera was approached to design a series of gastronomic tours of this area for the inaugural Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.

So popular did these prove that Meera conducted one or two tours every week for the next eight years and still offers them for groups of around twelve people.

The tours prompted Viking to commission Meera to write a Vietnamese cook book which she produced with the help of Le Van Nhan, proprietor of Pho Dzung soup restaurant.

A trip to Vietnam followed and the rest is history.

Even today, there is some confusion as to the difference between Vietnamese and Chinese cuisines since many Vietnamese restaurants also prepare Chinese dishes as part of their menu.

Let Meera explain and guide you through it all.

Course Content

In Meera's classes, you will learn how to prepare many of the classic Vietnamese  dishes such as rice paper rolls, sugar cane prawns, sour fish soup and chicken curry with lemon grass.

All dishes taught are MSG free and allow you to prepare at home the light and flavoursome cuisine of Vietnam which is now becoming one of the world's favourite tourist destinations.