Cooking Class Part II

So the class that I gave Rita for her birthday was all Vietnamese cooking. Mostly I picked this class because I thought it included sake (turns out sake isn’t Vietnamese after all…).

I expected the teacher to be a little Asian woman. Imagine my surprise when we were met by the whitest 2nd whitest woman in San Diego. She immediately had my sympathy because would you want to be the one to teach cooking to Rita (or worse…her trusty sidekick Papa John)? I knew when she passed around the scrapbook of her recent visit to Vietnam that we were in for a long night.

My key takeaway from the Vietnamese cooking class is this:
A good cook in Vietnam only buys live animals because then they know how their meat stock died.

I don’t know about you…but to me…the sign of any good meal is its dependence on an autopsy. And my friends want to know why I don’t want to join them on their next trip to Vietnam. [“That steak looks lovely – but how was it feeling the day before it died?”]. You know…”eat what you kill” has a MUCH better connotation in the consulting world.

The other valuable tidbits I took away about Vietnamese cooking:

• Fish sauce lasts forever [ummmm….so do Twinkies? Do we know how the fish in this sauce died?]
• Fish sauce is the Vietnamese equivalent of ketchup [smelly, sticky, nuclear-winter survivin’ ketchup]
• If it takes forever to fry your crispy noodles, than your oil is too cold [For this I went to class?]

And my BIGGEST takeaway from the TV-like cooking show…it’s a lot easier to be a great cook when someone else cuts everything up for you. Unfortunately, Rita learned the same thing =(