Customer Reviews

Quick & Easy Vietnamese: 75 Everyday Recipes

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I love Vietnamese cuisine, and this book allows me to easily incorporate it into my everyday diet. The ingredients are easy to find in chain grocery stores and I can use ingredients I buy in multiple recipes, making the book economical. I recommend preparing your own chicken stock (have it on hand in freezer). It improves the taste of the recipes. I grow my own Vietnamese herbs in the summer, and the book will give me lots of opportunity to use them on the fly. I have also lost a little weight cooking from this book because the dishes are flavorful (be sure to use the Everyday Dipping Sauce) and healthy, and replaced microwaved and canned meals. Many books may be more in-depth, and not every dish is absolutely fantastic, but if you need something for the busy weekdays, this is a good choice.

Though I grew up in the states, my family is of Vietnamese descent and I travelled (and ate) my way through Vietnam, especially Hanoi. This book was my first attempt at making Vietnamese food at home and boy am I impressed at how AUTHENTIC it is to what I ate in Vietnam and in local Vietnamese restaurants. I'll think twice about eating out now that I know how easy it is to make at home.

Let me first say that the bar was set very high: McDermott's Quick and Easy Thai is a masterpiece.

These recipes are also delicious, and the ones I've tried have been easy. However, they're not nearly as quick and easy as the ones in the Thai book.

What makes them not so quick? In a word, ingredients. Most recipe has lots of them, so there's a lot of measuring/chopping going on before you cook.

Also, if you're a European American like me, you don't have these ingredients lying around, so a trip to an Asian market is a necessity, at least to stock up in the beginning.

But don't let this deter you! Make fish sauce and lemon grass part of your standard staples, and McDermott does have an excellent section on ingredients, how to find them, and which are most important.

The recipes also have notes on what to do if you can't find something: suggestions for substitutions or just leaving things out (though again, not as many as the Thai book.) These recipes are delicious and have complex flavors, so even if you leave something out it'll still be good.

So to sum up, this is a great cookbook, but if you want to enter the world of SE Asian cooking, go with McDermott's Quick and Easy Thai first.

This book delivers exactly what it promises. It is not an in-depth, exhaustive look at the cuisine but a great, accessible introduction. Some years ago this type of cooking may have been more inaccessible but now the "exotic" ingredients here like lemon grass or fish sauce you should be able to find at any decent grocery store, or get on the internet. And as simple as some of the recipes are, they are fantastic, and most cook quickly so are good for entertaining. Asparagus and crab meat soup, yum yum. And the salmon steaks with caramel sauce are delicious!

While the initial cost of buying ingridents for these recpies can be

expensive, once you invest you are in for a treat! The direction of the

recipes are easy to follow , authentic and tasty too! We went to Vietnam

recently and now cooking from this book brings back culinary delightful

memories. The recipes can be time consuming but if you love to cook that

won't matter, have a glass of wine! The PHO is my husbands favorite,

Lemongrass Beef ummmmm good! Don't Miss

This is a great fundamental vietnamese food cookbook. I received this as a present because I love to eat Vietnamese food but never took the time to learn how to cook it from my mom.
Now that I no longer live in an area with a big vietnamese community, I'm finding it more and more necessary to cook the food myself so that I get my fix.
What I love about this cookbook:
nancie mcdermott keeps things very simple
the flavors are right on
simple cooking techniques
short ingredient lists
pictures! (you need to know what it's supposed to look like, right?)

Basically, I have three beefs with cookbooks: 1) extremely long or hard to find ingredient lists, which is overwhelming, 2) the outcome that, in spite of buying all the ingredients and putting in the effort, the food still tastes bad, and 3) food that uses a lot of obscure techniques or a lot of pots and pans.

Nancie Mcdermott rocks for realizing all of this and honestly, yes, the recipes are pretty good! You can tell she has eaten a lot of vietnamese food, and a lot of the recipes are one pot meals, healthy, and also list ways to use leftovers, so that you don't buy something for one dish and then have no idea what to do with it afterwards (another pet peeve of mine). You can tell she has run many a kitchen and is creative with leftovers.

oh yeah, another reason this cookbook is great - she really tries to help you figure out the vietnamese name of what you're cooking, and the index has a list of dishes by the letter it starts with in vietnamese as well as t in english. just in case you want to test your cooking against a restaurant's (trust me, your stir-fry, with nancie's help, is probably fresher)

Until I get to eat my mom's vietnamese, I am sticking with nancie mcdermott.

I have this book, as well as the Chinese & Thai versions and I love them all! The recipes are delicious and easy to follow. I've recommended all 3 books to many people and will continue to do so :)

I have been looking for a good vietnamese cookbook for awhile. I checked this out at the library and fell in love with it so much I bought it to add to my collection. The fish in caramel sauce is marvelous. There is a recipe for meatballs that is great too. I'm still working my way through the book.

Bought this book because of it's good reviews and high star rating. The layout and instructions of this book are easy to follow and pleasant on the eyes (vibrant colors and good quality pages). However none of that matters if the instructions are all slightly off (recipes that called for medium-high heat for 20 minutes was in actually 1 hour on high heat while covered in order for the meat to be cooked enough to eat. Resulted in good enough looking food but tasted off and not at all "authentic" vietnamese. I've grown up on Vietnamese food and TRUST ME you do not want to use the foods made from this cookbook to represent what Vietnamese food should taste like. My mom laughed and suggested I throw out the cookbook and finally accept her traditional method of Vietnamese cooking (a dash of this and a glob of that measurements) instead. I wonder if I can still return this book since it will definately be unused and collecting dust on my shelf!

This cookbook is easy to follow and written for the western cook who would like to recreate some of the wonderful Vietnamese dishes he/she might have had in Vietnam. Explains how to use ingredients that are uncommonly used in the west. The recipes are wonderful!