Quick & Easy Vietnamese: Home Cooking for Everyone [QUICK & EASY VIETNAMESE] [Paperback]

Andre(Author) ; Moriyama, Yukiko(Joint Author) Nguyen (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Joie, (September 30, 2003)
• ASIN: B001TJBITS
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Practical & Easy, January 31, 2005

By 

Punchy (Ft.Worth, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Quick & Easy Vietnamese: Home Cooking for Everyone (Quick & Easy Cookbooks Series) (Paperback)

Update May, 2006:
Watch out for the salt content on some of the recipes for chicken that also has a cooking sauce, such as Chicken with Mushrooms and Lemon Grass Chicken. I reccommend 1/2 teaspoon salt for 10 oz of meat or 1 teaspoon per pound of meat; you can always add more but you can't remove them once they're in.

Original review:
This is a nice cookbook with no personal or cultural anecdotes, just simple recipes with practical ingredients and very good results. The recipes are laid out one per page, with photographs of the dish, the ingredients and preparation. With so much photos, the instructions are necessarily streamlined, which works for many of the recipes except for a few, like beef pho. Telling one to combine all the ingredients in boiling stock and cook over low heat just won't do for pho. It assumes you know a thing or two about preparing this soup, like how long to simmer it. I reccommend at least an hour or more.

There is a wonderful recipe for chicken simmered in coconut juice and flavored with Maggie sauce, which is essentially Ga Roti in my book. It tastes just like my mom's and no other vietnamese cookbook I've come across have it. In fact, the ingredients the author uses are exactly my mom's, except she would measure in pinches and tads and touches of this and that. Ditto for the caramelized pork and eggs (thit kho & trung).

There is also an ingredients list containing color photographs that is handy for shopping.

Overall, a good selection of easy, homey, delicious recipes like bun rieu, bun suong (another hard to find recipe), and vietnamese sandwiches. Also, if you like cookbooks that contain more photos of how to prepare the food and optimal (minimal) use of words, this is a good choice.

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best Vietnamese cook book yet., April 8, 2007

By 

Kim Knudsen "ishagok" (Nome, AK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Quick & Easy Vietnamese: Home Cooking for Everyone (Quick & Easy Cookbooks Series) (Paperback)

I have gone through many expensive Vietnamese cook books and have not used a single recipe out of them because they're difficult or "it's not the way my mom made it." This book show pictures of the ingredients so you know what to look for in an Asian store and pictures of the end product. If I don't know the name of a dish I can look at the picture and recognize it. I tried learning from my mom but as everyone knows most women from Vietnam don't measure, it's a little of this and some of that. So some of the time my recipes are just right and other times they weren't. My mom would try to explain what a certain ingredient was but would not know the English name for it. This book explains it all. Very easy to follow recipes and they turn out just like "the way my mom made it."

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars just like mom use to cook, March 20, 2006

By 

gabrielle (columbus, ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Quick & Easy Vietnamese: Home Cooking for Everyone (Quick & Easy Cookbooks Series) (Paperback)

I am Vietnamese and moved to France with my parents in 1946. My mother was an exquisite cook. I unfortunately did not benefit from her gift. However, when I turned 30 I began to ask for recipes from my cousins. I have bought 5-6 copies pf this book for my children and friends. It is the most concise Vietnamese cookbook. The illustrations are very helpful.