Quick & Easy Vietnamese: Home Cooking for Everyone

I wanted to give this book only a FOUR STARS rating, but I couldn't edit that part; so it shows a five stars rating instead. This book is good for beginners who want to cook Vietnamese food on a superficial level but do not want to delve too deeply into Vietnamese cuisine. The author, Andre Nguyen, is a Vietnamese chef who owns a Vietnamese restaurant, so he knows how to cook very well. The recipes have only a few ingredients that are easy to find in a Vietnamese or Chinese supermarkets, and they taste good. If you want 100% authentic Vietnamese recipes which will take quite some time to prepare, then this book is not for you. But if you want good Vietnamese recipes that have been simplified by substituting ingredients that are easier to find and make, then this book is definitely for you. This book also has great color photos of every recipe, so they're very helpful. This book is not meant to be comprehensive or detailed, rather it is meant for people who want to put Vietnamese food on the table fast! If you're really serious about learning how to cook Vietnamese food, then I would recommend Andrea Nguyen's "Into The Vietnamese Kitchen" and Mai Pham's "Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table".

I'm Viet but I was born in America. I only learned how to cook a couple of Vietnamese dishes from my parents but I have been looking for a good cookbook. This one is my favorite so far! There are pictures of every dish AND step by step pictures! SOOOO helpful! And because there are pictures of each dish, I recognized almost all of them even if I didn't know exactly what it was called. This book is PERFECT for me (the amateur cook wanting to replicate Vietnamese homecooking for my own family)! 5 STARS!!

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."

Pictures of asian ingredients used made this book so easy to use. Plus ingredients are inexpensive and can be used for more than 1 recipe throughout the book. Pictures of each dish make each recipe visually appealing. Plus step-by-step pictures as well.

I have been a fan of Vietnamese food for many years, however I have always gone to a restaurant for it. These instructions, including the pictures of the ingrediants, make it very easy to make the dishes yourself. I just take the cookbook with me to the market when I am shopping.