We decided to take a cooking class during our trip to Hanoi, Vietnam where our chef took us to a local market to buy all of the ingredients needed for our dinner. Obviously we wouldn’t have been able to navigate the market without the help of our chef and there were plenty of ingredients that we can’t necessarily find at home. We were told that the local people of Hanoi, like in a lot of cities, go to the market every day or at least every other day in order to buy fresh ingredients for their meals.

We needed both beef and pork for our recipes, so the butchers trimmed the fat for us as we waited. There were stalls that specialized in vegetables, spices, fruit, as well as different meats. You could find live chickens as well as fresh fish swimming in buckets of water. It was very colorful as well as very busy as people navigated their motorcycles through the stalls picking up items.

Getting fresh ingredients to create local dishes was definitely an incredible experience and we are looking forward to trying our best to create some of the meals in the near future. Picking out all of our vegetables, meats, and other items was as interesting as the experience that we had actually preparing the meals afterwards. Taking a cooking class in a foreign country is definitely an experience that we would recommend and getting to go to the market truly enhances the experience. It was as close as we could get to preparing a meal like a local.