Cooking with Han.

After serving up a breakfast fit for an emperor (mango-stuffed pancakes drizzled with chocolate, to be specific), the Laugh Café had no trouble convincing A and me to sign up for a private cooking lesson. We got to choose five dishes from the menu for Chef Han to teach us. Here’s a breakdown of each dish:

Pumpkin soup: Totally easy to make with very few ingredients. I thought it would be bland, but it was delicious.

Rice noodles with veg: We could have figured this one out on our own. Plus, it could have done with a sauce. It was just sort of meh.

Veggie cao lau: Cao lau looks and tastes like thick noodles to me, though Chef Han kept telling me otherwise. I couldn’t decide if something was getting lost in translation, or if our two countries have very different ideas as to what constitutes a noodle. Anyway, whatever it is, I’m a big fan.

Vietnamese pancakes: This one was supposed to be stuffed with pork and shrimp, which A and I were not down with. This kind of messed up the recipe, I think, and we ended up substituting quail eggs for the meat. So, you make the pancake, throw a bunch of stuff on the top of it while it cooks, then fold it over like and omelet. Then, you cut it in half and roll each half in rice paper to dip into the accompanying fish sauce. A lot of steps for something that I didn’t really dig. I think I was put off by the quail eggs.

Fresh spring rolls: This one also seems like a no-brainer, but there were actually quite a few things in there that surprised me. Like green papaya and banana flower. And oyster sauce. Man, but they love infusing everything with the essence of the sea. The verdict: pretty good, I guess.

Anyway, all food aside, the most interesting part of the class was getting to chat with Chef Han. We asked her all of our burning questions about Vietnam like, “Why do the women wear surgical masks all the time?” The answer is that they protect their faces from exposure to sun. Chef Han explained that, to the Vietnamese, pale skin is beautiful. She told us that she was considered ugly because she was too dark. What a horrible, heartbreaking thing to say! She wasn’t ugly—she was actually really cute.

And of course she tells me this just as I was congratulating myself on finally achieving the tiniest bit of a tan. There goes any hope of me ever finding a Vietnamese boyfriend. Damn.