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The Best of Vietnamese & Thai Cooking: Favorite Recipes from Lemon Grass Restaurant and Cafes | 
 enlarge | Author: Mai Pham
Publisher: Prima Lifestyles
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy New: $15.61
You Save: $7.34 (32%)
New (27) Used (28) Collectible (1) from $3.73
Avg. Customer Rating:  36 reviews
Sales Rank: 191827
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.3 x 0.6
ISBN: 0761500162
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.59597
UPC: 086874500167
EAN: 9780761500162
ASIN: 0761500162
Publication Date: October 11, 1995
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Mai Pham has woven wonderful memories between the recipes of this beautiful book: memories of her childhood in Bangkok, her Vietnamese family and their reverence for good food, her husband's search for the best pho recipe in Saigon. The recipes themselves are light, healthy, and loaded with the unique flavors -- strong and delicate, tangy and mild, sweet and mouth-puckeringly sour, always exotic and delicious -- of Southeast Asia. Pham owns the Lemon Grass Restaurant and Cafes in Sacramento, and is a well-known teacher of Southeast Asian cooking.
Product Description
Light, Fresh, Exotic, and Delicious!
Tangy, sweet, and savory traditional dipping sauces. Mouthwatering soups. Innovative stir-fries. The Best of Vietnamese & Thai Cooking offers just that—the very best! Weaving a fascinating memoir amidst her splendid recipes, Mai Pham recreates the almost magical reverence with which food was prepared and enjoyed in the Vietnam and Thailand of her childhood. Inside she discloses the secrets to preparing her personal favorites—delicious dishes such as:
Firecracker Prawns • Minty Thai Chicken Salad
Hot and Spicy Chicken with Lemon Grass • Spicy Red Beef Curry
Crispy Spring Rolls • Eggplant and Broccoli in Ginger
Spicy Thai Cucumber Salad • Rice Paper-Wrapped Salad Rolls
Bangkok Beef with Basil • Lemon Grass Stir-Fried Jasmine Rice
Vegetarian Pad Thai • Perfectly Roasted Peanuts • Thai Tea
Evocative, lyrical, and eloquent, The Best of Vietnamese & Thai Cooking is more than a collection of great recipes—it’s a pleasure to read.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 31 more reviews...
 this book is not about authenticity...all recipes been revised August 9, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
i could not even use any of her recipes, because its like a mixture of recipes that she has revised for people who aren't asian to cook and eat. i am asian and i know that these are not the real recipes, any wannabe could write a book like this. and she tries to hard to be all fancy and high class with her food. she even makes up these strange names for her recipes, what a waste of money. the worst recipes ever!!!!!!!!! her thai recipes are horrible. i don't think she realize that she is vietnamese. please get back to roots lady!
 Not bad November 13, 2006
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
When I first bought this book I thought it was great but since then I have purchased Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors which is much more detailed and authentic. This "lemongrass" book is good for an introduction to both THAI and Vietnamese cuisine but I find it leans more towards "Americanizing" its flavors and for someone like myself who is trying to learn Vietnamese cuisine for her husbands sake..isn't the best. I being Hispanic, like the recipes but my Asian husband said they lacked TRUE flavor..hence my second purchase, which is a big hit. I like the Thai recipes in this book but tend to turn to the before mentioned book for Vietnamese recipes.
Overall good Vietnamese/ Thai cookbook. May 19, 2006
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I'm Vietnamese-American & grew up eating lots of Vietnamese food but never actually knew how to make anything myself so it is nice to have a cookbook that includes many of the traditional Vietnamese recipes, like carmelized ginger chicken, congee (chicken & rice soup), pho, etc. Also, the book includes Thai recipes which seem interesting though I haven't tried them yet. I've followed a couple of the former recipes and they provide good guidelines for the dish, however, I don't like how the author has "Americanized" the recipes and seems to make the highest priority presentation because I'm really just interested in eating simple, good food that's easy to make. Also, her narrative often includes "plugs" for her own or her husband's businesses which is a turn-off and detracts from the focus and authenticity of the book (which is supposed to be about cooking, not personal advertising). Still, the recipes seem ok and serve the purpose for Vietnamese-style cooking.
 Excellent Cookbook for Thai and Vietnamese food May 12, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I've been using this cookbook for years and I have yet to make something that I am not pleased with from it.
Some of my favorites include "Warm Beef on Cool Noodles", a classic Vietnamese dish. The Cornish hen stew, (made with a chicken instead) was insanely good (use Japanese style yellow curry, i think they say it in the book).
The curry recipes are quite good, although I prefer to defer to Simply Thai Cooking for their technique with curry recipes (involves lots of boiling of curry and coconut milk). But these recipes are definitely great.
There is also a great recipe for Shrimp with a homemade paste made with peppercorns, cilantro, and chiles that is excellent, even when I completely riffed on it.
The format is easy to read, and the book has held up to my extremely messy cooking style. I also enjoy the author's anecdotes about Thailand and Vietnam.
Great background Info--Not so great recipes November 30, 2005
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
There were a lot of things I really liked about this book. There's a detailed section on ingredients where she gives brand preferences on things like fish sauce, and substitution suggestions for hard to find ingredients. (The brand of specialty sauce you use can make a big difference in outcome in Thai/Asian food, and if you're not familiar with those foods, it's hard to know what brand to pick. And her preferences generally line up with what I've heard elsewhere.) The recipes that I've tried are fairly easy and straightforward. And I wouldn't care about authenticity if I liked the food. My problem is that while, for the most part, the results were perfectly edible, there was nothing I would want to make again. The lemongrass chicken was tasteless. And I love lemongrass chicken when I get it in Vietnamese restaurants! The lemongrass lemonade was very good, but not worth the work. The curried rice with kaffir lime leaves and the Thai Green Curry with chicken were both good, but definately missing something. This might just reflect my taste preferences--I live in New York, so I might be used to a relatively authentic restaurant version, or it might have been my technique or my lack of stellar ingredients. However, I've had much better sucess in general with Nancie McDermott's books. I will hang on to the book for the ingredient introduction, and I may try one of the recipes again if there's something I can't find elsewhere, but probably not.
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