Making Rice Noodles

Hi.  I've been cooking!  People eat different types of food in different countries.  It's fun to have a go at cooking local food when you're travelling.

First, I visited the place where they make peanut sweets.  Here's a big bowl of ground-up peanuts being mixed into a tasty paste.

Then you have to roll out the peanut paste on a big board.

And then you squash it flat with a giant rolling pin.  It's a mechanical rolling pin so you just turn on the switch; you don't have to do the rolling yourself like when you're making pastry at home.

Once it's been squashed flat you can cut it up into small squares and make peanut sweets.  Auntie Susan and Uncle Guy ate some and they were rather tasty.

Next it was time to start making rice paper and rice noodles.

Here's me with lots of big circles of rice paper.  Rice paper is very important in Vietnam because you wrap it round vegetables to make spring rolls.  Spring rolls are very popular here - Uncle Guy and Auntie Susan ate them almost every day.

To make rice noodles you make rice paste and then put it on the hot plate.  It's a bit like making peanut cookies at the start - you have to roll it flat with a big rolling pin.

Then you take it off the hot plate with the rolling pin and lay it flat so it looks like one of the white circles in the picture (I mean the picture with me in it).  Uncle Guy had a go.  The challenge is to make sure you lay the rice paper flat without any crinkles.  I reckon Uncle Guy did a pretty good job.

Some of the circles can be used as rice paper.  But we also wanted to turn some of them into rice noodles so we put them through this machine.  It cut them into long spaghetti-shaped pieces.

And in the end we had a big bundle of rice noodles.

People eat rice noodles for breakfast in Vietnam so it's important to make lots of them.

I wonder if Adam, Robin and Grace have ever eaten rice noodles.  You can probably buy them in the supermarket in Birmingham but people don't normally eat them for breakfast there!

That was the end of my cooking session.  It was lots of fun.  Now I'm going to Thailand!