noodlies Cabramatta Food Tour, May 2011

noodlies Sydney food blog's Cabramatta Food Tour came and went today and it was a wonderful success.  We met at a local temple and were greeted by the nuns.  Walter gave everyone a brief tour of the temple and read an exerpt from his book Destination Saigon.  And the lovely nuns and their volunteers whipped up a storm in terms of wonderful vegetarian food.



We were shown how to make our own Vietnamese rice paper rolls (goi cuon) adding our own filling which included several types of home made vegetarian 'meat', vegetables, mint, vermicelli and more!

digging into delicious vegetarian temple food

Then we also dug in to freshly made spring rolls and pipping hot, hearty Vietnamese corn soup.

homemade mock 'meat'

Dessert was a fruit platter of ripe persimmons and Fuji apples with warm jasmine tea.

The wonderful nuns and temple volunteers were so wonderfully helpful and friendly, they were stars! (For two of the tour members who asked me to pass on their donation to the temple, I delivered it to them last night, thanks for your kindness).

Then we strolled into Cabramatta CBD for some serious shopping and for a bowl of pho at one of my favourite places, Pho Minh.

And Cafe Nho where we had a smorgasbord of Vietnamese dessert shakes, including apple and lychee, tangerine, and coconut and avocado (above).  These shakes are made without any ice cream or yogurt but taste amazingly creamy and rich!  Oh, and we had Vietnamese coffee as well, a strong, intense espresso that was a very effective heart starter!

Everything went right today; the wonderful warm, sunny weather, our 14 engaged and enthusiastic tour members, Walter who added so much knowledge to the tour (watch him reading from his book in the video below), to the wonderful temple/restaurants and my sponsors and partners:

• Fairfield City Council
• Royal Umbrella Rice: everyone got a 1kg bag of premium jasmine rice
• Allen & Unwin
• Good Reading Magazine

This was going to be my last Cabramatta Tour, but seeing everyone so happy, maybe I might do a few more.

Send me a comment if you're interested and subscribe to noodlies e-newsletter to find out when the next tour will be.