Last week Books to Cooks was honoured to host author and teacher, Andrea Nguyen, for three Asian cuisine masterclasses. Each evening we featured one of Andrea's books: Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, Asian Dumplings and Asian Tofu.

Andrea started the series with her first book, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen and led guests through a veritable tour of kitchen essentials for Vietnamese cooking. Dishes like green papaya salad and chicken and ginger simmered in caramel sauce and personal stories of Andrea's connection to her native culture through food inspired guests to explore Vietnamese cooking at home.

Our second evening with Andrea was all about Asian Dumplings. With a pan-Asian sweep of the dumpling world, Andrea demonstrated a variety of dumpling wrapper doughs, fillings and sealing techniques. The best morsel of advice for dumpling making: don't worry about the fancy folds...just make sure they're sealed.

Our final evening with Andrea featured her latest book, Asian Tofu. Andrea demystified this most humble, yet revered ingredient and introduced new and refreshing ideas for enjoying tofu from making soy milk and tofu from scratch to enjoying tofu as a dessert.

Thank you Andrea for sharing your energy, humour, stories and kitchen wisdom and for inspiring us to explore Asian cuisine and our own cultural roots.