According to Duong Thi Thanh Lien in "Vietnamese Dishes," "cooking is a "time consuming job" because at a party we serve many courses at the same time, and food should be completed ready at the table when served. We do not serve knives and forks. We have bowls with saucers, chopsticks, spoons, and small plates for fish sauce (nuoc mam). Meats and vegetables must be chopped in advance. We mash or grind meat, fish, shrimp, beans, rice with the traditional grinder. It would be much easier with an electric blender. In the old times, to keep food, we had to season it, make it salty and to wrap it with banana leaves, because we did not have refrigerators or freezers. 

Today, in the countryside, we still cook outside with wood or charcoal; in the city we use gas and electricity. The traditional kitchenware was once made with clay or bronze, now we use aluminum or cast iron, ceramic, teflon or baking-glass ware. To cook rice we need a heavy pot to keep the rice warm. 

The electric rice cooker from Japan is a very practical one. To fry, we use a coolie hat pan, but I think that any pan can be used for this purpose, if it is wide enough to fry the whole chicken or the whole fish when needed, or deep enough for deep fat frying. Teflon sauce pans can help our sauted and fried dishes a great deal. I really enjoy the new facilities in a modern kitchen and make good use of them.

Like you, I have little time and cannot spend the whole day in the kitchen. My way of cooking and serving is adapted to the Western way and it is quite different from the traditional one. In the United States, you can cook tasty Vietnamese food, even though you lack some spices, seasonings, and vegetables. However, you can use dry or powdered ones, provided that you know the similarity of fresh spices to powdered spices and essences.

Vietnamese people usually have three meals a day. In the cities, breakfast is lighter than lunch and dinner. In the country, many of us eat a heavier breakfast and dinner than lunch. Each regular meal has three courses: soup, a fried or sauteed dish or salad, and a salty dish. The last one is the main course, either meat, fish, chicken, duck, shrimp or crab... We prepare the main course a little salty because we have a hot climate and salt should be included in our food. Plain rice goes well with these plates.

Sticky rice is not served very often. For light breakfast we have soups like pho, mi, or some cakes. To entertain, we prepare more courses and most of us serve from four to eight dishes. A family dinner has three dishes at the same time, because each dish goes with rice. For guests we serve soup or salad first, rice last, we may have two to three soups for an evening party.

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