• Professional Development
  • Medicine & Nursing
  • Arts & Crafts
  • Health & Wellbeing
  • Personal Development

209 Educators providing Open Water courses delivered Live Online

Casual Rice

casual rice

Cranmer Road

I’m Xuan (pronounced Sawn). I was born in Vietnam from Chinese Vietnamese parents and I am proud to be one of the original Vietnamese boat people now living here in the UK. In the late 1970s, the aftermath of the Vietnam war and the growing oppression of the ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam forced my family to flee their home. We left Vietnam on a small overcrowded and ramshackle boat that wasn’t fit for the open water and sailed the perilous South China Sea to Hong Kong. At age 2 my first and only memory of Hong Kong is a hazy image of the orange skies. After 6 months we left the tropical heat of Hong Kong and immigrated to the cold, or you could say dreich (Scots for dreary) climate of the Scottish winter. We lived in the quiet outskirts of Glasgow for four years before moving and settling in London, which was a hubbub of culture and activity. By the age of 14 I had lived in four vastly different countries and each of these places have influenced the person that I am and the food I love to cook and eat. My own cooking adventure started at an early age – washing the rice grains for steamed rice and undertaking the long and meticulous task of cleaning and snapping the tails off bean sprouts for my parents spring rolls. This you can say was my training for the future food lover in me – or feeder. As a child of refugees, love was often shown through food rather than words. From these duties and by always keeping my belly full, my parents quietly passed on their own rich food heritage and family history to me through the years. In my 20’s I became a sushi chef at a vibrant restaurant in Central London, and spent 4 years learning the meticulous art of preparing, filleting and slicing fish for sushi, maki, nigiris and sashimi. I have since run a number of supper clubs in London and Dundee, including a charity Chinese hotpot that raised over £2,000 for the charity – Sarcoma UK. This year, I’ve taken the next leap in my food adventure and launched my online cookalong classes, which have been great fun and allow me to reach new like minded food enthusiasts far and wide. Casual Rice is all about sharing my love for food and my own culinary heritage through authentic but informal Vietnamese and Chinese meals I devoured when growing up, with Japanese influences from my sushi training days. The name Casual Rice comes from The Mandarin Way, a book by the inspirational Cecilia Sun Yun Chiang. A pioneering woman who in the 1960’s opened one of the first authentic Chinese restaurant in North America. In her book she writes “when we sat down to meals as a family, we adopted a much simpler mode of eating … such meals were known as “pien- fan”, “casual rice” or what might be termed home cooking”. As the saying goes, food is a universal language that brings people together. I am hoping through this website and cookalong classes I am able to share personal recipes from my own home, that you can make and share in your homes with your loved ones. Thanks for visiting.

Courses matching "Open Water"

Show all 1

3rd October Hannah Weatherill #Agent121. Looking for: ADULT FICTION, NON-FICTION

5.0(3)

By I Am In Print

LOOKING FOR: ADULT FICTION, NON-FICTION Hannah joined Watson, Little in 2024 after four years as an agent at Northbank Talent Management and a year at Penguin Random House UK. She’s building a varied list of commercial and upmarket fiction and non-fiction, and authors she’s represented have been listed for prizes including the Women’s Prize, the British Book Awards, the Jhalak Prize, the Comedy Women in Print Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. She’s always looking for excellent writing which marries a strong voice with a catchy concept and a compelling plot, but more specifically, in fiction, she loves to represent: Crime and thriller novels with a confident voice, a clear hook and a fresh approach – especially if it says something about the world we live in today. She recently enjoyed the structure of Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister, the fun voice and family dynamics of My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite and the holiday setting of Murder on Lake Garda by Tom Hindle. Love stories, whether that’s a smart romcom like Book Lovers by Emily Henry or Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, an intimate coming-of-age love story like Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson or a big, weepy epic. General contemporary fiction about complicated people, families and lives, often when there’s a mystery at its heart. Some of her recent favourites include Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey, I’m Sorry You Feel That Way by Rebecca Wait, and All My Mothers by Joanna Cannon. She also takes on a small amount of historical fiction, generally set in the 19th and 20th centuries – so she’s not the best fit for books set much further back in time or myth retellings. She’s also looking for non-fiction with a strong voice and new insight into an experience or place, and am particularly interested in self-help, lifestyle and wellbeing, science, psychology, nature writing, memoir, and new ways into genres such as true crime, history or the environment. Over the years, she has loved The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, The Five by Hallie Rubenhold and Manifest by Roxie Nafousi. She’s not the right agent for sci-fi, fantasy or action thrillers, and is currently not accepting children’s and YA novels, scripts or poetry. Hannah would like you to submit your fiction as a covering letter, 1-2 page synopsis and the first 5,000 words of your manuscript in a single word document.  For non-fiction, she would like to see: 1-page synopsis – to give an overview of what the book will offer the reader and how it's different from other books out there on this topic A detailed proposed contents list, including proposed sub-section headings as well as chapter headings – to give a sense of the overall reader journey (this is not included in the word count) (In addition to the paid sessions, Hannah is kindly offering one free session for low income/underrepresented writers. Please email agent121@iaminprint.co.uk to apply, outlining your case for this option which is offered at the discretion of I Am In Print).  By booking you understand you need to conduct an internet connection test with I Am In Print prior to the event. You also agree to email your material in one document to reach I Am In Print by the stated submission deadline and note that I Am In Print take no responsibility for the advice received during your agent meeting. The submission deadline is: Thursday 25th September 2025

3rd October Hannah Weatherill #Agent121. Looking for: ADULT FICTION, NON-FICTION
Delivered Online + more
£72