Tuesday Cooking School Part 2

PART 2

I got so involved with making the curry using the curry paste we had made at the beginning of the class that I forgot to photograph the process.

The first and most important step, though, is cooking the curry paste until it is fragrant. Then you add the coconut milk and other ingredients by sections...meat and scallions first, then the other veggies and finally the sweet basil and kaffir lime leaves. My garnish started to sink, but it is thin strips of red pepper and a sprig of basil. I took the photo before I added the Coconut cream drizzle. Very classy.

Mine is green and Indira’s is a yellow curry.

Next up was the stir fry chicken and basil.

This was our ingredients plate. Those are yard long beans curled around the plate!

A lesson in stir frying…

I had never seen the tool she is using...it’s a spoon-spatula cross. I like it. Might have to find one. The couple in the back are the Russian couple.

Cooking and then placed on a plate with long grain rice.

And it was time to gather around the tables to eat again. A very filling day!

During the break time I took a walk down the lane...tucked away were maybe 5 more of these outdoor pavilion teaching kitchens. Each had its own little group of teacher, prep crew and 6-10 students.

A little pond at the end of the lane and gardens.

One last course!! By then even the enthusiastically-chowing-down younger guys were feeling stuffed! Dessert!

Our individual bowls of ingredients.

The first step is to grind up some pandan leaves in order to extract their green color so our coconut milk sauce would be a light green. Then off to our stations to cook up the coconut milk with some brown sugar.

Quite yummy, but Joyzaa said, “As is, only 60 baht.”

“Now 150 baht!”

And so ended our day at the Cooking School! Into the van we went and were dropped of at each one’s place of lodging around the city. The traffic was heavy...motor scooters everywhere. Many times if I could have opened my window and, if the people on the scooter would turn my way I could easily have leaned out and kissed them. Personal space for people or vehicles of any kind just doesn’t exist. Oddly enough, somehow it’s all kindly executed and everyone...walkers, scooters, tuk-tuks (pedicabs) and various cars/trucks/cabs all get where they’re going. We were deposited just outside the swinging doors into our courtyard, safe and none the worse for wear.

Martha came over in the evening and enjoyed some of the leftovers we brought home from class. We reviewed the schedule for tomorrow, which is Wednesday, Dec. 21. We have a day of Old City wandering and a list of places to go and teas to drink! But that’s another day’s story.