Posted by Jay
09 May 2011
On Tuesday of our vacation in Thailand I went to a Thai cooking school while Jess went to get pampered at the hotel spa. The hotel recommended the Phuket Thai Cooking School which is located right on the beach about 30 minutes from our hotel.
I was the first person to arrive and had about 20 minutes to relax and enjoy the nice breeze coming off the water and enjoy a cup of coffee (well i enjoyed the view as the coffee was not very good). There were five other students, 2 from Singapore, 2 from Switzerland and 1 from Australia.
We had 2 Thai teachers Get and Ben, which both were females, I really didn't get any back story about their "English" names.
Our first endeavor was preparing a red curry from scratch. This involved a lot of grinding of different spices and we really worked up a sweat in the process.
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| Table where we ground our curry and ate our dishes |
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| Grinding our spices |
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| Finished curry paste |
After making our curry paste we started making our first dish 'Tom Kha Kai', or chicken in coconut milk soup. The process for all of our dishes was to watch the teacher make it and then we went and made it. After finishing each dish we got to go and eat it.
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| Cooking school |
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| Soup before |
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| Soup after |
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Next we prepared 'Poa Pea Tod', spring rolls and 'Som Tam', papaya salad. Jess was very excited for me to learn how to make spring rolls and they were surprisingly easy. The papaya salad was really spicy even though I had reduced the number of peppers I put in.
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| Spring rolls prior to frying |
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Spring rolls and papaya salad
(not sure why this is sideways - the blog doesn't seem to like the picture!) |
Finally we prepared 'Pad Paew Wan Goong', sweet and sour vegetables with prawns and 'Kaeng Panaeng Moo', panaeng curry with pork. We used our curry past that we prepared earlier in the day for this curry. Both dishes turned out very delicious and we barely had room for the dessert of Mango with sticky rice.
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Sweet and sour and curry
(again sideways - what's up with that?) |
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| Chopping Veggies! |
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| So full! |
So besides learning how to make these awesome Thai dishes I really started learning how to taste my sauces and food and add different ingredients to bring out the saltiness, sour or sweetness that Thai food is known for. Overall it was a very fun day with some great people and I am excited to try these dishes in my own kitchen.
Cheers!
Jay
8:53 PM |
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Comments (1)
This sounded really neat Jay, something that I am sure Jeff would have enjoyed! Hopefully you can test out your new skills soon!