Oriental Cuisine Thai Cookery School – Day One

Most Thai cooking classes begin with a trip to the local market.  When I was in Chiang Mai cooking about 14 years ago I was given the option of going to the market or starting to help prepare curry paste.  I’d seen markets before so chose to help make the paste that morning and every morning thereafter. so I never saw the Chiang Mai market.

This morning the van carrying us to the cooking school stopped at the market first.  So, it took 14 years to show me what a real treat I missed.   The market is huge, acres and acres under roof.  We toured a portion of it.  As we walked along the chef would comment on different things.  One was lemon grass.  It was sold in bunches of three.  Three stalks were tied together with a slice of pineapple, a slice of an orange colored veggie and a couple of bay leaves.  The items tied to the stalks served as a bouquet garni for soup.

As for the school, there is a maximum of ten to a class.  There is a separate wok station for each student.  Today there were eight of us. There are six categories of dishes to choose from to prepare.  Under each category there are three choices.  Since I’ll be going for three days I’ll cook everything , a total of 18 different dishes.

My choices for six categories for the first day were:

A la Carte

                Pad  Thai

Curry

                Green Curry

Stir Fry

                Chicken with Cashew Nuts

Soup

                Mild Soup with Bean Curd

Dessert

                Sticky Rice with Mango

Hors Doeuvres

                Fresh Spring Rolls

The  instructor stands at the head of the prep table.  Before each of us is a tray with the ingredients for our dish (our mis en place)  She explains what to do with the ingredients for the dish.  Since we as a group may be making three different dishes under each category it is a little confusing at the start since she is explaining different dish preparations.  However, we all get the hang of it quickly.

We do the prep work, go to a wok station, prepare our dish,(mine was Pad Thai) and convene in the dining room to eat.  Although there are six categories, the soup, stir fry, and curry is combined, as is the dessert and hors dourvers, so we actually sit down three separate times during the course of the day.  (I find it a little unusual to end the class eating an appetizer and dessert together) 

I eat all of the Pad Thai.  The recipe was different from what I had learned in Krabi four years ago.  This one is a guaranteed no fail so the noodles and egg can’t wind up a gummy mess if the dish is done incorrectly. 

When I next sat down to eat the soup (delicious delicately flavored chicken soup with glass noodles), the curry, and chicken with cashews it was apparent there was going to be too much to eat.  While it is all tasty it becomes a decision of what to eat and what to leave.  I stopped eating three times saying – no more!  However, my spoon kept finding its way back for a little more chicken soup each time because it was so delicious.

Then came the fresh spring rolls and sticky rice with mango.  I must say I acquitted myself quite well with the spring rolls.  They came out tightly rolled and uniform.   I even sliced them on the bias, a technique I saw in the cooking DVDs Ralph gave me for Xmas, and arranged them artfully on my plate.  That earned a request from a fellow student if she could take a picture of them.  By the way, we cooked the veggies for the filling other than the lettuce.  Not quite the ‘fresh spring roll’ filling we are accustomed to.

Finally, dessert.  The sticky rice with mango requires you to take a very dry gelatinous lump of steamed rice a little larger than a golf ball, pull it into smaller lumps and drop them into a pan of boiling coconut milk to which some sugar has been added.  You then proceed at maniacal speed to break each of those small clumps up into individual grains with your wooden spoon as the coconut milk reduces.  Mine turned out, shall we say, a perfect consistency. 

Sticky rice with slices of succulent ripe mango.  What a way to end the class!

I took lots of pictures only to discover that I might not have packed the cable for downloading them to my netbook (Ugh!)

The rest of my day wasn’t.  Back to the hotel at 4pm.  Directly to bed, very tired.  Up at midnight and it is now going on 1 am as I write this post.  Hopefully by the end of the day tomorrow I’ll be on Thai time.