Thailand Next Head Chef

Cooking class today! I was so excited and I am very happy I decided to sign up for it. First of all it was something different than sightseeing and activity tour and second and most importantly, I have learnt quite a few new things, including cooking tricks which I can apply in cooking not only Asian dishes at home e.g. how to effortlessly peel garlic, how to properly use wok and why my sticky rice was never perfect and of course I learnt how to prepare 6 traditional Thai dishes.

Upon arrival we were given a list of dishes to choose from, we could select one in each category of starter, soup, stir fry, salad, curry and dessert.

I chose

1. Fresh spring rolls
2. Coconut soup with chicken (or prawn or tofu or all together)
3. Green curry (unfortunately there was no Massaman curry to choose :( )
4. Pad Thai
5. Cucumber salad
6. Sticky rice with mango for dessert

We started off by quick introduction to the curry world and chopping all the ingredients. Other course participants selected different curries but up till some point the preparation process is the same. At the end we produced a green and red curry paste from scratch. One teaspoon of a curry paste is enough for one portion so its convenient to prepare more and the preserve it for later.

Under a watchful eye of our teacher, I'm really going for it! Its not that easy to make a smooth paste out of chunks of veg and herbs.

 While preparing the curry, at the same time we chopped all the ingredients for the soup and Pad Thai.

Then I made a coconut soup (it is not sweet if there are any doubts) which smelled delicious and I couldn't wait to eat it!

The finished product!

Then green curry (its so easy to over spice it!)

Nom nom nom

And Pad Thai

After completing 3 dishes it was time for the first fest. My absolute favourite (apart from dessert later) was a coconut soup which I swallowed in minutes but I completely forgot that coconut milk is so filling and I just struggled to eat anything after that. The fact that it was 10 am also didn't help; most of us is not used to eating large amounts of full of flavor and spiciness food at that time of the day.

Next round was a dessert  and cucumber salad

And fresh and spring (fried) rolls - preparation of which became very sexual and dramatic in the same time...

The end results were again delicious. I seriously could not fit everything in my stomach but thankfully take away boxes were provided and I had a nice dinner later on that day. 

I am so proud of my little dishes as all of them turned out sooo yummy! The coconut soup was my favourite today cause I had one for dinner recently and I fell in love with it (and who knows me well know my love for coconut milk and coconuts in general) and was craving for it ever since, but it doesn't diminish the great taste of all the remaining dishes which I just cannot wait to reproduce and cook for friends and family back home. I am now seriously planning to get a set of good knives and all the other kitchen equipment which I saw today (especially a nice wok pan, a hand stone mill and a basket for cooking a perfect rice) because they can be so useful in so many different ways!

PS. From completely different box, since I arrived to Krabi there have been a festival going on. I thought it was a religious thing but after seeing and hearing very laud processions and fireworks all over the town and hearing reports of other travellers seeing people in the processions piercing their cheeks and scourging themselves I started asking. I found out that it is all to celebrate ... VEGETARIANISM! Yes, I was told its Vegetarian Festival! And although I have not witnessed people hurting themselves, I saw men walking?jumping?dancing? on top of lit fireworks. I made a couple of videos but once transferred to my netbook it is playing it sideways and I don't have a program here to flip it the correct way  (I don't want to upload sideways films) so you have to believe me on word!