Thai Cooking

We loved the food in Thailand. It is so much better than the local cuisine in Hong Kong. Lucky for us, we brought back a bit of that amazing cuisine in the form of a recipe book and newly acquired Thai cooking skills. On our second day in Bangkok, we ventured to the Baipai Thai Cooking school for a cooking class. We prepared four different dishes throughout the morning and sampled everything we (and the instructor) cooked. The class was great! It was fun and interactive and all of the recipes were fantastic. They were also very considerate about letting us substitute chicken for pork in the recipes. First up, we learned to make curry paste. I was called up to pummel some of the spices and I really showed them how it is done.

We learned to make the curry paste to be used in the final recipe of the morning which was chicken curry. The first full recipe we learned was vegetable cups. We really enjoyed this recipe because you make little pastry cups to fill with veggies. This involved dipping the batter into a boiling pot of oil with a very cool instrument to form the cup shape. The instructor of course produced perfectly shaped beautiful cups. When we first attempted to make them on our own, all of our cups were missing bottoms. That is a problem when you fill them with veggies. :-) Turns out the oil was too hot. Once we fixed that issue, we were well on our way.




Isn't Daniel a natural in the kitchen?

After the veggie cups (with bottoms), we made a delicious and spicy noodle dish. We followed that with a beef and veggie stir fry and finished with my favorite dish of the day, the chicken curry with potatoes. It was so good!





I hope that we can make some of these dishes at home. The hardest thing will be finding the spices and veggies (galangal anyone?), but in Hong Kong I think we had a good chance. We bought the little instrument for making the pastry cups and an apron, so we'll see that happens!