Fish and chips and vinegar...

Well almost...

I've been exporing my culinary creativity this week at Bangkok Thai Cooking Academy.

Before deciding to become a teacher I had seriouly considered becoming a chef like my father.

After 5 hours a day, 5 days in a row and creating 5 recipes each day, I'm glad I chose teaching, my legs are killing me! I am truly thankful for Salonpas!

Now if I could only find a sewing machine to make a few pairs of pants out of them...this blog is not sponsored or in anyway affiliated with Salonpas or it's parent company. I receive no additonal income for posting a picture of Salonpas on my blog(however, if you'd like to donate some to a worthy cause)

There are 4 students in the class.

Myself, Soom, from Bangkok, Noon, also from Bangkok and Kwa Huang, a chef from Korea, along with our instructor Chef Nat who has worked extensively throughout Asia( and nothing like Gordon Ramsey from Hell's Kitchen)

All classes are conducted in Thai~lish. Being hard of hearing at the best of Covid times(due to masks, screens etc.) and adding on a few pronunciation issues, I struggle along to complete the recipes to hopefully good results. I have yet to poison anyone... fingers crossed...

A typical day starts around 830am. Chef has been in along with his assistant, to prep the ingredients for the day's recipes. At each of our stations there are various trays for each recipe laied out. We then go and get the ingredients for each recipe wrap them in Saran, label and set aside until needed.

At 9am~ish we begin class.

If the recipe involves a paste to be made we usually begin with this recipe. Chopping the ingredients needed. Then using mortar and pestle, we pound the hardest ingredients into submission adding the softer ingredients until a fine paste is created.

We then prepare the oil to create the sauce add the paste and add the meat and vegetables for each recipe.

I was asked on FB if the ingredients are simlar to what we could find "at home"?

Living in Toronto going to your local market or Chinatown would get you everything you needed, however I'm unsure if everything could be found everywhere. One of the reasons a lot of chefs that came to Canada had to modify ingredients to achieve similar tastes to what they were able to make back home. ( a suggested reading, Chop Suey Nation by Ann Hui. Premise she drove across Canada to "write about small-town Chinese restaurants and the families who run them.")

I must say most ingredients are familiar to me...garlic, oyster sauce, fish sauce, sugar from cane, vinegar, chilis, shallots, onions, cilantro(yes even the root), 5 spice powder.

Some I have heard about and never used, until now...green mango, green papaya, wing beans, malt, taro, celery(looking like cilantro not the big stalks that we find in Canada), palm sugar, salted egg!

It is a fun exploration into the world of food.

I can devein 5 shrimp in less than 2 minutes now...in 4 weeks time it will take less than 1 minute for a whole pound I'm sure!

I must say, the use of chicken fat and a pig's leg (yes the trotter too) were the "highlight" for recipes.

The real highlight has been interacting with the other students and Chef(it's easier to say than Chef Nat) over lunch, a great many laughs and lots of questions.

The most important ones are:

1. Where did you come from(what were you doing before I just met you?)

2. Where are you going next?

3. Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend?(sounds like Guatemala all over again)

4. Have you eaten?

5. Have you gained weight/ lost weight?

check out this YouTube video that my language teacher sent me

https://youtu.be/Cgy_lptUWiY

and for me...

-- What did you do before you retired?(I'm apparently too young to retire)

-----"aaaawwwww you love children!"

-- How much do you make?

-- How do you live without money(pensions are rare here)

-- Are you here for plastic surgery?(apparently I don't look young)

--Why Bangkok?

--Where do you live?

--How do you know people in Bangkok?

I chuckle and answer as truthfully as I dare...apparently Yanhee is the best place to go for plastic surgery(I'll blog all the gory details), close to school is a nice neighbourhood and we are off to, hopefully, have a meal at Ja Fai next week. She is the first street cart vendor to achieve a Michelin star! You need a reservation...it's now expensive, go figure! I'm not dressing up!

Below are pictures of some of this week's recipes. If you are a FB friend you've seen most of them or if you read the previous post.

My work station

My home away from home for 5 hours a day!

The ingredients waiting to be prepped, wrapped in Saran.

Green Curry Paste

The first paste I ever made using a mortar and pestle!

Chicken satay, one of my all time favourites! Thank you to Wanda and Dave, my niece and her husband in the Netherlands, who first introduced me to them back in 1983!