Mmmmmm, Thai cooking

Before I get stuck into this blog post I have to apologise for the lack of photos - I was so busy with the class it didn't even occur to me to take any photos.

Anyway, yesterday I went off to my Thai cooking lesson. The class was from 9:30am until 3:30pm and was run by a lovely young Thai woman who has been in New Zealand for five years. She had two other Thai woman to assist her which worked out really well as some things took longer than planned. They were great at helping us catch up when we fell behind. In the class there were eight of us there to learn new skills.

Well, we sliced and pounded and stirred and cooked our little hearts out pretty much non-stop all day. We did have a small pause for lunch which consisted of yummy curry puffs that we had made. They were delicious.

Throughout the day we made the curry puffs (minced pork, potato, carrot, spices and seasoning wrapped in puff pastry), chicken stirfry, pork curry, jasmine rice and a dessert of water chestnuts. The part I enjoyed the most was making our own curry paste from scratch. It's the most that my mortar and pestle has ever been used! We got to use ingredients most of us had never heard of through the day as well as things that smelt like death but tasted fabulous.

My favourite dish of the day was the chicken stirfry which had really simple ingredients of chicken, mushrooms, sherry, fish sauce, garlic, ginger, tamarind paste, water and sugar. Hmmm, I guess that doesn't sound so simple but it was super simple compared to the curry paste we made which had ingredients of lemongrass, galangal, garlic, shallots, roasted peanuts, shrimp paste, salt, coriander, chillies and cumin - all of those were pounded together into a paste. While it took quite a long time to prepare the finished result was divine and totally worth the effort.

So that is one of my cooking lessons off my list of 101 things to do. The next one I have booked is the chocolate one. I am very much looking forward to that one!