This morning was an early start for my Thai cookery course which was a full day thing where you get to go to the market, buy some fresh ingredients then cook about 7 dishes from 9 til 4pm.
There was about 9 of us in the group so once we got picked up we went straight to a market about 5 mins down the road. The guide was great and showed us all of the different vegetables, fruits, spices, herbs etc that they use in Thai cooking. A lot of them are different to what you would imagine, like egg plant (aubergine) is really small and green, there are about 3 types so it's nothing like the purple ones we have!
We started off by learning how they cook jasmine and sticky rice (which luckily we didn't have to make every time we cooked a curry!). Then they gave us a big plate of fresh fruit to start off which was amazing as i'd wanted to try dragon fruit and it was on there. They also had various other weird looking fruits like rambutan (like lychee), pomelo (like grapefruit) but my favourite was the mangosteen as it was so sweet & juicy.
I could probably be here for hours telling you how i made each dish but to cut a long story short here is the menu that i had for the day..
Green Curry Paste
Green Curry with chicken
Stir Fried prawn with curry powder
Chicken in coconut milk soup
Spring rolls
Mango with sticky rice
All de-li-cious!! and the best part was other people were cooking different dishes at the same time so we got to try so much!
As you would expect the Thai's use alot of chilli in their cooking, the ones we used were 'mouse shit' chillis which are so strong and Thai's put about 20 of them in their curry..i put one (what a woose) but that was enough for me definitely!!
I got a little cookery book to take away so i'll definitely be trying out some when i get home. It's actually so easy to cook but i think it'll be difficult to find the right ingredients back home.
Anyway i ate so much today that i think i'll just get some ice cream for my dinner hahahaa!!