We shouldn’t have eaten breakfast.
I
wondered how it would play out…do we cook and then eat each dish? Or
cook them all and then sit down to a feast for lunch? It turned out to
be the former and each dish turned out to be a full-sized plate/bowl.
But first, getting there was to be more of a journey than we expected. After waiting 30 minutes on the East beach of Railay
for more passengers, our long tail boat taxi finally pulled its anchor
for Ao Nammao (just around a big karst formation.) It was low tide so
we slipped and slid a good 80 meters to the boat in the sandy muck.
On
the other side was more muck where our slippers were almost lost in the
sticky mud. Our teacher, Pin, met us at the dock and off we rode to the
Siam Cuisine Thai Cookery School (krabisiamcuisine@yahoo.com).
Phad
thai, spring rolls, coconut milk soup, chicken with cashews and ginger,
noodle salad…the highlight for me was pounding red curry paste from
scratch with a mortar and pestle.
We
learned that each dish takes either 2 tablespoons of oyster sauce or 1
tablespoon of fish sauce, or both, and it always requires two teaspoons
of sugar. We were told we were aiming for a “sweet, sour and fragrant”
touch. In every dish, Pin would point at a leaf or vegetable and smile,
“This makes it smell good.” Lee was surprised that such few and simple
ingredients made for such flavorful dishes. This is Tom Ka soup...
Oh,
and for all of you who like to cook or would like to try cooking thai
noodles…Phad thai has NO KETCHUP. Lee and I always wondered if American
Thai restaurants and recipes were not following an authentic style by
including ketchup. We now know that the basic sauce is just garlic,
oyster sauce, fish sauce and yup…two teaspoons of sugar.
We
realized after the first full plate of phad thai and then 3 spring
rolls per person that we should only be sampling these dishes…it was
only 10:30am.
The helper girls laughed at me for having little or no hot spice in my dishes. Pin
laughed at herself for being half of Lee’s size. I think she gets a
kick out of draping tall westerners in aprons especially when she has
to reach above her head to tie the strings around their waists. We
had a great time and recommend dong something similar. We cooked seven
dishes (enough to take home for dinner) and a ride back to the long
tail water taxi beach all for about USD$30 per person. Yum!
