Burned Bananas

We had a small breakfast this morning. We were saving our appetites for all of the delicious food we would be eating in our day-long Thai cooking class.

Our group of 7 left the hotel around 9:30 am with our teacher, Oil (that's her English name, fittingly enough). Baskets in hand, we headed to the daily market to buy our fresh produce for the day's recipes, and learn about Thai vegetables, fruit, and ingredients. We went back to the school, which is just a huge open room on the top floor of a home owned by the guesthouse people. We were given a stone mortar and pestle and a small chopping board each, then took a seat on a mat on the floor to start chopping away. Our first task: make Thai green curry paste from scratch. We chopped and chopped, then we pounded and pounded until we were left with what actually did look like Thai green curry paste. We proceeded to our individual gas stoves where we made ourselves Thai green curry with coconut milk and sticky rice. Our mouths watering, we couldn't eat it yet, as we had to complete our second task: make Thai sweet and sour chicken with vegetables. This was quite an easy, quick dish. Once finished, we all sat down at the table to gorge ourselves on our first two dishes of the day. And they were delicious!

We had a short 'lunch' break after this, where most people sprawled out on the floor and moaned about how full they were. Nige and I went for a walk, went to two 7-elevens to find a phone card, and made a call home before returning to our kitchen. Over the course of the afternoon, we made Pad Thai, spring rolls (difficult to roll up, but ours managed to stay together when we put them in the oil to fry), tom yum soup and an awesome dessert of caramelized bananas with coconut sauce and coconut ice cream. And we didn't burn our bananas either.

The food was so incredibly delicious, and we had a fantastic time chopping and cooking and learning new recipes. The best part was that we didn't have to clean up at all. We had enough food left over to feed a small army, and it fed us for the next two days. The Libra guesthouse let us store the food in their refrigerators, then the kitchen staff heated it up when we were ready for it. We didn't do much that evening, as our bodily energy was being used up to digest all of that food.