Chaing Mai, Thailand –
Looks can be deceptive.
At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.
Our instructor makes it all look so easy.
The ingredients are already portioned out for us, so all we have to do is this, that, and this other thing and Bam! You’ve got a perfectly prepared dish of Pad Thai.
It only takes about two minutes.
And that’s where the deception lies.
I’m sure for a practiced cook, going through the required steps in the short amount of time that the ingredients are allowed to be in the wok may not be difficult to do.
But for a clumsy, uncoordinated oaf like me, it’s another story altogether…
We’re spending the day at the A Lot of Thai cooking school, learning how to make a variety of dishes.
At least, that’s what we’re supposed to be learning.
I’m learning how slow and awkward I am when trying to pick up new skills.
We arrived to find a line of individual cooking stations all set out in an outdoor covered patio. Each station had a wok, a single, portable propane burner, and all the ingredients for our first dish artfully arranged at each station.
It was really an ingenious setup. All of the tedious prep-work had already been done for us, leaving only a few final steps to be performed before tossing all the ingredients into the pot and serving up a delectable dish.
And then, while we are sitting down to indulge ourselves in each dish we’ve produced, the cooking stations are cleared and re-setup for the next dish to be prepared.
We started with the Pad Thai. There were only a couple of small preparation steps to be completed, like chopping up scallions, or smashing a garlic clove with the side of our knives, or some other task that would only take a couple of minutes to perform.
Then came the challenging part. Cooking a dish of Pad Thai is a short, yet very involved, dance of ingredients, tools, and timing.
You need to be light and nimble in your actions to get it right.
And I’m anything but.
Luckily, I had the assistant instructors around to point out my shortcomings.
“Too hot!”
“Too long!”
“You’re going to burn it!”
Of course, without their drill-sergeant barks, telling me what I was doing wrong, what I produced might not have been edible.
As it was, what came out of my wok, and into the bowl, was quite delectable.
I was amazed with what I had produced.
Next up was a soup, complete with shrimp-heads that were used for flavor.
Luckily, this one didn’t seem to require such quick and short actions to be taken during the cooking phase, so the kitchen klutzes (like myself) weren’t in much danger of over-cooking our dishes as with the Pad Thai. This one consisted primarily of dropping the various ingredients into the pot of water in a specific order.
After the appropriate smashing, cutting, and other necessary final preparations, of course.
And again, while we were enjoying the fruits of our labors, the cooking stations were all swapped out with the ingredients needed for our next dish, a Green Curry.
While the Green Curry required a little more chopping and other prep than the previous two dishes, the key preparation step seemed to be to buy pre-prepared curry powder at the market.
I had seen the curry powder at the various markets we had visited, big piles of the stuff that would be slowly reduced in size as customers would buy what they needed. Now I knew what I had been looking at all those times.
Three substantial dishes down, it was time to take a break, and a walk.
We walked a few blocks over to the neighborhood market, where our instructor pointed out the various ingredients that we would need to be picking up if we decided to try cooking these dishes on our own.
Mainly, I think our instructor was enjoying picking up the more unusual items to be found, and explaining what they were and what we might do with them.
Market visit over, we returned to our classroom to prepare our final two dishes, more or less at the same time.
Of course, on these two, key steps were taken out of our hands.
First up was cooking sticky rice, which was demonstrated to us by one of the assistants, as he assembled and started cooking more than enough rice for the entire class.
Then, while the rice was cooking away, we were instructed in assembling an egg roll, with the final deep-frying step left up to the assistant instructors to perform. Apparently, they did not trust us with safely dropping our rolls into the hot oil on our own without splashing and possibly starting a fire.
Speaking for myself, it was probably a wise choice.
The final step was for us to each to prepare the Mango topping for our sticky rice. Once the rice was dished out, we would add the topping that we had each prepared.
We were finishing the day with the combination of an appetizer and a dessert.
Class over, we were sent on our way with a full stomach, and a cookbook, for those of us adventurous enough to try cooking these dishes on our own.
Without the drill-sergeants barking at us when we were cooking things too long…
For more photos of the cooking school and the dishes we prepared, click here.
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