At the appointed hour, we meet in the dining area to go to the market with Frans and our instructor, Tuo. We drive back over to Hang Dong market where we get instruction and information on all the different herbs and vegetables available. Of course there is also lots of food already cooked- like the whole crispy fish! Yum!
But, we’re not here for that! We shop around and pick up fresh basil, coconut milk, oil, tomatoes, ginger and fresh coconut – flaked right in front of us – for fresh coconut milk!
Eggs here are so cheap! And amazingly fresh and of course – not refrigerated!
We complete our shopping and head back to the kitchen for our cooking session. We’ll be cooking 3 dishes today – Pad Priew Wan (thai Sweet and Sour Chicken), Kaeng phad gai (Chicken red curry) and Tom kha kai (Chicken in coconut-milk soup). Tuo and her assistant Tuo (yes, there are two Tuos!) set everything up for us, Marlee (one of the caretakers here) acts as our photographer, we don our darling pink aprons and dashing white caps and we are ready to begin.
We start with the Red Curry Chicken, cutting up the ingredients…
then taking them all over to the cooking stations together.
Everything is really simple with a few basic ingredients, easily recreated when we get home. It’s fantastic how quickly and easily you can pull these meals together! So on we cook – I’ll leave the pictures to tell the story….
Finally we end up with our 3 dishes – and we all sit down to have a “family” dinner. Originally we thought we’d cook on dish, eat it, then move on to the next. But it really makes more sense to cook everything all at once and eat at once. That way you aren’t filled up on the first dish and can’t eat the 2nd or 3rd.
Of course there’s so much darn food it doesn’t matter when we eat it! I’m stuffed from lunch, so the bulk of this is coming home with us for left overs! Marlee and Joenen join us for dinner and spend a lovely evening enjoying everyone’s company and tasting the different ways each of us has made our dishes!
Then, of course, there is dessert! Fried Bananas! Oh torture, my favorite! Tuo shows us how to the make the batter. First Ed gets to make the fresh coconut milk by pouring water over the coconut then squeezing it out. Then he gets to mix the batter – it’s sugar and this awesome “flour for fruits and vegetables” – which smells like vanilla and is nothing like anything we’ve ever seen in the states!
Then Tuo does the honors and fries the bananas in Palm oil.
20 minutes later and even though we are stuffed to the gills, we are all happily munching away on these crispy sweet delicacies! I was too excited to even take a picture! LOL.
We spend the rest of the evening chatting away, trading stories with Frans and looking at pictures of his cars (he restores Essex cars) and highlights of his trip through Thailand. The evening ends too early – but Frans has a 7AM flight, which means 5:30 leaving – so we bid him farewell, and retired to our little stilt house for one final night.
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