Thai time

Thai food was on the menu today, with Rob teaching us. I've never really had thai food, so was excited to see what flavours and unusual ingredients I would encounter. We began by preparing the thai green curry paste for supper later. To make an authentic paste, we had to grind the spices in a pestle and mortar for at least 20 minutes. The longer you break the ingredients for the paste down, the better it will taste apparently. Hard work, I tell you! We also fried some sliced garlic in a wok in lots of oil to make it crispy. We used the crispy garlic in our dishes today, but you can then use it for salads, use the oil in chicken dishes...anything you want. The resulting paste from the mortar I think looked a bit like elephant poo, but I'm sure it would taste nice!

Then it was onto the Poh Pia Tod or Thai style spring rolls. Our filling was pork mince, bean sprouts, vermicelli noodles and some other tasty things. They were quite easy to make actually. Simples. We then whipped up some Tod Mun Pla, or Thai fish cakes which when making, you indent your thumb, so that you can put a bit of sauce on top and eat together. The fish cakes used some unusual ingredients, such as kra-chaai (poor mans' ginger which looked like old, long fingers) and fresh turmeric (bright orange stuff which stains your fingers after cutting it for ages) .We made a tamarind dip and a nam aa-jaad, a spicy dip with cucumber, chillies, sugar and coriander. So lunch was served.

The spring rolls and fish cakes were really tasty. Of course they would be, they've been deep fried! I really enjoyed the tamarind sauce too. Next, we made Tom Yum Kung, a hot and sour soup. We used galangal, a kind of ginger in the soup as well as other things and garnished it with strings of fresh green peppercorns on the stem and birds' eye chillies. Rob taught us a trick of testing how hot a chilli is to judge how much you want to put into your dish. Cut it and give it a lick. See what your reaction is and act accordingly. I licked a tiny bit of green birds' eye chilli. It felt like my tongue had been stung! I don't really like spicy food so I was a bit dubious about this soup, seeing as part of its name included the word 'hot'. To add to the authentic Thai feel of the day, the soup was served with a Thai beer.

The soup wasn't bad, just not to my taste. I don't particularly like coconut milk or chillies. Something which Thai cuisine uses a lot of. The prawns were good though. Then it was time to make the green chicken curry. We had already cooked out the ingredients after making the paste in the morning, so the hard, time-consuming part was already done- the rest of the curry didn't take long at all. More coconut milk, chicken etc, boil some jasmine rice and voila.

Gang Kiew Wann and Kaw Savy or Chicken green curry with boiled jasmine rice

Did you know that Thai people consider rice to be the main meal and anything else is an extra? The curry was alright.Not I'm not too keen on curries, but it was quite aromatic and not too hot as my partner and I made it mild, rather than hot hot hot. I don't think I'd have it again though. Not really my cup of tea. The rice was good though. Sort of sticky and yummy.

Then it was pudding. Pon-la-mai nam-cheum or fresh chilled melon with Thai syrup. The syrup was made with palm sugar and pandan leaves which are like the vanilla beans of Asia. It was a refreshing pudding with coconut milk and the thai syrup poured over the top and some edible flowers for presentation. Good, but I would have preferred to leave out the coconut milk. But the syrup was tasty and very unusual.

I have enjoyed today, learning of new, exotic ingredients, but I think I'll stick to less spicy and coconutty foods in the future. Tomorrow, we're doing a canape challenge, scallops and tart tatin. Yum!