Guest Blagger!! -- Thailand Day 4

Good evening everyone! Today on Our Little Joy Spot, we have a very special treat for you! Guest blogger and all-around handsome guy, TJ!

*cheers, applause, accolades, exuberance, etc etc etc*

Hi everyone, it's great to be here.

So, Day 4. 11/22/11. We got up, had some awesome (as always) breakfast, and headed over to the beach. Highlight of that was this little dude

...and his 37 million cousins. The beach is literally covered with these tiny little holes in the sand, each of which is a little hidey-hole for a tiny little crab. It's awesome to go running down the beach and see hundreds of these guys scatter under your tremendous footfalls.

At 10:00 I headed over to Ka-Ti's Culinary School for what would turn out to be one of the most awesome things I have done in my ever. Yes, In My Ever.

We heard about this place from Martin, our ever-helpful guide here in Thailand. I asked where I could learn to cook Thai food, and he said (in his awesomely-russian and thai accented english) "oh-hhh yais, yoo jhust haeed abowt toohun(dd)reaad, toohun(dd)reaad fiffty metres dhown (dd)e roaahd..." (and so on and so forth.) Either way, I got there fine, and was ushered back to an open-air kitchen and handed an apron and adorable towel.

The entire area smelled like a spice-rack exploded. I was also handed a pile of pots and pans and dishes and such, to arrange as I saw fit. Most of it went on the bench behind me, in easy reach, according to an extremely complex organization scheme that I'm sure looked like a scattered pile to the untrained eye.

This is Nuu, our instructor. By the way, Nuu means "Mouse" in Thai.

 

 Sweet. 

 Anyways, I learned a few basic things, (like the difference between Indian curry and Thai curry, namely dry vs fresh spices) and then it was off to the cooking! Nuu asked what recipe I wanted to make, then gave me the ingredients to make it and I was cooking like a pro!

Actually no, I was using a mortar and pestle to grind things.

 And grind things.

 And mortar things.

 Ooh! Then I got to stir some stuff!

 Then some pestling.

More grinding

 And some more.

 Really getting it in there.

 Scrape the bowl

Then I put it in little packets

And it was deep-fried, stir-fried, and pan-fried until delicious.

 A little fried rice here

Massaman Curry

Spring rolls and Golden Bags

Soon I will open up a Thai restaurant and call it "5-Minute Wok", and employ burly muscular men to do my mortaring and pestling.

Also, I have some advice. If you ever find yourself speaking with a wealthy European couple, it is considered rude to not ask the wife's profession when asking the husband's. 

On a related note, here are a wonderful couple I took the course with: Peter and Barbara, from The Netherlands. He is a financier, and she is a geneticist.

Ahem. Yeah. Social faux-pas.

All in all, a wonderful afternoon. I got my certificate, my cookbook, and a set of 2-foot long chopsticks (for stir-frying!)

Yep, pretty awesome.