Cooking Class

The class is held in an outside kitchen. There are children, brothers, sisters, grandmothers coming in an out of the family compound.

Before cooking, we go to the city market to buy ingredients. The market was described to us by our fellow chefs as an open sewer. Not quite true, but the concrete floor has canals carved into it where waste products are placed. Thankfully this is usually bits of vegetables, but the smell, the closeness, and the heat are overwhelming.

There are many live animals for sale -- I saw a woman carrying several ducks by their feet through the market. Chickens sat quietly (terror?) next to their owners, and huge barrels of live fish and eels.

There were even piles of organically grown tobacco.

Back home in the outdoor kitchen, the family helped us chop, grate, dice, the ingredients for our meal. Every dish was seasoned with salt, sugar, bouillon, and oyster sauce, but amazingly they all tasted different. We made: Amok, sour soup, egg rolls, shrimp with fresh peppercorns, and mango salad. By far the most interesting was the shrimp with fresh peppercorns -- we cannot get those fresh peppercorns in the states and they are so delicious.