Thai Cooking Class

The Menu: Pad Thai, Green Papaya Salad, Chicken Coconut Green Curry, Spicy Basil Shrimp

For my birthday this year, Sam's mom and dad gave me the money for a Sur la Table cooking class. Sam decided he would like to take one with me, so for Christmas I gave him an IOU. We decided to take "Secrets of Thai Cooking"since we loved our 2011 trip to Thailand so much.

We decided to take the class on Monday night, since it was right after we got back from our trip home for the holidays. I wouldn't recommend coming hungry, because we had to cook everything before we ate, and our 6:30 p.m. class was supposed to be over at 8:30 p.m., but that's when we started eating. Sam was about to pass out by the time we finally got to serve ourselves.

Sam was the star pupil! Our instructor brought him up to stir the curry.

All in all, the class wasn't what either Sam or I expected. There were 14 of us, situated into teams of 4, 4, 3 and 3. Each team prepared a portion of the recipe, and then the chef had us take turns preparing the final dish.

For the most part, we just watched other people putting it together and ate dinner super late. It felt like we were basically paying for the recipes, which we did get to take home with us, but we probably could have found them online. The techniques she used, such as how to cook the food in the wok, was pretty much what I remembered from the streets of Thailand.

One of the downsides to the recipes is the ingredients are all, obviously, pretty exotic. While the chef assured us that everything can be found at the 99 Ranch Market, the items come in larger quantities and have a shelf life of roughly three months. So we'd have to make the whole meal more frequently than once a month, and that's unlikely.

All our dishes prepped for dinner!

Roasted Tomato Basil Soup

This morning, Sam woke me up before he left to tell me a few things:

1. He was proud of me for getting the raise I deserve at work (I had my annual review last week and asked my boss to reconsider my merit increase and gave him four reasons I deserve the more money, and named my price.  To my surprise, he met my request yesterday!!!)
2. He wanted me to make the roasted tomato basil soup recipe he found in the crock pot cookbook
3. Our water heater wasn't working properly and he'd taken a lukewarm (at best) shower

Needless to say, it was a lot to take in at 6:00 this morning.  Hunter and I decided it was best NOT to lounge in bed, and we got up to tackle our honey-do list.  

First, I reviewed the recipe (which I included at the bottom of this post) and saw that I needed to roast the canned stewed tomatoes with brown sugar and diced onion in the oven for 30 minutes to create the base of the soup.  I was pretty confident I couldn't chop the onions small enough to make them smooth in the soup without a little help from my favorite emulsifier, so I pulled out the archaic cuisinart we got from Sam's grandpa several years ago when we helped him move out of his house.  The thing worked like a dream!  It took care of the chopping while I was spreading the tomatoes out on a baking sheet and sprinkling them with the brown sugar.  

Then, while the tomatoes, sugar and onions were in the oven, I took Hunter on his morning potty walk and tackled the pilot light on the water heater.

After everything had roasted, I popped it all back into the food processor so I could get the mixture as smooth as possible before tossing it into the crock pot with chicken broth, tomato paste, some spices and the left over juice from the canned tomatoes.  Needless to say, I did a lot better with the food processor than if it had been up to me to chop everything by hand.

Into the crockpot it all went, and then I started working on the dishes.  Unfortunately, the water coming out of the sink was still all cold, so I had to call our property manager and have her sent up a handy man to get the water heater functioning again.  Hey, at least everything was fixed before 9:30!

The final product was pretty delicious, if I do say so myself!  Sam has made a few comments to me that on the days I am working from home he would like me to get a home cooked meal put together so that it's ready when he gets home from work.  I suppose he's got a point that it would be nice if I did a little more cooking.  Even if some days it's a crockpot meal that I prep in the morning and then let simmer all day, rather than a complicated recipe I tackle at 5:00 when i get off work, it's nice to have home cooking and it's something we want to make a priority when we have our own family.