Life Is Short, Eat Biscuits
A Thai cooking class is something I've always wanted to do. I have a couple token recipes up my sleeve
that are either hand-me-downs from my sister, Rebecca's repetoire, or 
personally concocted variations of restaurant entrees, but nothing especially authentic.
Tressa and I lucked out with mild weather for our 5-hour stint in an outdoor kitchen with 5 other foreigners (4 Dutch and one Irish;
we found a vast majority of European tourists to North American on Koh Chang). Lonely Planet named our class, hosted by
the Blue Lagoon Resort, the best on Koh Chang. One of our classmates had participated in the course twice before and shared with us the evolution of the class: starting from a make-shift kitchen and an 
instructor that didn't speak a word of English, to a beautifully 
ceramic-tiled kitchen for eight, a now fluent instructor (the same woman, actually), and 4-5 sous-chefs/instructor's assistants.My favourite thing about the course was how the sous-chefs
presented the ingredients for each dish so artistically, but obviously eating our creations wasn't bad either. We worked in pairs and prepared 3 dishes each: Pad Thai, a soup, and a curry.
We also watched the instructor prepare a dessert dish, bananas in sweet coconut milk. Everyone made different soups and curries and each classmember had the chance to try all the resulting plates.Tressa and I made Prawn Pad Thai, Tom Yum Gai and a Paneang Curry. It was uberfun decorating our plates in the end, as presentation is KEY (don't you know?) We all received recipe books that feature numerous other recipes,
and our instructor explained some simple replacements that we can use when Thai ingredients are not available.We burned copious calories crushing homemade curry paste with a real pestle and morter, and definitely worked up our
appetites, but after 5 hours of slaving over the stove, we left the Thai Cooking class with very full stomachs.
finally! i have been trying to post comments like, forev! it wasn't letting me. looks like you had a fabo time in thailand hamsterino. thai guy say what? or no?