Asia Flavours

Martha Sherpa's Thai Cookery Course

Thinking that the credit crunch should mean that "eating in is the new eating out", a group of us decided to try Martha Sherpa's Thai Cookery Course in Mongkok. The course, which covers dishes like grilled chicken on bamboo skewers with penang curry, tom yam koong and chicken in green curry, is quite hardcore, lasting for a full day. To be honest, we were definitely fading by the end of the experience and I did come away feeling that sometimes life is too short and really I'd be better going to a Thai restaurant. Having said that, Martha is extremely knowledgeable about Thai food and making green curry from scratch (without a blender!) has made me realise just what proper green curry should taste like (even if i personally will always be using a blender in the future!). 

Speaking as a realist, some of the dishes were a bit too much for me and my very small Hong Kong kitchen. However, the dishes were all flavoursome and I think they could be adapted to fit with my kitchen and patience now that I have the basics!!

Chiang Mai Cookery Course

Ok, this is a little historical but it was so good that I thought it was worth including in my blog. The cookery course at the Four Seasons in Chiang Mai is simply brilliant. The chef who took the course was knowledgeable, the facilities were outstanding and the whole thing was really fun.

It started with a trip to the local market in Chiang Mai with one of the chefs from the hotel. She walked us through the various stalls from fresh herbs to meat to sugary candy, talking us through all the unusual ingredients. At one point she broke a Thousand Year Egg in two to show us what leaving an egg in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, lime and rice straw for several months does to it. To be honest, it didn't exactly inspire me to want to eat it but it was certainly interesting to see.

The actual cookery course took place in a specially built outdoor kitchen in the grounds of the resort. Although outdoor, it did have a roof on it and the place was kept quite cool which, given the temperature, was rather essential. Each person got a cooking area and it was really well staffed so the ingredients appeared ready to use and all the pots and pans were cleared away immediately.

We cooked four dishes and watched the chef cook a few others. The first was Thom Yum King (a spicy prawn soup) which I managed to make so spicy that i couldn't actually eat it but the huge prawns which I managed to fish out were excellent! I improved on my soup-making skills with the Thom Yum Gai Muang (salty and spicy chicken soup) which was really tasty. The Phad C Iew Moo (stir-fried rice noodles with black soy sauce and pork) were gorgeous and the Phad Thai Kung (Phad Thai with prawns) was also excellent. These were all fun to make but the highlight was making the egg net to wrap the Phad Thai in. Basically, you take about a zillion eggs, beat them with a brush made of about 50 thin sticks then flick the egg over an extremely hot wok until a net forms. Fantastic (particularly because I didn't have to clean it up!).

Four Seasons Resort, Chiang Mai
Tel: 66 (53) 298 181

Hanoi Cookery Course

The Sofitel Metropole's half-day cookery course was the absolute highlight of my trip to Hanoi. I love to do cookery courses whenever I go on holiday, partly because of the totally useless kitchen facilities in my flat in Hong Kong and partly because my main culinary experiences to-date have been very European-focused. Unlike the excellent cookery school at the Four Seasons in Chiang Mai, the Metropole's course was not hands-on but somehow that didn't seem to affect how much we learnt (or, for that matter, how much we enjoyed it).

The course started with a cyclo trip to the 19-12 Market (a slightly hair-raising experience given the traffic in Hanoi, where traffic lights are really not considered to be much more than street-side decorations). I'm not sure we'd have been brave enough to wander through the wholesale market by ourselves so it was really useful to go with one of the hotel's chefs. You could literally buy everything, from herbs and spices, to freshwater snails and roasted dog. At one point by the spices stall, the chef was trying to convince us that if we included turmeric in our cooking whilst pregnant, the child's skin would be whiter - ummmm, really? That slightly dubious old wives' tale aside, it was fascinating. Apparently the Vietnamese won't buy refrigerated meat or milk because the suspicion is that anything refrigerated won't be as fresh as it should be.

Back at the hotel we were shown how to make six different traditional Vietnamese dishes: Hanoi deep-fried spring rolls, marinated pork grilled in bamboo, steamed ca qua fish with beer and herbs, grilled chicken skewers with lemon leaves, sauteed pumpkin branches with garlic and Vietnamese banana flower salad. Most of the dishes - perhaps with the alternative ingredients they suggested - could be easily done at home. Also, as there were only five of us in the class, we were able to see everything really clearly and to ask as many questions as we liked.

In case we still felt hungry after trying all the different dishes, we ended the course with a buffet lunch at the excellent Spices Garden where they have traditional Vietnamese street food stalls (without the risk of a slightly dodgy stomach!).

Sofitel Metropole Hanoi
15 Ngo Quyen St