Hi everyone, this is my first posting on Steemit, I hope you will enjoy and like it.

I flew to bangkok with my family and stay there for a fortnight for our Xmas.

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I had some free time alone, so I grabbed myself a cooking lesson that I had longed for. Among three cooking schools (Mandarin cooking school, Blue elephant and Issaya), I went for Issaya simply because of its location, it is one BTS station away from the hotel I was staying at.

It was a morning lesson from 11am to 2pm at a dedicated cooking studio owned by the renowned chef Ian Kittichai, a celebrity chef in Thailand. The cooking studio is located on the basement of a new shopping center. The studio was neat, chic and modern looking with lots of state-of-the-art equipment.

I was lucky that morning, I was the only student in the lesson where I had all personal attention from the instructor. It was a four course cooking lesson starting from a salad, an appetizer, a main dish, to a rice.

It was a seafood salad, the plating I think I did well as a cooking amateur, but it could have been a lot better, taste wise, would all the seafood ingredients have been grilled or stir fried. The receipt said they had to be boiled but they were clincal and bland. After all, the sauce was fresh and had a lot of Thai characters.

The appetizer was a deep fried soft shell crab. It wasn’t hard to deep fry, same as usual, coated with egg white and flour. What so special about this was the tatse enhanced by a preserved egg yolk, it was crushed and melted as part of the sauce.

I was little disappointed that mutton was substituted for chicken for the curry. But the curry coooking experience was eye opening to me, I had used off the shelf curry paste so I never had had a chance to make a curry sauce all from beginning. It had lots of herbs and seasonings added to it but it wasn’t spicy. I don’t really like anything with coconut milk in it, so although it was fun making the sauce, I had a reservation about coconut mike.

My last dish was a mixed rice in clay pot. The instructor said this is a popular dish at the Ian’s restaurant, I found it quite so-so. Sorry about being so blunt.

Overall, it was a wonderful experience learning some basics of Thai cooking. Issaya was a wonderful cooking studio with its chic ambience and cooking equipment, It is worth a try if you have a half day free and want to explore Thai cooking. But I will try The Mandarin Cooking School on my next Bangkok trip, it seems to me The Mandarin Cooking School is prestigious and more traditional.

I hope you have enjoyed my first posting and you would upvote this. Thank you and have a wonderful day. See you later.

#whalepower
Photos and content are original.

#foodphotography