Cooking Class, Silom Style

Back from my epic adventures with Chuck and ready to report on them... here's a start, with my photos.  I may update these posts when Chuck gets her photos up online (ahem, Chuck.)
UPDATE: Chuck's pics added!

First order of business when she got off the plane: Soi Polo for fried chicken and fish with garlic crispies, super spicy chili sauces, other deliciousness and a Thai-style massage to get the kinks out. 

 
A trip to the neighborhood market, then jet lag set in and Chuck was toast:

Our second day: Thai cooking class!  

We took a course with the Silom Thai Cooking School, not too far from my apartment.  Before getting started with the cooking, we hit up the market for ingredients.  I love a good market tour!

Here's our cute cooking instuctor, Goong, showing us how to pick shrimp (comically, the word "goong" means shrimp in Thai.  Har har.):

Here's the guy who uses an industrial strength grater to grind up the coconut for making coconut milk (have I mentioned how much I love the auto-GIFing that Picasa/Google+ does?):

Fish lady:

Chicken dude:

Cooking class attendees (Team America, Team Singapore and Team Korea, as Goong called us), picking up some veggies and herbs:

Pretty flags on the market's street:

 The cooking class itself was pretty great, too.  Down a couple of sois, in an open air kitchen, great instructor and detailed recipe book (complete with photos of the ingredients and potential substitutes)... good stuff!

Here's me and Chuck squeezing the coconut shreds (plus water) to make the coconut milk:

Here's our food prep set-up... veggies and spices and big knives:

Cooking in the open air kitchen:

Here's us in our fancy aprons with our finished products:

Mid-cooking selfie:

The whole class, cooking up the green curry:

Just some of the dishes we made... green curry with chicken, tom yum goong, pad thai, and tub tim grob (aka "rubies in coconut milk"):

 Mmmmmmmmmm...

A Goodbye Party and a Mountain of Rice

Tim's colleagues held a lovely going-away lunch for us this week.  The main dish at the lunch was tumpeng, a traditional Javanese ceremonial/celebratory dish featuring a large cone-shaped mountain of rice surrounded by a variety of meat and veggie dishes (tempe, stuffed chilis, sambal eggs, and omelette, among many other things in our case).  The cone can be regular white rice (nasi putih), but more often it's more fancily prepared with coconut milk for richness and turmeric for the pretty yellow color, like we had:

 

(please note that it is also decorated with shrimp and quail eggs)

The cone of rice mimics Indonesia's mountains and is usually served at ceremonies/events to show gratitude. 

The guest of honor gets the top slice of the cone, and from what I've seen, a VIP also typically cuts the top off ceremonially.   Tim got cutting duties (although he was instructed to hand over the precious top slice to me, along with a full plate of food, mwa ha ha!):

Here we are, in front of the tumpeng and other goodies (and yes, this is an iPhone photo of a Polaroid, well, Fuji, photo):

And here is Tim and I with his colleagues, who are an awesome bunch.  They have been nothing but welcoming, helpful, friendly and sweet to us, making our 2 years here go pretty smoothly!  Thank you guys!!

(we thought this looked a bit like a wedding photo, but they insisted that we be front and center, which required us sitting)

Singapore: Food and Fun

So, post-Custer, I headed to Springfield for some baby squeezing and toddler chasing. Then the Real Martha and I headed back across the world (dragging a serger) to Singapore for a weekend of sightseeing and eating.  Let's start with the eating:

We arrived in Singapore disgustingly early in the morning, but in our jet-lagged daze, I was still able to navigate us over to Chinatown for an early lunch at Maxwell Road Hawker Centre (which you may remember from here and here).  Chicken rice, fresh squeezed juices and a strange, yet tasty dessert that Martha tried thanks to some new friends she met while saving a table (I was waiting in the heinously long line for the chicken rice, see below):

Chicken rice:

The juice lady:

Martha making friends with the folks at this stall, who were serving up a sweet snack that we devised was a rice flour dough ball rolled in coconut and filled with a palm sugar syrup... mmm:

The next morning our breakfast was the Singapore favorite, kaya toast and eggs with coffee.  We went to Ya Kun Kaya, where the eggs are runny and wet (see poster below), the coffee is rich and sweet, and the toast is spread with butter and kaya, a coconut jam/curd concoction that is awesome (I have plans to make kaya soon using our friend Zhenyi's grandmother's recipe.  It will happen.):

Martha loved the poster below (Screw the French press, we've got the sock!") because she said her father used to use the sock filter method when brewing coffee:

We also hit up Muthu's for some fish head curry... yum, fish heads!

And our final food outing was taking the MRT and a crowded bus out to the hot and crowded ChompChomp Hawker center (which Zhenyi introduced to me and Tim this spring):

We got the tried-and-true favorites, sambal stingray (mmmmmm), sugarcane juice, Hokkien mie, and carrot cake.  Delicious!