Cooking with Poo

I went to a cooking class run by a woman whose nickname is Poo.  This nickname is a shortening of the word for the color pink in Thai and comes from the word for rose apple, a sweet fruit.  It's kind of like calling someone honey or pumpkin, but the translation is unfortunate.  Poo has a sense of humor about it though, and has decided to use it to her advantage.  She explains all this at the beginning of the cooking class.

While you're cooking, you get to wear an apron that says, "I cooked with Poo, and I liked it!"  You can buy the apron as well.  The classes run Monday through Saturday, and each day has a different menu.  The poster for the classes keeps the joke going.

You have to have a sense of humor to do this class, and you can't be easily grossed out.  They weed out the weak with a trip to a huge market before the class.  I went with two friends and we were part of a total group of twelve people.  They broke us into two smaller groups of six and each group got a guide to take us through and explain everything to us.

It was fascinating, and I learned important stuff like how to tell the difference between a pink dragon fruit and a white dragon fruit from the outside skin (the pink is bumpier).

But they didn't start us off with the fruits and veggies, oh no.  We walked into the area with birds in cages and fish writhing around in shallow water which they splashed towards us.

I stepped away from them to the other side where there were frogs in mesh bags.

It took me a second to realize they were still alive.  I'm not going to lie, I was a bit freaked out, but I pressed on, only to be confronted by the bug section.

Luckily, we got through it, and then we were had flora rather than fauna to look at.  

We learned that you can buy your soup seasonings pre-bundled.

As soon as we relaxed though, they took us over to the seafood section.

Our guides understood that we were a bit shaken, so they ended the tour by showing us different kinds of whiskey.

Then we all piled back in the van and headed to the school.  Poo greeted us warmly.  She told us her story which was inspiring, and then she got right down to the cooking.  She really broke it down and made it simple.  We started with pad see ew with chicken.  We got a plate with most of our ingredients.

We chopped and stirred stuff in, and Poo and her helpers brought us the sauces and chicken as we needed them.

I was quite proud of my end product :-)

It was yummy too.  I ate it all up.  Next we made beef with cashews.

I saved most of that for Jeff.  The last dish to cook was green curry, but Poo didn't want us to use the paste you can buy in the stores.  She wanted us to make it from scratch with the mortar and pestle.  She gave us a really pretty one to use though.

I mixed it in with coconut milk, chicken, sliced Thai eggplant, a kaffir lime leaf, and basil leaves.

The end product was yummy, but spicy, so I saved most of that for Jeff too.

I was glad I saved space though when I saw what was for dessert.

Poo gave us directions on the order in which to eat the fruits, since they were arranged from least sweet to sweetest, with the mango and sticky rice as the grande finale.  I discovered a new fruit that I liked, rambutan.  It looks like it came from an alien planet,

but it tastes delicious.  They're in season for the next couple months, so I'll eat as many as I can while I'm here.  My friends and I were wiped out on the ride home, but we all agreed that it had been a great adventure.