Culinary Arts & Crafts

Yesterday, we began our day with a morning cooking class to try our hand at some traditional Thai dishes.  It started with a quick tour of the local market to learn more about our ingredients.  Then we decided as a group on which meals we wanted to prepare and settled on a stir-fry, soup, and curry dish.  It made for a fun and tasty morning!

Next, we set out to find the Elephant Parade House which is an exhibition of various sizes and designs of painted elephants.  These beautiful works of art are auctioned off all around the world and all proceeds go to the Asian Elephant Foundation which helps protect the elephant populations throughout Asia.  They also offer a fun elephant-painting workshop that allows visitors (like us) to purchase a ceramic elephant to create our own hand-painted souvenir – they even provided us with our own work stations, aprons, and free tea, coffee, water and snacks! 🙂

Asia Scenic Cooking Class

As a class we chose to make a stir fry, a soup, and a curry/curry paste.

We took a quick tour of the local market to learn more about our ingredients prior to cooking. This is a photo of our master chef, ‘A’, teaching us about long beans.

This tasty snack is considered to bring good luck to your dinner guests – in our case it was good luck served in hopes of no one burning themselves during the cooking class. It consists of betel leaves, chillies, shallots, roasted peanuts, toasted coconut, sliced lime (with skin), ginger cubes, and a sweet syrup. You fold the betel leaf into a little bowl, fill it with ingredients, and eat it in one bite.

This is us pounding out our curry paste while our teams cheered us on – very hard work!

Curries: Panang Curry & Gang Kheow Wan Gai (green curry with chicken) Soups: Tom Yum Koong (hot and sour prawn soup) & Tom Sab (hot and sour soup in local style)

Elephant Parade House

This little elephant represents Mosha, the inspiration for the Elephant Parade House. Mosha was a baby elephant who had lost her leg when stepping on a land mine; she inspired a tourist to invest in the Asian Elephant Foundation by creating Elephant Parade House which auctions painted elephants of to other countries to raise money to help save the elephants in Thailand.

A Canadian flag elephant – represent!

A little Mosha to pay tribute to the inspiration of the Elephant Parade House – plus a Thailand flag to commemorate our visit.

Amanda & Adam