Sydney Seafood School

Our cooking class in Singapore centered around Malaysian cooking and when we arrived in Sydney we signed up for the Sydney Seafood School's Singapore Chili Crab Class. To be honest it was the most interesting class offered during our time in Sydney and after eating the chili crabs in Singapore we were excited to find out how we could make it for ourselves. We arrived at the Sydney Fish Market too late in the day to enjoy the little shops selling fresh seafood and the much talked about fish & chips. We weren't too disappointed because we know in our hearts we will be return to Sydney soon, we simply fell in love with this city and can seriously see ourselves spending a lot of time here. Out of all our cooking courses the Sydney Seafood School was by far the most professionally organized and structured. At the end of the course we were all given a seafood grocery bag that is insulated so you can carry home from the store beer, seafood, meat and cold items. The course started with an introduction to the many varieties of craps.We learned about the difference tastes and textures between the varieties, how to humanely kill crabs, and how to clean and handle crabs and numerous different kinds of seafood.The class taught us two kinds of crab recipes and introduced us to the virtues of an electric wok.With all good seafood recipes simplicity is key. And our instructor quickly whipped through the crab recipes and soon it was our turn. We moved into another room where cooking stations were set up and we were given our own recipe books and off we were! We were using mud crabs and shared the station with two girls from Sydney. After preparing our crab dishes we moved to a dining area where we ate with our cooking partners. One of the girls had just returned from a trip to LA and we had a very interesting conversation about American coffee. Coming from the NW we quickly had to correct her on the Australian concept of "coffee" which is all espresso in Sydney. If you want a cup of coffee as we know it in the USA it's called a long pull, as in a long pulled espresso. What you do get is a proper 4.5 ounces of coffee, not this bogus 16-ounce Venti/Grande crap, but a properly pulled coffee. They complained American drip coffee was crap, but the concept of drip coffee is simply not available in Sydney, so to each is own. We enjoyed the conversation and the delicious crab meal, served traditionally with rice, something we hadn't had in a while and gobbled up quickly.We still get emails from the Sydney Seafood School making us yearn to go back and take more classes.

Bali Cooking Course: Casa Luna

We were very excited to find out the author of Balinese Cookbook 'Fragrant Rice' Janet DeNeefe has a cooking school in Ubud. The classes were held at her hotel the Honeymoon Guesthouse, which happened to be right next door to our hotel. Typical of Balinese guesthouses and hotels, the grounds were beautiful and filled with that unique Balinese style.

Check out the white carved sandstone wall in the background

We weren't feeling very good that morning and was happy the class began with a cooling hibiscus tea and a seated introduction to local ingredients

The class started with a tangy and tart rujak

A spicy, sweet and tart fruit salad, made on a traditional Indonesian pedestal and mortar

Other items we prepared were beans in coconut milkFragrant yellow riceIndonesian green bean salad LawarCorn frittersGado-Gado, an Indonesian salad topped with peanut sauce, homemade of courseand Balinese satays

The class was well paced, with plenty of opportunity to taste recipes as they were being prepared. The staff did the majority of the food preparation and all the cooking

However we encouraged to take our turns at grinding the pastes and saucesand preparing the satays

The Casa Luna Cooking class was a good introduction to typical Indonesian dishes with minimum participation. The course materials which includes many of the cultural aspects of the dishes and full recipes was also worth the very reasonably price of the class. And of coures we fully enjoyed the feast at the end of all the cooking.

Cooking Course: Singapore

We were unable to find a cooking course while traveling through Malaysia, so we were very excited to find the Cookery Magic courses in Singapore that taught regional cuisine, including Chinese, Indian, Indonesian and Malaysian. Several different regional cuisines were offered during our time in Singapore and we decided to join the Malaysian cooking course offered later in the week. By this time we have had taken 5 different cooking courses and each were so very different in class structure, teaching style, and methodology that we weren’t sure what the course would be like. But we did know one thing – Singapore is hot and humid and tiring and by the time we made our way across the city and walked from the MRT to the class we were exhausted and not very excited about the course. The class was held in a residential area of Singapore and as we walked through the front gate to the front door we quickly became more excited about the class. The front yard of the house was lush, tropical, serene, and tranquil.The personal-spa-front yard had a small koi pond with fish we could pet like a dog and would suck on our fingers. It felt very strange.

We were immediately greeted by the cooking instructor Ruqxana. Soon everyone arrived and we were ushered into the kitchen.And to our utter joy and relief we were all given seats along one wall of the kitchen where we remained and watched Ruqxana discuss Singapore’s unique cuisine

introduced us to exotic spicesshowed us how to bring out flavorsand introduced to new flavors and tools

Ruqxana reminded us of our Japanese cooking course instructor Elizabeth Andoh. Both Ruqxana and Elizabeth are incredibly knowledgeable of the history of local ingredients, as well as fascinating medicinal facts, cultural significance, and unique culinary techniques. We were definitely able to take away plenty of inspiration.

Ko Samui, Thailand

Southern Thailand has a huge number of islands to visit. We decided to go to Koh Samui because of the famous Samui Institute of Thai Culinary Arts (SITCA) School, which offered cooking classes.

Other reasons we made Koh Samui our first island exploration was the big beautiful Buddhist temples.

We stayed in Lamai beach, on the southern part of the island, across from the night market, what can we say we love night markets.

The beach was nice, a bit crowded during the day, with rough waves and gravel-like sand.

Since the beach wasn’t that great we spent more time by the pool at our cute little resort.

Another great reason to come to SE Asia is the incredible deals for accommodations. Our cute little resort on Koh Samui was one of many we would find all over SE Asia with a pool, a great garden area and included breakfast!

At night all the restaurants and bars along the beach would set up tables right on the beach where we could watch all the tourist buy large balloons and set them free in to the night sky, just like in the movie The Beach, which made us think which came first the tourist balloons or the movie making them popular, either way it was impressive to see the large white balloons float high into the sky and then disappear.

It was also incredibly inexpensive to rent a scooter for a day, around $6.00.

Our cooking class at the SITCA was a hands-on class where we learned how to make curry pastes for different dishes.

We were introduced to raw ingredients.

We were given our own wok stations and combined all the items to make our five dishes.

Afterwards we were seated upstairs and enjoyed our food.The portions we prepared in the class were huge and ended up feeding us the remainder of our time on the island. We found the food surrounding our hotel area was mainly western food or the Thai food was terrible and not nearly as good as the food we made in class, so we opted to enjoy ourselves on our balcony rather than go out.Our resort offered a private cooking class where we could choose up to three items to learn and after looking at the dishes available we decided to take another cooking class to learn a soup we absolutely love at home, jungle curry, a coconut milk-free curry soup with tons of veggies, lemongrass salad and pad-thai noodles.This class was also very hands-on with us cutting and cooking all the dishes.This class was leisurely paced and better portioned. After each dish we would sit down and eat the food, enjoying it right after we cooked it.The private class was different from the more formal cooking school class, in that we could to taste the food as we cooked it and alter the flavors to our own liking and it was a lot less “institutionalized” with a more casual pace.

On a side note, Thailand loves their convenience store, almost as much as Japan. Our resort had several 7-11s, family marts and other convenience stores within blocks of each other. And the one item we simply couldn’t get enough of was the local varieties of potato chips. The nori seaweed was surprisingly good and our favorite, the double cheese pork burger was very interesting, in a very unfamiliar kind of way.We enjoyed our short time in Koh Samui and will be back, but next time we would stay on the northern coast at Big Buddha Beach or Bo Phut.