Sunday 4th November

Today was a day we were both looking forward to and we took ages deciding which one we should go to but today is a day at cooking school!!

After a bit of debating we chose Sammys Cooking School. It was out on a farm a few miles from the city & I'm so glad we picked there. We went first off to the market for ingredients, an education on rice, coconuts, vegetables and more!! Again there were only 2 other people so it was a lovely small class, I think we're getting good at picking the right trips here!!

We arrive at the farm & it's beautiful. In a flat valley with forested mountains either side, paddy fields as far as the eye can see & a series of patches where Sammy is growing everything!! He shows us lots of crops like holy basil, lemon basil, citronella, monkey nuts, lemongrass, kaffir limes. Was lovely to see them growing everywhere, made me wish we had a garden to be able to grow a few crops!! His daughter & his sisters daughter came to say hello & practise their English with us. They got a big round of applause after saying greetings and counting 1-10! Super cute!!

Sy & I chose before to do different courses so we learnt more over the day. There were 7 things to learn today!

1st stop was making our curry paste, Sy was making jungle curry & I was making Green Thai. We had fun pounding the ingrediants in the big pestle & mortar to make the paste.

Onto the hob to chop the other ingredients & create the curry. Then we made soups. I did the hot & sour vegetable soup whilst Sy made chicken in coconut milk soup.

For the stir fried dish Sy did Pad Thai & I did chicken with cashew nut. They all looked gorgeous as we took our dishes to the table to eat. I was so impressed that we managed to pull off these dishes. They tasted great so we had proven to ourselves that we could replicate this at home. It was Sammys wife that taught the cooking today & she was amazing. Patient with our questions, explaining every step we did!

After we ate Sammy showed us the rest area for us all to relax for a couple of hours. He had hammocks set up at the back of the farm & it was so peaceful. Just gazing off towards the mountains & fields. Sy dozed but I gave him a little nudge when he started snoring as no one needs to be subjected to that!!

We were woken up & went back to the kitchen for round 2. We were shown how to make chicken in pandanus leaves, spring rolls & papaya salad. As these were cooking & cooling we made the 3 desserts. Pumpkin in custard, banana in coconut milk & mango with sticky rice. We all struggled to finish the 2nd round (well apart from the eating machine that is Sy!) but what we had was delicious.

The girls we were cooking with had a night bus to Bangkok to look forward to so Sammys wife prepared a doggy bag for them.

Time to go home so we say goodbye to the farm, the family & the kids as we head back to the city. It was a beautiful day spent in fantastic surroundings. Including an amazing open air jungle, flowers everywhere toilet!!

We head back to prepare our bags for our 2 day trip that were both really excited about.

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