Tag: cooking classes | Courageous Kitchen

Virtual Cooking Class Discounts for Groups and Kids

by Dwight | Feb 12, 2021 | Cooking Classes, Recipes

Here’s a quick update to everyone who has been supporting Courageous Kitchen, especially if you’ve been interested in attending one of our virtual classes. The live zoom classes we offer are booked through Airbnb and we’ve made some important changes to our prices. Most significantly, we now offer a discount on our group bookings and have a special price for kids!

Book A Virtual Cooking Class

In addition to helping you find a place to stay when traveling, Airbnb offers travel related activities too. Through the Airbnb Experiences program, when booking travel to Thailand, you may also see a recommendation for a Thai cooking class like ours. Well, with much of international travel on pause we’re fortunate to share that these classes are still happening virtually.

From the safety of home you can still experience a bit of Thai culture with the help of video technology and your taste buds. Our experience offers guests the chance to join on us zoom to make pad see ew noodles, green curry, or tom kha soup. However for larger private groups we offer discounts and the chance to customize the menu to your Thai favorites.

*The most popular options for our cooking classes are pad thai, pad see ew, and green curry. We do one dish live, but you will get access to all of these recipes and more!*

Zoom Cooking Class Perks:

Live HD Instruction with Two Cameras
Supplementary Course Materials to Help with Substitutions and Shopping for Ingredients
Discounts for Groups
Access to 10 of Thailand’s Top Recipes
Special Pricing for Kids (Kids Recipes Coming Soon)
Thai Vegetarian and Vegan Recipes Also Available

Recently Airbnb has also introduced pricing for children. This means you can get the whole family in the kitchen working on Thai food together. In the past, the per person pricing has led to a lot of confusion about how to work with families with children under 13. Hopefully, the new cheaper pricing takes some pressure off of parents and is a chance to get your young cooks enthused about diverse types of food and cultures.

Finally, don’t forget all bookings include access to one of our virtual courses. Currently, we offer either Thailand’s Top Recipes and Thailand’s Top Vegetarian Recipes to all students. Both of the courses are supplementary to our live zoom classes and leave participants with some extra recipes to try on their own. There are currently about 10 recipes featured, including favorites such as pad see ew noodles, green curry, and tom yum soup. However, we’re adding a recipe for our kid’s version of pad thai and will have other easy recipes for young chefs in the future.

*Join Dwight and Panisha for live zoom classes to learn to make your favorite Thai dishes.*

Thank you for your continued support. We’re fortunate to able to continue connecting with people and fundraising for those in need virtually. Airbnb has also recognized this virtual experience as an official Social Impact activity, so all proceeds from course will go back to Courageous Kitchen. We hope that’s more than enough reasons to join us in cooking class session soon!

P.S. – Special thanks to Bangkok based photographer Tim Russell, who helped us upgrade our Airbnb listing with these great photos.

9 Nonprofits in Bangkok You Should Know!

by Dwight | Feb 8, 2019 | Inspiration

Although information about them isn’t always readily available, there are many great nonprofit organizations in Bangkok. The work they’re doing is interesting, important, and diverse in each orgs’ area of impact. As we share in our Thai cooking class with guests about our work serving Bangkok’s most marginalized youth, we often have opportunities to point people towards other organizations as well.

Here’s a brief description, followed by links, to charities we believe you should know about, and may not easily come across on your own.

**Special thanks to the University of California’s EAP Internship program with Thammasat University for bringing many of these great organizations to our attention.

1) ANFREL

South East Asia is a hotbed of political unrest and tension between parties jockeying to have a say in how each country develops. While the style of government differs in each country, there are none that can deny the importance of hearing citizens’ voices. Bangkok based ANFREL works to develop fair elections and an informed populace throughout the region.

Asian Network for Free Elections

2) Needeed

Pronounced like the word ‘needed’ this organization serves to find ways to solve capacity problems of nonprofits, while simultaneously serving the CSR needs of corporations. Organizations short of funding, training, or technical know-how find the Needeed team, who helps develop and execute a plan. While helping organizations who serve those most in need, they also assist companies in accomplishing the volunteering and giving objectives of organizations genuinely interested in corporate social responsibility.

NeeDEED

3) CrCF

The Cross-Cultural Foundation works to build on peace-making efforts in conflict prone areas. Their work takes on a variety of forms from petitioning governments to defend human rights’, to providing legal aid to those in need, and working hands on with victims of torture to strengthen resilience in communities. Their work is needed in Thailand’s southernmost province where conflict ensues, as well as other similar places throughout the region.

Cross-Cultural Foundation

4) Internews

Internews is an organization battling to solve information poverty. They operate on the pillar that access to truthful, credible information improves quality of life for all. This includes working behind the scenes to promote media literacy in the region, as well as supporting less represented communities to produce their own news content. These efforts serve to create better quality information sources that all types of people in varied locations can use to make more informed choices.

Internews

5) PSPF

The People Serving People Foundation is focused on serving vulnerable populations throughout the region. Their efforts focus on self reliance and legal aid for at risk communities. The organization is also responsible for operating the social enterprise Chamaliin, which produces sustainable handicrafts supporting urban refugees.

People Serving People Foundation

6) Wedu

Wedu is an organization focusing on bolstering the role of women in societies around South East Asia. Their focus is helping provide funding, training, and mentorship for women as they pursue higher education and ambitious careers. Most notably their FISA (Future Income Sharing Agreements) program allows ambitious young women an alternative to loans in order to secure the financing needed to further their higher education endeavors.

Wedu

7) Childsafe

Childsafe, an organization protecting children, is an organization relevant to both visitors to Thailand and locals alike. Their Think Child Safe! campaign hopes to educate people on how they may be unknowingly endangering children. They are providing guidelines for the best child protection policies in a wide breadth of situations where people may come in contact with minors. The Childsafe organization is instrumental in training local businesses and key individuals in communities on how to identify and report abuse of children. The training they offer is available for everyone from a 5-star hotel’s general manager, to tour guides, and local neighborhood tuk tuk taxi drivers.

Childsafe

8) Asia Pacific Trans Network

The Asia Pacific Trans Network or APTN is an organization advocating for the human rights of gender diverse people in Asia. Now more than ever people are becoming aware of how gender bias and discrimination in a society can negatively impact and endanger lives. Despite being increasingly discussed in the western world, recognizing each individuals human rights regardless of gender, is still a developing conversation in South East Asia. This makes the work of APTN both challenging and especially relevant in today’s efforts to create more welcoming and inclusive societies.

Asia Pacific Trans Network

9) Courageous Kitchen

Last, but not least Courageous Kitchen! While our cooking classes and street food tours are among the most popular in Thailand, not everyone knows about our social mission. Long before we were teaching master classes on pad thai, our team was active in marginalized communities providing transformational assistance and education. We believe food has the power to transform communities and treat the kitchen as a classroom, teaching aspiring young cooks to speak English better, thrive under pressure, and develop leadership skills.

Donate to Courageous Kitchen

At Courageous Kitchen we have a lot of fun and are privileged to run into many great organizations along the way. We hope we will be able to continue to share more of them with you as we grow!

Follow our Courageous Kitchen page on Facebook and be sure to let us know if you found this information helpful.

Author: Dwight

Dwight is the director of Courageous Kitchen, and loves sharing his passion for food with new people.

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Two Big Safety Improvements Coming to Courageous Kitchen

by Dwight | Feb 25, 2017 | Donor Updates

We appreciate you checking in with us this month and we’ve got two big announcements to share from Bangkok. The first is that there’s a piece of equipment we’ve needed for quite some time and it’s finally arrived. We’ll give you a hint, it’s not a giant oven, or some expensive “must-have” kitchen gadget.

From Your Hood to Ours

If you’ve been following our story, a few months back we renovated a run down house to be a kitchen space with the help of funding from Bangkok Patana School. The new space allowed for use to have more room to host the swarming children of the neighborhood, who all seem interested in cooking at once. However, even after painting, replacing the floor, and knocking out a wall, the new space still wasn’t much of a kitchen.

That’s because doing more cooking in large groups was nearly impossible to do safely with the little to no airflow in the building. In Thailand, most kitchens are powered by portable gas burners which can be dangerous to use with out safety precautions, including having good ventilation. This also meant when we made traditional chili filled Thai dishes, we didn’t have to do much before everyone in the room was coughing and choking on the spiced filled air which couldn’t escape the room.

The good news is we have just installed a custom made exhaust hood into the room. We should have done this a few months ago, but honestly there had been several delays in making the hood happen. We appealed to private donors and to foundations offering grants, but none of the parties were interested in the not so flashy upgrade to our kitchen. Instead we used funding from your efforts to fund cooking classes this year, and spent about $500 to install a new ventilation hood. The new hood will not only improve the safety of our students, but because it is large enough to accommodate more than one burner, it will also open up greater possibilities for our cooking curriculum in the future.

Securing our Bridge to You

The other big safety upgrade is a bit technical, as we’ve just installed an SSL certificate to encrypt our website. To put it in laymen’s terms, we’ve improved the security of our site to be sure your information is safe. This means whether you’re making a donation, booking a cooking class in Bangkok, or just purchasing a t-shirt, all your information is transmitted safely and securely.

The added encryption to our website also opens up more possibilities in the future as we grow. For example, the added security may expedite further development of online teaching resources, and fundraising products for our own mini-marketplace. And more importantly, it means you can give not only with Paypal, but with any credit card you want, without fretting about being exposed to fraud.

We’re steadily building towards ambitious goals to connect better with you and improve the lives of our students and their families here in Thailand. Thank you for joining us on this journey and stick with us as we grow, and strive to conquer our most ambitious and challenging year yet!

Student Led ‘No Hunger’ Bake Off at the 2017 ServICE Conference

by Dwight | Jan 24, 2017 | Donor Updates

This past week our Courageous Kitchen students had the opportunity for a special visit to local international school Bangkok Patana. There the teens participated in a student led baking activity, making chocolate chip cookies and dark chocolate brownies with students from 8 international schools from around the city. The activity was part of the 2017 ServICE Conference which aims to engage young leaders at international schools to discover ways they can more actively give back.

On the first day of the conference the participants were divided up for activities with several NGOs and small charities, where they could serve the organizations with direct action in some way. Students who indicated interest in “No Hunger”, one of the new Sustainable Development Goals, joined our Courageous Kitchen students in the Bangkok Patana cooking classroom. These students who are passionate about ending extreme hunger, improving agricultural practices, and eliminating food waste — had probably not been expecting to spend the day baking and making friends with our kids from a community in Bangkok where food can be scarce.

This activity was also rewarding because, although our students have been cooking as a part of the Courageous Kitchen activities for more than two years, our kitchen facilities are basic compared to what you would find in a western kitchen. Instead the cooking we mostly do involves Thai or Asian recipes requiring minimal electrical equipment. This means CK students are pros are stir frying on a gas burner, but had not had the opportunity to bake before. When the activity began they were forced to learn very quickly how to deal with wax paper, induction stoves, electronic scales, and the sometimes tricky controls of built-in ovens.

The activity was a giant success, and although not all of the baked goods came out as planned, the new friendships made, and young minds expanded were beyond everyone’s expectations.

All photos are credited to volunteer photographer Alisa Suwanrumpha.