La saison des dons est imminente. La saison a débuté un jour seulement après le jour d’actions de grâce, nous étions heureux d’organiser notre premier cours en partenariat avec Holland America.
ONotre premier cours de cuisine thaïlandaise avec Holland America a été l’occasion pour les clients de se familiariser avec la cuisine courageuse
Ce vendredi dernier, nous avons accueilli nos premiers invités de “Holland America Cruise Lines”. La société propose des voyages dans le monde entier. Sur leurs itinéraires asiatiques, elle se rend souvent en Thaïlande, amarrée au port voisin de Laem Chabang. Une fois ici, les clients ont le choix de toutes sortes d’options pour des excursions d’une journée à la découverte de Bangkok et des provinces environnantes. Récemment, Holland America s’est associé à “Cuisine Courageuse” pour offrir à ses clients la possibilité de suivre un cours de cuisine thaïlandaise tout en aidant les personnes qui sont dans le besoin.
L’idée de faire venir des voyageurs en classe a commencé après que le personnel de l’entreprise eut lu une interview du fondateur de la Cuisine Courageuse (Courageous Kitchen), en la personne de Monsieur Dwight, sur les recettes et les vins proposes. Dans l’interview, Monsieur Dwight parle à la fois de ses endroits préférés où il fait beau de manger à Bangkok et de son œuvre caritative pour aider les citadins pauvres.
Le premier groupe qui a effectué la visite était composé d’Américains et de Canadiens, tous ont été sympathiques et désireux d’en savoir plus sur le travail de cette œuvre caritative. Alors que nous avons appris à nous connaître, ils ont appris à préparer quatre plats thaïlandais, dont notre fameuse recette de pad thaï et la délicieuse mais moins connue la salade de haricots.
Le menu du jour comprenait la salade de haricots thaïlandais, moins connue. Le haricot vert frais saupoudré de piment rouge ardent qui ressemblait à un arbre de Noël. En plus du coût normal du cours, Holland America a inclus un don à notre organisme de bienfaisance pour chaque invité participant.
Depuis que “la Cuisine Courageuse” propose des cours de cuisine thaïlandaise et des circuits de restauration de rue en 2017, nous avons accueilli plus de 600 invités. Bien que nous ayons encore beaucoup à faire, nous nous arrêtons cette semaine pour exprimer notre gratitude à nos anciens clients de nous avoir aidé à améliorer la vie de ceux qui sont dans le besoin. Bien sûr, un merci tout spécial à Holland America pour avoir cherché à entrer en contact avec des voyagistes plus responsables et pour avoir lancé la saison des dons en nous envoyant un excellent groupe de visiteurs!
Giving season is upon us, and just a day after Thanksgiving we were happy to host our first class in partnership with Holland America.
Our inaugural Thai cooking class with Holland America saw guests getting hands on in the Courageous Kitchen.
This past Friday, we hosted our first guests from Holland America Cruise Lines. The company offers trips all over the world, and on their Asian itineraries often visit Thailand, docking at the nearby Laem Chabang port. Once here, guests have all sorts of options for day trips to explore Bangkok and the surrounding provinces. Recently, Holland America has connected with Courageous Kitchen to offer guests a chance to experience a Thai cooking class, while simultaneously giving back to people in need.
The idea to bring travelers to the class began after staff in the company read an interview of Courageous Kitchen founder, Dwight, on Food & Wine. In the interview Dwight talks both about his favorite places to eat in Bangkok, and his charitable work to help the urban poor.
The first group to visit was made of Americans and Canadians, all friendly and eager to hear more about the work of the charity. While we got to know each other, they learned to make four Thai dishes, including our famous pad Thai recipe and the delicious, but lesser known wing bean salad.
The day’s menu included the lesser well known Thai wing bean salad. The fresh green wing bean sprinkled with fiery red chili, resembled a Christmas tree.On top of the regular cost of the class, Holland America included a donation to our charity for each guest attending.
Since Courageous Kitchen began offering Thai cooking classes and street food tours in 2017, we have hosted more than 600 guests. While we still have more growing to do, we’re pausing this week to express our gratitude to our past guests in helping us improve the lives of those in need. Of course a special thanks goes to Holland America for seeking to connect with more sustainable tour operators, and for kicking off the giving season by sending us a great group of guests!
Author: Dwight
Dwight is the director of Courageous Kitchen, and loves sharing his passion for food with new people.
The hallmark of our cooking class is that when you attend one of our small morning classes in Bangkok (with usually no more than 6 people), you will have an opportunity to request dishes you love. After you book your class, we’ll email you with a few options to help narrow down the style of Thai cooking you would most prefer. Then we meet you in Bangkok, take you to the local market for a fun wander around, and finally back to our home to teach you the dishes you’ve requested.
We do often have guests who may be new to Thai food, or need some inspiration to help you decide what to request. Although we’re happy to pick for you (just let us know what allergies you have and your preferred spice level), we though we’d share photos from recent classes where guests have been really please with both the taste and presentation of our Thai dishes. So here’s a few dishes for you to feast your eyes on from our classes, enjoy and we hope to be cooking them with more of you in 2018!
Pineapple Curry Fried Rice with Seafood
A few months back we published a spicy red curry with pineapple recipe, after making it as a special request for guests! If you enjoy red curry, you’ll love the fried rice version which isn’t too difficult to make. Our version of red curry fried rice gains sourness and punchiness from the fresh pineapple, but in our cooking class in Bangkok, you will serve it in the pineapple you’ve carved out yourself. We can’t think of a better serving bowl to represent this tropical, full flavored, and hearty fried rice!
2. Egg Wrapped Pad Thai Noodle with Homemade Tamarind Sauce
In the West, Thailand’s most famous dish is undoubtedly stir fried pad thai noodles. While it’s a starter Thai dish to many, often guests have more fun cooking a cuisine when they have a familiar dish like pad thai on the menu. So to keep this interesting for everyone, you’ll notice that in the Courageous Kitchen classes we put a local spin on the version of pad thai we make. While we can make the more typical presentation, where your egg is fried in the noodles, we love to teach guests to enshrine their pad thai in a fresh egg wrapper. This isn’t only super tasty, it’s more eye catching too! When you serve it, we’re sure your friends and family will wonder what deliciousness hides in this well garnished egg package.
3. Stir Fried and Drunken Pad Kee Mow Noodles
This dish isn’t for everyone, but has been popular with visiting spice lovers. While many people complain the food in Thailand is too spicy, there are still folks arriving who want all the chili filled food they can handle during their stay in Thailand. So if you’re a chili enthusiast, or love someone who is— then you’ve got to make them a smoking hot plate of pad kee mow. While the name of the dish sounds foreign, you may literally translate it as “a drunk’s noodles”, or more commonly, “drunken noodles.” Why is this dish well loved by Thailand’s hedonists? Because the mix of hot chilis with numbing spice from the handfuls of finger-root and fresh peppercorn are intense enough to bring you back to life after a big night out!
4. Shrimp Filled Tom Yum Goong Soup
While pad thai reigns in the West, in Asia Thailand’s most famous culinary export is tom yum soup. The dish has headlined in famous movies domestically and internationally, and generous portions of seafood included in the soup make it hard to overlook! So seafood lovers get those spoons ready and prepare to tilt a bowl of easy to make tom yum soup up, to get all the lemongrass, kaffir lime leaf, and galangal flavors from the broth. If you’re curious about how we teach this dish to students in our project, and visiting tourists, check out our recent video recipe for tom yum with chicken.
Finally, here’s a dish for your sweet-tooth that is more than capable of cooling you off after eating too much spice. To make this traditional dessert, we spend some time together first squeezing and kneading the dough together. In seperate batches we’ll add an all natural food coloring such as pandan leaf (green), pumpkin (orange), or butterfly pea (blue), to give a vibrant color to the dough. Finally, before boiling the dumplings we do the painstaking work of rolling them in to pea sized balls, which is more difficult than it looks or sounds. Making this dish is especially popular in our new evening cooking class in Bangkok. This new class is aimed at families who prefer to make recipes that their kids can get involved with too!
We hope these photos and descriptions give you an idea of what we’re up to in our cooking class in Bangkok! Our class is officially a year old and we’ve had so much fun teaching you these dishes and learning from your feedback. All of our students are provided a digital cook book after the class, so we hope you can make our most popular recipes at home. Every cooking class is unique though, so we’re also hoping to create a larger cook book to share with everyone later in the year.
Thank you for following and supporting Courageous Kitchen this past year, happy eating!
Note: Are you may know, we are a nonprofit project and not a cooking school. While we try to honor all requests made for our class, the guests who book in advance have the best chance of cooking dishes they want to make!
This past weekend we had a very special activity for our junior chefs, our Courageous kids aged 11-14. This is a special age group because they have been watching their older brothers and sisters in the kitchen for several years now and helping in small ways. In 2018 however, we’re pivoting to focus on this age group more, and really working on building their skills and confidence.
This past weekend we jumped into Thailand’s most famous flower market, the Pak Khlong Market. In the Yodpiman building there, we met friends at a company called Expique who run several different types of cooking classes known as The Market Experience. The fun Thai food they create is not unlike what we cook in a typical Saturday in the Courageous Kitchen, but by pulling these students away, we gave them an opportunity to shine without pressure from their older brothers and sisters. In addition to this freedom, they also had a chance to explore the market, learning about it’s rich history and of course, having a plenty of small treats along the way.
After the students toured the market, the washed up and got ready to get their hands messy in the kitchen. The Expique staff was great with the students, watching carefully as they used adult sized knives, and helping the group prepare their ingredients for three dishes with precision. The excitement was palatable as the students rushed to answer the questions from our hosts, and experienced some new methods of preparing their minced pork larb, green curry with chicken, and shrimp pad thai.
At the end of the class, the students were beyond thankful for the opportunity. They went around the room (not without some prodding), sharing what they enjoyed about they class and expressing their gratitude to Simon, Alyssa, and the whole team of Thai teachers.
The day was a special one as the group was not without it’s kids who have persisted through extraordinary challenges in their lives. One young boy with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in his knee had so much fun, he didn’t notice how long he had been standing. Another girl, who’s family had spent time in immigration, loved the outing and voted with a few of her friends to go swimming during the next school holiday. These are just a few stories of triumph over adversity the kids in the group, and seeing how far they’ve come, made us anxious to see what mountains they will move next!
Check out the photos from a recent class where Courageous Kitchen welcomed our largest group yet!
We were contacted by the Deakin University faculty for the Food and Nutrition Sciences Department. The teachers were organizing a study tour to Thailand and looking for a special cooking class for thirty people. Although we don’t normally host large cooking classes, the group was really open to learning more about the community we’re supporting.
So instead of our usual cooking class setting the Deakin students arrived in the community we’re helping in Bangkok, ready to get messy cooking with our students. We divided the young adults from Australia into 5 groups, pairing each of them with one or two youth from the community. The youth led each group in making several recipes such a tom kha soup, pad thai with shrimp, and even a handmade sticky rice dumpling dessert!
Big thanks to the Deakin University students and faculty for being so willing and flexible for our first large group cooking class. Not only was this a great experience for our community, but the faculty from the university committed early to helping us buy better equipment for our ongoing classes. We’re more than grateful and hope to welcome more groups for similar experiences in the future!
