A couple weeks ago we saw a flier in our building for cooking classes in the area. The classes covered a variety of food - Spanish tapas and paella, soups, and dim sum. We had talked about taking a cooking class before and decided to sign up for the class on Thai food, since it's one of our favorite foods to eat but one that we don't know how to make well.

Last Thursday night we walked the couple blocks to class. The class was hands-on and about 14 of us stood around a table and all participated in making the food. There were a lot of ingredients that we weren't familiar with, like Thai eggplant, fish sauce, and tamarind concentrate. We started by identifying all the exotic components and then started preparing food.

We all had a chance to make spring rolls, and helped make pad thai, papaya salad, peanut sauce, and green and red curry. We finished off with some sweet coconut rice. The recipes included ingredients completely from scratch and were more complicated than we're used to cooking at home. However, the food was pretty good, and it was helpful to see how these dishes are made. At the end we were full and tired, but it was a fun experience.

I'm not sure when we'll have a chance to round up all the exotic ingredients it took for some of these recipes, but we'll probably try to make one of these recipes at home this week.