Advertisement
Published: April 10th 2013
May Kaidee's Cooking School
Tom Yum soup (spicy and sour tofu soup)Well after two great first days in Bangkok we headed off to another cooking school that I had booked over the interent before leaving home. 'May Kaidee's' is a vegan cooking school so I thought it would be a good chance to do something a bit different from the norm. Two of the dishes I had read that you make were pumpkin humus and Isaan style vegetables. I was really interested in these as I love Isaan food (from north east Thailand) and the humus sounded yum!
We walked across the road to the school/restaurant only to be told the class was now
at 2pm not
1pm and that it had moved locations! They asked whether we had booked online (yes) and received a confirmation (no). I explained that I had sent numerous emails to them and had not had a response. In the end they drove us to the new location which was only a couple of km's away.
It was only the two of us for the first 15mins (May started at 1.45 with us which was nice since we had been expecting to start
at 1pm and they werent expecting anyone else at this point. Lucky for
us another girl turned up
at 2pm - which was great because I think without her company we would have walked out of the course half way through.)
May started the course with us and then handed us over to another girl 'Wun'. It started off on a bad vibe as May just dove right in and started cooking in front of us using pre cut up ingredients. She then gave us the recipe booklet we'd be using and said 'one read instructions, one cook'. It was literally 'put in vegetable, add sugar...etc'. we may as well have been posted out the booklet and just cooked it at home. There was no food prep done by us at all - even the curry pastes were already put out (which I saw they squeezed from a packet!). Never have I done a class before where you don't get to make the curry paste!
The dishes were all way to sweet to the point where they curries were inedible to me. The soups were nice, and the vegies with ginger too (but still just a very simple stir fry). As I mentioned, the main reason I took this course
was to make the Isaan vegetables and pumpkin humus as these were not offered in other cooking schools and I was looking for something different. Well, we were told that 'today we skip Isaan' and told to move on to next recipe. I questioned this (as it states both on the website and brochure that it is included) and was told 'we skip'. Not happy. After we were shown how to make fresh spring rolls and I could see that they had brought up a tiny bowl each of sticky rice and mango (no, we did not get to make, only told how to cook sticky rice) I asked about the pumpkin humus. Was told 'today, we skip'. It was then that I spoke up and said that the reason I took this class was to make the Isaan vegetables and pumpkin humus and they were skipping both. She then said grumpily, 'ok, I show you', went downstairs to get some ingredients then came back up and went over to a wok on the other side of the room and started cooking something while the three of us were leftat a table in the corner. I asked if we could
May Kaidee's Cooking School
Green and massaman curries. The worst curries I've ever had. Sickly sweet to the point inedible... come over and watch what she was doing and she said 'no, I'm just cooking some pumpkin'!! She then came over and showed us what to do making a very small batch of the humus. She did let us actually use her mortar and pestle to pound the pumpkin with the other ingredients - woo hoo...I suppose because she had worked put we all werent happy and that we were being ripped off. She served us each a tsp worth on a piece of cucumber then took the rest away! At the beginning of the course we were shown how to make the essential chilli paste they use for a lot of recipes. It was very quick and didn't look like the end result they had in the bowl already. It was funny as when I got back to my room, I noticed when reading my recipe booklet that it was someone else's from a previous class as they had written in the chilli paste recipe and it was totally different from what we were shown! (theirs had soy sauce, sugar and sweet and sour sauce which we were not shown, which probably explains why it looked different!Overall there was
May Kaidee's Cooking School
(Por Piah) fresh spring roll with peanut sauce no love or care to the course. We were ripped off as to what we didn't get to cook, what we did was not that nice at all. Same vegies in nearly every dish, all prepared and didn't even look fresh (lemongrass etc looked dried up and precut hours ago). Big shame. Unlike the Chef Leez course we did on Saturday there was no love in this course at all. I was quite happy to put an honest review on Trip Advisor!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.229s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 12; qc: 34; dbt: 0.0607s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Stephanie and Andras
Stephanie
Oh dear! Sounds disappointing all around. Thai cooking classes have always been something high on our "travel to-do" list; looks like I'll be making a mental note to avoid this one! I hope the rest of your Thailand travels fare better.