Informal Cooking Lessons

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Tonight was an exciting evening. Last night we had met a few of the local policeman and chatted with them and the Aomdoi owners and staff. It was a lot of fun, with much poorly spoken Thai on their parts, and a lot of understanding on their part when someone would butcher a word so badly that it was accidentally now a dirty word. Good times! But the best part was that we convinced them to teach us how to cook Pad See-ew tonight. Pad See-ew is a wide noodle dish that is sweet, sour and spicy all at the same time. Tasty!

To start, we learned how to cut the noodles from large sheets of rice noodle. The cut noodles were mixed with a thick black sauce. Then you heat up oil in a wok and add garlic until it smells really good (that was a direct quote). Then one egg per serving, scrambled. Next was diced pork, salt, pepper and sugar. After that came the addition of the noodles, soy sauce and fish sauce. This part required a lot of mixing and stirring so that the noodles didn't stick to the bottom of the wok. The final step was to add vegetables - sliced up broccoli stems and leaves and something that tasted like pepper.

The finished product was served on a tray with dried chili and chilies in vinegar to add to taste along with packets of salt and a lime. At the end of our feast we were all satisfied and exited to try cooking this dish at home!

On a side note, while moving a giant board at the office last week I bruised my arm, taking the brunt of it's weight when it tipped over. I've attached a picture of my spectacular bruises as proof of my war wounds. Enjoy!

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Photos

Noodle Cutting
As demonstrated by a pro.

My spectacular bruise
You can see all four points where the board made contact as it bounced down my arm...