Day 2 -- Friday, 11 December 2009

Today, we are going to learn to cook some yummy Thai dishes. Organizer Lynn got this idea from the Bangkok episode in a Taiwanese travel show, The Adventure King (冒险王).

Baipai Thai Cooking School (Thai: โรงเรียนสอนทำอาหารไทยใบพาย)

Baipai is approximately 30min drive away from Pullman King Power Hotel. We took the morning session. Transportation is provided at 8.20am at the hotel and lunch will be whatever we cook. It’s kind of ‘exciting’ as whether we go hungry or not depends on how well we did our dishes. @_@
Baipai is a charming two storey house with wooden door and locally styled furnishings in tranquil surroundings, cozy and relaxing atmosphere. The workshop is an opened-air Thai stylish home-like kitchen at the bottom floor of the house and each student has an individual cooking station.
There were 3 other people in our class – a couple from Singapore and a professional chef from France (This French chef came to Thailand to learn about Thai cuisine and has been learning from Baipai for the past week!)

All ready to cook!

We are supposed to prepare 4 dishes. The lessons are taught by a Thai chef and a bubbly translator in a fun and simplified manner. Each dish is taught in 4 steps – show, taste, cook and feast! The chef will first show us how the dish is prepared in details and let us taste the dishes as a guideline before releasing us to our stations to prepare our lunch.
We did not perform as badly as we thought we will. The dishes tasted just as delicious. =p It is indeed a unique experience – Nice job, Organiser!

Our lunch: Tod Man Pls (Fried Fish Fillet), Tom Kha Gai (Chicken & Galangal in coconut milk soup), Gouay Teaw Pad Thai( Thai Fried Rice Noodle) & Tab Tim Grobb (Water Chestnut in coconut milk dessert)

Preparation

Tod Man Pls (Fried Fish Fillet) - Getting ready to fry the fish fillet

Our Gouay Teaw Pad Thai( Thai Fried Rice Noodle)

Souvenirs from Baipai

MBK (Mah Boon Krong)Shopping Mall
After a filling lunch, we asked to be dropped of at the MBK Shopping Mall for our next round of shopping.

MBK (Mah Boon Krong) is an 8-storey shopping mall packed with shops that sell everything from clothing, fashion accessories to electronics like mobile phones, DVD players and even furniture. The nearest BTS station is the National Stadium. There is a wide range of food choices in its food court and various restaurants. There is also cinema and Karaoke facilities in the mall. One can find larger sized clothing and famous-name brands here too. Like all markets, all prices here are negotiable. It is however important to take a closer look at the quality and craftsmanship of the item of choice as the bargain prices could mean that the merchandise is copy products or from questionable origin. We cruised past a few shops in MBK but did not find anything to our liking. We then decided to give our nails a nice treat instead – Pedi & Mani-cure time!

Most of the nail art shops are pretty small (able to accommodate at most 3 people). As there are 4 of us and we wanted to do it together, we approached the largest shop in the building. That shop-front can easily accommodate up to 7- 8 customers at the same time.
Upon entering the shop, albums of nail art designs piled up in front of us. We took a good 15 minutes looking through them.
Once the designs were decided, the nail artists positioned us at different corners of the shop and started working on our nails immediately. At one time, there were two nail artists attending to each of us – fingernails and toenails respectively. They were quick yet accurate.
The designs seemed to be inscribed in their mind – they hand-painted the designs swiftly, hardly even looking at the template picture.
We spent about 2 hours there and were extremely pleased with the outcome. Such professional nail-art at a quarter of the price we get at Singapore!

With our beautiful nails, we went in search of a authentic Thai restaurant recommended by Ruoting’s friend but failed to locate it. (The only instructions given to us was a Thai restaurant opposite MBK Shopping Mall with green signboard. >_<) Famished, we decided to head back to MBK for the infamous MK Restaurant.

MK Restaurant is very popular among Thai family for a weekend meal. The main highlight is the MK Steamboat – it is very similar to what we have in Singapore, just order some food, tipped them into the pot with soup and feast. The choice of dishes is pretty limited, but I love their mushroom platter – good variety. Ruoting loved their spicy dipping sauce. I find it average though. What I like better is the soup base – it’s super tasty after only the first round of cooking and most importantly, there wasn’t any MSG in it. (We did not get tingling thirsty feel which we will usually get after drinking MSG soup.)
There are quite a few raved cooked dishes from MK eg. Dimsum dishes, roasted duck and grilled pork.
We were too full to try those.

.......... Day 3