There Are No Thai Police in Your Kitchen

Huddled around a metal table, sixteen of us are ready to embark on a journey to the Far East. Thailand to be specific. Our guide for today's adventure is Chef Jane. A short, stocky woman full of piss and vinegar and possibly tamarind sauce. Chef Jane is from Florida, which explains the y'all's that pepper her speech. I immediately take to her because of her "in-your-face" personality.

Currently residing in Astoria, Chef Jane recounts the wonders of her local Asian market as she explains the five, no four - cross out the five in your booklet - four flavor profiles of Thailand. Crossing out and writing corrections is a constant part of the next hour of class. For some reason, the booklet has a number of errors.

We learn about salty, sweet, sour and bitter flavors. The quasi fifth flavor profile is heat - a staple in Thai cuisine.

I learn that the way to distinguish between similar looking parsley and cilantro is to squeeze and crack the roots and take a whiff. I learn that black peppercorns are old, tannins are bitter, and tamarind looks like gray/brown pudding with a very sour taste. Chef passed specialty items around the table for us to smell and I sniffed the packages like a bloodhound on the trail. Dried shrimp smell like shrimp of course. Kaffir lime leaves smell like lime. Fish sauce smells like a mutant creature from the depths of the darkest, deepest trench in the Pacific ocean somehow crawled into the trunk of your car, died, and rotted in the blazing heat in August. Yes, it smelled that bad.

Its time to assign the groups. I'm placed into a group with a cute thirty something JCrew couple named Melinda and Mark and two African American women whose names I never got. I think they are a mother daughter combo. Together, we form Group #1. Mark will handle the Green Chicken Coconut Curry. Melinda and I tackle the Chicken Satay with Nancy Allen's Secret Spicy Peanut Sauce. I know, you are wondering who is Nancy Allen? Damn if I know. 

After cutting up the chicken breasts for the grill, I head to the stove with a medium sauce pan and half a can of coconut milk. Have you ever seen an industrial stove before? Its huge and intimidating. I'm terrified to turn on the gas because I fear flames will shoot straight up and I'll loose my eyebrows. The knob to turn the gas on has no indicator like "High," "Low," and not even an arrow indicating which way you turn it like mine do at home. I guess if you cook on industrial stoves regularly you would know what to do. But no, little old me is terrified. I get Joel, the polite, middle aged gay man complete with requisite 80's moustache and a leather fanny pack to assist me. He adjusts my flame properly and I pour in the coconut milk. We're cooking now!

I stare at the coconut milk, stir it and I am happy. I begin to reduce it and stand there once again twiddling my thumbs. I read the recipe and realize to my horror that about five different ingredients need to go into the coconut milk right now. Pronto! The recipe begins by saying "add the red curry paste, garlic and ginger." Oh shit! I can't just scoop in the large ginger root sitting on our table. It has to be grated. The garlic needs to be minced too. I rush to get Melinda to help. She sets about mincing the garlic while I tear off through the kitchen in a panic in search of red curry paste. I borrow it from Group #2 and then head over to the ginger root on the table by Mark and use Chef's wonderful ginger grater. I grate the hell out of the ginger root, which takes forever.

I’m freaking out because I think I’m taking too much time. I add the curry paste and ginger to the coconut milk and Melinda adds in the garlic she just finished mincing. By now the coconut milk has reduced a hell of a lot. Its now thick like marshmallow fluff. Oh shit, I think to myself. I turn off the burners and tell Melinda its probably over cooked already and we still have more to put stuff in. I need to find peanut butter while Melinda starts searching for chicken broth and palm sugar.

I tear across the kitchen again to the ingredient table in the back. "Peanut butter, peanut butter" I say to myself. All I see are bizarre Asian ingredients and bags with unidentified herbs and substances in them. Where the fuck is the peanut butter? Chef magically appears next to me and hands me a plain plastic container of it. Thank god!   

I add the peanut butter and Melinda and I discuss the amount of heat to apply to melt the peanut butter down. I then rush around looking for a zester for the lemon in my hand. It is impossible to find anything in that damned kitchen by the way. Aquarius, the Chef's bumbling assistant, hooks me up with a zester and I learn its proper name is a micro-plane. I'll have to remember that one. I add in the lemon zest. Melinda adds the palm sugar and at this point, all the rushing around, the people chattering, the adrenaline rushing, the anxiety mounting...I'm practically having a heart attack. 

Everyone is confused in the kitchen. Rushing here, rushing there. Using bizarre ingredients they've never worked with. Chef Jane is rushing to and fro. Talking loud and answering questions quickly. Aquarius knocks over the stacked chairs in the corner, then he knocks over the stack of bowls on the corner table which go crashing to the floor. Chef is cursing from difficulty finding something behind me. All of this fuels my anxiety over Nancy Allen's fucking Secret-Spicy Peanut Sauce.

I decide to boldly taste the bubbling brown peanut concoction before me. At first I get a strong peanut butter flavor which jumps out at me. Then it fades and look out! Here comes the curry paste. Wow! The heat rises intensely, but its not a four alarm fire in my mouth. Just an eye opening punch of heat. I invite Chef Jane to have a taste and she takes one look at our sauce and says in a scolding tone, "Something isn't right. This doesn't look right." She barks a question at me. "How much peanut butter did you add?" I meekly answer "one cup". She looks at me like I added a whole jar of it and I quickly defended myself, while pointing to the recipe, "it calls for 3/4 to 1 cup and I put in one full cup." Chef turns up the burner to a boil and mutters something about how it will cook down.

With the sauce left on its own, we move over to the grill.  After much debate, we work out a system of watching the clock and cutting a few chicken pieces to test for doneness. After fiddling around we get best results from 2.5 minutes of grilling on each side of a skewer and we are grilling away. Ladies are working at the neighboring grilling station on the cilantro shrimp skewers. They look absolutely gorgeous but a number of the skewers catch fire. The older woman says to me with indifference about her flaming skewers, "What can you do?"

We are almost finished grilling when I hear Chef bellow out an announcement to come to the back table if you would like to learn how to roll summer rolls. Hot Damn, here is my chance! I step up to the summer roll station next to two bitchy looking skinny girls and start mimicking their actions since I missed the demonstration that took place while I was hunting for a tray to roll my summer rolls on. Joel and his fanny pack wandered over and promptly gave me the instructions I so desperately needed to know.

Dipping the rice paper wrappers in the water was surprisingly fun. The wrappers start out almost the consistency of plastic Eucharist wafers. (Sorry for the religious reference, but its all I could think of.) When the wrappers heat up in hot water, they feel like thick, wet saran wrap. I laid out my wrappers and proceeded to assemble and roll three summer rolls. I kept rolling until I realized a crowd had formed around our table watching the process. I looked over at the Indian woman next to me and asked if she wanted a crack at it. She smiled and said sure. I gave her the little rolling station I had created for myself and told her that Joel was great for instructions. I then set off to wander about the kitchen totally euphoric from all that I had done and learned. The panic and anxiety was gone and I was just grinning ear to ear.

Before you know it, it was time to sit and eat everything that had been made. Aquarius had rushed to transform our filthy work tables into a large pristine dining table complete with tablecloths, wine glasses, and cutlery. 

We opened a bottle of Reisling and I grabbed one of the Tsing Tao Beers that were chilling on ice near the hand washing station. Chef wound up sitting in the only empty seat at the table, which happened to be next to me. Then it happened. Chef commented twice on how well Nancy What’s-Her-Face’s peanut sauce came out. Can you believe it? Melinda and I were so proud of ourselves. The problem with the sauce apparently resolved itself after cooking over a low heat for a long time. Hallelujah to the Thai gods!

We dined on pad thai (both shrimp and chicken), cilantro shrimp, mango sticky rice, summer rolls with a fiery dipping sauce, green chicken coconut curry, steamed whole fish with tamarind sauce, our aforementioned chicken satay skewers and an absolutely horrid dessert of fried bananas and tapioca pudding with young coconut.

Aside from the traumatic dessert, the food was a raving (hot and spicy) success and we were all pleased. We all took note that the food we cooked had much more flavor than any Thai we've had in restaurants or take out. Chef Jane agreed.

In case you were wondering about the title of this post - There are No Thai Police in your Kitchen - this was Chef Jane’s way of encouraging us to experiment with ingredients. It was such a wonderful phrase that I just had to slap it on as the title.

Tonight I dine on leftovers of Shrimp Pad Thai. The first and only Pad Thai I have ever enjoyed.

Knife Skills 101

Back in November, I took a knife skills class at the Institute for Culinary Education (ICE) on 23rd and 6th. The instructor was Norman W. A short man filled with sarcasm, fatherly concern, and personality that extended well beyond his surprisingly short stature. His snowy white hair and glasses beset a face that was warm and friendly, in a Papa Smurf kind of way. Just minus the blueness.

The class of about 12 were grouped at two steel tables at waist high height. At each spot at the table was a little set up including a cutting board, knifes, and a cheap, washed a thousand-and- one-times apron. Along with the dreaded "Hello My name is" nametag. How much I despise name tags? I could go on for hours, but I sucked it up. I wrote my real name down (for once, as I have a tendancy to use aliases in public) and slapped it across my chest. I was ready to learn. I was dressed and ready to go to battle with the knives placed before me. Now I must say before we begin, that I wisely made a beeline to the first table, and not the second, upon realizing that is the table where the instructor would be. I wanted to make sure I could really see what was going on. Hey these classes aren't cheap! I wanted to make sure I got every penny's worth.

As class was starting, I noticed the light skinned African American woman diagonally opposite me looked familiar. I took about ten seconds of scanning my brain through the countless images of celebrities that I have seen when it hit. Alison Stewart. No, could it really be the former MTV and VH1 VJ who had gone on to host the Bryant Park Project on NPR? I looked down at her name tag. Gasp - There it was. Emblazoned in bright blue sharpie - Alison. I'll be damned, I thought to myself. It is her. A bonafide celebrity in my midst. A mere foot away from me. I got nervous and flushed for a moment at being near a relative celebrity. Well celebrity to me anyway. I knew I'd have to say something to her to confirm it. But not in a gushing "omigodareyoualisonstewartfrommtvandvh1andnpr!!!?" But in a hip, cool, I see celebrities every day kind of way. I did this during our breaktime. She was excited to know I was a fan. I was excited I played it uber cool.

After being star struck, I had to focus on the task at hand. Norman began our class with his soft spoken, extremely funny, informal storytelling way. We got to work discussing the basics of knives. What makes a good knife. What makes a bad knife. Identifying the major parts of the knife. And he told us that all we knew about using knives was wrong. Don't you love that? I certainly do. Its like that History of Spain class I took in college when we read "The Conquest of Paradise" about the true story of Columbus' discovery. I learned everything I knew about Columbus and the native Americans was wrong. It wasn't a "hands across america" moment. It was genocide by force and by illness. During that class in college, it was exciting to challenge the status quo while I learned. And I had that same sort of taboo learning feeling shoot though me in the ICE classroom.

We mainly learned how to properly slice and dice. That was the basis of the first class. There were three knife skills classes in all. The other two focused on fileting fish and carving beef. The last was decorative cutting of fruit and vegetables for presentation.

In our class, we learned there is no real chopping, unless you have a cleaver. Onions, peppers, cucumbers, carrots were sliced. Not chopped. We learned that the bigger your kife, the easier it is to slice the above named vegetables. Except for shallots, which require a much smaller knife.

I experienced a culinary epiphany as I lifted the knife and sliced through the carrot. The sound, the feel, it felt rhythmic and fluid. Like a dance with the vegetable. I was becoming one with the carrot and it felt good. The four part method of dicing an onion was like someone explaining the meaning of life to me. The slice in half. Use the root to keep the layers of onion together. Then the real magic begins.

The bagel (horizontal) cut. The pull (verticle) cut. And the final slicing through to create the dice. It was pure bliss. We all oohed and ahhed at the simplicity of it. How easy it was to slice and not press down on the vegetable with out weight....ie chopping.

Norman walked around the class supervising and appropriately making fun of students doing the wrong thing. The most common error was improperly gripping the knife itself. We were all guilty of that several times during the class.

I was giddy as the class went on. Lightbulbs were illuminating in my mind. A series of "aha" moments. Along with the celebrity rush of Ms. Stewart at my table, I was on cloud nine.

We used a few different types of knifes during the class. All of the knives were the Wusthof brand, which is the brand of the one fancy schmansy knife I had at home. We used the 8" chef knife, the 10" chef knife, and the mother of them all -- the 10" wide chefs knife. Now that 10" wide knife was like a machete. Just picking it up, the weight was impressive. The long steel blade was terrifying at times to look at since it conjured up the stereotypical image and soundtrack that accompanied the legendary shower scene in the movie Psycho. But the 10" wide knife cut like butter. You really did have more control with a larger knife. What a concept!

The class concluded by using a much smaller paring knife to make a tomato rose. Holding the knife properly with the thumb as a guide, you inserted the blade into the top of the tomato at a 90 angle. You twisted the blade around in a very small circle and proceeded to peel the skin in one long strip. Not an easy feat, but going slow I accomplished it and left the bottom intact as instructed. After discarding the tomato itself, you carefully roll up the long strip of skin and sit it on the intact bottom and voila! You have created a tomato rose! My tomato rose was slightly deformed of course. More of a mutant tomato rose. But I was beaming with pride.

I felt victorious at the end of class. I hadn't cut myself. (The British girl did - sucker!) I rushed out of class at the end, despite wanting to stay and thank Norman for being a wonderful instructor. But I had a more important quest. That quest was rushing up to the 13th floor to the ICE store where I could be first in lie to buy one of those glorious knives. Being on a wave of excitement and feeling highly impulsive, I bought the bohemoth 10" wide chef's knife. All $118 dollars of it. I was thrilled and excited to be carrying a major weapon around with me on the streets of Manhattan.

I knew I would be returning to ICE again. My next class will be next weekend. I will spend the day learning about Thai food. Now that will be something to blog about!