For about three years, I’ve worked close to Hipcooks West LA and have wanted to take a class there, because I love cooking classes. So I was super excited to have the chance to take the Hipcooks “Thai One On” class through Course Horse. Hipcooks has a lot of awesome cooking classes in Los Angeles and signing up through CourseHorse is totally easy! CourseHorse is discovery and booking tool for local classes in Los Angeles and other cities as well and you can find all kinds of classes through the service.
In the “Thai One On” class (get the pun?), Vivien guided our class of 8 through four courses of Thai dishes, which we made as a group. Vivien explained to us that Thai cooking consists of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and spicy — and she regularly quizzed us on which one a dish could be missing. The first course we cooked was made up of appetizers: Chicken Satay with peanut sauce, veggie spring rolls, and coconut rice with shrimp and cilantro. After prepping the first course, we sat down to eat. Vivien warned us to pace ourselves and not fill up our stomachs too fast — we still had three more courses to go!
The next course included veggie pad thai with tofu, and papaya salad. I was tasked with mixing up the papaya salad in a bowl, while my classmates prepared the egg, tofu, and noodles for the pad thai. So, I have a love-hate relationship with papaya salad — I have never quite had one that didn’t set my mouth on fire at Thai restaurants…until now. The papaya salad we all prepared in class had a much milder spice, so I was finally able to taste the salad without desperately reaching for water.
Next, we had a “curry-off” and prepared red and green curries. I got food processor duty, so I got to use it to chop up the ingredients for both curries. It was cool to see all the ingredients that go into curry and the whole process. The red curry was served with chicken and cashews, while the green curry was served with eggplant and mushrooms.
To close out the meal, Vivien dished out black “Forbidden Rice” with coconut cream and Vanilla bean paste, her variation on the venerable mango sticky rice dish. It was totally yummy!
So it was really awesome to have these Thai dishes demystified for me and now I can’t wait to try them on my own. Thank you Vivien, Hipcooks, and CourseHorse for a lovely class! Check out the video above for the food class in action.