Balinese Cooking Class - Oct. 13, 2010

 October 13, 2010

Senne's Summary: Took a Balinese Cooking Class.

Before I tell you about the excellent Balinese cooking class we took this afternoon, I must just tell you one very cute thing we saw this morning on our walk. We saw a man riding his scooter, and he had his little boy (about 2 or 3 years old) sitting in front of him. This isn’t unusual, you often see small children on scooters with their parents. What was unusual this time was that the boy didn’t have the usual ear-to-ear grin… he was fast asleep, sitting up, riding the moped. The dad had one hand on the throttle and the other hand holding up the little boy. I wish I had my camera, it was really cute!

Now, let’s move on to the highlight of the day… the Balinese Cooking Lesson.

We took the lesson at Laka Leke, which is the restaurant beside our hotel. There were two Balinese people teaching the class.

The students were Steve, me and another lady from Australia named Dianne. It was nice to have such a small group because it was easy to ask questions, participate and see what was happening.

We learned to make five dishes.

The first dish was "Ayam Panggang Sambal Matah" (Balinese Chicken Salad) which was basically marinated grilled chicken wrapped in lettuce. They key was all the fresh spices we ground up to make the marinade. I think this was Steve’s favourite dish.

The next dish was “Sate Ayam” (Chicken Satay). First we prepared the fresh marinade and grilled the chicken. Then we made actual peanut sauce… by crushing real peanuts and about 7 other ingredients. I LOVED the peanut sauce!

The next dish was “Udang Campur” (Prawn Cashew Nuts with Tofu). Also delicious! It was interesting to taste the dishes as we were going, and talk about other ingredients we could add for variety (like apple!).

The next dish was “Beregedel Jagung” (Corn Fritters).These are not your typical North American corn fritters. There is no batter. It’s real corn (scraped right off the cob) and spices squished into spoon sized cakes and deep fried. It was delicious! We’ll definitely make this dish again. (Who am I kidding we’ll make them all!)

The last dish was “Waluh Kukus” (Steamed Pumpkin). This is a dessert… and I thought it sounded gross when I saw it on the list of what we would be cooking. I was so wrong! It’s pumpkin, sticky rice, coconut, brown sugar syrup and cinnamon. It was incredibly tasty!

Highlights for us were:

1)   Seeing all the fresh spices and ingredients. It was interesting to note how much access they have to fresh food because of the climate. For instance, they grow and harvest pumpkins all year long!

2)   Grinding up fresh ingredients to make our own marinades (I’m not embarrassed to say I almost always get my marinade out of a jar!)

3)   Getting to write notes on our own copies of the recipes so when we try to make these dishes again we know what they actually are.

4)   Being able to ask a million questions.

5)   Making fresh peanut sauce!

6)   Having experts teach us how to cook Balinese food.

7)   Just when we thought the class was over they led us over to a table where the lady had set up all the dishes we just cooked for us to eat dinner.