Cooking Class is a Debacle

After 20 miles of biking to the waterfall on our first day, I had no interest in biking again the second day. Doug headed out to the other side of the Mekong on his bike to see what he could explore and I headed to the Spa!

Massages in Asia are FABULOUS as they are usually in the range of $6 to $10 for an hour. I headed down to the places that were right on the river and got a $5 one hour Laos massage. It was amazing.

With the rest of my afternoon/evening I walked up the very many steps to the Stupa that is at the top of the hill for the sunset view. I will tell you that this is really not worth it. You and one gazillion people hang out at the top of the stupa waiting for the sun to set. It does not take much time before the sun is behind a huge hill - so you get a few rays of orange/violet before your sunset has ended. Then you and the same one gazillion people slowly make your way back down the hill.

At the bottom I headed through the night market to go back to our hotel and ran into Doug!

The next day Doug woke up and his right knee was hurting so he opted not to go back out mountain biking. I had gotten a recommendation for an all day cooking class from someone we had sat next to a couple of nights ago and I was anxious to check it out.

Doug had been admit that he did not want to do an all day cooking class and we had thought that we could do a half day - so we went to check it out. We found out the day class was full but we could do the evening class option. While the owner was walking us through the class, a couple came up to cancel their reservation for the day - and we now had the option of doing an all day class. Given that we had nothing else to do that day, Doug reluctantly agreed to do cooking class from 10 am until 5pm.

Cooking class was a debacle. The format is setup such that after a tour of the market you come back and the head chef demonstrates three dishes, of which you choose two to make. Then you get to eat it for lunch. Then you repeat the same process and end up with three dishes for dinner.

You prepare the dishes at your station with your partner. Generally Doug and I are great at working together but at cooking we were a disaster. I forgot to add vinegar to the salad dressing (which was recoverable once we figured out what went wrong). We both wanted to control the wok - I would add ingredients not measured to Doug's exacting standards - Doug forgot to add the water to allow the vegetables to steam and in another dish he forgot to add the chillies. In a final hurrah we jointly managed to burn the chili paste and coconut milk. For two intelligent, literate people - we were an absolute mess.

What made it all that much more interesting was that every other station was doing great. Even the girl next to us who was working alone was doing things better and faster than the two of us could do them. After an initially tense first few dishes, it just became hilarious. There was nothing we could get right (although Doug did a fabulous job of plating the Luang Prabang salad complete with cherry tomato cut to look like a flower).

At the end of the day our dishes were moderately edible - but certainly not enjoyable. We did our best to try to eat some of it and then happily parted ways with our fellow chefs. It was a great way to spend a day - but we were both happy to have someone else make us a real dinner.