Friday's with Bri - Asian Cooking Class

A COOKING CLASS WITH MY FATHER-IN-LAW

I have done a lot of cooking but never have I taken a course on it, so when I was invited by Bill to go learn some Asian cooking I immediately said yes. We were going to learn how to make egg drop soup, General Tao chicken, pot stickers, and a red bean dessert pancake. 

Class watching chef Nguyen

The classroom where the course took place is upstairs in the Westboro Loblaws Superstore and it is really cool. The room is huge and the kitchen is at the front with an awesome mirror on an angle so you can see everything on the counter, no matter where you are sitting. This really lets the chef do their work and not have to stop ever few seconds to hold up the cutting board or the pot so we can see what’s happening. The really awesome part was all the ingredients that we used: we could have walked downstairs a bought right then and there.

TOFU IS SAFE TO CUT IN YOUR HAND? 

The class was led by chef Thuy Nguyen; she probably was the most powerfully commanding lady I have ever met,  and she is only 5ft-nothing. She made the class so much fun and easy; she talked through every step and really shared her knowledge around all the health benefits of all the ingredients. My favorite was watching all her techniques, like how to get juice from a dry ginger root. My favorite quote of the day was “Tofu is safe to cut in your hand, tofu is really soft and your hand is really hard, so you know where to stop the knife”(as she cubed tofu in her hand with the chef’s knife)… until I develop hands of steal I still don’t think I’ll try this.

I particularly loved the fact that there was a hands-on portion of the class, where we as a class got to make the pot stickers (dumplings) and yours truly was given an extremely hard pat on the back, from such a small lady, when I made a different shaped dumpling.

CHINESE DUMPLINGS:

It was surprisingly simple:

1. Prepare the filling; we used pork and vegetables.

PC Cooking school

2. We used the prepackaged dumpling wrappers.

3. Take egg whites and use your finger to coat the outside edges.

4. Take a tsp. of the filling mixture and place in the center.

5. Fold the dumpling paper over the filling and press the edges together.

...and voila! a ready-to-cook dumpling.

For the full instructions and the recipes check out the PCcooking school’s web site and sign up for a course. I don’t want to give away all the fun!

My favorite part of the class was definitely the teacher. She was loud excited and totally in charge of the class, and you could see everything she did thanks to the mirror over the counter. Oh, and the food was amazing! Jordan said I came home smelling like a Chinese restaurant.

It was an awesome experience and I encourage everyone checkout some cooking classes at a PC cooking school near you.