Posts tagged ‘travelicious’

Yangshuo cooking school

Well… i love cooking and why not try to master some local delicacies yourself.. plus weather was so bad that an indoor activity wouldn’t harm. Thus Wednesday morning i met the cooking teacher and a girl from the UK who would learn cooking with me. However, before the fun starts, we first paid the local farmer’s market a visit to pick up some missing ingredients and get an impression what is for sale in such a market. Now i was warned by other posts that this market could turn you stomach upside down as there are some substantial differences between a market in Switzerland and one in China.

So we entered the first hall where everything looked pretty much normal except maybe the frogs and snakes that we passed when walking in. Lots of different vegetables and fruits beautifully piled up on tables, many familiar and of course some for Europeans unusual ones.

Starting to wonder what the warning was all about, we moved to the 2nd hall where you can by meat and fish. Unlike at home most of the animals are fresh for sale – i.e. alive.  So if you want to cook chicken you would select one from a cage, they tie their feet together and feet over head you can carry it home.. unless you would want to have it slaughtered on spot because you just don’t really feel like doing it yourself… which is also possible. Ok chicken was the easy example, but there were also rabbits, ducks, dogs and cats! Scrammed into cages looking miserable as if they knew what’s going to happen. I will save you the pics of these and show you here some goose and pig instead. By the way… when we left the market just one of these frogs managed to get out of the net/bucket and was jumping for his life… we kept our fingers crossed they will not notice / catch him again.

With a slightly uncomfortable feeling in our stomachs we left the market and drove off to the cooking school which was located in a small village in the countryside.  They had nicely prepared plates with all the ingredients and each of us had her own cooking station with a nice big chopping board and an even bigger chopping knife (i would love to get one of these for home!)

During the next 2 hours we learned how to cook: stuffed vegetables (pumpkin flower, mushroom and a dice of tofu) steamed in a bamboo basket. Beer fish a speciality of Yangshuo, aubergine with oyster sauce, chicken with cashew nuts and pak choi with garlic and chillies. Usually the teacher would first show us how to cook the dish by stirring and shuffling all the ingredients skilfully and as quick as a flash in her wok. By the time she had finished Alice and i had already forgotten how much of what needed to be thrown into the wok when and even less could we remember at what heat.. ha ha  But Amy our teacher patiently explained it to us again so that we managed to cook all these dishes close to perfection – at least thought it was delicious… yes absolutely travelicious!