Cooking Class

We haven’t really cooked much since moving to Singapore. Its too easy to eat out every night. Even coming from Santa Cruz, where we lived close enough to walk downtown to Pacific Avenue every night, we still cooked and ate at home more often than we do now.

To combine the whole cooking and eating out experience, we’ve been taking cooking classes.

Yesterday morning we went with a friend, Eleenor to the Coriander Leaf restaurant cooking studio. Our teacher was the fantastic French Cuisine Chef, Anne Guegan-Blayo, who led us through the preparation of several seafood courses.

We started with a dish I thought would be an appetizer. It was prawn seviche, with tempura calamari, and Thai seafood salad. It included roasted tomato salsa on the side.

Deanna loves squid, so we paid special attention how to recognize fresh squid in the wet market, and how to clean and prep them. The recipe mixed chili flakes and white pepper into the tempura batter, which added a nice kick to the calamari. When dipped in the salsa, this made my favorite flavor on the plate. But this was no mere appetizer; it was a complete meal in itself, especially after several extra helpings of seafood salad, and, of course, the calamari.

We were already full when our second dish was ready, poached threadfin with sauce Americaine. The sauce started with whole crabs browned and flambéed with diced vegetables, and then strained & reduced to a rich dark sauce.

Chef Anne said the sauce was invented when some Americans arrived to a restaurant after the kitchen closed. Their cook threw together a sauce using whatever scraps of crab and lobster was leftover from the evening.

We started our sauce at 10:00 in the morning; and considering how long it took to make, I’m doubtful my tardy countrymen would have had the patience to stay around to savor it. But I’m glad the recipes took time to prepare, because we were eating too much for a casual Saturday morning. By the time this dish was done, I was afraid the endless servings of fish were going to become oppressive.

The main course that followed included two different fish dishes. A red snapper fillets, pan fried and served with asparagus and hollandaise sauce. And a Barramundi/Seabass, roasted whole and served with butter-toasted almonds. This was all incredibly rich, employing an alarming weight of butter. For our final course, we moved out of the kitchen and sat down at a large dining table to enjoy.

While we were eating, Chef Anne was preparing a final treat of fresh fruit fritters with spiced sugar. By now, we had been in class nearly 5 hours. Drowsy from so much rich food, I wasn’t paying attention, so I have no idea how the fritters were made.

We took home two full bellies and some insights from Chef Anne that we might try at home. I’ll be testing our new squid knowledge on our next shopping trip.

I Like Small Airlines

On our last trip we flew on Air Aisa, a Malaysian airline based in Kuala Lumpur. There are two things I like about flying on small airlines. First, they generally use smaller airplanes, instead of giant large wide-body planes. Second, they generally fly out of smaller, regional airports rather than the giant hubs.

The reason I like smaller airplanes is because I like flying, and I like to feel the airplane in the air. Some people hate it, but I like to feel the air. I like to feel the takeoff and landing, the ascent and descent. I would compare it to drivers who like to feel the road. Large airplanes are like large cars - you can’t feel the road. When I fly in large airplanes I miss the feeling of flight.

The reason I like small airports is because they tend to have more personally and they don’t isolate you from the flying experience. Larger airports may be all dramatic architecture and everything, but from a passenger’s experience, they are all pretty much the exact same ticket queue and shopping mall inside.

Small airports don’t have long ticket queues or food courts. They don’t have huge crowds and labyrinthine terminals to navigate. Sometimes they don’t even have more than one or two gates. The arrival and departure schedule is simple: you can walk straight in and can see your plane on the runway. No shuttle bus or people mover to get you to your flight, it might be the only plane there.

I like walking straight onto the tarmac and then out to my plane--no skybridge. I like being able to see the whole plane from the ground.

There is something about being able to see the actual body of the plane, the engines, wings, landing gear, etc, that makes flying feel like flying. Big airports feel like you're just packing 400 people into a big bus.