Cooking class at Casa Luna cooking school

Thursday morning I did a cooking class- the biggest gathering of white people Ive seen in a while! There were about 12 people and a few people, staff from the restaurant took us on a tour of the Ubud markets to start with, pointing out the ingredients we'd need and typical Indonesian foods... We headed back to the restaurant and had a drink and morning tea to recover (lugging that laptop around in my backpack for a couple of hours certainly warranted a few glasses of hibiscus tea) and tried a few traditional Balinese dishes, some pandan green cakes, a gado-gado peanut salad, steamed bananas and some little cakes filled with sugar syrup. When we were sufficiently stuffed, we started the preparations: the restaurant had these massive 20kg granite mortar and pestle so we took in turns grinding up big bowls of beautifully smelling spices and herbs to make the sauce bases. Then we cooked a chicken curry, a few salads and our own sambal (we didnt do a lot of cooking, mostly the chefs demonstrated and explained why and how things fitted into their culture) then enjoyed the meal with a glass of brem, balinese rice wine. I met some interesting people, a family from Canada and several people from Oz, one from Launnie, and a Canadian couple teaching Spanish in Malaysia (as you do).