This is the first in a series of reviews taken from our experiences of several cooking classes that we participated in whilst travelling through Asia. We’re both foodies and love to explore new cuisine, this could have something to do with creativity. We both love to photograph and create nice imagery and design and we both like to design and create new and exciting food, and then photograph it! It all seems to be very complimentary!!

Whilst on the road, living out of our bags, on buses, trains and in hostels we didn’t get to cook and prepare our own food nearly as much as we would do on an ordinary day back home. In China we were really luck whilst staying in Beijing, we had an apartment for a month which mean’t we could go out and choose our ingredients from the local farmers market, this in itself was such a fantastic experience. Eating out all the time does take it’s toll but this is also part of the experience of exploring a country and it’s delights.

Taking part in a cooking class every so often mean’t we could explore further into the way the region or the country works with their local ingredients and taught us about the principles of their cuisine.It also mean’t we could eat everything we cooked!

We’re going to start with a course that we both loved and rate very highly in our travelling and food experiences. This was at The Yangshou Cooking School in Yangshou, Guangxi Province, China.

Their location on the banks of the Li River is stunning surrounded by karst peaks, bamboo rafts, and tourists! The course we did was a half day class starting at 8am with a local market tour. This is something that is very consistent with cooking courses in Asia, always starting with a market tour to give you an insight into where they source their ingredients from, what is local to the region and the atmosphere of a busy market place can be absorbed. Our chef and guide Kelly picked up on key ingredients that we would use such as bamboo shoots, chilli, chinese mushrooms and chinese eggplant before taking us back to the school.

We were informed about the morning, what we would be cooking and how we would do it. We each had our own cooking station with a wok on a gas stove, our own chopping boards, knives, bowls, oils and sauces for cooking with. The ingredients were portioned out for us and we would then prepare each dish before cooking it. Kelly demonstrated and then we cooked, and then we ate! For the final 4 dishes though we cooked them one by one and then had our own little banquet sat outside with the riverbanks below us – pretty idyllic!

Chinese cooking is all about sharing and dishes are served as a matter of balance. Hot and spicy dishes such as chicken with ginger and chilli should be offset by cooling preparations such as steamed fish or stir fried vegetables. A little bit of Yin and Yang occurs and equal attention should be paid for the balance of the food’s taste, texture, size, shape and aroma.

We had previously noticed how much oil was used in Chinese cooking, but on this particular course there wasn’t quite so much oil used and the dishes were very tastey and true to the Guangxi region. Not all Chinese food is the same, as we travelled from region to region we experienced subtle and strong differences in the presentation, spice, and taste.

There were around 10 of us in the class with a good mixture of young and old, and vegetarians were catered for equally. All in all we learned a lot about the values of Chinese cooking as well as picked up on some new and exciting recipes, which we think we could cook when we’re back in our own kitchen again.

Below are a few of those recipes! We hope you enjoy! Please do let us know if you manage to cook any!

Steamed Stuffed Vegetables

50gms minced pork / use finely chopped firm tofu for vegetarian option
1 tablespoon of Chives – chopped
One quarter teaspoon of salt
Mixed vegetables – peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, courgette,

Mix the mince/tofu, salt and chives together. Stuff vegetables and steam for 15 minutes in a steaming basket. (Can use boiling water in a pan with an oven proof glass bowl instead and place vegetables in the bowl and then cover)

This dish is great as a starter and would be good at a barbeque or for a little tray of canapes!

Beer Fish

100gms fish (firm white with skin on)
2 tablespoons of peanut oil
Half tomatoe – chopped
Half green, half red pepper – sliced
1 tablespoon of sliced garlic tops or spring onions
1 tablespoon ginger – sliced
2 cloves of garlic – crushed
1 tablespoon of soy saice
Half teaspoon salt
Half glass of beer

Heat the wok, add oil and leave on full heat. Turn down the heat, put fish into work skin down, add salt on top of fish. Fry on each side for about 3 minutes making sure skin is brown. Put all veges, garlic and ginger on top of fish. Pour on soy sauce and beer. Cover with lid and cooking for 5 minutes. Remove lid add spring onions, reduce liquid for 2 minutes. Serve.

This is a really tastey dish indeed!! It’s so easy but we found it’s all about timing, adding the ingredients at the right time. A useful hint on the crushing of garlic – all we did was smash it with a large flat knife and that was that – no extra chopping required.

Eggplant Yangshou Style

100gm eggplant
2 tablesppons of peanut oil
Half red pepper – sliced
One quarter teaspoon of ginger – sliced
2 cloves of garlic – crushed
2 spring onions – sliced
Quarter teaspoon of salt
One teaspoon soy sauce
Half teaspoon oyster sauce

Heat wok and add oil. Heat until oil is smoking and then add eggplant and fry until browned and cooked. Move eggplant to side of wok, reduce heat and fry garlic, ginger and pepper for one minute. Mix eggplant with vegetbales, salt, soy sauce and oyester sauce. Add spring onions. Serve.

All of these dishes are for 2 persons, so double your quantities if you’re cooking for 4!

Up early for our last time in Yangshou we were picked up by taxi from Trippers to be dropped off at the coach station for our journey to Nanning. It took around five hours or so to reach Nanning and we jumped on a bus to make our way to the Lotusland hostel. We found it relatively easily and checked into our double room which was small but functional and clean. We headed to the booking office to book our bus journey into Vietnam which cost £15 each. Looking for some food we followed the map provided by the hostel and decided to go to a restaurant with an English menu. The food was pricey and not very good, with Dave having a difficult time eating his food with all the bones in his chicken curry! On the plus side the steamed and fried dumplings with a custard style sauce were the highlight of a disappointing meal.

The following day we ate our own breakfast in the hostel, as they do not provide food, but a microwave and bowls and then washed clothes and hung them out to dry on the roof of the hostel. We walked into town to see what Nanning was like during the day. It’s a typical Chinese city full to the brim of shops and little food places.

There is a free museum called The Guangxi Provincial Museum not far away from the center of town, it took around half an hour to walk there from the hostel. They were showcasing the Nanning Institute of Art and Design degree shows, which were quite impressive with fashion and product design, architecture, 3D and visualisation. It was great to see what the students are completing for their degree levels in China. There are also some permanent exhibitions in the museum featuring ancient drums, jewelery and other artifacts. Afterwards we were feeling hungry and found a Japanese restaurant in a shopping mall which helped quench the hunger pains.

We met up with Jane, who we had met in Dali, at the hostel and decided to go for food. Walking around we found a fast food style Chinese restaurant and had some pretty good food. The food was served in a wooden basket which was interesting, but tasty.

Neon lights and people dancing in the parks were our entertainment for the walk back to the hostel and then an early night as we had a change of Country tomorrow and we were excited to see a new landscape and culture of Vietnam.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)

When we arrived in Yangshou we’d heard that the main cooking school ‘Yangshou Cooking School‘ offered some great half day classes so we booked this for the first part of the day. We had a pick up from our cookery master from Bamboo after checking out and we were taken to the local market, en route we picked up a few others who were also booked onto the cooking class and we arrived at the market ready for our first part of the class. It was really good to see the market in full swing, we’ve obviously seen many markets since traveling but each one always has something different. This one for example sold freshly cooked Dog meat, rabbit and a few sad cats were kept in baskets ready to await their doom. Both of us are cat lovers so seeing them there was pretty distressing, the dogs were already cooked and ready to eat. It’s a veer strange thing for westerners to witness but we don’t have them same approach to food as the east and especially in China food is food and you eat what you can, when you can. This mind set is still very much in place in the south. We were told not to photograph the dogs, and to be fair it wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it’s all part of the process of finding out about different cultures. The rest of the market place was bustling with energy and it was great to see all of the fresh produce and also have an explanation into the different food types.

Following the market tour we were piled into a van and taken to the cooking school. They are situated very close to the harbour where we got the boat to and they’re location is perfect for the environment. They have an open kitchen where everyone has their own cooking place, wok and sauces, the head chef stays at the front of the class for demonstration purposes and then we cooked what she did straight after, as she came around the make sure everything was going to plan. This is the best cooking class we’ve done so far as we did most of the preparation and all of the cooking for each dish. In total we had 4-5 dishes varying from stuffed vegetable/canopy style appetisers to the local delicacy beer soaked fish. The latter really was a delight. After each course we sat outside and ate as a group, except for the last two courses which we ate as 2 dishes togethers.

All in all the cooking class was excellent, the teacher was really coherent and patient and we enjoyed good food and company in a wonderful setting. We would recommend the school to anyone visiting Yangshou for sure.

After the class we went back to Bamboo to collect our bags and walked to the next village along from the pier Shi Ban Qiao the hostel we were moving to ‘Trippers Carp Diem‘ had been recommended to us by fellow travellers and we’d already scouted out the area on our bikes a few days ago so we knew it was in a good location. We sacrificed comfort for location on this one and saved our pennies in booking a dorm room. There is always plenty of space in the dorms in China but the beds are often a little hard. This was the case, but considering the quality of the service, food and location we couldn’t complain too much.

We had some food at the hostel and then set off for our New Years Eve bash at Monkey Jane’s. When we arrived it was pretty quiet, but before long the card playing crew came along and Helen succumbed to wearing the official Monkey Jane t-shirt. We enjoyed some more card games and the beer flowed freely. More and more people arrived and before long the rooftop bar was rammed. The cards stopped and we enjoyed a funny game of beer pong against a couple of the lads, much to our despair we lost!! And we watched them win time and time again afterwards, we think this was something to do with their distracting crazy dancing each time the opposition took a turn!

We met some fun people and a other travellers making the same trip as us – over many drinks, dances and ole langs sine we agreed to meet Emma and Doug the following night for food. The party was a good laugh, it was just great to go out, have a few drinkies and lot’s of fun too!! We enjoyed a good little boogy when the music hit it right and there were even a few fireworks to keep us entertained!

We left at around 2am and walked home along the dark paths to the village. What a fab end to 2010!! Happy New Year!!

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)

We went out for a bike ride with one of the Chinese girls’ Sylvia who was staying in the dorm with us, she was friends with another of the girls working at the hostel. It was good to have her with us as she could help us to find our way by asking the locals which way to such and such a place. She wanted to go to a specific village called Xixhou which is about 20km away from Dali old town. We wanted to cycle through some of the villages closer to the lake so we could explore the farmland, the most direct way would be to cycle along the high way for the entire ride but that’s no fun, so we compromised and spent some time cycling to the villages and some time catching up and taking the highway to the furthest place.

The farmland in Dali is very lush and extremely beautiful to photography. During our stay in Dali the sky was a perfect blue and it was a very comfortable temperature indeed, only being cold in the shade. By night it dropped significantly but we had electric blankets to cope with this!

So we took in the scenery around us, some farmland, some lake and some road. It was stunning. We got to Xixhou at around 3pm and ambled through the village market before stopping for some very good value soup rice noodles. For 3 of us to eat it cost around £2.80, and the food tasted really good. The only bad thing was a local guy pestering us for left over food and drink, he wouldn’t leave us alone and eventually got what he wanted. Still the setting took us away from this. We continued out of the village and took the road to some older parts of the area. Once more fantastic views, terraces and buildings surrounded us.

We decided to make our way back at around 4pm and set off for Dali. We were going quicker than Sylvia on her lady-like bike so we waited for her every so often, plus the drivers on the road aren’t the most reliable often overtaking two cars in one go so we wanted to make sure we were all with us. When we got back Sylvia joked about how fit we were compared to her and she said she’d only ever ridden a bike once before in her life. Considering this fact she did very well indeed.

When we got back we ate at an Indian restaurant down the road from our hostel and enjoyed more chai. Back at the hostel there were a few more travelers, Helen got chatting to Jane who she’d seen at various other places around China. It’s very easy to bump into people when you use Hostelworld for recommendations on where to stay. Many people also choose to travel through South China from Vietnam as it’s a good route and the weather is pretty good in Yunnan.

So it was our last night in Dali and we really loved the town and the hostel had a nice vibe too. We decided to nip back to Bakery 88 the next morning to get some take-away sandwiches with very good cheese and meat! Yum!! We also sneaked in a few more granola slices.

The bus back took the scenic route as part of the highway was closed but this wasn’t a bad thing as it meant we got to drive through some more beautiful countryside and villages. It was quite a luxury bus with only a few of us on board, and we got back to Cloudland at around 7pm. We had some food, chatted away and got ready for our flight to Guangzhou the following day.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)